[HN Gopher] Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
___________________________________________________________________
Einstein's Other Theory of Everything
Author : dnetesn
Score : 139 points
Date : 2024-09-01 10:09 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| paulmooreparks wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Ogx0b
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| An alternative to the "ball on rubber sheet" model of gravity is
| "twisting a lump out of a sheet of silly putty." You get the same
| curvature without relying on gravity to serve as a model of
| gravity (which always bothered me a bit)
|
| For clarity, here's what I mean: if you flatten out some silly
| putty (or pizza dough should work) then pinch and twist together
| some of the sheet into a lump, that pulls along the surrounding
| putty. So, if you drew lines on the putty then pulled it into
| lumps, you'd see the distortion to the lines.
| Levitating wrote:
| That's a pretty clever model. Do you know any videos
| demonstrating it?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| The recursive model always bothered me too. That's nice, though
| harder to explain in words.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| You can compromise: take a rubber net. Now bunch up a number
| of squares together and hold them with your hand. What
| happens to the bigger squares? Now explain that mass likes to
| move from smaller squares to larger squares and towards the
| bunched up areas.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| > without relying on gravity to serve as a model of gravity
| (which always bothered me a bit)
|
| Why though? Would it help if the sheet were in a centrifuge?
| carapace wrote:
| > Why though?
|
| It bothers me too, why? because it's circular reasoning:
| acceleration can't explain acceleration.
|
| > Would it help if the sheet were in a centrifuge?
|
| No, for the same reason. (You're imagining a tube-shaped
| membrane?)
|
| To make it worse, it's developing a wrong idea that hides the
| right and deeply strange idea: when an object passes a mass
| and its path seems to deflect what's really happening is that
| the object is moving in a straight line the whole time and
| space itself is curved. (The situation is actually a little
| stranger than that, but I'm no physicist so I won't try to
| explain any further.)
| photonthug wrote:
| As a sibling points out, it's not explanatory as much as a
| visualization. Or if it explains something it's not gravity
| itself but a less familiar kind of geometry and a new
| concept of straightness where sometimes the shortest path
| is what we'd usually think of as curved. Seems fine. Little
| chance of understanding gravity until you can grasp the
| prerequisite concepts you're going to describe it with.
|
| And anyway explaining gravity v2 in terms of v1's first
| approximation isn't that strange when recursive definitions
| are going to play a part in lots of higher education
| anyway. When you're a kid, 5 is just a concept useful to
| describe every instance of 5 apples, but later, a number N
| is perhaps best understood as the successor of N-1.
| raattgift wrote:
| The "balls on a rubber sheet" is a pain because nothing is in
| free-fall: there are dissipative contact forces between the
| balls and the rubber sheet. Consequently realistic initial
| [position, velocity] values for the test ball cannot give you a
| stable circular orbit around the central mass ball. Venus isn't
| about to fall into the sun. Now try setting up Earth-Moon or
| the Jovian-Gallilean systems on the rubber sheet.
|
| It's fun to try to peel away defects in the "ball on a rubber
| sheet" in an effort to arrive at Newtonian limit equations of
| motion for balls in placed around it. (First advanced question:
| how do we adapt Einstein-Hilbert to reflect trapping onto the
| sheet? Does dimensional reduction work?) What sort of membrane
| in constant acceleration could generate scaled 2+1 timelike
| geodesics for model solar system objects placed on it? Can one
| scale this to a model of the solar system with all orbits
| flattened onto the membrane? For instance, what do the IVs look
| like for a ~ 1050:1 mass ratio between a model sun and a model
| Jupiter that is shrunk down to classroom size and retains a
| good match to Jupiter's real orbital parameters (or if you
| prefer, lengths and angles) across many orbits? Without
| destroying this scale model orbit, can we add the inner solar
| system? Can we get sensible orbits of scale model Galilean
| moons?
