Is the Basic Structure of the Universe Simple?
Can our extremely complicated world be explained, starting from simple conditions and laws? Such questions easily become metaphysical, but at the same time they have historically served science well by promoting new and fruitful ideas. Of particular interest in this paper is the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. It is suggested that a way to find a common basis for these theories could be to view them both as stochastic theories which, among all possible macroscopic developments, promote the simplest ones. But with the difference that general relativity uses real probabilities, whereas quantum mechanics uses complex weights. In a certain sense this approach goes back to the Principle of Least Action, although the perspective on this principle in the present paper is different from the one which is commonly used in contemporary physics. It is also suggested that a more general principle, which applies to both theories and which is beyond both stationarity and minimizing, could give us a better starting point for the unification.
Authors
- Martin Tamm (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8640-3510)
Institutions
- Stockholm University (SE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Axioms
- Published
- 2025-12-14
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/axioms14120922
- Primary Topic
- Relativity and Gravitational Theory
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00