Unification

Abstract

THE GRANT PROJECT of quantum foundations is caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, everybody keeps singing the praises of quantum mechanics: how there’s never been a physical theory whose strange predictions have been so stunningly verified by experiment. Which means that we’re usually inclined, at least in our daily dealings, to think of quantum mechanics as some kind of finality, worth our undivided attention–much in the spirit, by the way, of Born and Heisenberg’s declaration, at the 1927 Solvay meeting, that quantum mechanics is a “closed theory, whose fundamental physical and mathematical assumptions are no longer susceptible of any modification.”

What new input and perspectives for the foundations of quantum mechanics may come from the interplay between quantum theory andgravity/relativity, andfrom the search for a unified theory?