Primordial Space Intro.

Every scientific programme begins with a discomfort — a feeling that a question is being asked at the wrong level, or that an answer that works is not the answer that is true. The discomfort that generated this work is simple to state: the two great theories of modern physics — general relativity and quantum mechanics — are each extraordinarily precise within their domain, and completely incompatible with each other at their boundary. Decades of effort by thousands of physicists have not resolved this incompatibility. The mathematical obstacles are real, but the deeper obstacle may be conceptual. General relativity describes spacetime as a geometric entity — a smooth, continuous, curved manifold on which matter moves and which matter deforms. Quantum mechanics describes matter as fields on a fixed background spacetime. Each theory assumes the other's domain as a given. Neither explains the other. And when both are needed simultaneously — at the Planck scale, at the origin of the universe, inside a black hole — both break down. The standard response to this impasse has been to try to quantise gravity — to apply the formalism of quantum mechanics to the gravitational field of general relativity. This programme, pursued for seventy years through string theory, loop quantum gravity, and many other approaches, has not produced a confirmed prediction. The hypothesis at the origin of this work is that the impasse is not technical but conceptual. The problem is not that we lack the mathematical tools to quantise gravity. The problem is that we are trying to unify two effective theories, each of which describes a regime of something deeper — and that something deeper has not yet been named.