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We first discovered the laws of gravity, and then those of quantum mechanics. But new work suggests nature might go about it the other way around: space-time, and hence gravity, could emerge from a fundamental quantum mechanical description of the universe.
According to Einstein’s general relativity, gravity is the curvature of space-time. That this geometry might be related to the minuscule quantum world was first understood in the 1970s when Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein showed that the entropy of a black hole – which depends on the black hole’s microscopic quantum structure – is proportional to its surface area.
While at Harvard University in the late 1990s, Juan Maldacena discovered a connection between a theory of gravity that describes a volume of space and a quantum field theory that describes the volume’s surface, and doesn’t include gravity. Since then, others have used