|
| (And of course all of the above has completely neglected the
| rotations of these bodies about their axes, which is clearly
| always very wrong with a typical in-classroom rubber sheet +
| balls demonstration. We can blame friction for that.)
|
| I'm not sure what you're representing on silly putty: are the
| drawn lines solutions to geodesic equations? What would the
| twists-pulls of the putty in a scale model ~kg:g Sun and
| Jupiter system look like? Or are you thinking about a
| relativistic regime somewhere in the right half of this diagram
| : <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
| Newtonian_expansion#/medi...> ?
| cyberax wrote:
| > The "balls on a rubber sheet" is a pain because nothing is
| in free-fall
|
| The balls on a rubber sheet model is actually really great,
| but not in the way it's typically presented (rolling a ball
| down the curvature). Instead, just use a pen to draw lines to
| show the concept of geodesics.
|
| Start like this:
|
| 1. Imagine that you can move without friction if you stay at
| the same vertical level.
|
| 2. Draw a line on a flat rubber sheet, that's a line in free
| space. It's just a straight line that can go on to infinity.
|
| 3. Now put a ball onto the rubber sheet, so you get some
| curvature. Now the lines near the ball that stay on the same
| level are not straight lines, but circles.
| portn0y wrote:
| Don't call it "balls on a rubber sheet" then.
|
| Describe it as an artistic representation of the theorized
| behavior.
|
| Pull a Maxwell, whose theory of electromagnetism only worked
| when he got rid of the imaginary levers; get rid of
| descriptions in terms of physical things.
|
| As a visual it's fine. The debate here is the language. Only
| one aspect needs to change.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Balls on sheet is a wrong model imo. It needs gravity to work
| and therefore doesn't explain gravity.
|
| I like to imagine a sponge. If you could somehow make dense
| lumps inside the sponge (may be apply heat in its center
| somewhere using microwaves?) everything around that lump will
| be feel a tension/attraction towards that lump. That's my
| mental model.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I think the balls on sheet is an OK compromise. The reason
| for me is, it's tough (but not impossible as you point out)
| to visualize functions over 3D space. Your sponge does that
| and I like it! (You could also use color-coding, vector-
| gradients etc) The ball and sheet uses a spacial dimension as
| the function value, and that's the dimension the _needs
| gravity to work_ acts on. So, if you accept that as a
| compromise, it 's OK; we are saying that dimension is a
| convenience.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I like to explain it all as graph paper where the squares
| get bigger or smaller depending on what's near them.
| jayd16 wrote:
| It just needs force, no? You could use magnetism or even
| intertia if you accelerated the system, right?
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Sure, but the problem is that the geometry of the sheet
| alone doesn't indicate what will happen to the matter on
| it; you need something external. Whereas in actuality the
| curvature of spacetime alone is sufficient.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's not trying to explain gravity. It's trying to visualize
| it.
| jacknews wrote:
| Or ripples in a table-cloth - the ripples gather the
| surrounding cloth, just like mass deforms spacetime.
|
| These models are also an intuitive way to illustrate why the
| speed of light is a limit.
|
| A ball rolling on a rubber sheet, or a boat on a lake, etc, can
| travel faster than waves in the rubber or water. So why can't
| matter travel faster than light? With ball-on-sheet type
| models, you need to resort to abstract relativity arguments
| about mass going to infinity, time slowing, causality, etc.
|
| But if particles are actually just waves or knots or whirlpools
| or whatever, they clearly can't possibly travel faster than the
| speed of waves in the medium.
| openrisk wrote:
| Physicists didnt abandon this idea, Wheeler's geometrodynamics
| was all about the concept of geometry being relevant for more
| than grabity.
|
| As it happens with so many cool ideas it did not germinate
| something useful.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| Grabity is such an apt typo for gravity
| Towaway69 wrote:
| And your comment is a perfect demonstration of the fragility
| of the universe: what if the OP edits and corrects their
| typo?
