From Calum Kermack, Aberdeen, UK
The energy applied by some of the world’s great minds to understand quantum gravity is something to celebrate, but the lack of any real progress in over 100 years implies a gap in the thought process(17 May, p 30).
A tenet of quantum mechanics is that the wave function of a quantum particle collapses when the particle interacts with its environment. My hypothesis is that “quantum gravity” is such an environmental interaction between a quantum particle and a massive object. That interaction may be as mundane as a photon emitted by the massive object and absorbed by the particle. It causes the wave function of the particle to collapse at the point of the interaction, which will be within the volume initially occupied by the wave function. Furthermore, it can be shown that the probability function representing the location of the interaction is concentrated towards the massive object. So, the particle establishes its new wave function, now centred on the point of the collapse. The shift in the wave function’s centre represents an acceleration by the particle towards the massive object, which we recognise as gravity.
