> There is a growing consensus in theoretical physics that spacetime is not a primitive notion
That’s a very strong statement. I’m not sure what the actual distribution of views on spacetime is, but there certainly isn’t a consensus on that matter. If I wanted to establish credibility, I wouldn’t open a paper with such a dubious claim.
Second, Pauli matrices are highly relevant to space (see: Dirac spinors; but also, they can be used for quaternions—i.e., rotations in 3D). Using Pauli matrices to argue that we live in a 1+3 spacetime feels, at the very least, like a circular argument.
tomrod · 2h ago
My understanding is limited, but this seems pretty interesting. I'm not quite sure I follow the argument that space is a correlated interaction at the quantum level.
As a total tangent: it would be interesting to have an LLM-based modality, like a browser extension, where a user could highlight academic concepts in a pdf and drill down. Academic writing, by convention and necessity, is terse and references prior literature, sometimes opaquely. So getting up to speed in the literature takes significant effort.
yababa_y · 1h ago
semanticscholar does this!
nyeah · 2h ago
Any physicist willing to comment? Sure, the spin matrices were built to deal with three spatial axes. Is there more to the paper than that?
n4r9 · 1h ago
> the spin matrices were built to deal with three spatial axes
If I understand correctly, it kinda happened the other way around. First the Pauli matrices were introduced to explain unexpected degrees of freedom in experimental observations; then the term "spin" was proposed because the operators related to each other in the same way as classical angular momentum operators. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13552...
naasking · 1h ago
Hossenfelder actually did a video on this just yesterday:
Decoding quantum reality - with Vlatko Vedral @ The Royal Institution (4-Mar-2025; 59:26)
https://youtu.be/70FhS6NAbuA
(I mostly watch while reading the running transcript these days - https://www.appblit.com/scribe?v=70FhS6NAbuA)
Second author seems very established, so some social proof there: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Geom...
EDIT: yesterday's video on the paper by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7See8OhtN-k (h/t user naasking below)
> There is a growing consensus in theoretical physics that spacetime is not a primitive notion
That’s a very strong statement. I’m not sure what the actual distribution of views on spacetime is, but there certainly isn’t a consensus on that matter. If I wanted to establish credibility, I wouldn’t open a paper with such a dubious claim.
Second, Pauli matrices are highly relevant to space (see: Dirac spinors; but also, they can be used for quaternions—i.e., rotations in 3D). Using Pauli matrices to argue that we live in a 1+3 spacetime feels, at the very least, like a circular argument.
As a total tangent: it would be interesting to have an LLM-based modality, like a browser extension, where a user could highlight academic concepts in a pdf and drill down. Academic writing, by convention and necessity, is terse and references prior literature, sometimes opaquely. So getting up to speed in the literature takes significant effort.
If I understand correctly, it kinda happened the other way around. First the Pauli matrices were introduced to explain unexpected degrees of freedom in experimental observations; then the term "spin" was proposed because the operators related to each other in the same way as classical angular momentum operators. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13552...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7See8OhtN-k