Friday, January 11, 2019

Uncanny dual

Lubos Motl just posted an essay, "Quantum gravity from self-collisions of the configuration space". It makes an analogy between a property of strings, and how quantum gravity in the larger world may work. Namely, a string may appear to be a self-contained world, but if the worldsheet fields approach the same values as those on another string - or even elsewhere on the same string - then interaction can occur, because both strings are actually moving in a larger space, and having worldsheet fields with the same values, means the strings are at the same place in the larger space.

So Lubos says, this may be a property of quantum gravity in general, that when quantum fields in different places approach similar values, there is some possibility for the formation of a wormhole connecting them.

What has me in mild shock is that this is the best rationale yet for something like Sheldrake's "morphic resonance", and for any number of alleged paranormal phenomena. The attempt to influence something far away by making a copy of it used to be called sympathetic magic, and is sometimes used as an example of pre-scientific or pre-causal thinking. And here we have the perfect mechanism for it!

Furthermore, there's no reason why these connections should be purely spacelike... For more details, see these future thoughts of mine.