Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "These Experiments Could Prove Einstein Wrong" video.

  1. It depends. If there are modifications of gravity at short macroscopic ranges, then we might learn something. The Washington group has been using conventional methods in the search for post-Newtonian gravity for decades and that is very important research in my opinion. It might be possible that there is a regime where the new experimental techniques can push these limits further down. Unfortunately, at some scale electrostatic effects will invariable swamp the gravitational interaction, so nature may not let us see what is really going on in that regime.
    3
  2. ​ @morphixnm  The modern measurements for that were made with radar reflection on Venus. Shapiro did those at Arecibo in the late 1960s, early 1970s. The physically relevant measurement there is the excess time delay, which is a much more precise measurement than the angular deflection can ever be. Phys Rev. Letters Vol. 26, NUM 18 has one of the papers. The max. delay was approx. 180us during the superior conjunction with error bars of approx. 20us per data point. 20us, that's a distance uncertainty of 6km or so, probably dominated by plasma interactions and a bit of topography.
    2
  3. The will of Nobel states that the price shall go to those who made the greatest positive impact on mankind during the previous year. It's very hard to argue that the general theory of relativity made any impact on the lives of people in 1915. It does now through the GPS system, but that wasn't invented by Einstein.
    2
  4. Nein. :-)
    2
  5. The radio communication with planetary probes is routinely used as precision test for general relativity. On a cosmic scale weak lensing gives plenty of opportunity to observe the effect.
    1
  6.  @morphixnm  You mean to say that you don't know how to determine the position of the sun from the Earth? Or you just want a plot to where the extrapolated ray would point in the sky? The latter is an advanced student exercise with little scientific value.
    1
  7.  @morphixnm  No problem. Reminds me of the time when I was taking the general relativity classes. I tried really hard to understand the math... but sadly, that level of theory is beyond my paygrade. :-)
    1
  8. It's not wrong. That's the real problem. As long as general relativity is spot on, we won't be making progress in this region of physics.
    1
  9. No, quanta, which are energy, don't "exist" in spacetime. They exist in what physicists might call "system space", but it's not really a space. There is a bit of a complication here in that quantum theory relies on energy being conserved exactly, while that is not the case in general relativity because the universe is not time-translation invariant. The violation is subtle, though. I don't know of a case that could be made how it would significantly change the structure of QM.
    1
  10.  @DjVortex-w  Fair. Do you remember the high school definition of energy?
    1
  11.  @DjVortex-w  There you go. A quantum is a little bit of work. Now you understand more about quantum mechanics than most people. :-)
    1
  12.  @DjVortex-w  Nothing. Gravity is most likely not a quantum effect.
    1
  13. And there is the scientifically clueless kid who needs attention.
    1
  14. Not within its range of application, as far as we can tell. Alternatives have been under investigation for at least sixty years now (probably longer, I just don't care to do the literature search), and they have come up empty, so far. Having said that, Einstein's solution is incredibly boring at this point. It would be nice to see some violation of it. Not having learned anything new in over 100 years is getting old.
    1
  15. Maybe you should spend your time on inventing better stories about yourself. ;-)
    1
  16.  @debrainwasher  Sure kid, have a cookie. ;-)
    1
  17. And there is the kid who wants attention. ;-)
    1
  18. Nein. :-)
    1
  19. And there is the kid who doesn't know anything about relativity. ;-)
    1
  20. What do you know about equations? Nothing. ;-)
    1
  21. Yeah, that all sounds good, except that electrons are not particles and the predicted effect is not being observed in quantum field theory. :-)
    1
  22. And there is the angry looking dude who doesn't understand physics. :-)
    1
  23. And there is the lonely kid who doesn't know anything about physics. ;-)
    1
  24. Actually, plenty of people did comprehend it quite well almost immediately. Most people are simply not aware of the level of mathematical sophistication around WW I. The world itself was cruel (and for some nations like Russia that hasn't changed, it seems), but intellectually it was a very interesting time.
    1
  25. It's not clear that quantum mechanics is incomplete. It's a theory very much like thermodynamics or statistical mechanics that follows from first principles. What is certainly completely open is the collection of fields that nature choses to implement on our scale, which is generally called the standard model of high energy physics. What is also under great consideration is the correct mathematics for field quantization. The way we calculate quantum fields right now is very byzantine and it leads to a lot of technical difficulties that have to be dealt with individually. There are some ideas out there how all of these technical problems could be greatly simplified, which would open the door to quantum field theory for a much larger audience than the comparatively few theoretical physicists who have the pain tolerance to deal with the current math.
    1
  26.  @mikemarkowski7609  Listen to what I said: the standard model is incomplete. The standard model is an application of quantum mechanics. The quantum mechanical framework is not incomplete. We haven't added anything substantial to it in almost 100 years and nothing that we know about is missing.
