In recent years a hot topic in some theoretical physics circles has been the 2013 “ER=EPR” conjecture first discussed by Maldacena and Susskind here. Every so often I try and read something explaining what this is about, but all such efforts have left me unenlightened. I’m left thinking it best to wait for this to be better understood and for someone to then produce a readable exposition.
Instead of that happening, it seems that the field is moving ever forward in a post-modern direction I can’t follow. Tonight the arXiv has something new from Susskind about this, where he argues that one should go beyond “ER=EPR”, to “GR=QM”. While the 2013 paper had very few equations, this one has none at all, and is actually written in the form not of a scientific paper, but of a letter to fellow “Qubitzers”. On some sort of spectrum of precision of statements, with Bourbaki near one end, this paper is way at the other end.
Susskind starts out:
It is said that general relativity and quantum mechanics are separate subjects that don’t fit together comfortably. There is a tension, even a contradiction between them—or so one often hears. I take exception to this view. I think that exactly the opposite is true. It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same thing, but those of us who are paying attention, may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that neither makes sense without the other.
I just finished writing a book about quantum mechanics, and it all seemed to me to make perfect sense without invoking gravity, but as explained above I guess I’m one of those who is not (successfully) paying attention. Another route to understanding would be to focus on the new experimental implications of the ideas. In the abstract Susskind claims that his ideas imply that we’ll observe quantum gravity using quantum computers in a lab “sometime in the next decade or so”. When that happens maybe this will all become clearer.
Update: Sabine Hossenfelder has a commentary on the paper here.