joigus

I think you're confusing torque with torsion. A two-body gravitationally-bound system has no torque, as the torque is the rate of change of angular momentum, and angular momentum is conserved in a gravitational problem --leaving aside tidal forces. Internal forces are collinear with distance between particles ==> no internal torque. There are no external torques either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque

It is fair to say that this LHS of Einstein's eqs. is not all of the geometry, as @Eise justly said. All of the geometry is captured by an object called the Riemann tensor, which in dimension 4=1(time)+3(space) has 20 independent components. In a \( D \)-dimensional space-time, the Riemann would have \( \frac{1}{12}D^2\left( D^2-1 \right) \) independent components. The "geometry" on the LHS is only part of the geometry. The rest is the degrees of freedom contained in the so-called Weyl tensor. Those are the degrees of freedom carried by gravitational waves. Only in dimension 3=1(time)+2(space) specifying the Einstein tensor would be tantamount to specifying the Ricci tensor, which would be tantamount to specifying the Riemann tensor, because all of them would have 6 components. Gravity in 1+2 dimensions would have no gravitational waves.

(My emphasis.) Taking up on this, your idea; dear @Butch; should be able to mesh with (at the very least): 1) Quantum mechanics 2) General relativity as it's presented as a model for gravity at a more fundamental level than the one we have. None of these criteria seems to be met from what I've seen. (My emphasis.) It's the other way. The meshing point should be the starting point, which is at the core, I think, of Swansont's last statements here. It's definitely not: Hey, this looks right in my mind; somehow some day it will click with everything else. What are the chances of getting it right this way? It's the other way. And believe me I just want to be helpful. If you see someone starting out from an obvious mistake, you try to tell them.

Good luck with that: There are 19 free parameters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Construction_of_the_Standard_Model_Lagrangian I applaud your optimism. PS: None of those include gravity, by the way. Plus the standing problem of hierarchies. Sounds like you have no idea what you're up against, honest. There's a (panoply of) reason(s) why revolutions in science are so hard to come by.

There is no torsion in 2D. You can only have 1 curvature, and no torsion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_of_a_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenet–Serret_formulas In 4D you have even more.

You may find it interesting to know that the Friedmann equation can be derived from Newtonian physics alone. The spatial curvature term of the Einstein tensor happens to coincide with the energy term in the corresponding Newtonian equations. This derivation you can find in Steven Weinberg's excellent book --although somewhat outdated today-- The First Three Minutes. Also in any of Leonard Susskind's lectures on cosmology (Youtube).

So what's wrong with string theory? Why does your theory have a better prospect of being right?

Another difficulty is that you use standard physics terms with a completely different meaning. Polarity has to do with existence of non-zero electric or magnetic dipoles; tensor is another thing altogether; Higgs and string theory have nothing to do with your model. All this only stands in the way of any meaningful communication.

Einstein's equations in general are complicated. They involve second derivatives of the metric arranged in an object with many (10) components (Einstein tensor; LHS of EE). And they are non-linear. On the RHS of Einstein's eqs. you have the distribution of matter, radiation, etc., in the universe. Schematically, they are: Geometry = matter Under assumptions of symmetry at large scale (isotropy=space is the same in every direction; homogeneity=space is the same everywhere) you get to a simple form of EE that's FLRW (Friedmann, etc.) that only involves the scale factor, which codifies the expansion of the universe. Very briefly, the Friedmann equations are Einstein's equations when you plug in several distributions of matter in the universe. On the RHS you plug in different distributions of matter dependent on the scale factor (radiation-dominated, matter-dominated, vacuum-energy dominated). And you solve, and get a rough picture of the different phases of the universe. I hope that was helpful.

Life is not spontaneous; it responds to accumulative causes. Meaning derives from life; not the other way around. Randomness is ubiquitous.

Your 'i' is not a tensor; it's a (Euclidean) scalar (inverse spatial distance squared).

OK. Let's take it piecewise: In your model, what is gravitationally coupled to what?

