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Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

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Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#51

I don't quite get it they say relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible. Does that mean they give different predictions?

It means we don't know how to quantize GR. Unlike the standard model of particle physics, it's a classical theory, i.e. a set of equations which tell you deterministically, without any of the inherent uncertainty of QM, how a given initial configuration will evolve.

This becomes a problem when you try to include GR in even simple experimental setups which expose QM's non-classical behavior, like the Stern-Gerlach experiment [1]. What does gravity do before the path chosen by the particle (which is gravitationally attractive) is measured?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experime...

Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#52
post #6

Can some knowledgable person articulate why physicists are so sure that QM and GR are incompatible?

1. If they aren't compatible at all something is really off, i.e. what happens to electrons in a gravitation field?

2. We can combine (quantize) gravity, but the problem is that using the tools we have today (Quantum Field Theory) the theory doesn't give meaningful answers. There is a process called renormalization that we use to squeeze an answer out of the theory, but that process don't work for all theories and not gravity.

Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#53

I don't quite get it they say relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible. Does that mean they give different predictions?

GR assumes reality is continuous, QM assumes it’s discrete.

Quantum mechanics is not inherently discrete.

We don't know whether the planck length is fundamental or not, but current models are in terms of continuous spatial and rotational degrees of freedom (in general). The eigenvalues often are quantized, however.

Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#54
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all physicists think they are incompatible. Mark Hadley [0][1] for example suggests that: "On spacetimes that are not time orientable we construct a U(1) bundle [model of a particle as an asymptotically flat spacetime manifold with a region of non trivial topology where time is not orientable] to measure the twisting of the time axis. This single assumption, and simple construction, gives rise to Maxwell’s equati…

In your quote of the abstract, you conveniently left out the last sentence: "The treatment is purely classical, but motivated by links between acausal structures and quantum theory." This is not unification of QM and GR, it's a classical construction which the author speculates might lead to such a thing. Such things have been around for a long time; the obvious (and far more progressed) example is string theory.

What you quote doesn't deny "no compatability" of the author… (I didnt say it was THE unification theory of QM and GR, you somehow inferred that, why? i dont know) and irrelevant when the author points out where the overlaps lie (what I quoted last). I could add that quote and it would change nothing as far as I'm concerned what the authors stance is on "no compatability". Hell, even in the second quote even mentions "it is purely classical" in reference to the derivation…

The author also doesn't also think very highly of string theory: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/staff/academic/mhadley...

Whether something is "more progressed" hardly matters in matters that still have many questions and more reflective of a consensus of the time that progresses one funeral at a time.

Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#55
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's completely wrong. Humans were just as smart 3000 years ago as they were today. The difference between today and back then is that people were much poorer and didnt receive an education. Their jobs were farming which didnt require things we consider essential like reading or writing which meant they stay unchallenged for their entire life. When you look at the rich elite or rich cities in the past then you see…

This is a nice theory, but what is the proof? Were people just as smart 30,000 years ago? What about 300,000 or 3 million years ago? How do you set the time scale? When was the boundary when people became smart?

We don't know exact dates of course, but looking at the works of mathematics and philosophy that have survived, we know for sure that humans were capable of abstract thought at least as far back as 4-5000 years ago (for example, during the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza), and very likely even 12-13000 years ago (during the construction of the megaliths at Gobekli Tepe, for example). Furthermore, we can assume that some time must have passed between the first threads of abstract thought and any achievements due to it that would stand the test of time, though I don't think we can put any hard estimates on this time.

Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#56
post #45
post #5

During brainstorming sessions, I often think about why/how medieval artists couldn't quite grasp how to depict depth in their paintings (as a lateral thinking technique). Being humans living in the world, they obviously experienced and understood that depth existed all around them, but had a hard time grasping the concept as a whole. I feel like we're kind of in a "medieval depth" phase of gravity/spacetime understan…

As others have said, I believe the lack of depth in medieval art is much more a matter of conventions than a matter of lack of theory or physical abilities (see [0]). The one thing that convinced me of that is the sudden jump in realism in Egyptian art during the reign of Akhenaten (Amarna period, see the famous Nefertiti bust for a great example). The new king asked for more realism and he received it, it just took…

Don't take this personally. Your comment just gave me an itch I had to scratch.

