![]() Somehow a theory of quantum gravity would need to reconcile these ideas about space and time. While quantum physics treats space and time as immutable, general relativity warps them for breakfast. Part of the problem lies in the ways the two theories deal with space and time. Nature knows how to apply gravity in quantum contexts-it happened in the first moments of the big bang, and it still happens in the hearts of black holes-but we humans are still struggling to understand how the trick is done. Ask general relativity what happens in the context of quantum physics, and you’ll get contradictory answers, with untamed infinities breaking loose across your calculations. Put them together, one might think, and you would have a “theory of everything.”īut the two theories don’t play nicely. ![]() Both theories have easily passed all the tests physicists have been able to devise for the past century. Their best theory of everything else is quantum physics, which is astonishingly accurate when it comes to the properties of matter, energy and subatomic particles. Physicists’ best theory of gravity is general relativity, Albert Einstein’s famous conception of how matter warps space and time. These radical notions come from the latest twists in the century-long hunt for a theory of quantum gravity. “We have a lot of hints from physics that spacetime as we understand it isn’t the fundamental thing,” Paquette says. At the deepest level of reality, questions like “Where?” and “When?” simply may not have answers at all. Instead space and time may be emergent: they could arise from the structure and behavior of more basic components of nature. A growing number of physicists, working in different areas of the discipline with different approaches, are increasingly converging on a profound idea: space-and perhaps even time-is not fundamental. Paquette, a theoretical physicist at the University of Washington, is not alone in thinking about this strange kind of dimensional transmutation. “But when we try to shrink it past a certain point, a new, large spatial direction emerges instead.” “We’re shrinking a spatial direction,” Paquette says. Then shrink those circles down, smaller and smaller, tightening the loop, until a curious transformation occurs: the dimension stops seeming tiny and instead becomes enormous, like when you realize something that looks small and nearby is actually huge and distant. Start with little circles, scattered across every point in space and time-a curlicue dimension, looped back onto itself. Natalie Paquette spends her time thinking about how to grow an extra dimension. ![]()
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