Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Physicist Despairs over Vacuum Energy" video.

  1.  @Brianboy9494  Approximations are meant to make our lives easier. They have to be "good enough to be useful", which means that only the practitioner in a field can develop a good feeling for the range of applicability of an approximation. You are of course correct that physicists are usually able to smell an approximation from miles away while the layman is, at best, guessing what it is that he is looking at. That's a serious problem in science communications and not just in physics. That is my reason for pointing them out wherever I see somebody misusing them.
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  2. Energy conservation requires (through Noether's theorem) that the universe is time-translation invariant. We can see that the universe is not time-translation invariant, hence there is no globally conserved quantity called energy. We can define it in the small, but all attempts to define the total energy of the universe are doomed to fail.
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  3. Physics is the art of approximation. If you don't know how to teach approximations properly, then you shouldn't be talking about physics.
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  4. You can think that and then nature will slap you with the standard model of particle physics.
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  5.  @hughmoore786  You sound just like the guy who knows how to get around the third law of thermodynamics. So when is your 0K freezer hitting the market?
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  6.  @hughmoore786  Can you argue with any kind of logic?
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  7. The problem with quantum fluctuations as the source of the cosmological constant is a misunderstanding of quantum fluctuations. They don't exist in the way they are being portrayed in the press. You can look up into the night sky and you can see objects that are millions of light years away (the Andromeda galaxy) with your own eyes and over 40 billion light years with instruments (the CMB). That light was not disturbed by quantum fluctuations, at all. If the universe was "grainy" or "foggy" the way the usual mental model suggests, then this light would have never made it undisturbed and we would probably not even be able to see as far as our own toes. In quantum field theory higher order terms cause changes in energy levels of bound states because these bound states select a distance (size) scale themselves, hence the integrals over contributions at higher energy are cut-off at that scale and they don't average out to zero. These, however, are not simple random terms and they all go to zero at the scale of the universe. At most you can get something like a 1/R_cosmological dependence, which would be important during inflation but can either be neglected today or would, at most, lead to an asymptotically free universe. If an actual cosmological constant exists, then it is not caused by effects that are consequences of the background geometry. It exists as part of the layer of physics that causes the background geometry, to begin with.
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  8. No, that's not what we are talking about. The Higgs is a well defined physical mechanism in the standard model. Vacuum self-energy is a mathematical artifact that tells us that something about our representation of quantum fields is wrong.
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  9.  @eljcd  The initial calculation by Feynman? It is not naive. It's actually quite congenial and it works, with some difficulties. What is certain is that we haven't found anything better for over 70 years, which tells us that it's not all bad. Is it the best possible model for how quantum fields work? Certainly not. I am highly skeptical that the real/virtual particle picture is the best way to describe quantum fields myself. That, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the multiverse question. QFT tells us how to calculate with quantum fields and which kinds of quantum fields can exist, at all, but it does not tell us which kinds of quantum fields should actually exist. I am not aware that there were a whole lot of complaints about that in the past. If we were to put the same "prediction" criteria for the universe on plain QFT that we are putting on string theory, then we would have to conclude that it predicts an infinite number of possible universes. Instead we accept that it can't predict any. It can only describe the one we see. What happened with the introduction of string theory is that people had overblown hopes that it would reduce the number of possible quantum field theories to one. It didn't do that. It seemingly reduced it to a very, very large number. Unfortunately, so far nobody seems to have found the actual solution to the universe inside string theory, either. It may be in there, it may not be. And with that a serious philosophical mistake crept into the discussion: since string theory (which effectively has done nothing for physics proper so far) predicts a very large number of possible low energy universes, then maybe there have to be a large number of low energy universes. That is total nonsense, of course. The situation on the ground has simply not changed: we can describe the low energy universe very well, but we still can't predict it. We are still roughly where we were in the 1970s, when the SM was more or less finalized structurally. That is not a very long stretch of stagnation in physics. It was much worse in the 19th century when we had a more or less spotless (if inaccurate) theory of motion of matter without having any theory of matter, at all. So take the "discussion" with a grain of salt. It is far more about egos of different groups of people, neither of whom has a solution, than it is about the actual state of physics. Physics is just fine, it simply didn't make as much progress as some elderly physicist would like to have seen. Will Susskind be able to die in peace, having seen the holy land at least from afar? No. He can talk to Moses and Newton and Einstein about that experience when he gets to heaven. :-)