There are some words in people's explanations that always bother me. These are 'just', 'mere', merely' and the like. Why? Because they're not explaining, but explaining away. It's like saying: x is trivial, so it's not as important as you think.

But reality is much more complicated than that. For even simple things are hard to fathom for those not knowing how simple it is.

Now, back to the topic: no, medieval painters' lack of knowledge on how use perspective was not just matter of being stuck at conventions. When everyone is expecting to see a certain thing and you're payed to do that thing, it's not 'just' up to the painter see outside her/his perspective. What I'm saying is that takes a huge leap to break away from all that.

Beware of just explaining away phenomena.

Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantum mechanics deals with very small particles interacting with very strong forces. Gravity is so weak it can be ignored. Relativity deals with so much gravity that spacetime is warped. Neither is appropriate for the other and they are on opposite sides of the spectrum. Classical physics is useful in the middle at "human" scale. What would be nice is a simple theory that covers it all. Nothing we currently have is…

Is it possible that there is no overarching theory that unifies both of them? Could they both be true yet not connected in any way?

Only if the large world is irreducible to the world of particles, which doesn't seem plausible.

Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#58
post #6

Can some knowledgable person articulate why physicists are so sure that QM and GR are incompatible?

It's mostly because math prevents them from expressing gravity as a quantum field. The exactly opposite idea of adjusting QM to directly work in geometry of strongly curved space-time is not pursued much. Not sure why. Maybe because it's hard. Maybe because it would just be an extension of business as usual which isn't attractive. Maybe for some other reason.

> Maybe for some other reason

The usual objection is that test stress-energy fairly generically forms singularities (via Raychaudhuri focusing and Jeans instability mechanisms, for example). Singularities obstruct the determination of the entire spacetime from a "complete sample" of it across a spacelike hypersurface, which makes initial values surfaces approaches containing singularities (very probably) incomplete. The genericity means that most spacetimes are incomplete, and if one thinks a fundamental theory should be able to describe a test universe completely (i.e., every field value everywhere and at every time), this is a problem.

This theoretical problem appears already in a purely classical stress-energy on a Lorentzian spacetime. For all practical purposes this only matters for carefully defined test spacetimes that we care to simulate, rather than for real astrophysical systems in our (Lorentzian) universe. After all we can only describe mathematically-isolated parts of our universe, and with current technology we can only reasonably describe even those with approximations and effective theories. There is no shame in using Newtonian gravitation when planning a moon shot even when you know that you can't use Newtonian gravitation to describe the entire universe or even parts of it like the precession of Mercury's orbit much less the Hulse-Taylor system. There is no shame in using General Relativity in satellite-based navigation systems, either, even if you suspect GR cannot describe some feature of our universe much further afield.

So, let's consider a concrete theoretical example using a Schwarzschild black hole for which we break the time symmetry (i.e., we let its mass vary over time) and whose mass we drive with some classical matter that only negligibly perturbs the exterior part of Schwarzschild spacetime otherwise. With the gentle assumption of the no-hair conjecture being true, one can toss a spherically symmetrical shell of perfectly classical matter (remember this is a probe of theory, rather than a simulation of reality) of mass M into a black hole at the centre of the shell, or two concentric shells of classical matter of mass M/2 each, or three concentric shells of classical matter of mass M/3 each. If one takes a initial values surface (IVS) in the future of this shell-tossing and works backwards to determine the predecessors value surfaces of the IVS, one cannot decide whether one, two, or three shells were thrown in. The black hole singularity at r = r_0 is said to have destroyed the information, or if you like, the information is simply not encoded in the modified Schwarzschild solution described above.

That this is a problem pretty generically in nonvacuum Lorentzian spacetimes is sufficient to make General Relativity, at least in its initial values formulation, a less-than-desirable candidate for a fundamental theory of our universe from which other theories (Newton, Einstein-Maxwell, QCD, Navier-Stokes, etc.) might be derived.

