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Quantum Gravity: Fundamental Red Herring in Physics



 
 
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  #1  
Old October 11th 17, 11:08 PM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default Quantum Gravity: Fundamental Red Herring in Physics

Big Brother replaced 2+2=4 with 2+2=5:

"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orw...hapter1.7.html

Einstein replaced Newton's absolute time with an absurdity called spacetime:

"Special relativity is based on the observation that the speed of light is always the same, independently of who measures it, or how fast the source of the light is moving with respect to the observer. Einstein demonstrated that as an immediate consequence, space and time can no longer be independent, but should rather be considered a new joint entity called "spacetime." http://community.bowdoin.edu/news/20...rs-of-gravity/

Scientists in Big Brother's world may be trying to reconcile 2+2=4 and 2+2=5.

Scientists in our post-truth world are trying to reconcile Newton's absolute time and Einstein's spacetime:

"The effort to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity means reconciling totally different notions of time. In quantum mechanics, time is universal and absolute; its steady ticks dictate the evolving entanglements between particles. But in general relativity (Albert Einstein's theory of gravity), time is relative and dynamical, a dimension that's inextricably interwoven with directions X, Y and Z into a four-dimensional "space-time" fabric.." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161...-time-problem/

Almost all theoreticians find Einstein's spacetime unacceptable - they want to modify and even totally reject it. This is silly. Spacetime is a consequence of Einstein's constant-speed-of-light postulate so if you don't accept it in its present form and want to modify, let alone reject, it, you should first declare that the postulate is false. Logic does not allow the combination "true postulate, unacceptable consequence":

"Special relativity is based on the observation that the speed of light is always the same, independently of who measures it, or how fast the source of the light is moving with respect to the observer. Einstein demonstrated that as an immediate consequence, space and time can no longer be independent, but should rather be considered a new joint entity called "spacetime."
http://community.bowdoin.edu/news/20...rs-of-gravity/

Pentcho Valev
  #2  
Old October 12th 17, 01:18 PM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default Quantum Gravity: Fundamental Red Herring in Physics

Nowadays almost all theoreticians find Einstein's spacetime unacceptable but continue to worship the underlying premise, Einstein's constant-speed-of-light postulate. Some day they may realize that the postulate is false - logic does not allow the combination "true premise, unacceptable consequence":

Nima Arkani-Hamed (06:09): "Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn't really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U47kyV4TMnE

Nobel Laureate David Gross observed, "Everyone in string theory is convinced...that spacetime is doomed. But we don't know what it's replaced by." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26563

What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... [...] The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25477

"Splitting Time from Space - New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime. Buzz about a quantum gravity theory that sends space and time back to their Newtonian roots." https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...me-from-space/

"Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. It was a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is right, it may be no more than a mirage." https://www.newscientist.com/article...of-space-time/

New Scientist: "Saving time: Physics killed it. Do we need it back? [...] Einstein landed the fatal blow at the turn of the 20th century." https://www.newscientist.com/article...-need-it-back/

Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects." http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257

"And by making the clock's tick relative - what happens simultaneously for one observer might seem sequential to another - Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin." http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013...reality-review

"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..." https://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-C.../dp/B00AEGQPFE

"[George] Ellis is up against one of the most successful theories in physics: special relativity. It revealed that there's no such thing as objective simultaneity. [...] Rescuing an objective "now" is a daunting task." https://www.newscientist.com/article...wards-in-time/

Brian Greene: "Special relativity in some sense is surely wrong." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uVZEg9gxM8

"...says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter." https://www.newscientist.com/article...-universe-tick

Perimeter Institute: "Quantum mechanics has one thing, time, which is absolute. But general relativity tells us that space and time are both dynamical so there is a big contradiction there. So the question is, can quantum gravity be formulated in a context where quantum mechanics still has absolute time?" https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/re...essons-quantum

Pentcho Valev
  #3  
Old October 13th 17, 01:27 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default Quantum Gravity: Fundamental Red Herring in Physics

"On one hand, time in quantum mechanics is a Newtonian time, i.e., an absolute time. In fact, the two main methods of quantization, namely, canonical quantization method due to Dirac and Feynman's path integral method are based on classical constraints which become operators annihilating the physical states, and on the sum over all possible classical trajectories, respectively. Therefore, both quantization methods rely on the Newton global and absolute time. [...] The transition to (special) relativistic quantum field theories can be realized by replacing the unique absolute Newtonian time by a set of timelike parameters associated to the naturally distinguished family of relativistic inertial frames." http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0610057.pdf

New Scientist: "In quantum theory, a "master clock" ticks away somewhere in the universe, measuring out all processes. But in Einstein's relativity, time is distorted by motion and gravity, so clocks don't necessarily agree on how it is passing - meaning any master clock must, somewhat implausibly, be outside the universe." https://www.newscientist.com/article...-go-both-ways/

Perimeter Institute: "Quantum mechanics has one thing, time, which is absolute. But general relativity tells us that space and time are both dynamical so there is a big contradiction there. So the question is, can quantum gravity be formulated in a context where quantum mechanics still has absolute time?"x https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/re...essons-quantum

Science: "In Einstein's general theory of relativity, time depends locally on gravity; in standard quantum theory, time is global – all clocks "tick" uniformly." http://science.sciencemag.org/conten...cience.aac6498

"In quantum mechanics, time is absolute. The parameter occurring in the Schrödinger equation has been directly inherited from Newtonian mechanics and is not turned into an operator. In quantum field theory, time by itself is no longer absolute, but the four-dimensional spacetime is; it constitutes the fixed background structure on which the dynamical fields act. GR is of a very different nature. According to the Einstein equations (2), spacetime is dynamical, acting in a complicated manner with energy momentum of matter and with itself. The concepts of time (spacetime) in quantum theory and GR are thus drastically different and cannot both be fundamentally true." http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2013/509316/

So theoreticians know that Einstein's relative time (spacetime) and Newton's absolute time are irreconcilable ("cannot both be fundamentally true") - then why are they reconciling the two concepts for more than half a century? The reason is simple. In the post-truth world producing idiotic ("invincible") models is profitable:

Sabine Hossenfelder (Bee): "The criticism you raise that there are lots of speculative models that have no known relevance for the description of nature has very little to do with string theory but is a general disease of the research area. Lots of theorists produce lots of models that have no chance of ever being tested or ruled out because that's how they earn a living. The smaller the probability of the model being ruled out in their lifetime, the better. It's basic economics. Survival of the 'fittest' resulting in the natural selection of invincible models that can forever be amended." http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9375

Pentcho Valev
 




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