“All the world’s a stage…,” Shakespeare wrote, and physicists tend to think that way, too. Space seems like a backdrop to the action of forces and fields that inhabit it but space itself is not made of anything—or is it? Lately scientists have begun to question this conventional thinking and speculate that space—and its extension according to general relativity, spacetime—is actually composed of tiny chunks of information. These chunks might interact to create spacetime and give rise to its properties, such as the concept that curvature in spacetime causes gravity. If so, the idea might not just explain spacetime but might help physicists achieve a long-sought goal: a quantum theory of gravity that can merge general relativity and quantum mechanics, the two grand theories of the universe that tend not to get along. Lately the excitement of this possibility has engrossed hundreds of physicists who have been meeting every three months or so under the banner of a project dubbed “It from Qubit.”
The “it” in this case is spacetime, and the qubit (pronounced “cue-bit,” from “quantum bit”) represents the smallest possible amount of information—a computer “bit” on a quantum scale.
Theoretical physicists are s fun bunch. Here they discover, or hope to prove, they the all really just some huge quantity of tiny bubble we call the vacuum. These bubbles have to estimate pi, and he best they can do is about 22/7, except in the quasars, their 'bits of precision' . It is not that the vacuum is too stupid to count with more accuracy, its just that we can't have quasars everywhere.
I wonder if these physicists suffer economics envy, the desire to figure out sticky things.
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