The Relationship Between General Relativity and Spacetime

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I think that people who do foundations of quantum mechanics generally don't think too much about general relativity and spacetime, or if they are experts in it. But I do think that that's something people should take more seriously. And this is the effect of gravity on quantum mechanics, not of quantum mechanics on gravity. You're just looking at experiments which are on the verge of being done or being tried even now. One of the latest ideas is using Bose-Einstein condensates. These are very, very quantum mechanical states, very, very cold, almost absolute zero. And you could put them in super positions of two places at once and maybe see what happens. It's experiment

Sir Roger Penrose has had a remarkable life. He has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of general relativity, perhaps more than anyone since Einstein himself -- Penrose diagrams, singularity theorems, the Penrose process, cosmic censorship, and the list goes on. He has made important contributions to mathematics, including such fun ideas as the Penrose triangle and aperiodic tilings. He has also made bold conjectures in the notoriously contentious areas of quantum mechanics and the study of consciousness. In his spare time he's managed to become an extremely successful author, writing such books as The Emperor's New Mind and The Road to Reality. With far too much that we could have talked about, we decided to concentrate in this discussion on spacetime, black holes, and cosmology, but we made sure to reserve some time to dig into quantum mechanics and the brain by the end. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.