> Decrease the entanglement between two halves of the CFT vacuum and the dual AdS geometry literally tears along the Ryu-Takayanagi surface—no entanglement, no bridge.
“Spacetime is glued together by entanglement.”
I’m deep in the quantum field theory + quantum gravity rabbit hole and it’s blowing my mind.
Is it viable an explanation like I was five?
Sean Carroll at Caltech has been involved in a fascinating line of research about this, starting back in 2016 and still going:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08444
His personal webpage for research:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/research/annotated-publications/
Great reading if you want to pursue this further.
awesome thanks will take a look
Don’t lose your mind.
Are you convinced that entanglement is a real phenomena of its own and not an artifact of spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetries (hidden variables)?
That doesn’t make any sense to me
The best explanation I've found is when an object is rotationally symmetric, and we mistake 180° rotation for a 360° one. Since it's symmetric, they both look the same to our "gauge", but the underlying object really does have two different states. The paper suggests what form of confusion could result in entanglement looking behaviors, if we ever discovered such a thing. Essentially a new EPR loophole based on a phenomenon seen in many other subfields of physics
I can't decide what is weirder, entanglement, or the fact that particles don't move through space continuously. I remember when I first read that, and it blew my mind. It was 1990. I was on a work-study gig at a computer lab studying physics as I helped students at the community college run their WordPerfect and Lotus 123. I remember the room. How it felt. Particles don't go through space continuously. Then where are they!!! Does the universe blink?
Well there is the underlying unobservable quantum state that seems to be evolving smoothly, just because observations decohere the state into seemingly discrete observables… you might think this means that it’s looks like particles are evolving discontinuously.
The true reality of everything *is* the quantum state, so i don’t think it’s true to say that just because you observe discrete outcomes that particles don’t move continuously, unless you are referring to some other mechanism i have never heard about.
There is even evidence (yale 2019, quanta article here[1]) that quantum decoherence is more of a smooth phenomenon vs an instantaneous, discrete jump.
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-leaps-long-assumed-to-be-instantaneous-take-time-20190605/
It is entirely likely that the 201 physics class I had in 1990 is both dated, and not as sophisticated as your (or current) understanding of how very small particles exist, move, and are observed. IANAP :)
I'm really not that much more enlightened after reading your link and this:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/particle-movement-in-quantum-mechanics.1054807/
The combination reminds me that observation has a resolution, and this is a separate issue and equally weird for multiple reasons. I do remember at the time that I cycled around that point of particle movement, and went back to my professor, as it disturbed me.
I'll remember going forward that I know longer *know* that small particles move in a discontinuous way. (I also remember the professor saying something like the particles are only statistically there.)
I kind of like that way... slowly realizing that nothing you thought you knew is still valid, until you just... disappear...
I would just look at the Schrödinger equation. It describes how a wavefunction evolves smoothly over time. It’s a continuous function. Considering everything in the universe at the fundamental level is described most accurately by propagating quantum waves which when measured in different ways give different observables… it makes sense to me to just think of the quantum state as the smoothly evolving thing.
I got o3 to do an analogy:
Think of a weather radar map:
• The underlying atmosphere obeys smooth fluid dynamics.
• Your phone, however, refreshes the radar every 5 minutes with a bunch of colored pixels that jump across the screen.
• Nobody concludes that raindrops teleport; we just recognize the pixels are a low‑resolution sampling.
Quantum measurement is like sampling the “atmospheric pressure field” (the wavefunction) with very coarse, yes/no pixels. The smoother the waves, the more “surprising” the pixel‑to‑pixel jumps can look.
In your quantum measurement tho, who is the observer? And why should I trust them?