    1
  27. Your feelings are broken. Please have them fixed. :-)
    1
  28. And there is the genius in his own mind. :-)
    1
  29.  @max0x7ba  And there is the genius in his own mind...again. :-)
    1
  30.  @max0x7ba  Your Nobel is in the mail. :-)
    1
  31.  @max0x7ba  Whatever you say, little boy. :-)
    1
  32. And there is the other kid who wants attention. ;-)
    1
  33. We don't. We think about theories as being "good enough" in their application domain. I don't care about wasting time on discussing Sabine Hossenfelder's occasionally wrong explanations of that, though. Somebody else can do that.
    1
  34. And there is the kid who doesn't know anything about dark matter. :-)
    1
  35. You have a completely false idea of how physics works. That Newton's result was only an approximation was already known to Newton. He wasn't even particularly happy with it for various reasons, it seems. We simply didn't have the necessary mathematical tools to derive a better post-Newtonian theory until roughly the time of Einstein, but even Cartan, a mathematician, was working on it. So there is really nothing "delicate" about this. This is simply standard modus-operandi of science. Classical unifications of gravity and electromagnetism are a waste of time, except for mathematical curiosity sake. We know that that's not how nature works.
    1
  36. Totaler Unsinn. Nein. ;-)
    1
  37. These are not the fools you are looking for! ;-)
    1
  38.  @Number6_  Absolutely. Her point and mine is simply that there is very serious research into the domain boundaries of general relativity. That has nothing to do with the trolling crazy folk that just can stomach relativity. We know from theoretical considerations where general relativity has to break down. The problem is simply that that's very, very far removed from the experimentally accessible physical regimes, right now. That, however, does not mean that we don't have to scan the accessible range as far out as we can. If you look at general relativity structurally, for instance, there are plenty of mathematically possible alternatives that behave just like Einstein's theory in the known range but deviate from it on an intermediate range to the Planck scale and possibly even over cosmological distances. We therefor have to perform experiments and observations that rule these alternative models out. That's just how science works.
    1
  39. Yes, but there are no observations that support those models. So you are basically asking if something unobserved has been observed. The answer is trivially "no".
    1
  40.  @nathanielacton3768  Dude, the definition of science is "the rational description of reality". The redshift describes reality perfectly fine, nothing else that we know of does nearly as well. That you don't like that is something you have to work out with your spiritual advisor. Reality simply doesn't care about what you like or don't.
    1
  41. The theory doesn't know about the structure of matter. For objects like planets and stars and even neutron stars for which equations of state exist, they can be coupled to the geometric equations and they will predict the structure of gravitating material objects correctly. In all those cases where the theory seems to predict singularities (like black holes), it usually applied without equations of state for matter. That is not exactly a failure of the theory. It's a failure in the way it is being used. The reason why it is being used this way is because there is an assumption that classical equations of states don't apply below event horizons and that the theory has to be replaced with a theory of quantum gravity. That is not necessarily a correct assumption. We shall see if precision measurements on actual black holes will uncover classical or semi-classical corrections near the observed event horizon of these objects. That will, of course, result in a different theory, just not necessarily in a quantum theory of gravity.
    1
  42. Next up: Tesla and a flat globe. :-)
    1
  43. Einstein is, on some scale, definitely wrong. We know that simply from theoretical considerations. Unfortunately that scale is completely inaccessible with current experimental techniques. Gravity may, indeed, not be quantized. The difficulties of developing self-consistent "conventional" quantum field theories of gravity are certainly telling us something important, we just don't know what. If gravity is an intermediary effective force, then it would behave mostly thermodynamically, possibly with some remnant quantum correlations. The problem is that such an intermediate "effective" gravity could actually make the detection of the actually underlying quantum theory (or post-quantum theory) even harder. It's like trying to do x-ray crystallography at the bottom of the ocean... not a very good outcome for physics.
    1
  44. And there is the lonely kid who failed school. ;-)
    1
  45. And there is the kid who doesn't understand physics. ;-)
    1
  46. Well, you are approx. ten lightyears away from the surface. ;-)
    1
  47. Ah, there is the lonely kid who failed in school. :-)
    1
  48. Dude, the entire point is that Einstein's theory still fits all the observations perfectly fine. That is the actual problem.
    1
  49. I don't know of a single serious physicist who does that. Neither do you. ;-)
    1
  50.  @Sneaky-Sneaky  You are watching too much YouTube bullshit, kid. ;-)
    1
  51.  @Sneaky-Sneaky  I am a physicist, kid. ;-)
    1
  52. Ma! I found a huge heap of bullshit on the internet. ;-)
    1
  53. Like what? ;-)
    1
  54. Look, Ma! Another lonely kid on the internet. ;-)
    1