"The notion of a smooth spatial geometry, the central principle of general relativity, is destroyed by the violent fluctuations of the quantum world on short distance scales. ...The equations of general relativity cannot handle the rolling frenzy of the quantum foam. ...There are ...physicists ...who are deeply unsettled by the fact that the two foundational pillars of physics as we know it are at their core fundamentally incompatible, regardless of the ultramicroscopic distances that must be probed to expose the problem. This incompatibility, they argue, points to an essential flaw in our understanding of the physical universe. This opinion rests on an unprovable but profoundly felt view that the universe, if understood at its deepest and most elementary level, can be described by a logically sound theory whose parts are harmoniously united. Physicists have made numerous attempts at modifying either general relativity or quantum mechanics in some manner so as to avoid the conflict, but the attempts... have been met with failure after failure. That is, until the discovery of superstring theory."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (1999) Ch. 5 The Need for a New Theory: General Relativity vs. Quantum Mechanics.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Unification_in_science_and_mathematics
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Unification in science and mathematics
99 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Unification in science and mathematics →
Related Quotes
"It appears... that the elastic theories of light, if Kelvin's gyrostatic adynamic ether be admitted, have not been wh…"
"At first the mathematical disciplines were not sharply defined. As knowledge increased, individual subjects split off…"
"Whatever its source, mathematics has come down to the present by the two main streams of number and form. The first c…"
"If the early Greeks were cognizant of Babylonian algebra, they made no attempt to develop or even to use it, and ther…"
"Science is an attempt to represent the known world as a closed system with a perfect formalism. Scientific discovery …"
"Up to this point mathematics alone appeared to Descartes worthy of being called a science. ...in order to establish t…"
"[A]s the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in the same measure sublime... w…"
"Edmund Burke, ' (1757) p. 81 of the 1898 edition."
"Copernicus had taken one course in treating the earth as virtually a celestial body in the Aristotelian sense—a perfe…"
"The more man inquires into the laws which regulate the material universe, the more he is convinced that all its varie…"