So how do you know both concepts, nothing and something really make sense, as mutually exclusive categories? Perhaps nothing and something, assuming they make sense, are interpenetrating, or implicating each other in some kind of circularity: There is nothingness in every somethingness (absence of a concrete substance that we can pin down as 'the thing in itself' --Kant-- in every observation we make). And also, maybe, there is somethingness in every nothingness (some non-removable features even after you remove every observable aspect). Can you guarantee that that 'nothing' and that 'something' are amenable to the application of such a thing as a 'boundary', so one is 'here', and the other is 'there'? Or maybe that boundary refers to logic, and not space? The concept of boundary seems to imply space.

As Swansont said: Gravitons move at speed c (they have no rest frame). Gravitons have spin 2. Gravitons are massless, so they cant have any characteristic length (radius of rotation). I see other problems (not completely unrelated): \( i \) seems to be an inverse length squared. But no 'internal' parameter describing a graviton can have length dimensions. Gravitons are not sources of gravitation, but the 'messenger particles' that carry it. Gravitons must have 'wave function' (field amplitudes) if we want them to obey quantum mechanics. Seems like you're trying to formulate an alternative physics, rather than modelling the known one.

Consequences for eyesight: Now serious. I'm sure there are some benefits in not doing something (anything) for a while, and giving it a rest, even if it's a regular body function. Eg: fasting for some reasonable time, I'm sure, has some benefits and somehow replicates better the kind of scenario we evolved in. If you're having sex several times a day, or masturbating, or just being sexually aroused without relief, it may be detrimental for obvious reasons. None of these activities are good for you if you practice them excessively. It just makes sense. As Phi said:

In the decades after Einstein's 'magic year' of 1905, physicists came to understand* that trying to set apart energy, \[ E=\frac{mc^{2}}{\sqrt{1-v^{2}/c^{2}}} \] and 'dynamic mass', \[ \textrm{inertia}=\frac{m}{\sqrt{1-v^{2}/c^{2}}} \] was quite futile, as they are proportional to each other with a universal constant as proportionality factor. Today, we no longer call mass this velocity-dependent quantity. We just call it kinetic energy. That's what it is. As to 'rest mass', it's just 'rest energy'. You can think of it as some kind of potential energy. If the body can't be broken apart by any process (decay, high-energy collisions), it still has this residual energy. As an example, if a body of rest energy mc2 (or \(m \), if you will; it's just a matter of units) decays into pieces of respective rest energies m1 and m2 , we know the liberated energy is (removing the unnecessary index 0 for 'rest', as mass is always rest energy), \[ \triangle E=\triangle mc^{2}=mc^{2}-m_{1}c^{2}-m_{2}c^{2} \] This is energy that we can understand as previously contributing to the internal cohesion of the particle that has just decayed, and no longer is contributing to forming the masses m1 and m2 , but contributing to the kinetic energy of the decay products, now moving with speeds v1 and v2 . Spacetime Physics; Edwin F.. Taylor, John Archibald Wheeler

Not sure that having wet biology is the key, @StringJunky, although it may be a factor. To me, and I'm speaking from intuition alone, the key would be having algorithms cooperate with other algorithms, and compete against still other, and produce offspring algorithms whose success is measured against relatively slowly-changing environmental conditions (as compared to the reproduction rate of such algorithms, so that anything like 'adaptation' even starts to make sense). IOW, a dynamics of competition and self-replication that mimics that of living organisms, and dispose of those organisms that don't fit the bill, so as to guarantee they don't have offspring algorithms. Given that we know for a fact that evolution of cognitive organs came about in the context of evolution of sufficiently autonomous structures in such a way at least once, it's a reasonable guess that something similar would likely happen again. Introduce cooperative self-replication (AKA sex), and evolution would speed up considerably. It is arguable that algorithms already have "awareness": Being able to probe the environment and store information about it however ephemeral, is some kind of primitive 'conscious' process. Self-awareness is just one step ahead: Being able to recognize clusters of data as other instances of algorithm and infer, by some kind of division self/other that the invisible 'self' variables (invisible because they're sacrificed to represent the universe outside) must be. Is awareness, consciousness, you name it, some kind of universal principle that operates in general; but in a very diffuse and ineffectual way mostly everywhere, while only in the way we experience it when a certain division inside (self) outside (universe) is established as a relevant "state variable" of the system, and cognitive connections as well in the internal states of these specially sophisticated physical systems? We don't know. I digress. The upshot (my guess) is: Let algorithms compete and cooperate among them, and have sex, and be anything like successful/unsuccessful, and there will be (some kind of) self-awareness at some point. In fewer words: Let there be Darwinian algorithms and there will be self-awareness.

