
Ask HN: Quantum entanglement - V2hLe0ThslzRaV2
Recently ran across physicist that claimed that physics is in a race to prove quantum entanglement based theories will unify physics and result in a completely new way to understanding physics.<p>Is anyone aware of any merit to these claims and able to provide notable sources to back why this might be the case.
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nabla9
It's hard to see what that claim exactly means.

There was very interesting and kind of deep interview with Edward Witten
recently and he goes unusually philosophical
[https://www.quantamagazine.org/edward-witten-ponders-the-
nat...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/edward-witten-ponders-the-nature-of-
reality-20171128/)

>What’s an example of something else we might need?

>Maybe a bulk description of the quantum properties of space-time itself,
rather than a holographic boundary description. There hasn’t been much
progress in a long time in getting a better bulk description. And I think that
might be because the answer is of a different kind than anything we’re used
to. That would be my guess.

Interview uses Wheeler's "It from bit" as background.

>I tend to assume that space-time and everything in it are in some sense
emergent. By the way, you’ll certainly find that that’s what Wheeler expected
in his essay. As you’ll read, he thought the continuum was wrong in both
physics and math. He did not think one’s microscopic description of space-time
should use a continuum of any kind — neither a continuum of space nor a
continuum of time, nor even a continuum of real numbers. On the space and
time, I’m sympathetic to that. On the real numbers, I’ve got to plead
ignorance or agnosticism. It is something I wonder about, but I’ve tried to
imagine what it could mean to not use the continuum of real numbers, and the
one logician I tried discussing it with didn’t help me.

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V2hLe0ThslzRaV2
Believe this article was the best they were able to offer:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16040860)

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gus_massa
[100% Ph.D. in Math + 50% major in Physics here]

Short answer: Nah

Medium answer: (from the comment of nabla9) "It's hard to see what that claim
exactly means."

Long answer: Superposition and entanglement are very common, almost all small
physics system have some of them. But they are worth mentioning in strange
cases, for example two entangled particles at long distance. (At a small
distance it's so common that it must be used in many calculations but nobody
cares about it.) So "It's hard to see what that claim exactly means." Do you
have a link to the slides of the talk or something similar?

