It's testable! And maybe not just theoretically testable, but realistically testable. So they're not just pontificating, nor even pontificating in a mathematically consistent way.
TL;DR: They're assuming that spacetime is not quantized, but is as GR describes it. This produces a consistent theory that predicts that measured mass will fluctuate very slightly.
Personally I think the universe is a cellular automaton rule.
Particles dont exist they are just percieved gliders in rule following substrate.
A wave in the ocean doesnt exist any more than any other part of the water that isnt in the wave. We just focus on the wave because our brains are good at seeing moving shapes for hunting.
The substrate graph is updated by travelling rule applicators which dont require energy. Theyre like the updating edge of stacking faults between planes in crystalography.
Gravity slowing down light is just due to the travel speed of rule applicators being fixed. Higher graph density but fixed node updates per time means it takes longer to update a given volume.
Until then we are stuck at a funky high level abstraction. The table of quarks and particles we have is like what would happen if we were trying to figure out what our computers were made of by interacting with a url bar, and coming to the conclusion that the fundamental components of a computer are like... a table of HTTP response status codes.
Not to say that its useless, just that its not zoomed in enough.
What do you mean by "travelling rule applicators"?
Also by "travel speed of rule applicators being fixed"?
Is there a fundamental space and time in which the rule applicators exist?
This would require spacetime to be quantized (presumably at the Planck length or something smaller) though, yes?
I've always thought entanglement makes more intuitive sense on a graph substrate of some kind, where the "spooky action at a distance" is actually just an anomalous edge in the graph connecting two vertices which would otherwise be more distantly separated. This begs the question of how the edges in the graph came to be or whether they're modifiable at all though.
I thought it yes but maybe not necessarily. There could be infinite nodes but the rule is such that at a slightly larger scale it can only result in near instantanious graduated shifts between states. Like a phase transition in material. Where below the scale that these phase transitions appear insufficient substrate complexity exists to support any other features, so youd just be better off setting your minimum abstraction level at the "discrete" one. Or maybe it is just discrete idk.
As for weird behaviour like far reaching spookiness.
Could be multiple overlapping substrates at different scales.
Or, the rule directly includes a mechanism for remote information transmission.
I like that random fluctuation is a key part of the experiment. I would love to see more results on the nature of randomness in the universe where things like Boltzmann brains and antimatter asymmetry are a thing.
At first I thought this would be referencing Eric Weinstein's Geometric Unity theory, which he claims does just what the title states - which he developed over a 35 year period.
I wonder if this research piggybacks or was inspired by Eric's work, whether acknowledged or not?
Time will tell if their math and experiments fit in with Eric's and which is most foundational.
Wasn’t this theory mostly laughed off by both the industry and online? Iirc his introduction of it was claiming he was being oppressed and his theory never taken seriously
I have a physics degree and continue to learn about math, but in one talk I saw, Eric started off using math I'd never heard of, and didn't bother to introduce it or even motivate it's use. If he's looking for popular support, that is not the way to go about it, IMHO. But frankly it seems to me that he'd rather get the juice from claimed persecution than actually advance the field.
Re: "I have a physics degree and continue to learn about math, but in one talk I saw, Eric started off using math I'd never heard of, and didn't bother to introduce it or even motivate it's use"
So what you're saying is you don't even have the ability to start to understand if what he's saying is true, as you've not been willing to put the effort into learning the math he's referencing - that you've never heard of - and instead essentially doing high-level ad hominem saying "he'd rather get the juice from claimed persecution than actually advance the field"?
Sounds to me like Eric is right about what he says about the field in general, and why there's been little to no uptake in the indoctrinated-seemingly ideological field of physics studies.
I agree his tactics may be lacking, and that clearly he'll have to do a better job eventually - to handhold for people who have the capability to understand but your comment here supports the difficulties Eric states he's encountered with academia.
Did you try sending him an email to ask him for more guidance? That would not only help you - whether that leads to believe he's just a charlatan or helps you learn new math - but it would be an opportunity for him to learn to be a better teacher too.
