A theory of reality beyond Einstein’s universe is taking shape – and a mysterious cosmic signal

could soon fill in the blanks

IT WASN’T so long ago we thought space and time were the absolute and unchanging
scaffolding of the universe. Then along came Albert Einstein, who showed that different
observers can disagree about the length of objects and the timing of events. His theory of
relativity unified space and time into a single entity – space-time. It meant the way we thought
about the fabric of reality would never be the same again. “Henceforth space by itself, and time
by itself, are doomed to fade into mere shadows,” declared mathematician Hermann Minkowski.
“Only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

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.

If this radical claim is true, it could solve a troubling paradox about black holes that has stumped
physicists for decades. What’s more, it could set them on the path towards their heart’s desire: a
“theory of everything” that will finally unite general relativity and quantum mechanics.

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.

Momentum space isn’t as alien as it first sounds. When you look at the world around you, says
Smolin, you don’t ever observe space or time – instead you see energy and momentum. When
you look at your watch, for example, photons bounce off a surface and land on your retina. By
detecting the energy and momentum of the photons, your brain reconstructs events in space and
time.

The same is true of physics experiments. Inside particle smashers, physicists measure the energy
and momentum of particles as they speed toward one another and collide, and the energy and
momentum of the debris that comes flying out. Likewise, telescopes measure the energy and
momentum of photons streaming in from the far reaches of the universe. “If you go by what we
observe, we don’t live in space-time,” Smolin says. “We live in momentum space.”

And just as space-time can be pictured as a coordinate system with time on one axis and space –
its three dimensions condensed to one – on the other axis, the same is true of momentum space.
In this case energy is on one axis and momentum – which, like space, has three components – is
on the other (see diagram).
Simple mathematical transformations exist to translate measurements in this momentum space
into measurements in space-time, and the common wisdom is that momentum space is a mere
mathematical tool. After all, Einstein showed that space-time is reality’s true arena, in which the
dramas of the cosmos are played out.

Smolin and his colleagues aren’t the first to wonder whether that is the full story. As far back as
1938, the German physicist Max Born noticed that several pivotal equations in quantum
mechanics remain the same whether expressed in space-time coordinates or in momentum space
coordinates. He wondered whether it might be possible to use this connection to unite the
seemingly incompatible theories of general relativity, which deals with space-time, and quantum
mechanics, whose particles have momentum and energy. Maybe it could provide the key to the
long-sought theory of quantum gravity.

Born’s idea that space-time and momentum space should be interchangeable – a theory now
known as “Born reciprocity” – had a remarkable consequence: if space-time can be curved by
the masses of stars and galaxies, as Einstein’s theory showed, then it should be possible to curve
momentum space too.

At the time it was not clear what kind of physical entity might curve momentum space, and the
mathematics necessary to make such an idea work hadn’t even been invented. So Born never
fulfilled his dream of putting space-time and momentum space on an equal footing.

That is where Smolin and his colleagues enter the story. Together with Laurent Freidel, also at
the Perimeter Institute, Jerzy Kowalski-Glikman at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and
Giovanni Amelino-Camelia at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, Smolin has been
investigating the effects of a curvature of momentum space.

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 (see diagram).
This mismatch between one observer’s space-time measurements and another’s grows with
distance or over time, which means that while space-time in your immediate vicinity will always
be sharply defined, objects and events in the far distance become fuzzier. “The further away you
are and the more energy is involved, the larger the event seems to spread out in space-time,” says
Smolin.

For instance, if you are 10 billion light years from a supernova and the energy of its light is about
10 gigaelectronvolts, then your measurement of its location in space-time would differ from a
local observer’s by a light second. That may not sound like much, but it amounts to 300,000
kilometres. Neither of you would be wrong – it’s just that locations in space-time are relative, a
phenomenon the researchers have dubbed “relative locality”.

Relative locality would deal a huge blow to our picture of reality. If space-time is no longer an
invariant backdrop of the universe on which all observers can agree, in what sense can it be
considered the true fabric of reality?
“Relative locality deals a huge blow to our understanding of the nature of reality”

That is a question still to be wrestled with, but relative locality has its benefits, too. For one
thing, it could shed light on a stubborn puzzle known as the black hole information-loss paradox.
In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes radiate away their mass, eventually
evaporating and disappearing altogether. That posed an intriguing question: what happens to all
the stuff that fell into the black hole in the first place?

Relativity prevents anything that falls into a black hole from escaping, because it would have to
travel faster than light to do so – a cosmic speed limit that is strictly enforced. But quantum
mechanics enforces its own strict law: things, or more precisely the information that they
contain, cannot simply vanish from reality. Black hole evaporation put physicists between a rock
and a hard place.

