Is There a Dynamical Law That Gravity Is?

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Gravity is the most exciting application, i would say. If you can use gravity to a generate entanglement between two quantu masses in some experiment, on some kind of laboratory setting, then gravity has to be non classical. And we haven't been able to do this yet in terms of erjust an experiment Er. So even though we don't have specific danomical models that can unambiguously work for making predict we can use principles.

Traditional physics works within the “Laplacian paradigm”: you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system through time. Constructor theory proposes an alternative paradigm: to think of physical systems in terms of counterfactuals — the set of rules governing what can and cannot happen. Originally proposed by David Deutsch, constructor theory has been developed by today’s guest, Chiara Marletto, and others. It might shed new light on quantum gravity and fundamental physics, as well as having applications to higher-level processes of thermodynamics and biology.

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Chiara Marletto received her DPhil in physics from the University of Oxford. She is currently a research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her new book is The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.

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