Researchers find quantum gravity has no symmetry

Could our universe be a hologram after all?

There are four kinds of fundamental forces in Nature: electromagnetism, strong force, weak force, and gravity. Of the four, the gravity is the only one still unexplainable at the quantum level. Researchers believe the holographic principle is an important hint to combine the gravity and quantum mechanics successfully.

A hologram makes three-dimensional images pop out from a two-dimensional screen. Similarly, the holographic principle allows physicists to study gravitational systems by projecting them on a boundary that surrounds the entire Universe. The AdS/CFT (anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory) correspondence, developed in the late 1990s by Juan Maldacena, has been particularly useful because it gives a precise mathematical definition of the holographic principle.

In the paper published on May 17, Ooguri and Daniel Harlow, Assistant Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proved that symmetry is not possible in a gravitational theory if it obeys the holographic principle.

Researchers find quantum gravity has no symmetry