Arguably the most efficient path for Eric as well, since everyone has limited time and resources, is to work with people who actually show and put in an minimally adequate effort to understanding - where connecting with him directly is perhaps the first necessary barrier to breach, so that you can have a productive conversation and at least a chance to be on the same page; and if you don't even know the math he's referencing, and can't talk his lingo, then you'd have to begin to learn the language he's speaking as a prerequisite - especially before judging him - the irony here is your ad hominem is in fact an example of persecution - and from the physics' community's mouth itself.
We all make judgements about what is worth pursuing. I'm not a fan of string theory because the sub-field over-promised and under-delivered for decades. I'm content to let others who know more get excited if the field is going to be saved by EW or anyone else. Spending time is a zero-sum, and the cost/benefit does isn't worth it to me.
But this is neither evidence of prosecution or an ad hominem. It's true that his other statements about politics and the world in general, particularly his propencity to accept and promulgate conspiracy theories without evidence, make me doubt his honesty and his moral fabric, but that's a relatively minor part of why I won't spend time on this.
"But frankly it seems to me that he'd rather get the juice from claimed persecution than actually advance the field."
This is absolutely ad hominem. You're insinuating he's a fraud - without even knowing the math he's referencing - and then saying he's trying to milk a victimhood stance; eloquent ad hominem, ad hominem nonetheless.
And the rest of what you said is fine - but throwing unsubstantiated shade/ad hominem as you walk away from the challenge is something else.
I'm curious though also, what "conspiracy theories" are you claiming he propagates - and without referencing evidence? That term is often thrown away as as ad hominem to be dismissive and demonizing as well.
People have overfit on a formalized dialect of math, because we dont practice on anything else.
If you beleive there are an infinite number of functions, youd probably also believe there to be an infinite number of notations for those functions.
All math in the formalized language has come from randoms making up their own symbols and arrangement rules, often times for fun. (see Newton) Sometimes theres equivalent notations for the same concept. (see leibnitz). Just like you can say the same sentence in chinese, english, and spanish, you can express the same concept in different math. Even within the same language you can say the same thing ten different ways.
Believing dogmatically in only one notation system would be silly. Put a modern calculus textbook, a 1920s boolean logic textbook, and principia next to eachother on the table. If you had only ever seen one before you'd think the others came from space.
If Eric is making up math you would need to translate it to the dialect you understand. (Which would probably result in you understanding it, and then he might stick with the more colloquial translation.)
I can follow Susskind's lectures about gravity. I understand metrics and tensors. Have you seen EW's talks? What was your take? I found them impenetrable and impossible to follow. Perhaps it's just me and my ignorance. But I happen to believe that a real expert in a field can explain it to a non-expert. By that measure, EW has not demonstrated expertise.
Sorry, at first I read "EW" as "Edward Witten" and was like "of course I wouldn't expect to follow any of his talks!" :) But no, I haven't seen any of Weinstein's talks. TBH I don't have a real physics education (just did independent study of GR as an undergrad), so my knowledge of QM/QFT is far too weak to really follow pretty much any technical talk on quantum gravity.
The funny part is that the beginning of the EricW talk mentioned by the grand-parent comment is just a summary of the another EdwardW talk, so of course it was hard to follow :)
Well, it was nothing controversial, just a super high level description of the current physics theories (general relativity and quantum field theory).
I went into a technical interview once and started solving a word search problem with a btree. I started with p-lists, and assembled the tree with tuples of tuples, assuming this was a starter data structure implementation that, after they added some constraint that would eliminate it as an option, i would easily modify.
Well, my interviewers didnt know what p-lists were because they only knew javascript.
They thought I was retarded and I didnt get the job.
Sounds like you should start your own company, at least technically then you'd be hiring better people - maybe even start competing in the same field of the company you were applying for?
That's an utter BS 'theory' and even if there was anything to it, its inventor did all he could to discredit his work in the eyes of many a scientist and science watcher
I hit a lengthy sequence of buttons, with intention.
