A Tale of Emergence

The question of what fundamentally is has never been straightforward in physics, yet there had always been a tentative answer for both theoretical and practical purposes. Everything shifted about a century ago with the advent of quantum mechanics, which challenged our traditional understanding of existence as suddenly we can also talk about things that are in quantum space*, not only in classical spacetime anymore. Nonetheless, were we to keep a strong reductionist position, then we would be left with no choice but to understand how classical spatiotemporal existence can emerge from the quantum mechanical one. This talk aims to be a pedagogical introduction to this discussion, and its implications for contemporaries' approaches to quantizing gravity. Technical details will be mostly committed, but we will do a deep dive into some of the conceptual underpinnings of fundamental physics.

*Known as Hilbert space.