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  10.  @eljcd  I think there are a number of attempts to use more or less plain QFT to work around the gravity problem. There is the double copy group which says that basically two copies of the color force can produce gravity. I have yet to understand how that is supposed to work even even at the kindergarten level, so I can't comment. Then there is an attempt at making gravity a massive field, which could possibly explain dark energy, but the model seems to suffer from cosmological stability problems... quantum gravity seems a bit like playing Whack-a-mole, whenever a model is successful in one area, it has serious, if not deadly problems in another. My perspective as an experimentalist is a bit more focused on observations, right now. I don't believe that we will get the funding/develop technology to get beyond the 1TeV accelerator barrier within my remaining lifetime. So that leaves astronomical and cosmological observations. If you have been watching the success of gravitational wave astronomy and radio astronomy to image black holes, then it becomes somewhat evident that building new (space based?) observatories for gravitational, optical and radio-astronomy is the way to go. Nature has given us such a beautiful laboratory of absolutely monstrous extreme systems in the universe. We can never hope to replicate the conditions near and inside those objects in the lab, but we can harvest much of this information from a distance. That is where the near term progress of physics lies, IMHO.
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  11.  @augustinemmuogbana3382  The third party is nature. All you have to do is ask her. Let me know when she shows you a quantum fluctuation. I'll be the first one to congratulate you.
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  12. It is usually called a constant, but it is really an arbitrary function of cosmological time that one can put into Einstein's equations without destroying their meaning and that modifies the solutions of those equations. When we fit the parameters of the equations to what we observe, the fit is better if we use a finite value for this additional term. We can make the fit even better if we use a custom function. That, of course, is just a continuation of epicycles. It doesn't teach us anything. Mathematically these kinds of terms usually point to a physical mechanism in the microscopic derivation of the equations, so we know that there is, most likely, some real physics going on. We simply don't know what that physics is. Sabine Hossenfelder points out that one should not try to fill that gap with speculative thermodynamic models that do not behave, at all, like the universe at large.
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  13. Energy is simply not a conserved quantity. What they told you in school about it was a lie of mercy because they couldn't teach you the actual facts. They are simply too complicated for children.
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  14. I never found the vacuum energy problem particularly interesting. It's seems like an artifact of the quantization procedure more than anything else.
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  15.  @macschomo  No, but it's not caused by quantum fluctuations, either, we just don't have a good language to talk about these things. We can see the problem already in the ground state energy, which ought to be enormous, according to the usual calculation methodology. Instead the effective ground state energy is tiny. So that tells us that something at the interface of quantum mechanics of fields and the underlying geometry of spacetime is broken. It's probably the same technicality that makes it so hard to deal with gravity in a quantum mechanical way. So where does this problem come from? For one thing, it comes from our definition of "physical event", which is classical and point-like. That, already, would cause an infinite energy term in the most naive formulation, right? We can not even implement a single "point" in spacetime with a proper physical system without running into the infinity problem, but our theory then happily goes on to integrate over an infinite number of four dimensional spacetime integrals to get to a finite result (with some very heavy lifting in the symmetries department that offset some infinities against others). Moreover, the ground state energy was infinite in classical mechanics, already, if you remember... if we integrate the energy density of a point charge all the way to r=0, then we end up with a divergent integral, so the problem is not even quantum mechanical, it is a general conceptual difficulty with the infinitely "small". Nature does not have that problem. It simply does not "start" with spacetime, at all. It does not seem to care about the "infinitely small". It only cares about whatever scale is of relevance based on the total energy in the system. Instead, spacetime "is" what "stays behind" in an abstract way (that can, as I said, not implemented with physical systems) once we strip all matter and radiation out of the actual physical solutions. Now, if I could tell you how to implement this with a mathematical model, then I would be in line for the physics Nobel. As far as I know nobody can do this, yet, but we can still point to where the problem originates: from dragging the classical mechanics picture too far into quantum mechanics.
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  16. You may want to read up on the definitions of science and the scientific method, again.
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  17. Except that that "fudge factor" is blowing the universe apart as we speak. You can't discuss it away. It's all over the night sky.
