Four revolutions in physics and the second quantum revolution — A unification of force and matter by quantum information
Xiao-Gang Wen
Newton’s mechanical revolution unifies the motion of planets in the sky and the falling of apples on Earth. Maxwell’s electromagnetic revolution unifies electricity, magnetism, and light. Einstein’s relativistic revolution unifies space with time, and gravity with space–time distortion. The quantum revolution unifies particle with waves, and energy with frequency. Each of those revolution changes our world view. In this article, we will describe a revolution that is happening now: the second quantum revolution which unifies matter/space with information. In other words, the new world view suggests that elementary particles (the bosonic force particles and fermionic matter particles) all originated from quantum information (qubits): they are collective excitations of an entangled qubit ocean that corresponds to our space. The beautiful geometric Yang–Mills gauge theory and the strange Fermi statistics of matter particles now have a common algebraic quantum informational origin.
arXiv:1709.03824•International Journal of Modern Physics B•Sep 27, 2018•9 citations