Beyond space-time: Welcome to phase space
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But did Einstein's revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, doesn't think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space.
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So what is phase space? It is a curious eight-dimensional world that merges our familiar four dimensions of space and time and a four-dimensional world called momentum space.
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The quartet took the standard mathematical rules for translating between momentum space and space-time and applied them to a curved momentum space. What they discovered is shocking: observers living in a curved momentum space will no longer agree on measurements made in a unified space-time. That goes entirely against the grain of Einstein's relativity. He had shown that while space and time were relative, space-time was the same for everyone. For observers in a curved momentum space, however, even space-time is relative.
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Seems the technique is somewhat akin to what Witten did to unify competing String Theories, which was akin to what Einstein did to move things along from Newtonian models .. ie: move thinking towards higher dimensions.
The Cosmological Principle, at the end of the day, is a working assumption which provides the fundamental basis for Standard Cosmology with all of its strengths and weaknesses. Is this really the way nature works ? Why should we presume it is necessarily this way ?
Cheers