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  18.  @marcdb9974  It is not expanding into anything. The "volume" of space is simply not a constant. Why would it be? There is absolutely no identifiable physical reason for space to have a constant volume. That was always just an ad-hoc assumption based on local observation of solid matter at 300K. Does the universe behave like solid matter? No, it doesn't. There is no real mystery here, just old fashioned 19th century mechanistic thinking. Is it hard to overcome that kind of thought mechanism? Yes, absolutely, but a discussion of these old human habits belongs into the arts and humanities and maybe psychology. It is useless in physics. In physics when A does not behave like B, then the laws for A are not the same as the laws for B. Yes, it is that simple.
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  19. The spaghetti monster was never in the dark. He just spent a very long time perfecting pasta recipes in a well-lit all-stainless kitchen.
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  20. What about it?
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  21. Do you remember Clausius? Heat flows only from hot to cold (unless something else is happening). If you wanted to measure absolute energy density, then you would need a reservoir that is truly at 0K (including self-energy). If the self-energy of the vacuum is >0, then we can't measure something below that... we are already hotter.
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  22. Because in the classical theory the cosmological constant is an energy density. If it stays constant, then the total amount of energy is proportional to the total volume. One could, of course, argue that the classical theory is wrong, which it most likely is.
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  23. Ah, so you didn't understand a thing.
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  24. Have you ever seen a quantum fluctuation? I haven't. So why are you taking it so seriously, then? Just because somebody told you about them? That's not science but religion.
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  25.  @augustinemmuogbana3382  Absence of observation means that science can't say anything definitive about whatever is absent. Science is the description of what can and has been observed. That doesn't mean we can't make predictions of what should be observable to tailor our next experimental or observational hardware or strategy to it. Of course we can and we do. That's called hypothesis building and we do it all the time. There is no such thing as a theoretical observation. An observation is always a physical observation. There are theoretical predictions. Theory doesn't predict virtual particles in any meaningful form. It doesn't even predict real particles. Quite the contrary. Theory DESCRIBES real quanta, which are IRREVERSIBLE energy measurements at the field/external system boundary. It does not even predict quanta inside the field because there are no irreversible processes inside the field and there are no such boundaries, either.
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  26.  @augustinemmuogbana3382  That's the definition of "observation" in science. It always refers to a physical event. Like I said, we can use hypotheses to predict phenomena that should be observable according to the hypotheses. Unless they are being actually observed, however, we can't assign "reality" to them. I can, for instance, calculate the exponential function of the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe. Does this mean that there is a physical observation that corresponds to this very large number? No. There is, as far as I can tell, no natural phenomenon that counts hydrogen atoms and then somehow implements their exponential function. Hence I will never claim that exp(n_Hydrogen) is a physical phenomenon. In the same way I can't claim that virtual particles are a physical phenomenon. They are an intermediate result in a calculation procedure that can, with enormous difficulty, be used to make SOME predictions about quantum fields. We can't even claim that it makes only correct predictions. The vacuum ground state energy prediction, for instance, is wrong by many orders of magnitude, which proves that something is fundamentally wrong with the calculation to begin with.
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  27.  @Nat-oj2uc  Hey, Ma! There is a lonely kid who wants attention. Let me give him some. ;-)
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  28. So the mathematicians are now stealing the physicist's comedic material?
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  29. Nobody is suggesting that one can extract energy from these things.
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  30.  @billmullins6833  In parts of the popular press Trump has won the election. You need better information sources. :-)
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  31. What is it with you and marshmallows? :-)
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  32.  @hantra17  Bacteria are eating your marshmallows??? What????? ;-)
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  33. Yes, Wheeler was calculating bullshit. So what? So nothing. ;-)
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  34. @ Am I? :-)
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  35. Particles don't exist at all, neither virtual nor real. What "exists" are quanta of energy, i.e. under certain circumstances quantum fields perform work on external systems. Virtual particles are imagined energy exchanges of the field with itself that are part of some calculation procedures. They are not physical energy values in the sense of work performed.
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  36. Real science doesn't sell. Why? It's hard to read. Try reading a mainstream science article from any field now without being a specialist in that field. It soon becomes a weeklong catching-up and learning exercise at the graduate student level if you want to understand in depth what the authors are talking about.