|
| Edit: edited after 57 minutes - pedantic nerd here :)
| pestatije wrote:
| not possible after 5 minutes
| pantulis wrote:
| We are talking relativity here, beware with time lapses
| and Lorentz transformations!
| hughesjj wrote:
| > As it happens with so many cool ideas it did not germinate
| something useful.
|
| Well, at least, not so far.
| openrisk wrote:
| With so many trained mathematical / theoretical physicists
| around even the slightest experimental hint from nature would
| bring about a scientific revolution and new paradigms - like
| in real time.
|
| The lack of news from the "deep" frontiers of fundamental
| physics might end tomorrow or might last a millenium. Its
| impossible to tell.
|
| The pace of our increasing understanding of universe is not
| particularly predictable beyond these periods that benefit
| from simple scaling rules (ever bigger detectors etc.)
| photonthug wrote:
| I'm no mystic but one idea with slim evidence I just can't
| shake is that anything and everything that's theoretically
| elegant will find application or explanatory power in the
| fullness of time. Besides noneuclidean geometry, integer
| partitions come to top of mind as something that looks pure
| finding applications that we didn't know we needed, and
| surprisingly fast.
|
| I can only barely understand the explanation for things like
| monstrous moonshine, but I'm with Conway on this stuff
| anyway.. there has to be a reason, it can't just be a
| coincidence. Or in more classical terms, maybe nature abhors
| a vacuum, but not in the original sense. Lots of math is just
| too cool to _not_ use somewhere.
| DFHippie wrote:
| If mass/energy were interconvertible with space, if the former
| were some curled form of the latter, could you explain dark
| energy as the uncurling of mass/energy into ordinary space?
| jb1991 wrote:
| Indeed that is exactly what it is.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's possibly even simpler than that. The equations of GR
| involve a constant, called the cosmological constant, which
| could be given any value without changing the theory. A
| positive value for that constant would exactly correspond to
| what we know about dark energy.
| breck wrote:
| > Einstein finished his masterwork, the theory of general
| relativity, in 1915. He was 37 years old
|
| Interestingly if you look at the most popular programming
| languages they were created by someone 37.5 years old, on average
| [0].
|
| [0] https://pldb.io/blog/ageAtCreation.html
| bmitc wrote:
| That's not a great comparison. Einstein had already turned
| physics on its head and kickstarted several foundational
| paradigms in 1905, when he was only 25-26 years old.
| yyyk wrote:
| It's too commonly argued Einstein didn't produce anything after
| GR. This article is a welcome correction. The same collaboration
| produced the EPR paradox - a real achievement which taught us a
| great deal about quantum theory.
| pantulis wrote:
| For all the glory Einstein deserves as one of the greatest
| minds I find more interesting the history of this supposed
| "failure" in later life, but it's even more admirable his
| tenacity at trying to tackle the problem at different angles
| for decades. And boy it must be a _hard_ problem if Einstein
| himself could not crack it!
| sdenton4 wrote:
| There's some argument that Einstein was in the right place at
| the right time. Mercury was wobbly, and there was about fifty
| years of non-euclidean geometry research built up, including
| (eg) Riemann breaking ground on differential geometry.
|
| Maybe matter didn't crack because the right tools weren't
| available.
| phkahler wrote:
| An electron falling (electrostatically) toward a proton will
| reach the speed of light at some point. This is of course the
| same distance where inside it would need an escape velocity
| greater than c. So that's an event horizon due to a different
| force.
|
| Some claim matter falling into a black hole never really does
| from the point of view of an outside observer. I've seen weird
| sounding descriptions like it "spreads out over the surface".
| What if electron orbitals are some kind of equivalent to that?
|
| When I ask these (admittedly naive) questions, physicists will
| usually say something like "oh you have to treat that with
| quantum mechanics". But why? Isn't trying to resolve it using
| more conventional means (including concepts from relativity) a
| good idea? I feel like it's not right to reject one approach
| simply because nobody has figured out how to make it work while
| another does. That's different from showing that it can't work.