IMO, brilliant explanation, Studiot.

The roots of science as we know it, I think, are already present in Roger Bacon and Galileo. It's this emphasis on observation and careful measurement that really did it. I see some kind of fruitful meandering from the empirical side (Francis Bacon) to the mathematical/rational part (Descartes). Advances have come in successive emphasis on one and the other. Aristotle (empirical emphasis) got his physics badly wrong. Much later, Descartes (pure reason, mathematics) got his biology of sorts badly wrong. I think this tension echoes through the centuries even today (cosmology; multiverse, pre-big-bang scenarios). "Greater" as more efficient, more influential at the grassroots level, more present in people's minds if only to the effect of disagreeing with it, or setting in motion waves of counter-opinion, or even just wondering what it means or implies, I think science is more influential than philosophy. I can hardly think of anything like the denial campaigns on global warming and the possible human influence on it would have happened had it been a question on purely philosophical epistemology.

Thanks for the mention. I'm in the middle of reading the thread so far. I'm no expert on Islam; rather, a person very interested on the history of Islam, and still largely learning about it. After the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661) and the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus (661-750), which are characterized by waves of conversion, civil wars, internal dissent on interpretation of the Q'uran, etc., comes the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) (1261–1517). This first period of the Abbasids is the one that we traditionally associate to the flourishing of, not only science, but also religious studies, poetry, astronomy, and what not; mainly in Baghdad. The scholars' capital, so to speak. The date 1258 corresponds to the fall of Baghdad under the Mongols, which caused the destruction of vast amounts of scholarly treasures. Baghdad, and the Islamic world, never recovered from this blow. But people (scholars from the three monotheistic traditions) survived, and for a while formed a thriving community in Toledo during 12th-13th centuries, even previous to the final blooming of modern science as we know it mainly in Italy. They were kind of intellectual refugees. Then it was Italy who took the torch, and finally many ideas from (not just) the Greeks, but also India (eg, the concept of zero) and Babylon (eg, hexadecimal system), and very importantly, the Arabic numerals, which really gave rise to the scientific side of the Renaissance. The most relevant Muslim countries that have undertaken any kind of attempt at a scientific comeback are of course, Turkey (under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) and Pakistan (under Liaquat Ali Khan). These are the highlights on Islam and science as I know them at this stage. I've filled in some details from Wikipedia, of course. BTW, this is a very nice thread, @studiot.

Very elegant explanation, as well as @Janus'.

Yeah, it must have been about that time. But the theory put me to sleep almost immediately. Fields are entities that vary in space/time. Is space an entity that varies in space? The metric is a field, matter and radiation are fields, etc. They are because they sit in space time. But 'space-time sits in space-time' doesn't make a lot of sense. I wanted to upvote MigL's last comment, but the voting function is not working for me.

You mean the odderon is the Higgs? I'm assuming God particle = Higgs. Higgs and odderon have different spins. Odderon is an odd number of gluons (spin 1); Higgs is spin 0. How do you get zero from an odd (algebraic) sum of ones? For some reason, I can't sleep. Normally I would be sleeping peacefully now.

🤣 It's a beaut, Moon. Didn't even notice the music. Although second time round I did turn it off, to just concentrate on the fish.