Conjecture Institute

Conjecture Institute Fellow Sam Kuypers discusses the ideas in his essay, The Fate of Spacetime: What Many Worlds Means for Gravity.

 

Sam's essay is one of several written for our upcoming compendium, Bold Conjectures, Volume II: Essays Across Physics.

As we saw in Module One, all dynamical laws of motion are time-reversal symmetric: if the trajectory of a system from state A to state B is allowed by particular laws of motion, then the trajectory of that system from state B to state A is also allowed by those same laws.
 
Yet this fundamental reversibility sits in stark tension with the one-way processes we observe all around us.
 
Since 1870, a number of attempted solutions to this conflict have been offered that can’t quite solve the problem. But, as is often the case in science, understanding the reasons why they fail shed light on what attributes the actual solution must have.
 
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While Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity consist of radically different conceptual frameworks and mathematical infrastructure, they are all expressible in what David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto call the prevailing or traditional conception. If you know the current positions and velocities of the planets, Newton’s laws let you calculate where they will be next year, or where they were last year. If you know the wave function of an electron and the rule governing how it changes, quantum mechanics lets you compute its entire future and its entire past. If you know the positions and velocities of two black holes at the current moment, Einstein’s equations in general relativity fix their entire evolution in spacetime — forward or backward.
 
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The scope of a scientific theory is not a matter of subjective preference, and that judging a theory by its scope is a mistake. Judging a scientific theory by its structure—for example, whether or not it consists of algebraic equations and dynamical laws of motion—is also a mistake. Absent a good explanation for why a given theory’s scope is too great, or why a given theory’s structure renders it inviable, it is irrational to dismiss a theory just because its scope or structure does not meet your preferences.
 
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Philosophy is often divided into three branches: metaphysics or ontology (what is existence, why do reality’s constituent parts behave the way they do, what constrains and explains Nature’s regularities), epistemology (how knowledge grows, how people come to know what we think we know), and morality (what one should and should not do, how to choose some values over others).
 
Read: https://www.conjectureinstitute.org/courses/people-reason-reality/Logan%20-%20Reason%20Module%204%20-%20Google%20Docs.pdf
 
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