New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics
phys.org
phys.org
Definitely don't know enough to comment about the overall proposal, but given how many grand physics theories over the past couple decades have been untestable, it's really nice to see the proponents proposing a test.
Black holes, Higgs bozon and neutrinos are a few popular examples.
"In scientific reasoning, a hypothesis is constructed before any applicable research has been done. A theory, on the other hand, is supported by evidence: it's a principle formed as an attempt to explain things that have already been substantiated by data."
Most people in this thread, as well as the writers of the article seem to be confused about the meaning of the word theory.
Besides, I was commenting on the topic of falsifiability. To be a scientific hypothesis or theory it must be falsifiable - in principle, not practically. At least that's my claim in the context of Popper. Evidence didn't even enter the discussion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02048
> The CCM will be an important stepping stone toward an ultimate Planck- scale collider, with a centre-of-mass energy of ∼10^16 TeV, that would require a minimum size equal to a tenth of the distance from Earth to Sun.
The higgs boson theory was theorised in 1964 and it was untestable at the time, but that theory got the funding together to create one of the largest and most expensive scientific instruments built to prove the theory.
Nuclear fusion was theorised in 1915, again untestable at the time, and look how far we've come.
The above comment is an anti-science comment if I've ever seen one.
Popper's falsifiability criterion was more aimed at theories like Marxism, where it seemed that within the theory there was always something available to account for an exception or challenge.
Is it feasible though? I wonder whether that test is not just outside of what can be technically realized today, but Heisenberg's uncertainty principle gets in the way.
Some of the theories like gravity waves and Higgs boson took almost half a century to be confirmed by experimentation.
The hard part about this is building tools that can precisely measure mass fluctuations with extremely low error bars at picosecond timescales.
Because we need to both validate the theory and that the device is correctly measuring.
So much of science became only possible because of better instruments. Be it microscopes to see the tiniest phenomena or telescopes to observe the furthest phenomena.
Why would that cause red shift?
Basically, cooling down is the same thing as moving farther away from an inertial reference point.
We observe redshift in the spectrum. Hydrogen emits radiation in very specific frequencies, which are redshifted. This cannot be explained by losing mass, heat or energy.
I would argue a stronger claim: experimental confirmation of theories and better measurements must always bootstrap each other. The history of temperature has many examples [1].
[1] https://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/jgrice/psyc4333/Therm...
>>> Whereas Carlo Rovelli and Geoff Penington firmly believe that gravity is better described by a quantum theory.
>>> And whereas Jonathan Oppenheim is more sympathetic to other possibilities (i.e. doesn’t have a clue) ...
[1] - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/oppenheim/pub/quantum_vs_classical_bet...
I think we can guess who write up the contract!
> Should space-time be shown to be quantum, the loser will give to each of the winners, one ITEM* of their choice. If the alternative hypothesis is deemed to be correct, the losers will each give 5,000 ITEMS to the winner.
> * ITEM is defined to be a object of the winner’s choice, worth no more than 20 British pence on January 21st, 2021. Examples include some crisps, a bazinga ball, a small amount of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, or wine
So it can be one drop of "Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena DOP", which is the real deal. Prices start at around 50€ for 100mL, but it can easily go into the 100s if you want the more premium ones (25 years). A single drop would fit the 20 pence bill.
If A wins, B pays A $1. If B wins, A pays B $N. For the bet to be fair (zero expectation value), the probability that A wins needs to be p=N/(N+1) and that B wins needs to be 1-p=1/(N+1). My understanding of what "odds" are is the ratio of the outcome probabilities: p:(1-p) = p/(1-p) = N/1 = N:1. (This is why the "log odds" are log(p/(1-p)).)
Do they use a different notion of "odds" in sports gambling?
I simply missed the second “each” below:
> Should space-time be shown to be quantum, the loser will give to each of the winners, one ITEM of their choice. If the alternative hypothesis is deemed to be correct, the losers will each give 5,000 ITEMS to the winner.
Also, who wants 10,000 <$20 items? It's a cool payout, but if I wanted to spend ~$200,000, I wouldn't do it in 10,000 pieces.
