Andrew Strominger

So if you're going to reverse engineer, that means, you know, you...

Forward engineering means that you take the present and determine the future.

Reverse engineering means that you take the present and determine the past.

But if the past was nothing, how are you ever going to reverse engineer to nothing?

No, but do you think that... Maybe, but people have tried to do things like that.

It's not something that we're getting A pluses in.

Well...

I have some late night ideas about that that aren't really ready for prime time.

Yeah, yeah.

And many people do.

It could be that some of the advances in quantum information theory are important in that they kind of go beyond taking quantum systems and just replicating themselves, but combining them with others.

I think ultimately it has to be emergent.

Well, let's review what it means for space to be emergent.

What it means for space to be emergent is that you have a holographic plate and you shine some light that's moving in space and it produces an image which contains an extra spatial dimension and time just goes along for the ride.

So what we'd like to do, and indeed there is some rather concrete work in this direction, though again, I would say even within our stringing community, we're not getting A pluses on these efforts.

But what we'd like to do is to see examples in which the extra space-time dimension is time.

In other words,

Usually what we understand very well mathematically is how to take systems in some number of space-time dimensions and rewrite them as a plate in fewer space dimensions.

What we'd like to do is to take systems with...

one time in some number of space dimensions, and to rewrite them as a system that had only space dimensions in it, had no time evolution.