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  37. It doesn't take an energy, at all. Energy is simply not a conserved quantity, which makes the question meaningless.
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  38.  @TWak4ord  The galaxies beyond a fraction of the size of the current universe are already out of our sphere of influence, so we couldn't tie a string to them that would drive e.g. a generator, if that's the kind of mechanical analogy that you are looking for. They are already moving away at more than the speed of light from us. What an observer would see over the long term is that space will be emptying out, except for a few gravitationally bound local objects, which will not move away, unless dark energy is increasing over time and then everything will fall apart. At one point that process will probably become so fast that there will be a new wave of matter creation and that is where this "dark energy" will "condense" into new matter and radiation, if you will. So that's really a phase transition from an empty universe into a new matter filled universe. This may repeat cyclically over and over, again. Whether this actually increases the total size of the universe is not clear. Personally I have a feeling that it's more like kneading a finite piece of dough, the "inside" goes "out" and the "outside" comes "in", but, of course, the "inside" is everywhere and so is the "outside". That is very hard to visualize geometrically in a flat space, where something like this can't happen.
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  39. The speed of light with gravity has been measured with great precisions and it's exactly the same as without.
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  40. How did that strategy work out in school for you? :-)
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  41. It used to be OK until the end of the 1980s, I think, then it became ever more speculative and gazette-like. My guess is that today it's barely better than PM, but I haven't been reading it for decades.
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  42. You should write a paper about that. We still have too many trees on the planet.
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  43. Yeah, somebody still needs to go back to high school and relearn the angular momentum lessons. ;-)
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  44. Ah, the DK salesman is here.
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  45. I have never heard that one needs renormalization for anything in quantum optics. What would you be using it for at the 1eV level????
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  46.  @m1lkb0n3z  I don't have that book. Why does it say that one needs renormalization for a completely linear system without ANY interaction terms????????
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  47.  @m1lkb0n3z  In other words, you don't know, and you don't have enough intuition about quantum field theory to understand that there is absolutely no need for renormalization at the level of benchtop quantum optics with 1eV photons. Look, man, books are only useful if you understand what's in them. Just throwing them at another person is a bad strategy if that person happens to know just a tiny bit more than you do. OK? Are we cool?
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  48. You should have listened better in school.
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  49.  @cgfreeandeasy  No, because that's where you learn to stand on the shoulders of giants. Take care.
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  50. The Casimir Effect is due to boundary conditions.
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  51. That is what we are observing... an expanding universe. ;-)
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  52. She is talking about poor science writing.
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  53.  @wayneyadams  Vacuum energy problems only exist in poor science writing, not in science proper.
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  54.  @wayneyadams  If you want to learn real physics, please read a textbook and papers. This is the internet and she is only here to earn money.
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  55.  @wayneyadams  Does she ever claim that? Where? And even if she does, what does that have to do with physics proper, which you can't find on YouTube? :-)
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  56.  @wayneyadams  Oh, look, now somebody is snapped in. See you next time.
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  57.  @wayneyadams  That was quick. :-)
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  58. Particles don't exist. You are welcome.
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  59.  @shagrat47  A "virtual particle" is the mathematical result of a perturbation series decomposition of a path integral. Nobody has ever seen a physical equivalent of a "virtual particle" in an experiment. We haven't even seen "real particles". All we ever see are quanta.
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  60. Which god? Dyson?
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  61.  @dw-rh6fb  Jesus vacuums the universe? Far out.
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  62.  @dw-rh6fb  I mean, if Jesus vacuums all of space, that would explain why he hasn't come back in 2000 years... that's a mighty big floor Daddy gave him to clean. ;-)
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  63.  @dw-rh6fb  He said he would come back within the lifetime of his apostles. He clearly lied about that. Worst housecleaning service, ever. It's also not clear to me why vacuuming the physical vacuum is more important than not giving cancer to little children. Please explain in great length and detail so I can call your post the great wall of bullshit on the internet. :-)
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  64.  @dw-rh6fb  Jesus said that he would come back, resurrect our dead bodies and throw all but 144,000 of them into a lake of fire. The 144,000 are supposed to be all old, celibate Jewish guys, so your chances of not ending up in the fire lake (an Egyptian invention, by the way) are pretty low. Now why is Jesus vacuuming the universe, again? :-)
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  65.  @dw-rh6fb  That's not what the bible says. That's what you want to believe. The bible says clearly that all but 144,000 celibate old Jewish guys will be tortured forever. You should read it. :-)
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  66.  @dw-rh6fb  I am simply reading what was written. You are the one who denies it, self-declared prophet of god. :-)
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  67.  @alanfoxman5291  You are welcome.