If you'd like to attend a public lecture (virtual or in London) about the postquantum theory of classical gravity, or contribute a donation to the group's research program, click "Donate" to add your email address to our list.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/oppenheim/research.html
See Also:
Gravitationally induced decoherence vs space-time diffusion: testing the quantum nature of gravity (March 2022) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.01982.pdf
Is it time to rethink quantum gravity? (March 2023) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.12221.pdf
That said, there are many results that connect gravitational and thermodynamic phenomena. It would be good to understand how these look from the perspective of this theory.
Edit: just started reading, so if this is explained somewhere would love to get a pointer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
Seems like so far our observations are that the universe is pretty homogeneous. Cosmological principle being the default position, my best understanding is that it's just a lack of evidence otherwise:
> The End of Greatness is an observational scale discovered at roughly 100 Mpc (roughly 300 million light-years) where the lumpiness seen in the large-scale structure of the universe is homogenized and isotropized in accordance with the Cosmological Principle. At this scale, no pseudo-random fractalness is apparent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#End_of_Gre...
You want your physics to apply everywhere and that’s why you start with the assumption that the same laws, constants, etc apply everywhere.
There’s no “ope stuff is just different over there” in physics, you look for those inconsistencies and then you try to explain them.
The universe appears homogenous at various scales, meaning it's self-same within some amount of tolerance across itself. The distribution is homogenous. That's different from invariance, the assumption that a variable (in this case an intrinsic property such as mass) remains unchanged over time for a given subject of study, such as a particle.
Even if a given property can vary from subject to subject (even wildly), the sum of all subjects could still appear homogeneous in their distribution.
>why do we assume spacetime to be homogenous in its nature?
Because it's distribution appears to be consistent, at least as far as we can measure. That's not the same thing as objects at the quantum scale being invariant (or variable) in some way that we currently think is the opposite.
>Couldn't then dark matter be explained by some variations on a large scale? Like giant "wrinkles" in spacetime?
Considering the scales at which these fluctuations would have to occur for us to have not already measured them I'm doubtful they could build up to anything like that, even in aggregate and random patterns.
>They would then behave as pseudo black holes, or more like "black trenches", that lead to the structures we see today in the universe. The structures seem to have more mass than what we can actually see, but are in fact just placed in locations that behave differently gravity wise?
I don't think I'm really qualified to answer on how possible this interpretation is, but with the confirmation of gravitational waves a few years back we confirmed another piece of Einstein's theories and seem to have a good grasp on the observational effects of gravity at least. There was a recent announcement about mapping of the Gravitational Wave Background [0] using pulsars spread across the galaxy that was super cool too you might be interested in that I would say is related to this question.
The real answer is that theories like this require quite a bit of work to manipulate existing and complex math, and that you'd need someone who can translate an idea like yours into a mathematical model that fits with our observational data. That's an exceedingly difficult thing to do, as evidenced by the last 70ish years of physics.
[0]: https://www.space.com/gravitational-wave-background-universe...
What happens to quantum tangles[0] that get inflated? — do they melt or is it possible for them to absorb energy in a hard to interact with state?
Eg, is the reason dark matter looks like a braid that it is? — and inflated foam turned into a foamy-web?
Namely, the possibility of the low-entropy start of our observable universe being merely a local statistical fluke on a cosmic scale across infinite time and space.
The problem is that this often leads to weird paradoxes, like the Boltzmann brain universe[0], and from what I understand it's still not entirely clear if that's just a sign we're doing statistics wrong or if there's something missing in the theory of cosmology.
Personally, I'm wondering if the issue isn't that these theories are assuming randomness, but in reality the next "state" of the universe depends on the previous state, so it's actually pseudo-random. But that sounds like too obvious an explanation so that has probably been ruled out somehow.
Anyway, just to be explicit about it again: what I'm talking about relates to thermodynamics and entropy. You're question is about spacetime and the laws of physics, which is something else.
This is not a result of this theory. Our best current theories say this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam Spacetime getting distinctly different at very small scales is a vital part of all modern theories and I doubt it's going away. Even if spacetime is shown to be continuous itself, which I tend to personally doubt [1], getting close to the scales where the uncertainty principle becomes a major influence rather than an almost academic curiosity will inevitably have major impacts on the behavior of things.
"Like giant "wrinkles" in spacetime?"
Giant wrinkles in space time don't act like dark matter. They either smooth themselves out basically instantly (on cosmological scales) or form something other than a giant wrinkle, such as a cosmic string: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_string
In fact one of the low-key mysteries extant in the universe today is that our best theories say cosmic strings really ought to exist, but we don't see them. Though I think the confidence in our theories being pushed to that extent is low enough that this is not generally considered the biggest problem, and very unlikely to be the thing that cracks the mystery, so it isn't something that gets talked about a lot. So you could say that we actually don't "expect" space time to be homogeneous and one of the mysteries is why it observationally is!
