What awful AI-generated illustrations.
Anyway, is there any justification for treating spacetime as a smooth manifold, except for mathematical tractability?
Anyway, is there any justification for treating spacetime as a smooth manifold, except for mathematical tractability?
Hm, not quite, they'd be held together topologically but the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrodynamics is interesting.
>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?
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.