Does reductionism End? Quantum Holonomy theory says YES

during the past few centuries scientists have probed physical reality at ever shorter scales this incredible endeavor has given us a tower of scientific theories where biology stands in the science of chemistry which in turn stands on atomic physics which stands on nuclear physics which stands on particle physics particle physics is the science of elementary particles like the up and down quarks inside the protons and neutrons and the electrons orbiting them these are the basic building blocks of the atom thousands of scientists have dedicated their lives to uncover this incredible intellectual tower the question i want to know the answer to is how tall is this tower will this tower end somewhere does a final theory that ends this reductionist probing into ever shorter distances exist or will we find layer upon layer of theories without ever finding an end point is this tower truly infinite or will it be able at some point to conclude that indeed our scientific voyage understand the true nature of reality as a destination at least one theory attempts to show that indeed such a reductionist journey has an end point what is this theory and what does it have to say about how reality actually works that's coming up right now [Music] i want to tell you that the last two videos were inspired by a documentary i watched on magellan tv today's sponsor called seeing the beginning of time it looks at technology scientists are using to find out how galaxies were formed in the universe this got me thinking about how the universe itself came to be in the first place you'll find thousands more incredible documentaries like this on magellan tv it's a streaming documentary service created by the filmmakers themselves they dive deep into subjects like history culture science and technology and you can watch it at any time on any of your devices including many in 4k i am delighted to tell you that magellan has a special offer for arvind ashbears right now you click the link in the description to get a free one month drop i think you're gonna love it too so be sure to take advantage of the free trial by clicking the link in the description we have very good reasons to believe that this tower of scientific theories must be finite in other words a final theory must exist to understand this let's look at it from the perspective of making a measurement any measurement must involve some kind of interaction we need a probe to observe an object the probe can be a photon an atom an electron even a tennis ball whatever it is we need to throw something at an object so that we can get a signal back which is then our observation now any probe will carry energy and that energy will cause space time to curve at low energies this curvature of space and time is inconsequential but when we begin to observe very short distances then we need to use probes of higher and higher energies this is because as things get smaller we have to use shorter wavelength objects like high frequency photons or higher energy electrons in order to measure them because larger wavelengths will not reflect any signal back and this energy will begin to curve space and time more and more and at some point if the object of our measurement gets small enough the high energy of our probe will cause such a large curvature that it will create a black hole and the key feature of a black hole is that no signal can ever escape it this means that there must exist a shortest distance beyond which it is impossible to perform measurement that distance is the planck length because in order to measure something at this plank length scale we have to put so much energy into the length that it creates a black hole this plank energy of planck mass is equal to 1.2 times 10 to the 19 giga electron volts this is an enormous amount of energy in a very small volume the planck length is 1.6 times 10 to the negative 35 meters it is 10 to the 20 times smaller than a proton which is itself a hundred thousand times smaller than an atom this argument suggests that the tower of scientific theories probably has to end here that a final theory will exist because if you cannot measure distances beyond a certain length scale then it makes no sense to have theories beyond that point because you would never be able to test them you may say well just because we can't measure something it doesn't mean that something doesn't exist beyond the scale and you may be right about that but our theoretical models can only go so far as the information accessible to us in the last video about the theory of everything we discussed how science has already had a lot of success in unifying seemingly dissimilar theories to a single greater theory two quick examples of the unification of the electric and magnetic force into the electromagnetic force and then later the unification of electromagnetic force with the weak force combination being called the electro weak force we have thus seen many times how seemingly very different forces actually come from a unified theory so this seems to suggest that we might be able to unify the rest of the theories into a single theory of everything to continue this reductionism we would want a theory that unifies all the forces today we have two overarching theories of forces einstein's theory of general relativity for gravity and the standard model for the electromagnetic weak and strong force an obvious problem is that the standard model is a quantum field theory but general relativity is a classical field theory quantum theories are generally what we consider more fundamental because they explain more phenomena than classical physics in fact many processes only work if we use quantum theories like our theory about the structure of the atom the problem is that gravity doesn't seem to want to be treated at a quantum level we actually have no evidence that requires gravity to be quantum nevertheless many people are searching for theories of quantum gravity in order to find a theory of everything a theory of everything should not only unite forces but also unite the theory of all matter in other words everything we see and experience around us the question is then what this theory of everything should look like we've talked about string theory in a few previous videos this is the idea that all matter and forces are fundamentally made of one-dimensional strengths vibrating in nine to ten dimensions the graviton emerges from its mathematics but its mathematics is so flexible that this theory could potentially describe a near endless number of universes not just the one we live in so the problem is that it is not able to produce falsifiable statements it's simply too flexible according to string theory the standard model of particle physics is merely a coincidence it could just as well have been completely different we've also discussed blue quantum gravity or lqg which attempts to quantize space-time itself but lqg only deals with gravity not the other particles or forces there exists however a third newer and lesser known candidate for a final theory of everything and it's called quantum holonomy theory or qht this was pioneered by two danish scientists physicist jesper grimstrop and mathematician johannes ostrom it begins by asking the question what would it take for a theory to be a final theory how can a theory be immune to further scientific reductions how does reductionism end although this seems almost impossible the presumptive idea is that the final theory must be based on something incredibly simple the more structure there is at the macro scale and the deeper the theory needs to go the simpler the building blocks need to be grimstrop and austria therefore believe that a theory to be immune to further scientific reductions that is for a theory to be final it must be based on a principle that is extremely simple