So, you don’t think structures like galaxy superclusters are a second hand visualization of the existence of cosmic strings? I know these formations could be explained by the effect of gravity of just visible matter. But maybe it’s both. Like a valley could exist because of a river and a river could exist because of a valley.
Since this concept has been around for so long I have some reading to do to understand why cosmic strings are not a possible explanation for dark matter. To me high density and invisible fit the bill for dark matter quite well.
Edit: never mind, continued reading the article and saw this
> in the past it was thought that their gravity could have been responsible for the original clumping of matter into galactic superclusters. It is now calculated that their contribution to the structure formation in the universe is less than 10%.
Or is it because the Penning trap measures "inertial mass" but they really want a measurement of "gravitational mass"? But wouldn't inertial mass fluctuate the same way?
You can keep the classical half (the shape of spacetime) classical, if the effect of the quantum part is partially stochastic. There's a minimum amount of random noise you need for it to be mathematically consistent. So, you set up an experiment where a particle is acting on another via gravity. There's a quantity of noise you should expect to see in the gravitational force.
"Inertial Mass=Gravitational Mass" now only holds on average. The gravitational mass will effectively have a Brownian noise term added in.
Quantum particles can effect change (curve) spacetime without direct quantum action if you sprinkle a bit of randomness into the (quantum acting on spacetime) effect?
Or just hype? Sorry, gun shy about believing big breakthroughs this year.
Quantum Gravity and Testable? Seems huge on the surface.
If it can be tested, then this is already worlds ahead of string theory.
Anyway, is there any justification for treating spacetime as a smooth manifold, except for mathematical tractability?
>Except, you know, all the elementary particles.
except, you know, all the elementary particles don't do a good job of explaining what GR explains
I don't think a smooth anything is physically tractable. You need infinite resolution for perfect smoothness - essentially an infinite amount of information at every point.
Except there are no points. So somehow you have equations that define curvature floating in some kind of metaphysical space which somehow gets mapped to observable phenomena.
And if it's a noisy smoothness - where does the noise come from?
Hm, not quite, they'd be held together topologically but the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrodynamics is interesting.
Having said that, to produce art that actually works is clearly not easy. If you've ever used Midjourney or DALL-E, you'll know it's a challenge to get the tool to output exactly what you have in mind. It's also clearly hard to produce images that physically realistic. If mismatched tiles and unrealistic perspectives are noticeable then they'll be a distraction and detract from the reader's experience.
Unless yeah as you said, it's just too abstract to put anything coherent, in which case I guess it works (though the mass weighing image surely could have been better than some generic sci fi thing)?
When i use it in DALL-E 3, I get similar images.
"The image depicts an experiment in which heavy particles(illustrated as the moon), cause an interference pattern (a quantum effect), while also bendingspacetime. The hanging pendulums depict the measurement of spacetime. The actual experiment istypically performed using Carbon-60, one of the largest known molecules. The UCL calculationindicates that the experiment should also be performed using higher density atoms such as gold. The other two images represent the two experiments proposed by the UCL group, both of whichconstrain any theory where spacetime is treated classically. One is the weighing of a mass, the otheris an interference experiment."
> … Carbon-60, one of the largest known molecules.
background: my lay understanding of MOND is that it modifies the gravitational interaction parameter over cosmological distances. the force exerted on objects due to gravity is currently accepted to scale with distance in a certain manner (ex. 1/distance^2) while MOND postulates a different scaling relation (ex. 1/distance^3). Those are just examples, not actual values. The currently accepted gravitational interaction force scaling is what gives rise for the need for dark matter, and the corresponding lambda cold dark matter (LCDM) theory. Of course, we have not been able to observe dark matter, which is a problem for a theory. That is what has given rise to MOND, amongst other things. There are prominent, esteemed physicists who have recognized many issues with LCDM, some of which are addressed by MOND (https://astro.uni-bonn.de/~pavel/kroupa_SciLogs.html)
previous HN posts with interesting discussions / links re: MOND
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37012052
MOND gives a different scaling relation, and is therefore contradicting general relativity. Its goal is to explain the effects we associate with dark matter, without the need for dark matter.
