Nothing has satisfied me between why gravity and magnetism are not the same thing. A ferrous material where the electron poles can be aligned show high forces. Most things are totally misaligned, which I believe creates gravity. No explanation on stackexchange or anything else convinces me. Most of the arguments feel egotistical to me.
Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
61–70 of 138 posts
Re: Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
#62> Einstein finished his masterwork, the theory of general relativity, in 1915. He was 37 years old Interestingly if you look at the most popular programming languages they were created by someone 37.5 years old, on average [0]. [0] https://pldb.io/blog/ageAtCreation.html
That's not a great comparison. Einstein had already turned physics on its head and kickstarted several foundational paradigms in 1905, when he was only 25-26 years old.
Re: Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
#63Well that’s very interesting because one of the latest ideas getting traction on solving the information paradox is exactly this — that black holes are connected to each other and the outside space by wormholes. Check out the current Scientific American special publication.
I have always understood black holes to be "failed" wormholes. How does that fit into these new ideas?
Re: Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
#64An electron falling (electrostatically) toward a proton will reach the speed of light at some point. This is of course the same distance where inside it would need an escape velocity greater than c. So that's an event horizon due to a different force. Some claim matter falling into a black hole never really does from the point of view of an outside observer. I've seen weird sounding descriptions like it "spreads out…
You can try to make them viable if you want: it's Physics, not Math. You can't really "categorically prove something inviable". But you'll also have to reproduce the results of Quantum Mechanics that predict experimental results to the 11th decimal place.
I think something to keep in mind is humility. In the Bayesian sense it's quite unlikely for you to have picked up something that physicists missed or didn't try to work out before accepting Quantum Mechanics.
Re: Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
#65It's too commonly argued Einstein didn't produce anything after GR. This article is a welcome correction. The same collaboration produced the EPR paradox - a real achievement which taught us a great deal about quantum theory.
For all the glory Einstein deserves as one of the greatest minds I find more interesting the history of this supposed "failure" in later life, but it's even more admirable his tenacity at trying to tackle the problem at different angles for decades. And boy it must be a hard problem if Einstein himself could not crack it!
There's some argument that Einstein was in the right place at the right time. Mercury was wobbly, and there was about fifty years of non-euclidean geometry research built up, including (eg) Riemann breaking ground on differential geometry.
Maybe matter didn't crack because the right tools weren't available.
Re: Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> without relying on gravity to serve as a model of gravity (which always bothered me a bit) Why though? Would it help if the sheet were in a centrifuge?
> Why though? It bothers me too, why? because it's circular reasoning: acceleration can't explain acceleration. > Would it help if the sheet were in a centrifuge? No, for the same reason. (You're imagining a tube-shaped membrane?) To make it worse, it's developing a wrong idea that hides the right and deeply strange idea: when an object passes a mass and its path seems to deflect what's really happening is that the o…
As a sibling points out, it’s not explanatory as much as a visualization. Or if it explains something it’s not gravity itself but a less familiar kind of geometry and a new concept of straightness where sometimes the shortest path is what we’d usually think of as curved. Seems fine. Little chance of understanding gravity until you can grasp the prerequisite concepts you’re going to describe it with.
And anyway explaining gravity v2 in terms of v1’s first approximation isn’t that strange when recursive definitions are going to play a part in lots of higher education anyway. When you’re a kid, 5 is just a concept useful to describe every instance of 5 apples, but later, a number N is perhaps best understood as the successor of N-1.
Re: Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
#67Einsteins later work led only recently to the following exciting conjecture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER_%3D_EPR
Unfortunately the author doesn't seem to know about this idea.
Re: Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
#68Physicists didnt abandon this idea, Wheeler's geometrodynamics was all about the concept of geometry being relevant for more than grabity. As it happens with so many cool ideas it did not germinate something useful.
> As it happens with so many cool ideas it did not germinate something useful. Well, at least, not so far.
With so many trained mathematical / theoretical physicists around even the slightest experimental hint from nature would bring about a scientific revolution and new paradigms - like in real time.
The lack of news from the "deep" frontiers of fundamental physics might end tomorrow or might last a millenium. Its impossible to tell.
The pace of our increasing understanding of universe is not particularly predictable beyond these periods that benefit from simple scaling rules (ever bigger detectors etc.)
Re: Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
#69Physicists didnt abandon this idea, Wheeler's geometrodynamics was all about the concept of geometry being relevant for more than grabity. As it happens with so many cool ideas it did not germinate something useful.
> As it happens with so many cool ideas it did not germinate something useful. Well, at least, not so far.
I’m no mystic but one idea with slim evidence I just can’t shake is that anything and everything that’s theoretically elegant will find application or explanatory power in the fullness of time. Besides noneuclidean geometry, integer partitions come to top of mind as something that looks pure finding applications that we didn’t know we needed, and surprisingly fast.
I can only barely understand the explanation for things like monstrous moonshine, but I’m with Conway on this stuff anyway.. there has to be a reason, it can’t just be a coincidence. Or in more classical terms, maybe nature abhors a vacuum, but not in the original sense. Lots of math is just too cool to not use somewhere.
Re: Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
#70As a physics student, I feel compelled to point out, to any readers who might now go read Hossenfelders other articles, that many of her views are generally not shared by a majority of physicists today.
She is a real physicist and not a kook, but she has been criticized for presenting her views (e.g. superdeterminism) as having much more acceptance than they actually do. She ignores and misrepresents counter-arguments regularly. Her ideas about, e.g. the explanatory power of entanglement wrt processions of moons around (IIRC) Jupiter are certainly well outside what I’d describe as regular astrophysics.
The golden standard of science communication was set by Sagan, and he always carefully pointed out when he was expressing a personal opinion, as opposed to one shared by the majority. Sabine Hossenfelder is no Sagan.
So proceed with caution. :)