Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

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Curved spacetime is a mathematical model Einstein used to model gravity. Einstein advised to be careful to not confuse the model with reality. To wit, GR doesn't explain how mass/energy curves spacetime, it merely(!) provides the tensor needed to explain gravity as the result of such a curvature.

Consider this: you have two massless particles that are motionless with respect to one another. Suddenly both particles acquire mass at the same time (let's set aside this is physically impossible - this is a thought experiment). How does curved spacetime explain the sudden gravitational attraction between those two particles and how they're accelerating toward one another? It doesn't.

These problems are how we know GR is wrong, the problem is it's not flat-out wrong! Einstein's field equations are better than what Newton had provided and explains more observed phenomena - they even predict phenomena we have since observed! GR is a very good theory (model) for gravity, but it's not the whole picture - and we know it. We simply don't know how to improve upon it and I personally think that believing curved spacetime is actual "reality" is a big part of why we haven't made much progress. Well, that and some other issues QFT has when attempting to model a graviton, but this comment is already long!

EDIT: merely(!) - this isn't to understate Einstein's contribution to the matter which was quite considerable! But when the old genius himself is warning you to not get too caught up in the model, I suggest we take heed.

EDIT 2: QFT has issues modeling a graviton, not a gluon.

Taking a gravity and then performing an impossible physical modification so you can make conjectures on the model is nonsense.

You can't take an model, apply an impossible scenario and then claim the model is invalid because it can't account for this scenario that you admit is impossible.

> You can't take an model, apply an impossible scenario and then claim the model is invalid because it can't account for this scenario that you admit is impossible.

That's not what's being said. The fact is GR cannot explain why these two particles will suddenly start moving toward one another. All I've done in this simple thought experiment is eliminate every other externality.

The key point here is GR doesn't explain why curved spacetime causes objects to move. It only says that the movement can be modeled by curved spacetime. This thought experiment was just a way of expressing that.

Which is all to say GR doesn't explain what gravity is, it provides us a (complicated!) set of equations for determining an object's motion in a gravitational field. In my mind that's a fundamental shortcoming of GR as it was a fundamental shortcoming of Newton. NEITHER of their theories even tried to explain what gravity was, they provided a mathematical model for describing the effects of gravity. Newton's was good, Einstein's is better - but neither tell us much about gravity itself.

OTOH, quantum gravity tries to tell us what gravity is, but that has run into issues. Not only is it going to take someone of the caliber of Newton and Einstein to figure this out and people like that only come around every few centuries, but we have to have the means to test the theory. We have several theories, but we don't have the ability to test which theory is correct. We simply don't know which way to go.

Anyway, all that is to say GR is incomplete - and we know it.

I am not a physicist, my sense though as a layman is that GR explains the motions with which it is concerned more effectively than QM or QFT do. As in, with Schrodinger's cat, what causes the poison's release? And why does that happen? The "shut up and calculate" thing I'd assumed referred to quantum theory.

:) - yes, the "shut up and calculate" was a reference to quantum theory applied to GR, since people neglect to mention that GR doesn't explain what gravity actually is. And really, if you "shut up and calculate" using Einstein's Field Equations, you'll get results that largely align with observations, more so than Newton's equations, anyway. But there are observations that can't be explained by GR and there are simple thought experiments that can't be explained by GR. As I keep saying, we know GR is not the final word on gravity. That doesn't mean GR hasn't been incredibly useful - especially if you just "shut up and calculate!"

The thing you are asking for, the "why does mass cause spacetime to bend" seems... perhaps impossible to answer? Or like, I don't see why there should necessarily be anything that satisfies what seems to be your reason for dissatisfaction.

Imagine we explained it as "Mass causes X, and because X causes spacetime to be curved, we have that, mass (indirectly) causes spacetime to be curved." . But then, why would you be any more satisfied with this? Why would you not then ask, "Well, why does X cause spacetime to be curved?" ? (Or, "why does mass cause X?")