General relativity is (we are pretty sure) inconsistent with quantum field theory. String theory tries to fix the issue by replacing the particles in field theory with strings. Oppenheim is trying to fix it by putting general relativity as a classical phenomenon that lives "outside" of quantum field theory.
They're trying to solve different problems. And, Oppenheim's classical gravity picture could be used just as well with MOND instead of standard general relativity, if that's what you wanted.
MOND is getting less popular every year as evidence for dark matter piles up. The Bullet Cluster is a particular instance where we can actually "see" the dark matter flying around, in a way MOND couldn't hope to explain. LIGO has also given us a lot of confidence we have the right theory of gravity, at least up to the quantum scale.
This is not correct. In fact, LCDM can't even explain the Bullet Cluster [1]. The evidence is not so favourable to LCDM over MOND [2] when taken as a whole.
More recent observations on wide binary stars disfavour MOND more strongly, but the classic reasons you cite are not valid reasons.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0381
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06936
Edit: See for instance what Milgrom said about the Bullet Cluster back in 2006:
[0]https://bigthink.com/hard-science/dark-matter-alternative-mo...
If you want to go much deeper, Roger Penrose wrote The Road to Reality which is a much much harder read (I was never able to complete it after 3 separate attempts).
Most things interact with each other, they create "particles" to exchange force / energy (actually in the case here much of this is actually virtual particle interaction / creation). An example of this is when two magnets are interacting with each other, the repulsion/attraction that the magnets / and magnetic fields, the force carriers there actually described by best by "virtual photons" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_photon#:~:text=Virtual....
The whole standard model is like this (protons/neutrons exchange gluons via the strong nuclear force).
For gravity, there isn't a good "particle" we've found that can accurately describe how gravity behave. It's good to note here a "particle" is what is used to "quantize" something, and so quantum mechanics is the study of how these subatomic particles interact and are created when things like protons are smashed together in a particle accelerator.
Gravity, on the other hand, behaves more like a classical theory (in the sense that it is a field, rather than a discrete quantized energy exchange). In the parlance of the field, mass, appears to cause a curvature in space time according to the rules (quite accurately predicted) in general relativity.
This appears to be some sort of more reconciliation by acknowledgment of the different aspects of the behaviors of the models (GR vs QM), and chooses a path to verify this by looking at the breakdown of matter (in this case, entangled quantum particles) in a asomtomic limit that might be imposed on a quantized theory when that is subatomically reconciled against a continuous field like gravity.
(My own notes) This might be indicating that there is a continuous nature (or at least continuous at the scales that these subatomic particles experience) such that when the particles interact with the continuous field, their movement creates some snapback of the field (thinking how movement in water creates microscopic cavitation) which disrupts what would be a continuous laminar flow in the water case, creating macroscopic turbulence (in this case disturbing the entangled particles)
* Edit: a little clarity / notes on the SM/QM/GR overlap
Like electron tunneling that made a good amplifier (transistor)?
Could this “snapback” be utilized in interesting ways?
Trying to give a slightly more high level idea, the conflict is simply that if you introduce the gravitational effects (spacetime bending) from general relativity into the equations of quantum mechanics you get infinities all over the place. This happens because in QM particles are not localized, they exist as a probability wave with certain values at any space and time, but the effects of their mass at all those spaces and times adds up to infinity if you just apply the calculations from relativity, in a way that we haven't been able to solve.
This is all very roughly speaking - the exact reasons are quite technical and I don't understand them myself. Electromagnetism and other interactions had similar issues, but we found mathematical solutions to fix them, and those solutions we know just don't work with the equations for gravitational interactions.
It doesn't go into math but mentions that in the standard model, interactions are local, which for example means something like photon emission is instantaneous. When applied to gravity/gravitons, you get infinities in the math. This sort of makes sense to me, but I have yet to find anything that does an understandable job explaining how/why exactly the math breaks down.
There's a series on the maths of general relativity [2] which I haven't completed but I'm hoping will provide a bit more background to understand the math.
Also, the article mentions that the new theory was motivated by solving the black hole information paradox [3], which there's a good video [4] about as well
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7cOlBxtKSo
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xodtfM1r9FA&list=PLu7cY2CPiR...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
Im a physics noob, but does this imply the theory helps explain why we usually only see quantum effects on the mucroscopic scale, since it says something about how heavy objects cant be put in superposition?
