John Carlos Baez on Nostr: There's a ton more to say, but let me recap and expand slightly on my main points: 1) ...
There's a ton more to say, but let me recap and expand slightly on my main points:
1) We don't know that something interesting must happen around the Planck length, roughly 10⁻³⁵ meters. We don't even know much about what's going on at distances smaller than 10⁻²⁰ meters, which is roughly the limit of what our accelerators now probe.
2) We don't know that we need a renormalizable theory of quantum gravity.
3) All this is actually good news for theoretical physicists, since the Great Stagnation may be due to unnecessarily limiting the range of theories being studied.
4) There's a lot we still don't know about the earliest theory of quantum gravity, which I've been calling 'naive quantum gravity'. It's not renormalizable in the traditional sense. But we don't know if the dreams of Asymptotic Safety are correct. There's even a lot of confusion about what naive quantum gravity predicts about how Newton's constant G depends on how you measure it:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08773
6) This is also good news: it means there are some very basic things left to figure out - so lots to do. New insights may help break the Great Stagnation.
7) There's a whole other story to be told about particle physics, and yet another story to be told about cosmology. I'm not going to talk about those now - but not because they're unimportant or uninteresting!
8) Happy New Year! 🎉
(7/n, n = 7)
1) We don't know that something interesting must happen around the Planck length, roughly 10⁻³⁵ meters. We don't even know much about what's going on at distances smaller than 10⁻²⁰ meters, which is roughly the limit of what our accelerators now probe.
2) We don't know that we need a renormalizable theory of quantum gravity.
3) All this is actually good news for theoretical physicists, since the Great Stagnation may be due to unnecessarily limiting the range of theories being studied.
4) There's a lot we still don't know about the earliest theory of quantum gravity, which I've been calling 'naive quantum gravity'. It's not renormalizable in the traditional sense. But we don't know if the dreams of Asymptotic Safety are correct. There's even a lot of confusion about what naive quantum gravity predicts about how Newton's constant G depends on how you measure it:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08773
6) This is also good news: it means there are some very basic things left to figure out - so lots to do. New insights may help break the Great Stagnation.
7) There's a whole other story to be told about particle physics, and yet another story to be told about cosmology. I'm not going to talk about those now - but not because they're unimportant or uninteresting!
8) Happy New Year! 🎉
(7/n, n = 7)