[HN Gopher] Godel's solution to Einstein's field equations (2021)
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       Godel's solution to Einstein's field equations (2021)
        
       Author : jorgenveisdal
       Score  : 66 points
       Date   : 2023-01-31 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.privatdozent.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.privatdozent.co)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | kkylin wrote:
       | For anyone interested in this topic: there are commentaries on
       | this paper as well as Godel's own lecture on this in Volume III
       | of his Collected Works.
        
       | daxfohl wrote:
       | So to solve physics, you don't just have to be smarter and more
       | creative than Einstein, but than Einstein and Godel combined.
        
         | shsbdncudx wrote:
         | You don't have to be smarter than them, no. Standing on the
         | shoulders of giants etc.
        
           | User23 wrote:
           | Indeed, in fact indirect evidence suggests that Sir Isaac,
           | the source of that quote, probably had more intellectual
           | horsepower than anyone until von Neumann.
        
         | chatterhead wrote:
         | What is Tesla.
        
         | renox wrote:
         | But you know that the Bells equations for the 'spooky action at
         | distance' are violated by QM, which they didn't. Among many
         | other new experiments results..
        
           | yarg wrote:
           | Spooky action at a distance doesn't need to be a thing.
           | 
           | Retroactive causality implements the same functionality
           | without requiring information to propagate faster than c.
        
             | renox wrote:
             | Given that you can't use quantum entanglement to send
             | information, I fail to see where information is propagated
             | faster than C.
        
       | musgravepeter wrote:
       | The article mentions "few known exact solutions". There are
       | actually quite a number. Most are from after 1950.
       | 
       | Cambridge University Press has two good books: Exact Spacetimes
       | in Einstein's General Relativity (Griffith & Podolsky) - good
       | readable (if you speak GR) account of the more common solutions
       | Exact Solutions of Einstein's Feild Equations (Stephani, Kramer,
       | MacCallum, Hoenstelaers, Herlt) - encyclopedic, authoritative and
       | mathematical. In my case an aspirational purchase
        
         | immmmmm wrote:
         | the gr_qc list on arXiv is quite vivid, it's pretty amazing
         | what this system of equations yields as solutions.
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/archive/gr-qc
        
       | thedudeabides5 wrote:
       | Does this mean that traveling faster-than-light can be considered
       | a form of time travel?
        
         | superposeur wrote:
         | Yes, which is why sci fi scenarios in which ships whiz between
         | star systems will never, ever, ever happen.
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | I've never quite understood why this is so certain.
           | 
           | If I instantly teleported to Alpha Centauri, that wouldn't
           | put me in the future.
           | 
           | Sure, if I turned a telescope back towards our system and
           | watched Earth, I would see myself wandering around as I was
           | four years ago and then... after four years... I could watch
           | myself step into a teleporter.
           | 
           | This is entirely consistent and in no shape, way, or form
           | would this let me get super rich on the stock market.
           | 
           | You could only ever know information from your present or
           | your past.
           | 
           | Imagine a hypothetical universe with a maximum speed 's'. The
           | creatures in this universe could develop relativity and
           | everything, the same as us. But what if 's' is the maximum
           | speed of sound in the gas that fills this toy universe? What
           | if the creatures are all blind and use only sonar to get to
           | know their world? Would travelling faster than 's' be
           | violating causality somehow? Or would it simply be the same
           | as a supersonic plane, leaving a sonic boom behind it?
           | 
           | Having said all that, I very strongly suspect that FTL will
           | never be possible. However, I don't agree that it would
           | result in time travel if it were possible.
        
             | avmich wrote:
             | > If I instantly teleported to Alpha Centauri, that
             | wouldn't put me in the future.
             | 
             | If the teleport is using a wormhole - a device which
             | connect two points in space - we can consider this.
             | 
             | We have experimental confirmation of time dilation, if we
             | have an accelerated motion. In other words, let's make the
             | wormhole entry on Earth move for some time so that its time
             | is behind, say, by 10 years from the Alpha Centauri.
             | 
             | Then, if you instantly teleport to Alpha Centauri by
             | stepping from Earth into the wormhole, the time at Alpha
             | Centauri is 10 years before. You may use, say, 7 years to
             | fly back to Earth through "ordinary" space, with sub-light
             | speed, and you'll arrive to Earth 3 years before you left.
        
             | shsbdncudx wrote:
             | You could do something on Alpha Centauri, instantly
             | teleport back, and then make a bet on what's going to be
             | observed in 4 years time.
        
             | mr_mitm wrote:
             | If you "instantly" teleported to alpha centauri, then there
             | would be a frame of reference in which you arrive before
             | you left. To another observer, you would travel back in
             | time. It's not something you can disagree on. Instead,
             | convince yourself by studying the spacetime diagram:
             | http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-
             | ti...
             | 
             | Note that "instantly" is ill-defined in SR. Simultaneity of
             | events is observer-dependent.
        
               | gnad_sucks wrote:
               | Studying a spacetime diagram is hard work. It's a lot
               | easier to just say "I never understood why it's so
               | certain" and leave it at that.
        