In low enough temperature and regular enough structure, even macroscopic objects can be entangled (or, I assume, show other quantum effects): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-supers...
It seems to me that one issue with falsification is that: if you're exactly right on how the universe works, then it's hard to know that you are exactly right. So I imagine that we'd be infinitely putting resources in it (to some extent) to see if anything is unexplained. So if the universe is just like that, then we'd have a long way to go to find out.
I do think that physicists are bothered by the idea that current theories can't explain everything they're observing. So whether the universe is or isn't like that, more research is definitely needed.
No, it couldn't be just like that. There could exist a common umbrella theory that uses GR for certain objects and QM for others, but it would have to be a new theory that introduces a very important new info: the nature of the separation between the two.
Right now, all of the laws of QM say that it applies just as much to the motion of the Sun as to the motion of an electron. GR says the same. And yet, GR's predictions for how an electron behaves are clearly wrong. QM's predictions for how the Sun moves are closer to being correct (that is, QM + SR + Newtonian gravity), but it is hard to measure.
A unified theory has to either correct the equations of QM, GR, or both; or to add explicit boundaries to each of them. A theory that would say "an object moves according to the laws of QM if it's 0.00000001g or lower, and according to the laws of GR if it's any higher" (or any other distinguishing characteristic) would be an entirely new theory.
Interestingly, this new theory being proposed in the articles actually does something slightly in this vein: it says "QM applies to the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, and GR applies to the mass/gravity interaction". It then finds a new way to account for the known inconsistencies between the math of each, apparently by getting rid of the assumption that a particle has a fixed mass (and thus fixed space-time curvature in GR).
Similar things are discussed in the literature under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluid_vacuum_theory and https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/physicist-theorizes-dark-ma...
Moreover, according to the article this collapse does not preserve the key property of quantum mechanical time evolution: unitarity (aka "preservation of past information" aka "predictability of the future").
> The new theory allows for information to be destroyed, due to a fundamental breakdown in predictability.
You expect simple explanations to VERY complex problems from random internet commenters. I think you expect too much.
* it’s not like there aren’t good theories but you can’t experiment directly on “the” kg because you can’t risk changing it!
Like if you find that your car has broken down after 200k miles, you might not be able to determine the cause, but it wouldn't exactly be some kind of mysterious physical phenomenon that would puzzle scientists. Obviously, something wore out. Why/how is this any different?
A useful paragraph is the following: "The trend during the past century had been for most of BIPM's official copies to gain mass relative to the IPK, although by somewhat different amounts, averaging around 50 micrograms (millionths of a gram) over 100 years. But an alternative explanation is that the IPK was losing mass relative to its copies. Even more likely, it was a combination of both."
Those pages are for the lay audience but you can do your own web search (probably even an algolia search of HN) to know more.
In general, it's often easy to come up with an explanation of some new phenomenon, but to answer the question you still have to do science...which often simply confirms intuition but not always. My comment was less on the reason and more on the difficulty of doing experiments on what was literally the kg, no matter how it fluctuated.
I'm just some random guy on the internet, I know. It's fun to have theories!
Sure, the explanation might not fit in the margins here, but then a link to a source that does attempt to explain it would be fine too.
> The reason for this drift has eluded physicists who have dedicated their careers to the SI unit of mass. No plausible mechanism has been proposed to explain either a steady decrease in the mass of the IPK, or an increase in that of its replicas dispersed throughout the world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prototype_of_t...
OPs question is not ridiculous, nor does he suggest it to counter the "mysterious" claims
1. I am wrong and could learn something new.
2. They are wrong and their opposition fills me with defiant determination.
The difficulty comes when you view something as case 2 but it is actually case 1 and you embarrass yourself. I do this all the time.
The mystery being discussed is that, even after the obvious sources of error are allowed for, there is still a discrepancy, and it's not easy to determine how much of that discrepancy is with the weights being recalibrated vs the test standard they're being calibrated to. None of which is shocking to anyone involved, just puzzling.
I can think of one example in software deployment frequency. The observation (many years ago), was that it's painful and risky (therefore, expensive) to deploy software, so we should do it as infrequently as the market will allow.
Many companies used to be on annual release schedules, some even longer. Many organizations still resist deploying software more than every couple/few weeks.
~15 years ago, I was working alongside the other (obviously ignorant) people who believed that when something is painful, slow and repetitive, it should be automated. We believed that software deployment should happen continuously as a total non-event.
