What Constitutes Emergent Quantum Reality? A Complex System Exploration from Entropic Gravity and the Universal Constants

Abstract

Abstract:In this work, it is acknowledged that important attempts to devise an emergent quantum (gravity) theory require space-time to be discretized at the Planck scale. It is therefore conjectured that reality is identical to a sub-quantum dynamics of ontological micro-constituents that are connected by a single interaction law. To arrive at a complex system-based toy-model identification of these micro-constituents, two strategies are combined. First, by seeing gravity as an entropic phenomenon and generalizing the dimensional reduction of the associated holographic principle, the universal constants of free space are related to assumed attributes of the micro-constituents. Second, as the effective field dynamics of the micro-constituents must eventually obey Einstein's field equations, a sub-quantum interaction law is derived from a solution of these equations. A Planck-scale origin for thermodynamic black hole characteristics and novel views on entropic gravity theory result from this approach, which eventually provides a different view on quantum gravity and its unification with the fundamental forces.

Gravity from transactions: fulfilling the entropic gravity program

“…13 Note that equation ( 14) might serve as a definition for the constant G [7]. 14 We can multiply the information-entropy ( ) I x by the "number" of bits on the sphere, because ( ) I x is the average information over all partitions containing the point x and is hence independent of a specific coverage B of the sphere. In order to count the number of bits on the sphere, S , R we chose the local surface-measure…”

“…The notion of micro-constituens of space-time in general is discussed with a view to the vast literature in e.g. [14].…”

Emergent Gravity Simulations for Schwarzschild–de Sitter Scenarios

“…Building on entropic gravity theory, previous work has provided an exploration of the emergentist viewpoint on gravity by adopting an explicit complex systems approach [19]. This work conjectured that spacetime basically consists of indistinguishable constituents that fulfil the conditions for the emergence of a complex system, which are defined as 'numerosity' and (typically non-linear) 'interactions' that spontaneously result in persistent structures [20].…”

“…In this work, the spacetime constituents proposed in [19] are taken to be standard model gravitons (spin-2 gauge bosons). However, instead of using the standard derivation involving a boson Lagrangian that has each term corresponding to an interactionspecific Feynman graph [13,14], the graviton self-interaction is here derived from a reverseengineering argument, in analogy with [9,19]: As the emergent effective field dynamics of the gravitons must eventually obey Einstein's field equations, an interaction law that yields the required diffeomorphism invariant field behaviour is obtained from a solution to these equations (also see Section 2). This means that the graviton interaction is eventually formulated within the emergent spacetime framework itself, and not in a more fundamental, pre-geometric framework.…”

“…The presented work first revisits the spacetime constituent interaction identified in [19], which is extended to Schwarzschild-de Sitter scenarios in such a way that it only depends on local variables (Section 2). This enables direct graviton-level simulations for two simulation scenarios that are presented afterwards, and which are intended to, respectively, address two research questions (Section 3): (1) Does spacetime curvature emerge upon introducing a graviton condensate into a flat graviton (spacetime) background, and (2) does a graviton density gradient induce free fall upon a test mass?…”