Indeed, taking the position that one might erase quantum weirdness in strong gravity (and not worry much about exactly how by resorting to the slightly-less-gentle assumption of a cosmic censorship conjecture being true, such that strong gravity is always completely enclosed by a horizon) does not repair this problem, even if it might conceivably fix all the questions raised by Hawking radiation. Essentially, you're still left with questions like (simplifying the nuclear physics): given an initial values surface for black hole M at time T_now, when considering time T_slightly_earlier for black hole M_slightly_lower, can one work out whether the increase in mass was due to two deuterons falling in or one helium nucleus falling in? That is, we just have a quantum version of the classical shells above, and the same failure to extend from arbitrary IVSes across a whole fairly-generic spacetime.

We can make it worse by taking a surface T_far_future and M_much_smaller, that is after Hawking radiation has much reduced the mass of our black hole, and discover that we have an apparent violation of unitarity: our quarks and gluons (and electrons and so on) can't still be in the black hole (it's now too light to hide them behind the horizon) and yet there is now a cold gas of photons "carrying" the difference in mass. Lots of very clever people continue to study this "AMPS firewall" problem, which is essentially a theoretical sharpening of the "we lose the ability to describe the entire toy universe when a black hole is involved, and the real universe appears to have black holes in it" problem.

Experiments which provide evidence favouring a generic blocking mechanism that prevents matter from forming gravitational singularities in General Relativity would undoubtedly encourage a great deal of research into GR as a candidate fundamental theory once again. (Geometry-is-fundamental-as-in-stress-energy-is-geometrical-when-you-look-closely extensions of GR are still not dead-ended; just unpopular compared to stress-energy-is-a-specific-gauge-theory-and-geometry-probably-arises-from-it approaches).

Penultimately, a mathematical discovery that proves that gravitational singularities in GR are procedural artifacts arising from things like gauge fixing, and that they vanish with a good choice of gauge (or coordinate condition or whatnot) much like the coordinate singularity at r = r_s in the Schwarzschild solution was eventually found to vanish under different choices of coordinates (none of which makes the infinite Kretschmann scalar (at r = r_0 in Schwarzschild) go away).

Finally, we can just shrug and keep working with GR (and careful approximations) where it's useful and obviously in concordance with observations, and not sweat the fine details we can't in practice measure now anyway. If someone discovers an observational conflict which undermines GR as a theory in specific circumstances, it seems unlikely that GR will stop being used or taught any more than Newton has been abolished from classrooms and lecture halls, mostly because it is such a brilliantly effective theory for why there are very specific and observed-in-detail deviations from Newtonian gravitation. Practically nothing comes anywhere close to the match between GR and experiment and observation, and of those that do, most do worse than plain old Newton (sign reversals are rife) in certain situations : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternatives_to_general_relati...

Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#59

> Despite its successes, Einstein's robust theory remains mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics, the scientific understanding of the subatomic world. Testing general relativity is important because the ultimate theory of the universe must encompass both gravity and quantum mechanics. Maybe the universe just has a giant if statement.

Why must the ultimate theory of the universe encompass both? Do we know that there is an ultimate theory of the universe? Could GR and QM be wholly separate with no unifying connection?

They give different predictions for the same observed event so both can't be true. For example, since there is no gravity in the standard model (the general QM-model encompassing everything but gravity) and gravity obviously is observed, the theories are fundamentally incompatible.

It would be a different situations if the theories actually covered different domains of experiments, but neither define such a restriction (and it wouldn't make much sense to either of them).

Re: Einstein's description of gravity just got much harder to beat

#60
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a possible explanation that I'd seen somewhere. Up until very recently, humans had had weak ability to think, especially abstract thoughts, and the phrase common today "just think about it", would be meaningless just a few centuries ago. Perhaps the concept of depth in those times would be similar in complexity to 4-dimensional structures today.

That's completely wrong. Humans were just as smart 3000 years ago as they were today. The difference between today and back then is that people were much poorer and didnt receive an education. Their jobs were farming which didnt require things we consider essential like reading or writing which meant they stay unchallenged for their entire life. When you look at the rich elite or rich cities in the past then you see…

Another big factor, I think is communication. Today, discoveries spread almost instantly, all over the world. But back then you had hard to copy manuscript and people had to meet in person using slow and dangerous transportation.

So I think ancient discoverers wasted a lot of time rediscovering things.

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