Imagine Describing Our Universe to an Alien from an Alternate Dimension. Where Would You Begin?

You might reasonably begin by explaining that we live in three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. Space and time are so fundamental to our understanding of the universe that they are woven into nearly every equation in physics. They are the words in which we speak the language of nature—so tried, tested, and true that we don’t even know how to talk about the cosmos without engaging space and time in the conversation.

But what if it turns out that space and time are not the fundamental infrastructure of our cosmos—what if they are themselves products of some deeper physics?

This idea is called emergence. We see it in nature, as when fish school or birds flock. If you were only to study an individual fish or bird, you would never predict how they would come together as a group. Yet each one “knows” simple rules that, when combined, create a wide range of agile and elegant behaviors. Could it be that physicists have been studying flocks all along, not realizing that it’s the birds that are truly fundamental?

“There aren’t many things in quantum gravity that everyone agrees on,” says Eleanor Knox, a philosopher at King’s College London who specializes in the philosophy of physics. “Yet the one thing many people seemed to agree on in quantum gravity was that we were going to have to cope with space and time not being fundamental.” …