from Hacker News

Geometry from Quantum Temporal Correlations

by ljosifov on 6/13/25, 1:21 PM with 27 comments

• by stared on 6/13/25, 4:24 PM

  Well, it feels shaky. First, it starts with:

  > There is a growing consensus in theoretical physics that spacetime is not a primitive notion

  That’s a very strong statement. I’m not sure what the actual distribution of views on spacetime is, but there certainly isn’t a consensus on that matter. If I wanted to establish credibility, I wouldn’t open a paper with such a dubious claim.

  Second, Pauli matrices are highly relevant to space (see: Dirac spinors; but also, they can be used for quaternions—i.e., rotations in 3D). Using Pauli matrices to argue that we live in a 1+3 spacetime feels, at the very least, like a circular argument.

• by patcon on 6/13/25, 2:57 PM

  Can't assess content beyond amateur attempt, but am curious.

  Second author seems very established, so some social proof there: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Geom...

  EDIT: yesterday's video on the paper by Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7See8OhtN-k (h/t user naasking below)

• by ljosifov on 6/13/25, 4:41 PM

  A recent Vedral (one of the authors) talk -

  Decoding quantum reality - with Vlatko Vedral @ The Royal Institution (4-Mar-2025; 59:26)

  https://youtu.be/70FhS6NAbuA

  (I mostly watch while reading the running transcript these days - https://www.appblit.com/scribe?v=70FhS6NAbuA)

• by magicalhippo on 6/14/25, 12:18 PM

  I just watched a brief talk[1] over at Pirsa about the emergence of Lorentzian signature and time dimension from quantum fluctuations.

  As I understood it, starting with a uniform 4D metric, and then introducing a certain amount of asymmetrical "noise" to the background field through particle coupling, one of the dimensions got an effective sign flip in the metric leading to spacetime metric signature we know and love.

  Just a layman so can't comment on the details, but sounded interesting.

  [1]: https://doi.org/10.48660/25060082

• by tomrod on 6/13/25, 2:43 PM

  My understanding is limited, but this seems pretty interesting. I'm not quite sure I follow the argument that space is a correlated interaction at the quantum level.

  As a total tangent: it would be interesting to have an LLM-based modality, like a browser extension, where a user could highlight academic concepts in a pdf and drill down. Academic writing, by convention and necessity, is terse and references prior literature, sometimes opaquely. So getting up to speed in the literature takes significant effort.

• by nyeah on 6/13/25, 2:48 PM

  Any physicist willing to comment? Sure, the spin matrices were built to deal with three spatial axes. Is there more to the paper than that?

• by neom on 6/13/25, 5:26 PM

  There was a long paper on HN recently that I've been stuck thinking about.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43990843

  Jaeger et al.’s ideas on consciousness is in which many “baked in” structures are emergent, and that living or "cognitive systems" similarly generate meaning from underlying complexity without being reducible to a straightforward set of rules. Macro level “givens” (geometry) can arise from deep nonclassical processes. “procedurally generated quantum reality” or something.