81–90 of 120 posts
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But relativity explains GPS. And the two theories together explain practically everything to insane levels of precision. The only time they go wrong is when they both operate at once, in a narrow range around black holes or the very earliest universe.
They also go wrong with large scale phenomena like inflation, dark matter, and dark energy.
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General Relativity doesn’t end just above the atmosphere and quantum mechanics ought to apply to everything, not just experiments. The current microscopic models don’t even attempt to explain how a molecule of water is lighter than the oxygen and two hydrogen atoms that went into making it. Oh sure, we can wave our hands at it and invoke the mass-energy relation from GR, but this doesn’t “pop out” of the Standard Mod…
Can you point to some evidence for the claim that "a molecule of water is lighter than the oxygen and two hydrogen atoms that went into making it?" I could understand the atoms sharing electrons, but just want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly, because you said it's unexplained.
Not OP, but burning hydrogen in oxygen is exothermic. It makes intuitive sense that the energy from that reaction no longer contributes to the mass of its products.
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It is factually incorrect in the assertion that the standard model can't explain the reduction in mass (special relativity and quantum mechanics work fine together. It's general relativity that is the problem). In fact mass-energy equivalence is a pretty core part of quantum mechanics.
> In fact mass-energy equivalence is a pretty core part of quantum mechanics. It may be stated as such, and added in to equations as an external piece of knowledge from relativity, but this is cheating a bit. Essentially, when we state that H2O has less mass than H+H+O, what we actually mean is that H2O bends spacetime a little bit less than the three atoms individually that made it up. There's no accepted variant of…
if we have to come up with a completely new model, we should at the same time reduce confusion going forward by renaming the new model to "the nucular model of the nuculus".
The fundamental theories we have is Quantum Electrodynamics and Quantum Chromodynamics. This new experiment tells you that "modern nuclear forces, including those derived within chiral effective field theory" break down and cannot be used to describe what they observed. Here is the arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10582 It just tells you that their effective theory is no longer effective in these circumstances. Unle…
The title says that the experiments diagree with "the leading theory of the nucleus", which is chiral effective field theory. I don't see anything wrong or "clickbaity" about this.
Whether or not you consider that to be part of their job is in the eyes of the reader.
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There's also the problem of fine tuning -- why is the fine structure constant roughly 1/137? If it were different from its current value by a tiny amount, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist. Is the anthropocentric principal the only explanation we have -- it has the value it has because it produces a universe in which we're able to observe it? And I guess less formally there's also the problem of complexity: c…
The other theory is there are infinite universes somehow being created all the time by every choice. Which to my mind isn't very Occam's Razor-ish. But it does exist as a theory.
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They also go wrong with large scale phenomena like inflation, dark matter, and dark energy.
IMHO, "Inflation" is false theory, because it doesn't obey law of conservation of energy. If no inflation, then no Big Bang, so our Visible Universe is much older. If our Universe is much older, then life evolved multiple times already. Red stars are shallow gravity wells, so they are primary target of an expansive civilization, because it easy to enter/exit them, so they are colonized first and their light is captur…
It is possible and I would judge even likely that some other value is conserved; that conservation of energy can be broken doesn't mean all chaos is unleashed and the Patent Office should revoke their ban on perpetual motion machines. When it is finally worked out, we may even pick up our "energy" label and move it to this new quantity. Depends on a lot of details we don't currently know. But what we today call energy is not necessarily conserved at large scales.
Saying that the universe can't do X because it violates conservation of energy is a circular argument; the precise definition of "conservation of energy" used by physics today is derived from our belief that the universe can't do X, but we also know our beliefs are incomplete. Very good approximations. Don't quit your day job to build a perpetual motion machine. But we are not in a position yet to even claim that our description of the universe is complete and we know the exact thing being conserved.
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Cool story. Now explain why almost everything we see is moving away from us, where fresh hydrogen for stars comes from in an ancient universe, where the cosmic background radiation comes from, why the distant universe appears 'younger'... Note that the 'laws' of physics are no better than normal scientific theories, scientists just had more hubris back then.
I don't even know where "fresh" hydrogen comes from for new stars in our current universe. Why would it be different for an older one?
It’s a much much bigger problem if the universe significantly older than we think it is… if we were to believe the Wikipedia article on this[0], we’d only expect stars to exist at all for about 100 trillion years, but given that the distribution of hydrogen availability is likely to follow an inverse exponential decay curve of some sort, we’d probably see much lower amounts of hydrogen much earlier than that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_univers...
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The standard model has a number of free parameters [1] but the results of calculations are pretty sensitive to them, and this is what predicted (not just explained post-hoc) the Higgs. It's not incorrect to say there's curve fitting involved, but it severely understates the magnitude of the achievement that is the standard model, and its success in explaining everything that underpins everyday life[2], as well as mos…
If it explains everything then why are experiments still ongoing? What is left to explain?
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The title says that the experiments diagree with "the leading theory of the nucleus", which is chiral effective field theory. I don't see anything wrong or "clickbaity" about this.
I would characterize it as the article doesn't have anything overtly wrong with it, but it did make it easy to come away thinking this is revealing some sort of massive fundamental issue with everything, rather than what it is, which is the continuing process of tuning a highly successful theory down in the decimal points. Whether or not you consider that to be part of their job is in the eyes of the reader.