Jonathan Oppenheim likes the occasional flirtation, but his interests are a little more tenuous than horse racing or one-armed thieves. Likes to gamble, his latest interest is space-time itself.
Two great theories of physics are fundamentally opposed. In one corner is general relativity, which holds that gravity is the result of mass bending space-time, like a stretchy sheet. The other is quantum theory, which describes the world of elementary particles and posits that all matter and energy are small discrete chunks. Together they can explain much of reality. The only problem is that you can’t put them together. The grainy mathematics of quantum theory and the smooth description of space-time do not mesh.
Most physicists believe the solution is to “quantize” gravity, or show how space-time can be small quanta like the other three forces in nature. Effectively, this means fine-tuning general relativity to fit the quantum type, and researchers have already been working on this for almost a century. Oppenheim, however, suspects that this assumption is wrong. That’s why he made a 5000:1 bet that space-time is ultimately not quantum.
new scientist We caught up with him to find out why he thinks the conventional wisdom may be wrong here, how experiments solve problems, and why physicists like good bets.
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