From Clara Moskowitz at Scientific American:
Hundreds of researchers in a collaborative project called “It from Qubit” say space and time may spring up from the quantum entanglement of tiny bits of information
…
Some skeptics have questioned how productive IfQ can ever be if it is based on an unrealistic foundation. “That certainly is one very valid criticism: Why are we focusing on this toy model?” Engelhardt says. “All of this depends on the validity of the toy model, and the idea that in the end the toy model is representative of our universe. I would like to make sure that if we understand the toy model, we understand the real deal.”
Why does it sound like an effort to rehabilitate string theory?
The project is reminding some physicists of the heady days in the past when other big ideas were just getting started. “I became a grad student in 1984 when the so-called ‘first string theory revolution’ took place,” says Hirosi Ooguri, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology who has been working on IfQ. “That was a very exciting time when string theory emerged as a leading candidate for a unified theory of all the forces in nature. I do see the current explosion of excitement around this similarly. This is clearly an exciting time for young people in the field as well as those of us who received our PhDs decades ago.” More.
Okay, but string theory never really went anywhere.
There is something going on here and it often sounds like a lot of people are determined not to find it.
See also: In search of a road to reality
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as to:
Although I do like the ‘information theoretic’ foundation to reality that quantum mechanics puts forward, I, none-the-less, must point out that any ‘toy model’ of reality we construct that excludes consciousness as a primary prerequisite in building that ‘toy model’ will be, by definition, “based on an unrealistic foundation”. In other words, for us to even be able to define what is real and what is not real in any ‘toy model’, it is required that ‘mind’ must be assumed as a given. William J Murray puts the situation of constructing any realistic ‘toy model’ like this:
William J Murray is in very good company:
Of related note to properly defining what is real and what is not real, in the following study, researchers who had a bias against Near Death Experiences being real, set out to prove that they were merely hallucinations by setting up a clever questionnaire that could differentiate which memories a person had were real and which memories a person had were merely imaginary.
They did not expect the results they got:
This ‘more real than real’ finding is completely inexplicable on Naturalism. Whereas on Theism, this ‘more real that real’ finding is expected since God is the source of all reality and we rightly would expect things to become very much ‘more real’ for us the closer that we got to God.
Verse:
Off topic; well, sort of.
I have been thinking about Einstein’s general theory of relativity as I was challenged by my two sons.
According to them, there has to be a flaw in the theory as they do not agree that one’s time clock could tick to the past or the future depending on his distance and his movement through space-time.
They think it’s impossible because the past has already happeded and the future hasn’t happeded yet…
They were inspired to challenge it by the video by PBS at
the 23 min mark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44ngv-8b8FM
IBM advances bring quantum computing closer to reality?
http://www.computerworld.com/a.....ality.html