Over the past several days, I attended a fascinating conference that explored an old idea of Einstein’s, one that was largely dismissed for decades: that quantum mechanics is not the root level of reality, but merely a hazy glimpse of something even deeper. A leading advocate is Gerard ’t Hooft of Utrecht University, who shared the 1999 Physics Nobel for helping to assemble the Standard Model of particle physics (for which, rumor has it, another Nobel will be awarded tomorrow). He and I chatted over a lunch of beef goulash and maize stew, and I thought you’d be intrigued by what he had to say.
’t Hooft thinks the notorious randomness of quantum mechanics is just a front. Underneath, the world obeys perfectly sensible rules. In the models he has toyed with, those rules govern building blocks even more fundamental than particles. You’d see them only if you could zoom into the so-called Planck scale, which, according to many modern theories, is the smallest meaningful distance in nature.
One point in favor of such an approach is that far-flung particles can act in a coordinated way, which you wouldn’t expect if they were purely random. Yet the idea of a deeper level is deeply troubled. In the 1960s, Irish physicist John Bell showed that the degree of coordination among particles is too exacting for any deeper level of physics to explain. Bell argued that particles actively need to communicate with one another, which ’t Hooft’s models don’t allow for.
To read more, click here.