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  68. It does not produce energy (or matter) at the current time for all we know (but it probably would during phases of rapid expansion). It does invalidate energy as a globally conserved quantity.
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  69. No, it's not time that causes gravity.
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  70. It doesn't come from anywhere. It's not "free" energy that we can harness to begin with. We are locally gravitationally bound and therefor there is no expansion around the local group of galaxies or inside the solar system itself. Everything that has a certain distance (that is set by gravitation) remains at that distance (up to Newtonian or GR motion). The problem with the expanding space picture is that we are used to think that space is an absolute background without matter. As it turns out, it is not. What keeps spacetime "together" is the matter. Where matter dominates, spacetime falls into the gravitational wells. Where dark energy dominates, spacetime keeps expanding towards infinity. This is hard to visualize because we can not think in four-dimensional spaces that have a local Lorentz metric. At least I can't. Maybe people who have a better grasp on general relativity can.
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  71. That's not what she is talking about. This is about field theoretical calculations, not general relativity.
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  72. The consistent theory is called "general relativity" and the parameter that plays a role in there happens to have the units of energy density. You are correct that homogeneity is, as of now, an assumption. Not much changes, though, if the universe is not completely homogeneous. The basic effects stay the same.
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  73. You will be glad to know that they don't exist. They are the result of us trying to describe a quantum field in terms of classical physics.
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  74. The expansion of the universe creates more universe. The slow expansion does not create energy and matter. Only rapid inflation would, and whether that is (or was) happening or not is still up for grabs.
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  75.  @biggerdoofus  The cosmological constant is not a constant. There is nothing in either the theory or at the level of observations to suggest that it is. Whether it is a useful parameter to describe cosmology at the level of (possible) inflation remains to be seen. I am a bit skeptical about that.
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  76. Because physicists, especially theoretical physicists, don't care about units in the first place.
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  77. Dilute into what? If the self-energy of the vacuum is already the lowest energy state (which is the usual definition of vacuum), then we can't dilute into anything "less".
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  78. The "law of conservation of energy" is a local law that requires time-translation invariance. The universe is simply not time-translation invariant, hence energy is not a conserved quantity at the scale of the universe. We need to update the way we teach matter and energy conservation at the high school level.
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  79. Energy is the ability of a system to perform work on another system. A galaxy receding from us can't perform work on us. In reality energy is simply not a globally conserved quantity, hence it behaves differently at the level of the universe than it does locally. It is highly likely that globally "energy" is completely "free". It does not take the universe any work to create as much of it as it like. It certainly does not seem to take any work to create more space and more time. We simply don't have the correct intuition for systems that have unlimited "resources".
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  80. So you got a toy model for your kindergarten playroom. So what? So nothing. You can't get neutron stars, black holes and the big bang out of it. You can't even make GPS work with it. You do like your GPS, don't you? Or would you like to have your paper maps back?
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  81.  @TheNewPhysics  Every drunk can explain everything all the time to everybody who doesn't want to interact with a drunk. ;-)
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  82. Yes, that nonsense has been popularized by Hawking because he was too lazy to explain in his books what really happens. ;-)
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  83. Energy is the ability of a system to perform work on another system. You are welcome. You should have memorized this in your high school science class, though.
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  84.  @michaelhey4039  You basically just told me that you can't even do what your iWatch does... memorizing a simple sentence. :-)
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  85. Energy is the ability of a physical system to perform work on another physical system. It's the same property that it was when you didn't listen in high school science class.