I've had to debate this subject with "experts" over and over and over again, and I've never met a single person who, once migrated, wanted to go back to the nightmare of slow, periodic software deployments.
Computers mostly just continue to work when you don't change anything, so that meant after the first week or so after a release, the chance of getting paged dropped dramatically for 3 months.
The amount of politicking was incredible when it came to which features would be in the next push and which features would slip. The planning meetings, the arguments, the capability slashing, the instability that came from all these political decisions. It was not great and this enormous amount of churn literally disappeared when they moved to daily pushes.
And if by "many years ago" you refer to a period where software deployment was mostly offline and through physical media, then it was indeed painful and risky (and therefore expensive). The experts weren't wrong back then.
* have to be a bit vague here, but while working as a research scientist for the US Department of Defense I regularly witnessed and occasionally took part in scenarios where a radical idea turned "expert advice" on its head, or some applied thing completely contradicted established theoretical models in a novel or interesting way. Consistently, the barrier to such advancements was always "experts" telling you that your thing should not / could not work, blocking your efforts, withholding funding, etc., only to be proven wrong. Far too many experts care more about maintaining the status quo than actually advancing the field, and a concerning number are actually on the payroll of various corporations or private interests to actively prevent such advancements.
* over the last 30 years in the AI field, there have been a few major inflection points, Yann LeCun's convolutional neural networks and his more general idea that ANNs stood to gain something by loosely mimicking the complexity of the human brain, for which he was originally ridiculed and largely ignored by the scientific community until convolution revolutionized computer vision; and the rise of large language models, which came out of a whole branch of AI research that had been disregarded for decades and was definitely not seen as a thing that might ever come close to something like AGI, natural language processing.
* going back further in history there are plenty of examples, like quantum mechanics turning the relativistic model on its head, Galileo, etc etc. The common theme is a bunch of conservative, self-described experts scoffing at something that ends up completely redefining their field and making them ultimately look pretty silly and petty. This happens so frequently in history that I think it should just be assumed at all times in all fields, as this dynamic is one of the few true constants throughout history. No one is an expert, no one has perfect knowledge of everything, and the next big advancement will be something that contradicts conventional wisdom.
Admittedly, I derived these beliefs from some of the Socratic teachings I received very early in life, around 6th grade or so back in the late 90s, but they have continually borne fruit for me. Question everything. When debugging, question your most basic assumptions first., "is it plugged in?" etc, etc
It's sort of at a point these days where if you want to find a fruitful research idea, probably best to just browse through conventional wisdom on your topic and question the most fundamental assumptions until you find something fishy.
I apologize for being a bit snide in my original challenge, I'm fairly sensitive to the "why don't you just" attitude, but I agree with pretty much everything you have to say here.
I have a very similar approach around enumerating and testing assumptions when the going gets tough, and similarly have found that has enabled me to solve a handful of problems previously claimed impossible.
I think the tautological issue with our initial framing is that if you're able to easily identify these problems you probably are a subject matter expert. In many ways it's the outsider art of analytical problem solving - established wisdom should not be sacred.
A test for this theory would have to involve a means of accounting for these kinds of fluctuations.
Wouldn’t just moving an object change its mass? Any change in potential energy would mean a change in mass from good old e=mc^2
Can someone help me understand this? I thought that things were supposed to be stable given the elements used for le grand k. That they don't decay on their own and it would have to be another mechanism to explain the divergence?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prototype_of_the...
But, Le grand K is made of naturally occurring platinum of which most of the isotopes are observationally stable[0] and the one isotope that isn't has a half-life of 6.5×10^11 and only makes up 0.012% [1].
So yeah I don't buy the unstable explanation to even begin to show the divergence, let alone "weight gain".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_nuclide#Still-unobserve...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_platinum
[Edit] Wait are you describing evaporation?
Maybe these aren't the best sources of historic mass data.
And yeah, the mystery is just what mechanism exactly affected each one. (AKA, not much of a mystery.) The possibilities are very well understood.
Ahh, that makes more sense. Thanks!
The new theory allows for information to be destroyed, due to a fundamental breakdown in predictability.
Are you kidding me?!
Yeah, if information can be destroyed then a lot of physics needs to be redone.
We're talking about the validity of the mathematical theory, not new age woo-woo methaphysical theories.