Now, perhaps there is such an X, and perhaps it will be found. But, I don't see why this would satisfy you any more than "Mass causes spacetime to curve" satisfies you.

If you keep asking "why", you either eventually end up in a loop, have an infinite regress, or stop getting an answer. A non-empty directed graph either has a cycle, an infinite outgoing path, or a vertex without an edge away from it. (And also, either a cycle, an infinite incoming path, or a vertex without an edge going to it.)

Many are content to allow the laws of physics to just be, without explanation, others may say that the laws of physics are explained by God, who is without explanation. Personally, I go with the latter, but, unless one wants to go with infinite regress or a cyclic explanation, one has to allow that something is without explanation.

For your complaint to be compelling, I think you should give criteria for, what conditions would something have to satisfy, in order for it to satisfy you?

(Also, you seem to assume that if the two particles suddenly acquired mass, that they would immediately begin to feel a force between them. While the hypothetical is presumably impossible, still, what I imagine happening would instead by that there would be a light-speed delay between when they gained mass and when they began to accelerate towards one-another. Though, I'm not sure if there is a fact of the matter as to "what would happen in this impossible hypothetical".)

An idea I’ve been toying with as an amateur physicist is to take the equal signs to mean “is” instead of “in proportion to”.

For example, take the famous equation:

    E = mc^2

The common interpretation is that mass can be created from energy with the proportionality constant of c^2. That constant can be set to “1” using natural units. This just leaves:

    E = m

But GR also have a similar equation basically saying that curvature = mass.

Soo… by my interpretation:

Mass, energy and spacetime curvature are the same thing! They’re not “proportional” to each other and one doesn’t “generate” the other like an electric field by an electron. Instead, everything is literally made up entirely of space time curvature. That’s what matter and energy are.

This is why all forms of matter have masses — the only other option is empty space with a flat curvature, but that’s just the absence of matter. If everything else is curvature, then they must cause long-range distortions — which we call gravity.

This doesn't appear to fit with other quantities like say, electric charge, or lepton number, or whatever. Like, there's more to matter than "how much is there here".

On the contrary, I got the idea from Kaluza Klein theory, which unifies general relativity and electrodynamics by converting the electric charge into spacetime curvature.

Roughly, my concept is conserved quantities are topological defects, which is why they seem to have a neat “algebra” and integral quantities.[1] Conversely, mass comes in fixed but non-integer quantities because the total curvature of some complicated knot doesn’t have a simple algebraic expression.

[1] Makimg the fractions disappear is easy. Just multiply by the denominator. E.g.: we say the electron has a charge of -1 because we discovered it before the quarks historically. If the quarks were discovered first, we would assign it a charge of +3.

You can't just set c = 1 as a pure number and conclude that E = m, the units won't match.

Natural units are very useful when doing math, but they don't reduce constants down to plain numbers, they still retain their units. Once you factor this in the rest of your argument falls apart.

That's a valid criticism, but the point is that you can have two types of curvature that you assign different "units" to when measured, but they're still both curvature.

As a hand-wavey example, one could claim that energy in the form of bosons is just a "wiggle"[1] of the spacetime fabric, and that matter in the form of fermions are topological defects or knots.

That way they're different enough that you'd want to use different units to represent them, but at their core, they're both distortions in spacetime that must inherently cause a distortion in spacetime at a distance (GR).

It also explains how they're inter-convertible. E.g.: energetic gamma rays can be converted into electron-positron pairs. If they're both "made of distortions" then it's like a very strong wave creating a pair of vortices spinning in opposite directions. You can't count the waves (it's smooth and continuous), but you can count the vortices.

[1] For the wiggle, imagine taking a huge sheet of cloth laid out flat over a smooth surface. If you tried to put a wave into the middle, the edges of the cloth would be pulled in. Contrast this with the typical view of fields as "vectors on top of a base (flat) spacetime", much like a mathematical function graph.

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