Quantum Gravity Will Be Just Fine Without String Theory 62
StartsWithABang writes: It's a difficult fact to accept: our two most fundamental theories that describe reality, General Relativity for gravitation and the Standard Model / Quantum Field Theory for the other three forces, are fundamentally incompatible with one another. When an electron moves through a double slit, for example, its gravitational field can't move through both slits, at least not without a quantum theory of gravity. String Theory is often touted as the only game in town as far as formulating a quantum theory of gravity is concerned, but in fact there are five viable options, each with different pros, cons, and approaches to the problem. Many of them, in fact, have undergone significant developments in the past 5-10 years, something String Theory cannot claim.
This is not news (Score:1)
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It's an OK blog, but it's being posted too often. Slashdot needs a wider science blog coverage.
The main problem here is that SWAB is probably one of the only science bloggers submitting their stories to the submission queue. Submission and their selection is a long standing problem at Slashdot but I don't care enough about this site anymore to go further into that.
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StartsWithABang [slashdot.org] has 15 slashdot submissions since May 21st, all of them links to medium.com. It's probably just someone at medium.com gaming the system. They can always hide behind the "well they get upvoted people must like them", unfortunately. They're not all Ethan either, it's a variety of people although his articles were used the most.
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We will be just fine (Score:1)
without the endless error-ridden blogposts on unreadable hipster website clickbait spam, thanks.
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Look, any Quantum theory describing any force faces the basic problem that the effects of the force occur before the state is detected. Since QM believers think that detecting something *determines* its state at the time of detection, it requires time travel to go back in time and determine the effect so the force can apply correctly. Thus QM is an incorrect model because it violates causality.
Why do you believe in causality? Is it based on events you have witnessed (and read about and so on) at human scale? I suspect so. Both QM and relativity have somewhat odd things to say about causality, but both make predictions consistent with your experience at human scale and in familiar conditions. QM, however, also explains a bunch of very surprising observations. The universe is evidently a strange place, not always consistent with "human scale at familiar energy levels".
QM is certainly consisten
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Thus QM is an incorrect model because it violates causality.
Regardless of if the model is correct or incorrect, these are facts. The double slit experiment violates causality, which means physics violates causality. There must be a catch.
"Laws" are actually only valid on the macro level. Even thermodynamics can be violated at the micro level as long as it isn't violated at the macro level. We already have machines that can make energy flow from low to high without putting energy into the system.
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The double slit experiment violates causality, which means physics violates causality.
Why do you believe the double slit experiment violates causality? It violates locality, but not causality. No slit, no interference.
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You are wrong about casualty, measuring one part of entangled quantity only tells what the other one is, nothing more. Quantum theory is the most useful model of reality that we have, excluding gravitational interactions. Maybe gravitational field is not quantized, that's the issue
DELETING MY ACCOUNT (Score:1)
Bye Slashdot.
I'm sick of the videos and silly new poll positioning and STARTS WITH A BANG.
Any recommendations for other tech news sites?
Re:DELETING MY ACCOUNT (Score:4, Funny)
I already have. Inadvertently. Through Slashdot.
really old science... ? (Score:1)
There are sites offering an alternative view to the internals of the electron. Not sure how controversial it is.
You may want to take a look at Blaze Labs Research.
http://blazelabs.com/index.htm
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You misunderstand the issue, slashdot should not be actively trying to drive away users.
That's why Sheldon left string theory research (Score:2)
Oh no (Score:1)
Has anyone told Sheldon yet?
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testable theory of quantum gravity? (Score:4, Funny)
http://link.springer.com/artic... [springer.com]
Abstract
It is shown here that Newton’s gravity law can be derived from the uncertainty principle. The idea is that as the distance between two bodies in mutual orbit decreases, their uncertainty of position decreases, so their momentum and hence the force on them must increase to satisfy the uncertainty principle. When this result is summed over all the possible interactions between the Planck masses in the two bodies, Newton’s gravity law is obtained. This model predicts that masses less than the Planck mass will be unaffected by gravity and so it may be tested by looking for an abrupt decrease in the density of space dust, for masses above the Planck mass.
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This immediately fails because masses less than the Planck mass are affected by gravity.
Examples of varying familiarity (to physicists) include the drops in the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment, Bose Einstein Condensates, and slow neutrons.
Meanwhile, this gets ignored (Score:1)
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How about a theory that connects classical physics, electrodynamics, special relativity and gravity, and explains everything from the stability of atoms and molecules to the accelerated expansion of the universe?
Yay, Time Cube!
String Theory is not even a proper theory (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it can be mangled to fit any observation. It's not disprovable [columbia.edu]. All of the alternatives are better because they are actually disprovable via experimentation.
What does the double slit experiment (Score:1)
have to do with gravity? I have never heard of this interpretation ever, and I've been reading about it for 30 years.
Please provide a link that shows the double-slit experiment has anything to do with an electron's gravity.
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I would be delighted for any link that shows an electron in fact is affected by gravity. We've only ever measured its inertial mass and assume gravitational mass is the same
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All this because Einstein threw out the Aether. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Double-Slit experiment is easy to explain if we consider that EM fields ride on a substrate or carrier wave, or dark matter or let's just call it "The Aether". It's a concept that Space was a thing, and along with bad ideas, Einstein threw this baby out with the bath water.
Now we've got physicists who want everything to be a particle and they can't say "Aether", so they'll invent dark matter or something else to fill the void, rather than saying the void is already filled.
EM fields don't have gravity, do they? So the extra interfering slit is a resonance set up by space itself. Gravity is the phenomena of particles (I think they are 8 dimensional resonating fields -- but whatever to avoid argument with current ideas) pushing out on Space. When their motions are organized (such as in a magnetic field or resonating with kinetic energy/heat) we can get EM fields. Gravity is many times more powerful than the standard model -- it's just not aimed at matter and we drift around and clump together based on the pressure of Gravity pushing on Space (like corks on the ocean).
Well anyway, that's just the way I see things. It sounds a bit like m-theory or the Quantum Gravity, but it's just easier to use a clean slate and figure out how we get what we observe with the fewest forces possible. So to me, it's resolvable with the Push of Gravity, the Pull of EM fields, folded space (particles) that have positive or negative charges in various degrees (created by Time potential), and we have space which allow these things to interact and interfere with each other. Gravity is created by Space/Time coming out of the folded space/time (particles). All you need is a medium and a Universe can be created merely by the interference.
GTR and quantum mechanics are NOT incompatible (Score:2)
I'm crazy enough to believe I have found a path to unification that is actually quite simple: add a new relativity principle that states that laws of physics must be the same irrespective of the measurement instrument we use. Here is a parallel:
- Special relativity states that the laws of physics must be the same irrespective of your state of motion. So a complete description of an experiment must include which referential you are using. There is no absolute space, no absolute time, no aether. And we need t