| Or have such approaches somehow been categorically proven
| inviable?
| cyberax wrote:
| > An electron falling (electrostatically) toward a proton will
| reach the speed of light at some point.
|
| Only in Newton's mechanics. With special relativity, it'll
| approach the lightspeed.
|
| > Some claim matter falling into a black hole never really does
| from the point of view of an outside observer. I've seen weird
| sounding descriptions like it "spreads out over the surface".
|
| It doesn't. To an outside observer, the object falling towards
| the black hole just becomes progressively dimmer and more red,
| until it disappears.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Another layman observation, based on your last paragraph: In
| terms of electron orbitals, the definition of what _quantum
| mechanics_ means varies. For example: Are you using quantum
| mechanics when describing an electron in hydrogen 's orbital?
|
| I have heard both answers. It's spread out over space and is
| not like the _classical_ pre-Bohr models, but it 's described
| by a _classical_ wave equation, and can be viewed at as a
| differential equation solution; a function over 3D space (For a
| time snapshot; or 4D spacetime with rotating phase). In this
| definition, you are not doing quantum mechanics until dealing
| with things like anti-symmetry, spin statistics, exchange
| interactions etc.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| You're trying to solve the two body problem of an electron and
| a proton classically including relativistic effects. But we
| know this is not describing reality, because an electron
| orbiting a proton should radiate energy in form of
| electromagnetic waves and quickly collapse into the proton. The
| orbit of an electron in the ground state is well outside the
| Schwarzschild radius of the proton.
|
| Quantum mechanics successfully explains why the electron does
| not collapse: because its time evolution is given by the
| Schrodinger equation. Unlike your idea, it even correctly
| produces the energy level of the ground state and everything to
| an astonishing degree.
|
| Quantum mechanics is arguably the most correct theory we ever
| had, so ignoring it and trying to find an alternative approach
| is extremely unlikely to work. People may start listening if
| you can also produce the correct energy level of the ground
| state.
| pdonis wrote:
| An electron-proton pair approaching each other will not
| necessarily form a hydrogen atom by emitting radiation. They
| could just scatter off each other, and if the impact
| parameter is large enough, this process could be modeled
| reasonably well by an analysis using classical relativity.
| Or, at high enough energy, other particles could be produced,
| which would require quantum field theory to model.
| XorNot wrote:
| You can't just reject evidence like this though: electrons
| orbiting protons don't emit synchrotron radiation. So
| whatever else you want to the prize, you have to be able to
| reproduce this result.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> An electron falling (electrostatically) toward a proton will
| reach the speed of light at some point._
|
| No, it won't. A correct relativistic analysis of the relative
| motion of the electron and proton will show their relative
| speed never reaching c, let alone exceeding it. You can't just
| plug numbers into Coulomb's Law for this case, because
| Coulomb's Law by itself is not relativistically correct. You
| need to use the full Maxwell's Equations and the relativistic
| Lorentz force law.
|
| _> So that 's an event horizon due to a different force._
|
| No, it isn't. No force in the relativistic sense produces an
| event horizon. In relativity, gravity is not a force, it's
| spacetime geometry, and so is an event horizon in spacetimes
| where one is present.
|
| _> physicists will usually say something like "oh you have to
| treat that with quantum mechanics"._
|
| They are correct in the sense that once the electron and proton
| get close enough together, classical relativity and Maxwell's
| Equations are no longer a good model. But as above, you don't
| need to do that to realize that your claim about reaching the
| speed of light is wrong.
| greysphere wrote:
| > You can't just plug numbers into Coulomb's Law for this
| case, because Coulomb's Law by itself is not relativistically
| correct.