My point was simple that you must seperate the art from the artist. I've heard very bad things about Hubble as well. Dawkins is sort of an asshat, but i liked The Selfish Gene, even if many parts of it didn't have supporting evidence.
Learn to enjoy the experience of processing and criticizing an idea itself. It can be fun and enlightening.
Okay, please debunk the math he's presented. I've yet to hear someone actually counter his math. You seem very certain, so I'm glad someone knows for sure he's wrong! I'll wait!
Nah the Weinstein thing is a meme, Oppenheim and his collaborators are proper scientists who write real papers about their stuff where they do real maths and physics. Not even comparable.
To me, intuitively, it makes sense for gravity to be classical, since gravity is not a force but a curvature of space-time. I hope we see results of their tests soon.
Gravity is a curvature of space-time in the theory of General Relativity. It is not known what it will be in the final theory. It could end up being a "force" after all, or it could be that all forces are "curvatures" of a sufficiently complicated understanding of "space time", in which case force would be likely be redefined to be "curvatures" of space time anyhow, or other possibilities.
It may be easier to understand this point by looking at the current theory of Quantum Mechanics, in which gravity doesn't exist at all. We are not entitled to make conclusions about gravity from that fact, since the conclusion would be "gravity doesn't exist", which is clearly false.
In General Relativity, the curvature of spacetime is affected by matter. Matter is governed by quantum mechanical physical laws, so General Relativity has to interface with quantum mechanics.
To illustrate the problem: If an electron is not in a fixed position, but is rather spread over a range of possible locations (described by a wavefunction), then what is the gravitational effect of the electron? General Relativity, being a classical theory, contains the assumption that the electron's location and velocity can be precisely determined, so that its effect on the curvature of spacetime can be calculated. There's no way in General Relativity (as presently formulated) to take into account the electron wavefunction.
If you start thinking about ways to interface General Relativity (GR) with quantum mechanics, you quickly realize that GR itself has to become quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics is like a virus: once it gets into one part of the theory, it spreads everywhere. There's no way to build a logically coherent theory of the Universe that is only partly quantum mechanical. It's 100% or 0%.
This is not completely accurate. The theory proposed by Oppenheim and his collaborators appears to be a consistent theory with classical gravity interacting with quantum stuff.
It is subjectively rather ugly, but it does appear to be a counterexample to this 100% or 0% dichotomy.
The theory of electromagnetism had to be completely reworked in order to take quantum mechanics into account.
The modern theory, developed from the 1920s-40s, is called "Quantum Electrodynamics." The older theory of electromagnetism (Maxwell's Equations) is the classical limit of the modern quantum theory.
General Relativity is in the same situation now as Maxwell's Equations were before Quantum Electrodynamics was developed. Everyone knows that a quantum version of the theory is necessary, and that that theory will have a classical limit that is equivalent to the old theory. It's just that finding a quantum version of General Relativity is way more difficult than finding a quantum version of Maxwell's Equations. The tricks that worked for electromagnetism don't work for gravity.
It's not a question of evidence. General Relativity does not explain how gravity interacts with quantum matter, so it must be updated.
There is a whole set of no-go theorems that constrain how gravity can interface with quantum mechanics. The theory presented in this paper does modify GR to interface with quantum mechanics, albeit in a very strange way.
I'd love to know more about the "random fluctuations" of spacetime. I thought the only "randomness" in the universe was nuclear decay. Where can I learn more about the "random fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime"?
Look into Quantum foam and Casimir force. In simple terms it’s basically the physical manifestation of the uncertainty of position and energy of all matter within the universe.
According to quantum mechanics there is plenty of true randomness around. If you get an electron or ion and pass it through a Stern-Gerlach apparatus [1] or a photon and pass it through a polarising beam splitter. Then in each case you can set it up so you get the thing going in 1 off two directions with 50:50 probability.
Question for any physicists out there. If the theory can be tested with just a 1 kg mass on Earth, could the fluctuation in mass of GPS satellites also be detectable from their timing data?
I'm a physicist but not an expert in this field, but my guess would be the answer a comprehensive "no".
The way satellites orbit is incredibly well described by Newtonian mechanics and there the impact of their mass on the shape/timing of the orbit is by changing the center of mass of the combined satellite-earth system. That is you only get measurable effects if the fluctuation in the mass are big enough compared to the mass of the earth.
> Instead of modifying spacetime, the theory – dubbed a “postquantum theory of classical gravity” – modifies quantum theory and predicts an intrinsic breakdown in predictability that is mediated by spacetime itself. This results in random and violent fluctuations in spacetime that are larger than envisaged under quantum theory, rendering the apparent weight of objects unpredictable if measured precisely enough.
I have so many questions about this paragraph; how did they change quantum theory? Are they saying that breakdown in predictability at the quantum level is actually caused by space-time? Why does this result in violent fluctuations in space-time? And why are the space-time fluctuations larger than in the case of quantum gravity?
So the fundamental problem in quantum gravity is something like this (arguably).
Particles with mass distort space-time (according to general relativity). Particles can be in superpositions where different parts of the superposition are in different physical positions (according to quantum mechanics). We don't know how to make gravity quantum and it seems to be difficult. So we don't have any damn clue what happens to space-time when an object with mass is in a superposition of different positions.
The suggestion by Oppenheim and friends is that space-time is fundamentally classical and what happens when you put an object with mass in superposition is that random fluctuations in the space-time force the object out of superposition and into a classical random state.
I.e. where quantum mechanics says you'd have a particle in a superposition of being in place A and place B, this new theory says you'd end up with a random choice being made between A and B, and it ends up in one based on something like a coin-flip.
Disclaimer: I don't work on this stuff directly. My expertise is entirely that I attended a talk Jonathan Oppenheim gave at a conference last year.
Would this put a limit on how well a quantum computer (or any other large entangled system) can be isolated from its environment (how long it can be kept from decohering)? Or was a similar limit already there and this just describes it differently?
Probably for some models of quantum computers yes, but there are many different ways to build one and not all will be limited in this way. For example the polarisation degree of freedom of a photon doesn't appear to interact with gravity at all, so that wouldn't be impacted by this.
Wow that’s a beautiful explanation, and gives me hope - thanks for taking the time to explain such things to a layman :)
So the overall “quantum properties are only visible at that tiny scale” issue could be explained by “particles are ‘forced into a classical state” by a chaotic background space time force”, if I’m understanding correctly? Like super sensitive special electrical chips that are buffeted about/‘forced into a new state’ by cosmic background radiation?
The 1 kilogram weights previously used to define the unit have mysteriously diverged from their supposed weight [0], so I wonder if this divergence was an early sign of this theory.
>What is known specifically about the IPK is that it exhibits a short-term instability of about 30 μg over a period of about a month in its after-cleaned mass. The precise reason for this short-term instability is not understood but is thought to entail surface effects: microscopic differences between the prototypes' polished surfaces, possibly aggravated by hydrogen absorption due to catalysis of the volatile organic compounds that slowly deposit onto the prototypes as well as the hydrocarbon-based solvents used to clean them.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadNew theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526877 - Dec 2023 (196 comments)
TL;DR: They're assuming that spacetime is not quantized, but is as GR describes it. This produces a consistent theory that predicts that measured mass will fluctuate very slightly.
A wave in the ocean doesnt exist any more than any other part of the water that isnt in the wave. We just focus on the wave because our brains are good at seeing moving shapes for hunting.
The substrate graph is updated by travelling rule applicators which dont require energy. Theyre like the updating edge of stacking faults between planes in crystalography.
Gravity slowing down light is just due to the travel speed of rule applicators being fixed. Higher graph density but fixed node updates per time means it takes longer to update a given volume.
Until then we are stuck at a funky high level abstraction. The table of quarks and particles we have is like what would happen if we were trying to figure out what our computers were made of by interacting with a url bar, and coming to the conclusion that the fundamental components of a computer are like... a table of HTTP response status codes.