According to Smolin, relative locality saves the day. Let’s say you were patient enough to wait
around while a black hole evaporated, a process that could take billions of years. Once it had
vanished, you could ask what happened to, say, an elephant that once succumbed to its
gravitational grip. But as you look back to the time at which you thought the elephant had fallen
in, you would find that locations in space-time had grown so fuzzy and uncertain that there
would be no way to tell whether the elephant actually fell into the black hole or narrowly missed
it. The information-loss paradox dissolves.

“There would be no way to tell whether an elephant actually fell into the black hole or narrowly
missed it”

Big questions still remain. For instance, how can we know if momentum space is really curved?
To find the answer, the team has proposed several experiments.

One idea is to look at light arriving at the Earth from distant gamma-ray bursts. If momentum
space is curved in a particular way that mathematicians refer to as “non-metric”, then a high-
energy photon in the gamma-ray burst should arrive at our telescope a little later than a lower-
energy photon from the same burst, despite the two being emitted at the same time.

Just that phenomenon has already been seen, starting with some unusual observations made by a
telescope in the Canary Islands in 2005 (New Scientist, 15 August 2009, p 29). The effect has
since been confirmed by NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, which has been collecting
light from cosmic explosions since it launched in 2008. “The Fermi data show that it is an
undeniable experimental fact that there is a correlation between arrival time and energy – high-
energy photons arrive later than low-energy photons,” says Amelino-Camelia.

Still, he is not popping the champagne just yet. It is not clear whether the observed delays are
true signatures of curved momentum space, or whether they are down to “unknown properties of
the explosions themselves”, as Amelino-Camelia puts it. Calculations of gamma-ray bursts
idealise the explosions as instantaneous, but in reality they last for several seconds. While there
is no obvious reason to think so, it is possible that the bursts occur in such a way that they emit
lower-energy photons a second or two before higher-energy photons, which would account for
the observed delays.

In order to disentangle the properties of the explosions from properties of relative locality, we
need a large sample of gamma-ray bursts taking place at various known distances
(arxiv.org/abs/1103.5626). If the delay is a property of the explosion, its length will not depend
on how far away the burst is from our telescope; if it is a sign of relative locality, it will.
Amelino-Camelia and the rest of Smolin’s team are now anxiously awaiting more data from
Fermi.

The questions don’t end there, however. Even if Fermi’s observations confirm that momentum
space is curved, they still won’t tell us what is doing the curving. In general relativity, it is
momentum and energy in the form of mass that warp space-time. In a world in which momentum
space is fundamental, could space and time somehow be responsible for curving momentum
space?

Work by Shahn Majid, a mathematical physicist at Queen Mary University of London, might
hold some clues. In the 1990s, he showed that curved momentum space is equivalent to what’s
known as a noncommutative space-time. In familiar space-time, coordinates commute – that is, if
we want to reach the point with coordinates (x,y), it doesn’t matter whether we take x steps to the
right and then y steps forward, or if we travel y steps forward followed by x steps to the right. But
mathematicians can construct space-times in which this order no longer holds, leaving space-
time with an inherent fuzziness.

In a sense, such fuzziness is exactly what you might expect once quantum effects take hold.
What makes quantum mechanics different from ordinary mechanics is Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle: when you fix a particle’s momentum – by measuring it, for example – then its position
becomes completely uncertain, and vice versa. The order in which you measure position and
momentum determines their values; in other words, these properties do not commute. This,
Majid says, implies that curved momentum space is just quantum space-time in another guise.

What’s more, Majid suspects that this relationship between curvature and quantum uncertainty
works two ways: the curvature of space-time – a manifestation of gravity in Einstein’s relativity
– implies that momentum space is also quantum. Smolin and colleagues’ model does not yet
include gravity, but once it does, Majid says, observers will not agree on measurements in
momentum space either. So if both space-time and momentum space are relative, where does
objective reality lie? What is the true fabric of reality?

“If Einstein’s space-time is no longer something all observers can agree on, is it the true fabric of
reality?”

Smolin’s hunch is that we will find ourselves in a place where space-time and momentum space
meet: an eight-dimensional phase space that represents all possible values of position, time,
energy and momentum. In relativity, what one observer views as space, another views as time
and vice versa, because ultimately they are two sides of a single coin – a unified space-time.
Likewise, in Smolin’s picture of quantum gravity, what one observer sees as space-time another
sees as momentum space, and the two are unified in a higher-dimensional phase space that is
absolute and invariant to all observers. With relativity bumped up another level, it will be
goodbye to both space-time and momentum space, and hello phase space.

“It has been obvious for a long time that the separation between space-time and energy-
momentum is misleading when dealing with quantum gravity,” says physicist João Magueijo of
Imperial College London. In ordinary physics, it is easy enough to treat space-time and
momentum space as separate things, he explains, “but quantum gravity may require their
complete entanglement”. Once we figure out how the puzzle pieces of space-time and
momentum space fit together, Born’s dream will finally be realised and the true scaffolding of
reality will be revealed.

 The principle of relative locality by Giovanni Amelino-Camelia and others