We don’t often hear space and time described as a quantum error-correcting code

Big Bang/NASA

But some argue, the same codes used to prevent errors in quantum computers might give space-time “its intrinsic robustness”:

But in the dogged pursuit of these codes over the past quarter-century, a funny thing happened in 2014, when physicists found evidence of a deep connection between quantum error correction and the nature of space, time and gravity. In Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity is defined as the fabric of space and time — or “space-time” — bending around massive objects. (A ball tossed into the air travels along a straight line through space-time, which itself bends back toward Earth.) But powerful as Einstein’s theory is, physicists believe gravity must have a deeper, quantum origin from which the semblance of a space-time fabric somehow emerges.

That year — 2014 — three young quantum gravity researchers came to an astonishing realization. They were working in physicists’ theoretical playground of choice: a toy universe called “anti-de Sitter space” that works like a hologram. The bendy fabric of space-time in the interior of the universe is a projection that emerges from entangled quantum particles living on its outer boundary. Ahmed Almheiri, Xi Dong and Daniel Harlow did calculations suggesting that this holographic “emergence” of space-time works just like a quantum error-correcting code. They conjectured in the Journal of High Energy Physics that space-time itself is a code — in anti-de Sitter (AdS) universes, at least. The paper has triggered a wave of activity in the quantum gravity community, and new quantum error-correcting codes have been discovered that capture more properties of space-time. …

“It’s really entanglement which is holding the space together,” he said. “If you want to weave space-time together out of little pieces, you have to entangle them in the right way. And the right way is to build a quantum error-correcting code.”Natalie Wolchover, “How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code” at Quanta

They certainly make it sound as though our universe is designed.

See also: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana