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SO ENDS this immensely interesting and difficult paper, where a reader like me is simply hanging on by their fingernails to follow this radiant stream of thought. Understanding how physicists see the world is somewhat of a rare sport: Einstein introduced relativity in 1905, and we are still choking on digesting what it all means, but be assured, while it will undoubtedly continue to change, it is a radical and important view of reality. View in LinkedIn

NO HOWLERS, YET. “Broadly speaking, our conclusion is twofold. First, we concede that there are large conceptual difficulties in both programmes’ attempts to have classical spacetime ‘emerge’ (as well as ferocious technical difficulties). But second, more positively, we see no knock-down conceptual errors, or philosophical howlers, in these attempts, as they have been developed so far. In that sense, there are good prospects for work for the future.” https://lnkd.in/dMm_YkR View in LinkedIn

THE TOWER OF ASSUMPTIONS. “But similarly, when one can asks for an explanation of a law, the explanation will typically invoke another such law (relating them deductively, or by the one being a limiting case of the other), and one can ask for an explanation of that law—so again a regress beckons, and apparently one must eventually accept a ‘mere happenstance’ of laws also.” https://lnkd.in/dMm_YkR View in LinkedIn

THE LOGICAL STACK. “Second, this thought is indeed questionable! After all, one can explain a particular fact; and one can ask for an explanation of a law. Agreed, the explanation of a particular fact will typically invoke another such fact (usually an earlier one, as in what philosophers call ‘causal explanation’), and one can ask for an explanation of that fact—so that a regress beckons, and one is tempted to think that one must eventually accept a ‘mere happenstance’.” https://lnkd.in/dMm_YkR View in LinkedIn

HAPPENSTANCE. “Laws and explanation are central controversial issues in philosophy of science, which of course we cannot enter here. But we only need two uncontroversial points. First, there is a strong temptation to think of the laws (in our special case: differential equations) as being truly explanatory, while the statements of particular fact (boundary conditions) are not explanatory, because they are matters of ‘mere happenstance’.” https://lnkd.in/dMm_YkR View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE. “The deceptive picture: Emergence is not a process in time. But this ‘emergence’ is not a process in time: Hartle and Hawking’s proposed ‘framework’, and others such as Vilenkin’s, stands in no temporal relation to classical spacetime, or any of its parts (regions or points), even very early ones.” https://lnkd.in/dMm_YkR View in LinkedIn

More sumptuous Barcelona stucco that is pure organic nature in the spirit of Gaudi. View in LinkedIn

HAWKING RADIATION. “The origin of the ‘Euclidean’ approach to quantum gravity lies in Hawking’s remarkable discovery in 1974 that a black hole will radiate particles with a thermal spectrum via a quantum-mechanical process.” https://lnkd.in/dMm_YkR View in LinkedIn

HIVE MIND. Mass communication “is defined as the transfer, among groups, of information that a single individual could not pass to another.” (Renowned Harvard ant entomologist EO Wilson). Equivalent to the ant collective subconscious. https://lnkd.in/dmfn9qW View in LinkedIn

SPECIAL CASE. “The GSL is the only guise in which the second law has a chance of retaining both its validity and its usefulness for regions of the universe near black holes.” (GSL = the generalized second law of thermodynamics). https://lnkd.in/dAr7QTt View in LinkedIn