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  86. There is no disagreement. Nobody can tell you how to calculate this quantity correctly. It doesn't drop out of quantum field theory in a natural way. Why does it no do that? Because quantum field theory is an ensemble theory with an infinite number of ensemble members. Therefor the theory can not make a statement about the total energy density of a single member of the theory. There are ad-hoc calculations that have no theoretical motivation that are wrong by many orders of magnitude. So what? So nothing. ;-)
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  87. The derivation of general relativity will be the same in 2071 as in 2021. That the cosmological constant can be made part of the equation is trivial. So can other, higher order terms that are just not included in most books about the topic (except in tiny chapters about modifications and extensions to GR like Brans-Dicke and GR with torsion). That the cosmological constants is not some external energy term is simply the standard interpretation of the theory. Is GR wrong? Of course it is. That's a trivial thing to say, though. Unless YOU know HOW it is wrong, YOU don't know anything more than anybody else.
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  88. Quantum field theory is a perfectly fine theory. It allows us to calculate everything that happens inside the LHC, for instance, which is amazingly complex physics. One should not mistake the SM for QFT. The standard model is one possible application of QFT and it is never "complete". As new phenomena are seen, we can always try to fit them into the SM with the tools we get from QFT. So while QFT predicts and limits possible properties of the SM, the SM does not predict all of the physics seen in experiments. In order to break QFT, one would have to find violations of special relativity (very unlikely) or the assumptions that QM is based on (also not very likely since they are basically the same as for probability theory). In comparison, in order to break or change the SM, a single new measurement of an unknown (QFT) field at LHC or another high energy physics experiment is enough. These are just completely different levels of physical understanding of the world with vastly different consequences. SR and QM are fundamental and QFT is a more or less a direct mathematical consequence. The SM, on the other hand, is just one possible fit to the physical data.
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  89. Physicists don't care about units. Engineers do.
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  90. A quantum computer is made of matter, which is very, very high above the vacuum ground state.
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  91. That is probably a misinterpretation of what Maxwell and Einstein thought. It's much more simple than that, anyway. "The vacuum" is a bunch of quantum fields that produce nothing but relative physics, which means that they have to have Lorentz symmetry. Pretty trivial, really.
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  92.  @cristig243  Light is a quantum field. Have you seen light? Then you know what a quantum field is, too. Did you hold two magnets in your hands? That's a quantum field at work. And no, I didn't say that Einstein and Maxwell had these insights. I didn't say that is was easy for THEM to make sense of it. I said that it is easy NOW (minus the mathematics of quantum fields, which is "intense", to say the least). Why? Because there were more giants in physics since Einstein and Maxwell and we can stand on their shoulders. In science knowledge goes from the hard, complicated, convoluted, mind-boggling towards the conceptually easy. You should celebrate that. It's absolutely amazing.
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  93.  @cristig243  Ah, so you are seventy years behind in science. Well, that's a lot of reading, kid.
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  94.  @cristig243  And there, kids, is another person who didn't get it that Feynman (who was probably not even the originator of it) made a superposition joke. :-)
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  95.  @cristig243  And now you are just snapped in because we found out about your missing sense of humor. Who said that there had to be relativity in rotation? There did not even have to be relativity, at all. It just happens that there is and that has severe consequences. Your understanding of physics is extremely limited.
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  96.  @cristig243  And now you are just venting your frustration with the fact that somebody knows more than you. Let me know when you want to talk about physics, again. Take care.
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  97.  @cristig243  You are still just ranting. Let me know when you want to learn something.
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  98.  @cristig243  And now you are doubling down on the ranting.
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  99.  @cristig243  Don't say I didn't try to enLIGHTen you! Pun! :-)
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  100.  @cristig243  See you, too, SUNSHINE. :-)
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  101. The problem is exactly that there is no disagreement between both theories. We have never observed a phenomenon that requires the use of both at the same time.
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  102. Photons don't travel at all.
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  103. Yes, because a YT video at high school math level by Leonard Susskind is the totality of what we know. Would you like a cookie with that?
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  104.  @backpackmc  OMG, a joke from the 1920s!
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  105. Tesla: Saint of the science illiterate.
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  106. Sounds great, until you do the math and it doesn't work out that way.
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  107. Because she makes a big fuss about nothing? ;-)
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  108. Why would the mathematics care about physical constants being constant? Mathematics is a big boy, it can handle functions. :-)
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  109. What is it performing work on?
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  110.  @masterstacker2833  Yes, that is Newtonian physics. This isn't. Two galaxies, no matter how far away, are still in free fall. There are no forces between them that are accelerating them apart. There is merely new space that wasn't there before.
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