![]() ![]() ![]() They pointed out that, according to the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, a pair of particles once associated would be eternally connected, even if they were light-years apart. In the other paper, Einstein, Rosen and another physicist, Boris Podolsky, tried to pull the rug out from quantum mechanics by exposing a seemingly logical inconsistency. In one paper, Einstein and Nathan Rosen showed that general relativity predicted that black holes (which were not yet known by that name) could form in pairs connected by shortcuts through space-time, called Einstein-Rosen bridges - “wormholes.” In the imaginations of science fiction writers, you could jump into one black hole and pop out of the other. The schism between the two Einsteins entered the spotlight in 1935, when the physicist faced off against himself in a pair of scholarly papers. That insight, Susskind and his colleagues hope, could lead to a theory that combines gravity and quantum mechanics - quantum gravity - and perhaps explains how the universe began. “But those of us who are paying attention may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that neither makes sense without the other.” “It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same thing,” Leonard Susskind of Stanford University wrote in a paper in 2017. In this version of the cosmos, there is no difference between here and there, cause and effect, inside and outside or perhaps even then and now household cats can be conjured in empty space. The implications are mind-bending, including the possibility that our three-dimensional universe - and we ourselves - may be holograms, like the ghostly anti-counterfeiting images that appear on some credit cards and driver’s licenses. The two realms long seemed to have nothing to do with each other this left scientists ill-equipped to understand what happens in an extreme situation like a black hole or the beginning of the universe.īut a blizzard of research in the past decade on the inner lives of black holes has revealed unexpected connections between the two views of the cosmos. Gravity rules outer space, shaping galaxies and indeed the whole universe, whereas quantum mechanics rules inner space, the arena of atoms and elementary particles. God doesn’t play dice, Einstein often complained. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead until it is observed. On the other side is the Einstein who, starting in 1905, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that inject randomness into the world - rules that Einstein never accepted. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of Jell-O and disappear into those bottomless pits of nothingness known as black holes. On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. ![]() For the past century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself. ![]()
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