Quantum gravity research could unearth nature of time

Wired interviewed Mark Van Raamsdonk, a UBC physics and astronomy professor, for an article about quantum gravity research.

Many leading physicists consider space-time and gravity to be “emergent” phenomena.  Curvy space-time and the matter inside it are a hologram that arises out of a network of entangled qubits, or quantum bits of information. This is comparable to how the three-dimensional environment of a computer game is encoded in classical bits on a silicon chip.

“I think we now understand that space-time really is just a geometrical representation of the entanglement structure of these underlying quantum systems,” Van Raamsdonk said.