Captain Inanity

This is a fun thought experiment inspired by emergent gravity, condensed-matter field theory, and the idea that many effective fields arise from deeper microscopic quantum systems. What happens if we treat spacetime in exactly the same way we treat emergent quantum fields? In other words, what if the spacetime we...

Relativity tells us that spacetime is a 4D structure with no universal “now.” Einstein took this seriously. He believed that the flow of time is an illusion, and that we live in a block universe where past, present, and future all coexist within spacetime. But quantum mechanics seems to treat...