Where are we on the road to quantum gravity?

Damned if I know! But I got to ask some questions to Lee Smolin which he kindly replied to, and you can read his answers over at Starts with a Bang. If you’re a string theorist you don’t have to read it of course because we already know you’ll hate it.

But I would be acting out of character if not having an answer to the question posed in the title did prevent me from going on and distributing opinions, so here we go. On my postdoctoral path through institutions I’ve passed by string theory and loop quantum gravity, and after some closer inspection stayed at a distance from both because I wanted to do physics and not math. I wanted to describe something in the real world and not spend my days proving convergence theorems or doing stability analyses of imaginary things. I wanted to do something meaningful with my life, and I was – still am – deeply disturbed by how detached quantum gravity is from experiment. So detached in fact one has to wonder if it’s science at all.

That’s why I’ve worked for years on quantum gravity phenomenology. The recent developments in string theory to apply the AdS/CFT duality to the description of strongly coupled systems are another way to make this contact to reality, but then we were talking about quantum gravity.

For me the most interesting theoretical developments in quantum gravity are the ones Lee hasn’t mentioned. There are various emergent gravity scenarios and though I don’t find any of them too convincing, there might be something to the idea that gravity is a statistical effect. And then there is Achim Kempf’s spectral geometry that for all I can see would just fit together very nicely with causal sets. But yeah, there are like two people in the world working on this and they’re flying below the pop sci radar. So you’d probably never have heard of them if it wasn’t for my awesome blog, so listen: Have an eye on Achim Kempf and Raffael Sorkin, they’re both brilliant and their work is totally underappreciated.

Personally, I am not so secretly convinced that the actual reason we haven’t yet figured out which theory of quantum gravity describes our universe is that we haven’t understood quantization. The so-called “problem of time”, the past hypothesis, the measurement problem, the cosmological constant – all this signals to me the problem isn’t gravity, the problem is the quantization prescription itself. And what a strange procedure this is, to take a classical theory and then quantize and second quantize it to obtain something more fundamental. How do we know this procedure isn’t scale dependent? How do we know it works the same at the Planck scale as in our labs? We don’t. Unfortunately, this topic rests at the intersection of quantum gravity and quantum foundations and is dismissed by both sides, unless you count my own small contribution. It’s a research area with only one paper!

Having said that, I found Lee’s answers interesting because I understand better now the optimism behind the quote from his 2001 book, that predicted we’d know the theory of quantum gravity by 2015.

I originally studied mathematics, and it just so happened that the first journal club I ever attended, in '97 or '98, was held by a professor for mathematical physics on the topic of Ashtekar’s variables. I knew some General Relativity and was just taking a class on quantum field theory, and this fit in nicely. It was somewhat over my head but basically the same math and not too difficult to follow. And it all seemed to make much sense! I switched from math to physics and in fact for several years to come I lived under the impression that gravity had been quantized and it wouldn’t take long until somebody calculated exactly what is inside a black hole and how the big bang works. That, however, never happened. And here we are in 2015, still looking to answer the same questions.

I’ll restrain from making a prediction because predicting when we’ll know the theory for quantum gravity is more difficult than finding it in the first place ;o)