Not to say that its useless, just that its not zoomed in enough.
The rule applicator just traverses the graph and updates a node based on adjacent nodes.
Time for us is just the difference in relative sequence lengths between updates applied to volumes at our scale.
I've always thought entanglement makes more intuitive sense on a graph substrate of some kind, where the "spooky action at a distance" is actually just an anomalous edge in the graph connecting two vertices which would otherwise be more distantly separated. This begs the question of how the edges in the graph came to be or whether they're modifiable at all though.
As for weird behaviour like far reaching spookiness. Could be multiple overlapping substrates at different scales.
Or, the rule directly includes a mechanism for remote information transmission.
I wonder if this research piggybacks or was inspired by Eric's work, whether acknowledged or not?
Time will tell if their math and experiments fit in with Eric's and which is most foundational.
So what you're saying is you don't even have the ability to start to understand if what he's saying is true, as you've not been willing to put the effort into learning the math he's referencing - that you've never heard of - and instead essentially doing high-level ad hominem saying "he'd rather get the juice from claimed persecution than actually advance the field"?
Sounds to me like Eric is right about what he says about the field in general, and why there's been little to no uptake in the indoctrinated-seemingly ideological field of physics studies.
I agree his tactics may be lacking, and that clearly he'll have to do a better job eventually - to handhold for people who have the capability to understand but your comment here supports the difficulties Eric states he's encountered with academia.
Did you try sending him an email to ask him for more guidance? That would not only help you - whether that leads to believe he's just a charlatan or helps you learn new math - but it would be an opportunity for him to learn to be a better teacher too.
Arguably the most efficient path for Eric as well, since everyone has limited time and resources, is to work with people who actually show and put in an minimally adequate effort to understanding - where connecting with him directly is perhaps the first necessary barrier to breach, so that you can have a productive conversation and at least a chance to be on the same page; and if you don't even know the math he's referencing, and can't talk his lingo, then you'd have to begin to learn the language he's speaking as a prerequisite - especially before judging him - the irony here is your ad hominem is in fact an example of persecution - and from the physics' community's mouth itself.
But this is neither evidence of prosecution or an ad hominem. It's true that his other statements about politics and the world in general, particularly his propencity to accept and promulgate conspiracy theories without evidence, make me doubt his honesty and his moral fabric, but that's a relatively minor part of why I won't spend time on this.
This is absolutely ad hominem. You're insinuating he's a fraud - without even knowing the math he's referencing - and then saying he's trying to milk a victimhood stance; eloquent ad hominem, ad hominem nonetheless.
And the rest of what you said is fine - but throwing unsubstantiated shade/ad hominem as you walk away from the challenge is something else.
I'm curious though also, what "conspiracy theories" are you claiming he propagates - and without referencing evidence? That term is often thrown away as as ad hominem to be dismissive and demonizing as well.
If you beleive there are an infinite number of functions, youd probably also believe there to be an infinite number of notations for those functions.
All math in the formalized language has come from randoms making up their own symbols and arrangement rules, often times for fun. (see Newton) Sometimes theres equivalent notations for the same concept. (see leibnitz). Just like you can say the same sentence in chinese, english, and spanish, you can express the same concept in different math. Even within the same language you can say the same thing ten different ways.
Believing dogmatically in only one notation system would be silly. Put a modern calculus textbook, a 1920s boolean logic textbook, and principia next to eachother on the table. If you had only ever seen one before you'd think the others came from space.
If Eric is making up math you would need to translate it to the dialect you understand. (Which would probably result in you understanding it, and then he might stick with the more colloquial translation.)
Well, my interviewers didnt know what p-lists were because they only knew javascript.
They thought I was retarded and I didnt get the job.
You can model the ocean as a blob of probabilities to handle large scale, but having a causal model is important.
Pilot wave theory has been ridiculed and ignored even when just mentioned by physicists for so long, I suspect its under researched.