|
| Sorry if this is a bit pedantic, but as someone trying to
| study this at the moment, I don't see this the same way and
| I'd like to validate my interpretation: You can just plug
| numbers into Coulomb's law, that part is correct. But then
| the problem of infinite velocities comes from interpreting
| the 'F' side of the equation, assuming Newton's law (F=ma),
| rather than using its relativistic counterpart.
|
| Coulomb's law: F = qq'/r^2
|
| Lorentz force law: F = q(E + mu x B)
|
| For the 2 particle case, both of these say the same thing
| (substitute into the Lorentz eq E = q'/r^2, B = 0 and you get
| the same thing).
|
| The promotion from non-relativistic to relativistic mechanics
| is a change of what 'F' means.
|
| nonrelativistically: F = p' = m v' = m x'' = m a
|
| relativistically: F = p' = \gamma m v' = \gamma m x'' =
| \gamma m a
|
| where \gamma is the Lorentz factor.
|
| Interpreted this way, infinite velocities are avoided.
|
| But, as r->0 we still have an infinity problem - namely
| infinite energy! This necessitates a quantum mechanical
| correction to both the Coloumb and Lorentz laws.
|
| TLDR: relativity is necessary when things start to move 'very
| fast', qm is necessary when things are 'very small'
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| You can plug arbitrary values in, but you can not expect to
| gain any valid predictions or reasonable physical insight
| from Coulomb's law as soon as you are no longer dealing
| with static point charges. That's because B and E are not
| independent quantities but actually closely intertwined
| components of the electromagnetic field strength Tensor F.
| As soon as you start dealing with motion, these components
| will mix, preserving only certain quantities like the
| tensor contraction E^2-B^2. So even if you construct a case
| where B=0 at time t=0, that will no longer be true once you
| had any acceleration of your charge carriers.
|
| In the fundamental quantum field theory picture you don't
| even have forces and particles in the original sense
| anymore. The dynamics are then described by interaction
| between the em field and charged fermionic fields. Stuff
| like Coulomb's law (or any other force potential) only
| emerges as a macroscopic low energy approximation for
| specific field configurations.
| greysphere wrote:
| In a classical view of 2 particles accelerating towards
| each other v x r will always be 0 so B will always be 0
| even if the particles are accelerating towards each
| other. I believe all this holds under QFT [1].
|
| Looking further a redefinition E is necessary when
| including the \beta factor [2]. So that was a mistake on
| my part - relativity does change the rhs of Coulomb's
| law.
|
| Admittedly the problem as stated (two particles falling
| towards each other) constrains things in such a way that
| there is no off-axis contribution. Or to put it another
| way, 1d electromagnetism doesn't have magnetism.
|
| [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/142159/de
| riving-...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb%27s_law#In_rela
| tivity
| tgarrett wrote:
| Hi greysphere, you are definitely correct that one primary
| thing preventing velocity of the electron from exceeding
| than the speed of light is the presence of gamma in the
| relativistic force law, aka \partial_t (m_e \gamma v ) =
| q_e(E + v \times B), although the LHS doesn't quite equal
| \gamma m_e a, since \gamma also depends on v...
|
| In general I think it's fine to use Coulomb's law as an
| approximation in this case because the proton is much
| heavier than the electron and so we can just stay in the
| proton's reference frame and let the electron fall in from
| infinity (and we're ignoring QM and just doing relativistic
| EM here). We could also switch to a tritium nucleus and
| make it a bit better of an approximation, or indeed add a
| whole bunch more neutrons and get lucky that they don't
| beta decay to make it an arbitrarily good one. It is true
| that if the proton starts moving that you will no longer
| have a pure Coulomb field with respect to the original
| reference frame, as after a Lorentz boost the E field gets
| squished into the transverse direction somewhat, and you'll
| gain a B field swirling around the proton...
