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… "I think that the biggest significance is that our new definition does not describe the emergence of the universe from a complete absence of space and time," Lehners told Phys.org. "Rather, the new mathematical conditions, that we had to impose to avoid instabilities, can be interpreted as saying that there existed already fluctuations of space and time. This is in fact what one might expect from quantum theory in any case, as the quantum uncertainty principle implies that there should always be fluctuations, presumably even of space and time."
… The issue of perspective also informs the interpretation of the study, Batelaan said. Classical forces operate locally, affecting only the matter adjacent to those forces. But quantum mechanics—notably quantum entanglement, whereby changes in one particle simultaneously manifest in another entangled particle that could theoretically reside light-years away—isn't bound by distance.
Batelaan said the team's results could be interpreted as evidence of a similarly non-local force. "Here, we have a situation that is non-local but unlike quantum entanglement," Batelaan said. "It is a one-particle phenomenon, not a two-particle phenomenon. So can this idea of things happening without a force be applied in a different context? That's very rare. It's very, very special. I think that what we're on to here is indeed another example of it. ... … "This step of discretization is complex," says Tilloy. In addition, such simplifications always have the disadvantage of breaking a fundamental symmetry of nature when dividing the continuum into a grid of discrete points. They are thus forced to move away from the actual physics. The method of continuous tensor networks could provide help here, because it does not require this prior discretization of space. Perhaps the behaviour of quarks and gluons at low energies will one day be understood. Today it's still an open problem, but the recently discovered continuous tensor networks might already be part of the solution.
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