My point was simple that you must seperate the art from the artist. I've heard very bad things about Hubble as well. Dawkins is sort of an asshat, but i liked The Selfish Gene, even if many parts of it didn't have supporting evidence.
Learn to enjoy the experience of processing and criticizing an idea itself. It can be fun and enlightening.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38816493
The novelty of this theory gives hope.
It may be easier to understand this point by looking at the current theory of Quantum Mechanics, in which gravity doesn't exist at all. We are not entitled to make conclusions about gravity from that fact, since the conclusion would be "gravity doesn't exist", which is clearly false.
To illustrate the problem: If an electron is not in a fixed position, but is rather spread over a range of possible locations (described by a wavefunction), then what is the gravitational effect of the electron? General Relativity, being a classical theory, contains the assumption that the electron's location and velocity can be precisely determined, so that its effect on the curvature of spacetime can be calculated. There's no way in General Relativity (as presently formulated) to take into account the electron wavefunction.
If you start thinking about ways to interface General Relativity (GR) with quantum mechanics, you quickly realize that GR itself has to become quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics is like a virus: once it gets into one part of the theory, it spreads everywhere. There's no way to build a logically coherent theory of the Universe that is only partly quantum mechanical. It's 100% or 0%.
It is subjectively rather ugly, but it does appear to be a counterexample to this 100% or 0% dichotomy.
There are a bunch of proposals, including this one but none of them are really complete or fully satisfying right now.
The modern theory, developed from the 1920s-40s, is called "Quantum Electrodynamics." The older theory of electromagnetism (Maxwell's Equations) is the classical limit of the modern quantum theory.
General Relativity is in the same situation now as Maxwell's Equations were before Quantum Electrodynamics was developed. Everyone knows that a quantum version of the theory is necessary, and that that theory will have a classical limit that is equivalent to the old theory. It's just that finding a quantum version of General Relativity is way more difficult than finding a quantum version of Maxwell's Equations. The tricks that worked for electromagnetism don't work for gravity.
"Everyone knows" is not any kind of evidence. It's not even really an argument. It's, essentially, a statement that an assumption is widely shared.
And, if I understand the article correctly, it may not in fact be necessary.
There is a whole set of no-go theorems that constrain how gravity can interface with quantum mechanics. The theory presented in this paper does modify GR to interface with quantum mechanics, albeit in a very strange way.
Dr Šoda?
Professor Bose?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Gerlach_experime...
The way satellites orbit is incredibly well described by Newtonian mechanics and there the impact of their mass on the shape/timing of the orbit is by changing the center of mass of the combined satellite-earth system. That is you only get measurable effects if the fluctuation in the mass are big enough compared to the mass of the earth.
I have so many questions about this paragraph; how did they change quantum theory? Are they saying that breakdown in predictability at the quantum level is actually caused by space-time? Why does this result in violent fluctuations in space-time? And why are the space-time fluctuations larger than in the case of quantum gravity?
Particles with mass distort space-time (according to general relativity). Particles can be in superpositions where different parts of the superposition are in different physical positions (according to quantum mechanics). We don't know how to make gravity quantum and it seems to be difficult. So we don't have any damn clue what happens to space-time when an object with mass is in a superposition of different positions.
The suggestion by Oppenheim and friends is that space-time is fundamentally classical and what happens when you put an object with mass in superposition is that random fluctuations in the space-time force the object out of superposition and into a classical random state.
I.e. where quantum mechanics says you'd have a particle in a superposition of being in place A and place B, this new theory says you'd end up with a random choice being made between A and B, and it ends up in one based on something like a coin-flip.
Disclaimer: I don't work on this stuff directly. My expertise is entirely that I attended a talk Jonathan Oppenheim gave at a conference last year.
So the overall “quantum properties are only visible at that tiny scale” issue could be explained by “particles are ‘forced into a classical state” by a chaotic background space time force”, if I’m understanding correctly? Like super sensitive special electrical chips that are buffeted about/‘forced into a new state’ by cosmic background radiation?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prototype_of_the...
Though I have a physics background, this is niche stuff.