|
| Staying with the frozen proton approx, if we plug numbers
| in we get quite a bit of energy: set the proton radius r_p
| to 1E-15, and we get U = q_e^2 / ( 4 \pi \eps_0 r_p ) ~ 1.4
| MeV, or a gamma of about 4, so yeah, it would be moving
| faster than c if we stayed with Newtonian mechanics. But
| there's another wrinkle: the 1.4 MeV of liberated potential
| energy won't all go into the electron's relativistic
| kinetic energy, because it is accelerating like crazy,
| especially in the final femtometers, and that acceleration
| (essentially Bremsstrahlung, although its not braking here)
| will generate an intense pulse of EM radiation as well - a
| decent fraction of the 1.4 MeV will go into that instead.
| You could perhaps estimate how much using the Larmor
| formula (in general calculating this radiation reaction
| force precisely becomes very complex, because the
| excitation of the EM wave modifies the acceleration, which
| modifies the excitation of the EM wave etc... And, now
| looking on Wikipedia, I'm not surprised to see that the
| first QM version of the calculation was done by
| Sommerfeld).
|
| So yeah, the electron will zip through the proton, with
| much of the potential energy converted to an EM pulse that
| zips off to infinity, and so the electron is now bound to
| the proton, and will continue to zig zag back and forth,
| emitting more radiation until it comes to a rest inside the
| proton. So yeah, we do need QM after all.
| tgarrett wrote:
| To follow on a bit, the wikipedia article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung links to a
| paper by Weinberg: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11168 and a
| quick skimming shows that he's perfectly happy to use the
| Coulomb field as an approximation...
| cheschire wrote:
| If you make a game that is 4D, you can visualize moving
| 4-dimensionally via a 3 dimensional shadow. See the book
| Flatland for more concepts like this if this sounds
| interesting.
|
| Now you can get quite good at predicting where you will end up
| after a while, and even be able to remember how to get places.
| But does that mean you are thinking 4 dimensionally? No, you're
| still thinking in 3 dimensional shadows.
|
| I get the feeling that is analogous to what happens when you
| try to do what you're describing.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Some claim matter falling into a black hole never really
| does from the point of view of an outside observer._
|
| Such claims are wrong. The correct statement is that the
| outside observer never _sees_ the matter reaching or falling
| inside the event horizon. But that 's not because it never
| happens; it's because the spacetime geometry prevents light
| emitted at or beneath the horizon from getting back out to the
| outside observer.
| tux3 wrote:
| A problem with trying to use concepts like this and asking
| "what if?" is that it's reasonning and trying to extrapolate
| from an analogy
|
| It's one thing to use analogies to guide your intuition, but
| physical theories are written in the language of math, and not
| the language of analogies!
|
| You don't have to use QM to describe protons and electrons at a
| fine level, but it is very hard to do otherwise, because
| whatever new theory you want to invent would also have to agree
| with QM on all the experiments where we have observed quantum
| effects. You can make an even bigger theory, but you can't
| throw away the existing approach without reinventing most of
| its results.
|
| You're welcome to try, of course. But be aware you'll need cold
| hard math, not just high-level ideas
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Well said. I think Einstein himself used the same kind of
| analogous thinking to guide his intuition, and wouldn't have
| been nearly as successful as he was without allowing himself
| this sort of unbounded thinking. In the end, however, he
| proved these intuitions true or false with the light of math.
| csomar wrote:
| I thought it's impossible for any object with non-zero mass to
| reach the speed of light?
| drowsspa wrote:
| You can try to make them viable if you want: it's Physics, not
| Math. You can't really "categorically prove something
| inviable". But you'll also have to reproduce the results of
| Quantum Mechanics that predict experimental results to the 11th
| decimal place.
|
| I think something to keep in mind is humility. In the Bayesian
| sense it's quite unlikely for you to have picked up something
| that physicists missed or didn't try to work out before
| accepting Quantum Mechanics.
| defamation wrote:
| Sabine is awesome
| motohagiography wrote:
| naively, i'd wonder if the time properties of black holes could
| be used to effect local super-massive gravitational effects on
| entangled particles here.
