What if a paper appeared tomorrow unifying General Relativity and Quantum | Hacker News Reader

What if a paper appeared tomorrow unifying General Relativity and Quantum

1 pointpajuhaan11 comments

Imagine waking up tomorrow to a scientific paper that's exactly what physicists have been searching for over the past 100 years: a unified framework seamlessly connecting quantum mechanics and general relativity.

What would your reaction be if this theory, rather shockingly, abandons the familiar 4-dimensional spacetime structure of General Relativity, and instead derives all phenomena of special and general relativity from one extremely simple, elegant, and almost unbelievable equation?

What if this theory needs no Dirac or relativistic Schrödinger equations, yet naturally explains the quantum predictions of spin and entanglement--even elegantly deriving Bell's inequalities?

I'm genuinely not joking or posting just for fun--I truly care and want to know your honest reactions.

How would you feel?

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Post-2000 the problem is not that we lack a theory of quantum gravity, it's that there are a large number of approaches to quantum gravity [1] but no experiment that can pick out one of them. The most valuable theoretical work now is that which proves certain approaches are dead ends -- the demolition of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_special_relativity is one of the best things that happened in the last 20 years as I see it.

So, to parody the VISA ad, "new theory of quantum gravity: 50 cents, experiment that reveals something about quantum gravity: priceless"

[1] I count 25 here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity#Candidate_theo...

I totally agree; the inability to experimentally falsify most quantum gravity theories is indeed a huge pain that has haunted theoretical physics for over 80 years.

But here's a thought: what if a completely new approach emerged, one that didn't start with 11-dimensional strings, M-theory, or quantizing General Relativity directly? after all, 100% quantum gravity candidates still assume the standard 4-dimensional spacetime as described by GR +smt extra, then attempt to quantize it!

But imagine if we had a fundamental theory from which gravity and GR themselves emerged naturally and effortlessly—making General Relativity merely an emergent phenomenon of something "much simpler"

Wouldn't a theory like that be worth more than 50 cents?

That kind of radical theory would resonate deeply with my own research direction.

My work with the entropic_measurement library is all about re-examining the foundations of measurement and bias—using entropy and information theory rather than just classical statistical concepts. The central idea is that many of our most familiar frameworks (even in physics and data science) might only be special cases or projections of deeper informational principles.

If a new physical theory replaced 4D spacetime with a more fundamental description and still recovered the predictions of relativity and quantum mechanics, it would bolster the intuition that foundational “stretch points” in our theories—where anomalies or measurement ambiguities show up—are clues pointing us to deeper structures. My library’s approach, which explicitly quantifies and corrects informational bias, would fit naturally into this kind of paradigm shift:

Measurement would no longer be “just” about experimental manipulation in spacetime, but about managing and correcting fundamental information dynamics.

Bias correction based on entropy could become a bridge between experimental data and the predictions of radically new theoretical models.

The need for rigorous, transparent, and universal measurement tools would be even greater if the concepts of space and time themselves are revisited.

In a world where basic assumptions can be replaced by simpler or more abstract equations, approaches that foreground information theory and entropy—like mine—could become essential not just for practical analysis, but for interpreting the very nature of physical reality itself.

If anyone’s interested in how these ideas translate into real-world measurement and data science, or wants to discuss the overlap between foundational physics and informational bias, I’d be glad to chat!

If such a fundamental theory emerged tomorrow, what's the first, most essential question you'd ask about it?

Given your focus on entropy, would you be surprised if quantum probabilities turned deterministic at that foundational level?

If such a fundamental theory appeared and, say, showed that quantum probabilities are merely emergent from a deeper, almost “informationally deterministic”, law—my first reaction would be both awe and pragmatic excitement. But my essential question would be:

How does the new framework make concrete, falsifiable contact with measurement? In other words: Does it yield unmistakable, testable consequences in the way we extract information from experiments—not just new field equations or mathematically elegant objects?

I’ve devoted my own research (see https://github.com/rconstant1/metrologie-entropique-constant... ) to this question of measurement-as-bias-correction:

Instead of seeing quantum uncertainty or bias in data as “annoying noise”, I treat it as an informational clue to what’s truly fundamental.

If the new theory makes quantum randomness deterministic below the surface, then measurement outcomes (and their entropic corrections) become the direct probes of this “hidden layer”.

So the recipe for revolutionary science would be:

Propose your elegant new equation.

Show exactly how any experiment’s entropic bias or uncertainty will shift in the new theory—compared to the old one.

Publish the “statistical procedure” for experimenters: what concrete bias-corrections or informational signatures should they hunt for, in atomic clocks, cosmological surveys, or particle beams, that Einstein/Bohr did not predict?

If quantum processes turn out to be deterministic under the hood, “entropy” and “bias correction” will be the microscopes, not the obstacles, to seeing the new reality.

Ultimately, what would revolutionize science isn’t just a new equation, but a new attitude toward measurement —where information theory, uncertainty, and bias quantification become our main laboratory tools to find cracks in today’s deepest laws.

Would love to see foundational theorists and experimentalists collaborate on this directly—not just for gravity or quantum, but for all of science.

(PS: If any theorists or experimentalists want to brainstorm practical protocols that could reveal “hidden determinism,” DM or comment!)

I'd feel intrigued and curious.

"What would your reaction be if this theory, rather shockingly, abandons the familiar 4-dimensional spacetime structure of General Relativity, and instead derives all phenomena of special and general relativity from one extremely simple, elegant, and almost unbelievable equation?"

I'd assume it was LLM-generated slop, TBH

no -- just written by Grammarly

happy

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