Prequel to Diaphorum: The Riddle Underlying Math and Physics
As Richard Feynman, pitch the MSRP (below) at the Caltech Athenaeum
ChatGPT Prompt
Richard Feynman walks to the podium in the Athenaeum dining room, taps the microphone twice, and grins.
“Alright, you clowns. You’ve spent a hundred years polishing spacetime like it’s some sacred crystal. Minkowski this, Markov that. But nature—real, messy, experimental nature—keeps coughing up data that doesn’t fit your pretty, memoryless picture.
So here’s a new game. A puzzle. Something you can chew on for the next decade. And if you solve it, you can say you replaced spacetime. That oughta look good on the résumé.”
He clicks to the slide:
THE MSRP CHALLENGE
Feynman turns back to the crowd.
“You see the problem? Everything you folks are using—Markov chains, differential geometry, causal sets, fancy category jazz—they all assume too damn much. Nature doesn’t hand us points and arrows and metrics with a bow on top.
Maybe there’s a simpler thing underneath it all. Something that isn’t a set, isn’t a process, isn’t a category. Something stupid. Something obvious. Something so embarrassingly simple that once you see it, you’ll smack your forehead and say, ‘Why the hell didn’t we start with that?’
So that’s the challenge. Don’t fix spacetime. Replace it.
And make it work.”
He pauses, rocking on his heels.
“If you really understand physics, you ought to be able to start from nothing and build the whole damn universe. If your tools can’t do that, get new tools.”
He snaps the clicker shut, laughs, and adds:
“Now—who’s buying the beer?”
Markovian Spacetime Replacement Problem
- Challenge: Existing Markovian models of uniform spacetime struggle to account for non-Markovian (textured) observational data.
- Problem: Fixing this in the bulk is hard; non-Markovian texture tends to break recovery of Minkowski spacetime.
- Complication: Putting texture on the boundary (AdS/CFT) seems a natural solution but known tools fail: causal sets are too rigid, category-theoretic approaches are too structured.
- Solution: A simpler pre-geometric primitive capable of encoding texture while still reproducing smooth spacetime.
Follow-Up Q&A
(A lively, anachronistic exchange with physicists from many eras.)
Audience Member 1 — Hermann Minkowski:
“Feynman, your proposal threatens the clean geometric unity we fought for. Without a manifold, where does spacetime live?”
Feynman:
“Maybe it doesn’t ‘live’ anywhere, Hermann. Maybe it condenses out of something simpler. Geometry as an emergent trick rather than a starting axiom.”
Audience Member 2 — Emmy Noether:
“If your pre-geometric whatever-it-is isn’t a category or set, how do you preserve invariances? What guarantees conservation laws?”
Feynman:
“I’m not promising invariances—only that they could arise from the deeper structure. Think of symmetries not as axioms but as leftovers from the way the primitive organizes itself.”
Audience Member 3 — Paul Dirac:
“You’re ignoring algebraic elegance. Any replacement for Markovianity must still admit linear structure. Otherwise, goodbye Hilbert space.”
Feynman:
“Or maybe Hilbert space is the convenient approximation—like classical mechanics is to quantum. I’m not tossing it; I’m just asking what lies underneath.”
Audience Member 4 — John Archibald Wheeler:
“Is this just ‘it-from-bit’ in disguise? Or are you aiming for something even more basic?”
Feynman:
“Bits still assume too much. I’m exploring the possibility that even discreteness and information are emergent.”
Audience Member 5 — Modern Heckler (pick your favorite holographer):
“If texture lives on the boundary, why don’t the usual tools—causal sets, categories—work?”
Feynman:
“They’re too stiff or too structured. They smuggle in assumptions that kill the texture. I’m after something supple enough to wrinkle but stable enough to smooth into spacetime.”
Audience Member 6 — Albert Einstein:
“But Richard, without differential structure, how do you recover curvature?”
Feynman:
“Al, maybe curvature is the macroscopic shadow of microscopic texture. Like Brownian motion giving you diffusion.”
Audience Member 7 — Stephen Hawking:
“You’re proposing a replacement for spacetime but offering no equations. Isn’t that premature?”
Feynman:
“Sure. But every good idea starts out unequational. The trick is carving out the problem sharply enough that the equations have no choice but to show up later.”
Audience Member 8 — Erwin Schrödinger:
“So: Markovian spacetime fails, but non-Markovian fixes break geometry, and boundary tricks break your tools. What’s left?”
Feynman:
“That’s exactly the fun part. We don’t know yet. But if we find the right primitive—simpler than sets, categories, or processes—we may get both texture and smooth spacetime for free.”
To be continued…
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