|
| e.g. they figured out how to entangle the electron and proton of
| a hydrogen atom with a complementary particle that is being
| pulled into a black hole, like if there were a way to entangle or
| entrain a local atom with hawking radiation from a black hole,
| where as the effect of entanglement, the local atom adopted the
| dialated time/gravity of its remote counterpart in the black
| hole. the effect would be that states of matter which only
| existed on the ephemeral femtosecond scale here would be
| stabilizied for longer time periods because its "clock" had been
| slowed down by its adopted clock entanglement via hawking
| radiation in a kind of black-hole-time.
|
| maybe better for a movie script or fiction, but people who think
| of these things reason them through logically before doing the
| math as well.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I don't believe you can entangle items remotely like that.
| motohagiography wrote:
| photons entangle at a distance as there is tech in the market
| right now in cryptography that uses entangled photons over
| distances of several miles into orbit.
|
| the naive intuition is that lensing hawking radiation might
| stabilize unstable elements for longer periods.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Huh. I thought you had to entangle them locally & then
| separate them maintaining entanglement. Entangling at a
| distance is weird. Can you provide a source of entangling
| particles remotely on Earth & in orbit?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| No, you entangle them locally and they maintain their
| entanglement as they move away from each other.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah, even entangling particles remotely seems to require
| two pairs of entangled particles locally, sending each
| half somewhere, entangling the remaining local halves
| again locally and then using quantum teleportation to
| transfer the entanglement to the remote pairs together.
| So while you could do this to entangle a particle to a
| black hole, you'd still need to travel to the black hole
| classically and there's no way to do this today as the
| nearest black hole is over 1k light years away.
|
| I'm not aware of any theoretical or experimental way to
| straight up entangle unrelated particles remotely but I
| don't know QM enough to say it's straight up impossible
| but it would violate my understanding of how entanglement
| works.
|
| That being said it is an interesting thought experiment
| although in practice I doubt you'd measure anything
| particularly interesting through the entanglement and
| more importantly it's not clear entanglement would
| survive near a black hole since we don't have a unified
| model of gravity and QM.
| niederman wrote:
| While something like this could be an interesting idea for a
| sci-fi novel, this is not at all how quantum entanglement
| works. Entanglement doesn't make one particle "[adopt] the
| dilated time/gravity of its remote counterpart", it just refers
| to a perfect correlation of certain measurements of the two
| particles. For example, if you produce two particles that you
| know have zero total momentum, but don't measure the momenta of
| either individual particle, these particles are now entangled,
| because measuring the momentum of one particle to be p
| immediately tells you that the other particle's momentum is -p,
| regardless of distance. Time does not actually come into play
| at all here.
| motohagiography wrote:
| interesting, content to be wrong based on an absolute
| ignorance of the topic. my laymans read of photon
| entanglement had to do with how it was described in quantum
| key distribution, where entangled photons maintained a kind
| of polarization state between each other over a long
| distance, where the observation of one of them caused a state
| change at the other "end". this idea of remote causality was
| what implied that the properties of one end of an
| entanglement could operate on another.
|
| when I looked up whether other particles could be entangled
| in the same way, the analogy seemed to map, but the logical
| errors appear to be, a) assuming there is time between the
| entangled photons as there's no _t_ in p = mv, b) then that
| there is time dependent _information_ between the photons,
| then c) extrapolating that some property of black holes might
| operate on that relationship.
|
| thank you for indulging!
| transfire wrote:
| Well that's very interesting because one of the latest ideas
| getting traction on solving the information paradox is exactly
| this -- that black holes are connected to each other and the
| outside space by wormholes.
|
| Check out the current Scientific American special publication.
| bmitc wrote:
| I have always understood black holes to be "failed" wormholes.
| How does that fit into these new ideas?