what does that actually mean well in quantum photography theory hellonomy refers to geometry and curvature which is based on the mathematics of empty three-dimensional space just space not even time and no stuff no things within that space just empty space so let's let's look at that what is a fundamental quality of space well one thing is that you can move things around in space so the starting point of quantum hellonomy theory is the mathematics of moving stuff around and again the stuff itself doesn't matter here it's simply the action of moving stuff around how can we describe the action of moving an arbitrary object from any point a to any point b well there are many ways of doing this for instance you can rotate an object a bit to the right or you can rotate it forwards 45 degrees you can also flip it around some skewed axis or you rotate the object several times to the left while you move it from point a to point b let's call any one of these combinations of movements from point a to point b a recipe a recipe for a combination of movements in physics is called a gauge field a gauge field is a recipe of how to move one particle from point a to point b gauge fields are what make up the forces in the standard model since they are recipes of moving things around in space they actually represent how things interact with each other or how forces work the sum of all mathematical recipes is called the configuration space of these recipes so the configuration space of all these recipes is all the different ways you can move objects between points this is infinite the key insight in quantum hellonomy theory is that the geometry of this space stores a lot of information what do i mean when i say geometry of this space basically it means that two different recipes from moving stuff around can be said to have a relationship between each other for example if we have one recipe r that tells us to rotate an arbitrary object slightly to the left when we move them and we have a second recipe s that tells us to rotate that same object just a tiny bit more to the left and finally we have a third recipe t that rotates the same object two times to the right does it make mathematical sense to say that r is closer to s than to t in other words can we say that r s and t are related that there's a geometry between r s and t this is a complicated mathematical problem that some scientists worked on for several years what they found is that yes this enormous space of all possible recipes for moving things around does have a geometry meaning that the recipes are related but an even more interesting thing they found is that this geometry results in mathematics that looks almost identical to what we already know from quantum field theory this includes the mathematics of the standard model but qhd mathematics gives us more than just the standard model which is what you would expect if this theory is to be a candidate for a theory of everything let's look at the overall picture in qhd you start with an empty 3d space and you consider within the space an infinite number of recipes which are basically combinations of movements these are gauge fields the gauge fields represent the mathematics of how things interact with each other this space of recipes is infinite but more importantly the recipes are mathematically related to each other they have a geometry now here's the keys to the kingdom from this geometry you can obtain what's called a bot dirac operator don't worry about what this is but just know that the square of this operator gives us the hamiltonian for both matter particles and force-carrying particles the hamiltonian represents the formula for all the energy in a system this hamiltonian can be written as the following d squared is the bot dirac operator each one is the bosonic hamiltonian or in simpler words it tells us how the energies of the forces evolve in time h2 is the fermionic hamiltonian which tells us how the energy of the matter feels evolved in time omega represents some extra corrections that's relevant only at high energies for example close to the moment of the big bang once you have a description of the energies of all the matter and forces in the universe that's all you need to understand how matter interacts in the universe and that's what you can get from the mathematics of qht this is essentially all we need to describe the universe once all the math has been worked out the remarkable aspect of this theory is that from simply considering the movements of objects in empty space all this rich mathematics that appears to resemble the known mathematics of the universe comes out and if qht is correct it has some astonishing implications for example uht actually offers an explanation as to why the universe is quantum mechanical if you buy that the simplest way you can describe the universe is moving stuff around in 3d space then the math shows that this movement has to have a quantum description in other words the math of the simplest description of the universe dictates that the universe must be quantized this is a central result of qht uhd also predicts a few other surprising things for example gravity is not quantized but a solution to the problem of reconciling gravity with quantum theory does not require a quantization of general relativity maybe the reason why physicists haven't found a theory of quantum gravity is because such a theory doesn't actually exist perhaps gravity due to the curvature of space-time is simply not quantum in addition no singularities exist there can be no infinite density because qht gives an upper limit to how close you can pack matter together this would be close to the planck volume if there's a limit then the mass density in any part of space cannot be infinite this also means there are no singularities there's no infinite curvature or hole in space-time inside a black hole light still can't escape because the curvature is too high but it is not an infinite curvature and since singularities can't exist the big bang could not have come out of it it must have come from some finite density universe it could not have come from nothing it was more like a big bounce according to qhd this is the same prediction as in loop chronic gravity but don't get too excited because qht still would not tell us what existed prior to the bounce only that the current universe must have come from it so qhd seems to solve several major problems in physics unlike string theory there is no need for new hypothetical objects like strings or six to seven extra dimensions or supersymmetric particles that we have never found we only need the mathematics of moving stuff in 3d space now i want to warn you that i simplified this greatly although the concept is super simple the mathematics is super complex it's non-commutative geometry and very few physicists have expertise in it so it remains relatively obscure now i'd like to give a big shout out to jesper grimstrop for helping me understand this fascinating theory if you want to learn more about it check out his brand new book on amazon the link is in the description it's written in simple language so i think you're going to enjoy it and if you have a question post it in the comments and i will try to answer it i will see you in the next video my friend [Music] you

Channel: Arvin Ash

Views: 175,343

Keywords: theory of everything, general relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, string theory, quantum gravity, quantum theory, quantum holonomy theory, quantum holonomy, QHT, T.O.E., TOE, is there a theory of everything, reductionism, Is there an end to reductionism, jesper grimstrup, Loop quantum gravity, what is a gauge field, What is a configuration space, johannes aastrup, bott-dirac operator, dirac operator, theory of empty space, what is a hamiltonian

Id: fSVbWwivu5g

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021