             | Jaygles wrote:
             | True teleportation would not hit the same limits. The idea
             | is, in conventional travel, your velocity has a time and
             | space component that are hard linked, the faster you are
             | traveling through space, the slower you are traveling
             | through time. The speed of light is the maximum speed you
             | can travel through space, because you've run out of the
             | time component you must take away from to get a larger
             | spatial component. An object that has a spatial speed
             | greater than the speed of light must have a negative time
             | component, aka traveling into the past, which under current
             | understanding isn't possible.
        
           | n4r9 wrote:
           | Also, any kind of instantaneous communication.
           | 
           | Unless the theory of relativity is superseded by something
           | quite radically different.
        
             | __Joker wrote:
             | High school educated talking here.
             | 
             | Does Quantum Entanglement have any promise for
             | instantaneous communication (theoretically) ?
        
               | explaininjs wrote:
               | Nope, entangled pairs are _basically_ the following in
               | JS:                   class RawQuantum {            value
               | = () => this._hidden ??= Math.random()          }
               | class EntangledQuantum extends RawQuantum {
               | valueA = () => this.value()           valueB = () => 1 -
               | this.value()         }              const {valueA,
               | valueB} = new EntangledQuantum()
               | 
               | You can give valueA to one procedure and valueB to
               | another and know that whenever the _hidden field is
               | observed, the two will have complementary views of the
               | data. But this doesn't give the two procedures any way to
               | communicate, and there's no measurable difference between
               | resolving the _hidden filed now or later.
        
               | OkayPhysicist wrote:
               | To elaborate somewhat on the _basically_ , the key
               | difference between this example (and the more common "put
               | a left shoe in one shoebox, a right shoe in another,
               | shuffle, and send each to different people" example) and
               | actual quantum entanglement involves being able to choose
               | from a multi-axis spectrum of different measurements, and
               | the resulting level of correlation precluding the
               | possibility of there being a local hidden variable (the
               | leftness or rightness of the shoe in the box before
               | opening).
        
               | moefh wrote:
               | That only works if you replace " _basically_ " with "
               | _not really_ ". With this code you can't violate Bell's
               | inequalities[1], which is a really important feature of
               | Quantum Mechanics.
               | 
               | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
        
               | BoiledCabbage wrote:
               | For someone who is trying to learn the basics of quantum
               | entanglement, the distinction between local and non-local
               | hidden variables isn't take that essential.
               | 
               | Or make those "hiddens" in the code above globals.
               | Problem solved.
        
               | moefh wrote:
               | The problem is not the distinction between local and non-
               | local hidden variables, but the that the "value" in that
               | code doesn't depend on the measurement being performed.
               | 
               | You can't understand anything about quantum mechanics
               | without knowing that in order to measure a qubit (or
               | anything, really) you need an observable, which is
               | completely missing from that JS code (for a qubit, the
               | observable for a simple projective measurement could be
               | represented by a direction in space).
        
               | phkahler wrote:
               | Non-locality seems to be the least favorable way to
               | resolve the Bell inequalities as far as most physicists
               | are concerned. I'm not sure why though. I think they like
               | exotic and unintuitive sounding stuff.
        
               | karmakurtisaani wrote:
               | Nope, you can't pass information through entangled
               | particles. All you know when you measure you particle is
               | that the other one will turn out the same (or is likely
               | to, I forgot the exact details). This does not lend
               | itself to any communication protocol.
        
               | chrismarlow9 wrote:
               | https://news.fnal.gov/2020/12/fermilab-and-partners-
               | achieve-....
        
               | OkayPhysicist wrote:
               | That's about transmitting qubit-encoded information. It
               | has absolutely nothing, at all, to do with FTL
               | communication. It's a somewhat more elegant solution than
               | USPS for solving the problem of "I have a qubit here, I
               | want to move it over there".
        
           | pocketleaf wrote:
           | In reality it's debatable, but within the logic of the
           | fiction universe it holds, yeah?
           | 
           | To be able to move those sorts of distances and arrive at a
           | time comparable to the origins absolute time would require
           | the "time travel" aspect of ftl, right?
        
             | superposeur wrote:
             | Most sci fi just pretends relativity doesn't exist.
             | 
             | Yes, the point is that _any_ way to send a signal between
             | space like separated events A and B (in sr or gr) would
             | also allow a return signal to be sent back from B to event
             | C in the past of A. So _any_ means of ftl signaling
             | (wormhole, warp drive or whatever) is tantamount to
             | building a time m achine. No amount of techno optimism or
             | can-do cleverness will ever be sufficient to surmount this
             | obstacle in real life.
             | 
             | Incidentally the Godel metric runs into causality violation
             | in a different way: closed timelike curves. No need for ftl
             | , it's even less realistic as Einstein is quoted pointing
             | out in the article.
        
               | chatmasta wrote:
               | I enjoyed this lecture [0] from Scott Aaronson about
               | closed timelike curves and the impact they would have on
               | computational complexity theory. Basically, they would
               | give you the ability to spend an eternity computing some
               | subcalculation, and then return to where you started with
               | the result in hand.
               | 
               | [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ha4eG8gLSK4
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-31 23:01 UTC)