| ls-lah_33 wrote:
| I'm surprised Sabine doesn't mention the way fermions are treated
| in Loop Quantum Gravity [1][2]. My understanding is they are
| treated as "non-local" or open loops of gravitational force, and
| thus entry and exit points in space-time. This makes them
| conceptually similar to the "wormhole model" of matter that
| Einstein and Rosen originally described.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/9404010
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1012.4719
| trhway wrote:
| so, Higgs gives mass, and the mass curves the space to produce
| what the see as gravitation. I think there are some questions
| here to the Higgs at it seems it has some special relation to the
| spacetime.
|
| And that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_electron
|
| "...the angular momentum and charge of the electron are too large
| for a black hole of the electron's mass: a Kerr-Newman object
| with such a large angular momentum and charge would instead be
| "super-extremal", displaying a naked singularity, meaning a
| singularity not shielded by an event horizon."
|
| And 2 singularities having worm-hole connection is the
| entanglement.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Energy gives mass. The Higgs mechanism only explains the mass
| of the elementary particles (electrons, quarks, W and Z bosons,
| etc). The vast majority of the mass of everything else comes
| from the energy of the strong force or the electromagnetism.
|
| For example, the vast majority of the mass of a proton is
| explained by the immense energy of the three quarks and gluons
| being bound together by the strong force. The mass of the
| quarks themselves is only a tiny portion of that (about 1%),
| while gluons are massless.
|
| The mass of the atom is further increased by the energy of the
| electromagnetic force. A hydrogen atom has one proton
| (1.6726x10^-24 g) plus an electron (9.1x10^-31 g), but the mass
| of the hydrogen atom is slightly higher than their sum
| (1.6735x10^-24 g).
|
| The mass of a composite particle is at least partly coming from
| the famous E = mc2.
|
| The Higgs mechanism is ultimely just a way for elementary
| particles to have this type of energy as well, even in a void
| and without any other forces present. There is nothing special
| about it and spacetime, it works like any other field.
| throwmeaway222 wrote:
| Nothing has satisfied me between why gravity and magnetism are
| not the same thing. A ferrous material where the electron poles
| can be aligned show high forces. Most things are totally
| misaligned, which I believe creates gravity. No explanation on
| stackexchange or anything else convinces me. Most of the
| arguments feel egotistical to me.
| amai wrote:
| Einsteins later work led only recently to the following exciting
| conjecture:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER_%3D_EPR
|
| Unfortunately the author doesn't seem to know about this idea.
| t8sr wrote:
| As a physics student, I feel compelled to point out, to any
| readers who might now go read Hossenfelders other articles, that
| many of her views are generally not shared by a majority of
| physicists today.
|
| She is a real physicist and not a kook, but she has been
| criticized for presenting her views (e.g. superdeterminism) as
| having much more acceptance than they actually do. She ignores
| and misrepresents counter-arguments regularly. Her ideas about,
| e.g. the explanatory power of entanglement wrt processions of
| moons around (IIRC) Jupiter are certainly well outside what I'd
| describe as regular astrophysics.
|
| The golden standard of science communication was set by Sagan,
| and he always carefully pointed out when he was expressing a
| personal opinion, as opposed to one shared by the majority.
| Sabine Hossenfelder is no Sagan.
|
| So proceed with caution. :)
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Is there any scientist science communicators that this
| criticism wouldn't apply to?
|
| As far as criticism goes, I appreciate how professionally you
| stated this PSA. Most don't make the same points as gracefully.
| Best of luck with your studies.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Neil deGrasse Tyson; if he is working on a s riot prepared by
| someone else like on a TV Show, he is quite a nice
| communicator. But, if he does not have such a script, I would
| say unless he is debunking a flat earther or some actor's
| mythical views of mathematics, I would just ignore it. If he
| talks about biology, which he often does, I would just leave.
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| He comments on fields in which he's unqualified, and his
| remake of Nova had a ton of unnecessary swearing. And goes
| on TV and talks about politics. That's when he lost me.
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