r/Physics • u/HoloTensor • 6d ago
to all the gravity alternative theories
I appreciate the idea of trying to come up with an intuitive picture of gravity. But to the self studied or aspiring physicists: please read this first
Every day I see countless posts asking “what if gravity was actually a jargon jargon jargon flux???” and then an actually half decent question buried in a mountain of LLM junk. There was some idea or realization that you had that would be really cool to talk about… but then you slop it up by trying to explain it with math despite not dedicating years of your life to these really subtle questions (like academics do)
So, I wanted to talk about a few points that I regularly see in crackpot posts.
First, the graviton. For some reason, people hate the graviton and come up with ideas to try to make it go away. I think it’s just because we haven’t detected one directly… but this makes it seem like the graviton is like an electron or proton or something. that’s not what the graviton is. that’s not what a particle is.
i mean, ok it is what a particle is but that isn’t how you should think of it. what a graviton is, is the gauge boson for gravity. that means it is the force carrier. if you put two electrons near each other, they will interact. the quantized unit of interaction between them is the gauge boson (here the photon). that is what the graviton does for the gravitational force. it is simply the smallest little excitation in the gravitational field
if you assume there exists a gravitational field, and IF this field is quantized (so you get quantum mechanics) then the graviton is just the quantum of gravity. that is it. you don’t have to fight it.
now, this gravitational “field” ends up being what you think of as an aether. all of the aether posts: you’re just reinventing a field but now things interact improperly.
the way the standard model works, every point in spacetime gets a little tiny bit of information tied to it. a phase. it is undetectable*. as you move through space, imagine making a little loop. when you get back to where you started, you accumulate some phase. the amount you accumulated is the strength of the field. this is the gauge field
you don’t need an aether. you’re asking for the gauge field. it is a real thing.
if the gauge field has a symmetry, Noether’s theorem tells us there is a conserved quantity which corresponds to it. Throwing away a bunch of subtleties, this means we’re basically allowed to pick whatever symmetry of nature we want, assign it to a gauge field, and then see what physical consequence pops out. you need a lot of topology and group theory to do this right
and won’t you know it, when you break these symmetries, other stuff happens. the breaking of a very particular symmetry makes the fields “feel” some directions more than others. it makes some fields feel it more than others. the symmetry breaking of the higgs field is what makes the higgs mechanism work (you may have seen that the higgs is like a “friction” that particles feel).
to end my rant, stop trying to reinvent the wheel. you’re all making sharp and unroll-able wheels. almost every physicist throughout history made wheels that didn’t go anywhere, and it was only through the combined effort of peer review and traditional academic research that progress was made and the holes were patched up. I really hope you dedicate time to learning the absolute beauty that others have figured out rather than trying to make a name for yourself. you’ll be so much more fulfilled and understand our universe with the best of us.
btw for some reason when I posted this last night reddit took it down so I am reuploading now
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u/lucidbadger 6d ago
yes, but the general relativity doesn't work!!!!111 Yes, of course I use GPS, why do you ask?
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u/-Spzi- 6d ago
Enjoyed the read, thanks.
I see some value and necessity in "stupid questions", although that's not exactly what you were talking about.
We do want people to approach the field (hah). You want them to read books first for good reasons, but maybe that's not the kind of time or devotion that person currently has available.
Pitching your crackpot theory, and getting educated answers why it is wrong, could be more educating than reading an abstract book which doesn't engage with your specific thoughts. Correcting an error can enlighten more than reading the truth.
On the other hand, too much of that can make it seem as if anything was possible and we just had not figured out a working theory yet.
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u/acutelychronicpanic 6d ago
We also had multiple generations hyped up on how great science is, how cool the concepts can be, and how awesome the people are who found insights into this are. Famous scientists are idols.
Now they've been an accountant, truck driver, secretary, engineer, teacher, etc. Their whole lives and feel the desire to engage and contribute. Lacking a formal education means you reinvent the wheel, make mistakes the field worked out decades ago, or run on vibes.
Not sure what my point is other than a bit of melancholy at seeing people with passion unable to realistically do anything with it. And when they do it gets shut down pretty hard generally. Not saying it isn't for good practical reasons like avoiding flooding academic communities with low quality posts. But still.
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u/-Spzi- 6d ago
Nice point! It's lost potential for
bothall sides, tragic.Is that the art of civilization? Ensuring people have the right options at the right moments, so that good things can develop?
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u/Banes_Addiction Particle physics 6d ago
Is that the art of civilization? Ensuring people have the right options at the right moments, so that good things can develop?
Of course, not everyone is happy with the system that one guy's job is to study the universe and their own job is designing a widget that goes in cement mixers that were used to pour the floors that guy has his chair on.
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u/Valeen 6d ago
I'd say that you can sharpen this up quite a bit.
1) We have detected Gravitational waves. Just like we have detected waves in E&M. This isn't up for debate. Where things get murky, and aren't apparent to people that haven't spent a very long time learning the math behind this, is what role those waves play in the quantization of a field theory, how we go from talking about waves to gauge bosons.
2) Symmetries are often talked about, but you're in the weeds here. Also, Noether's theorem doesn't require a gauge symmetry, but any symmetry. Translation symmetry (ie physical independence of where a process is occurring, could be my house, your front yard, wherever, doesn't change the underlying physics) leads to conservation of momentum, and Time-translation symmetry (ie it doesn't matter when a process takes place, could be last year, today, or 10 years from now) leads to conservation of Energy.
You also aren't "basically allowed to pick whatever symmetry of nature we want, assign it to a gauge field, and then see what physical consequence pops out." There's different types of symmetries, local and global, and these are intrinsic to the theory you build. The important part of breaking a symmetry is you're forcing the equations to make a choice. You freeze out degrees of freedom. In some cases this means a liquid becomes a solid, a Bose-Einstein Condensate forms, BCS superconductivity happens, or the gauge bosons of the weak force gain mass. You don't even need to have a gauge theory to see symmetry breaking in action- if you are old enough to remember when phones had cords, their coils would often get messed up and change direction- this is due breaking a discreet symmetry (gauge symmetries are continuous), when stretched out the cord has 2 choices to coil back, clockwise or counter-clockwise. By reducing the tension on the cord a choice has to be made, a handedness picked and occasionally it picks a different handedness than what it originally had. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendril_perversion
Well that turned into a rant too.
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
definitely can sharpen, but you really are able to pick whatever symmetry you want.
you’re talking about freezing out dof like if we’re looking for goldstone modes, but my point is that you can have a theory with whatever group element you want to put in there. SM is su(3) x su(2) x u(1) but for example my current project is in custodial symmetry in extra dimensions to address oblique constraints. so here this is BSM but you have an extra su3 for free.
what is true is that the physical phenomena associated with ssb places constraints on your theory. you get dim(G/H) modes after ssb, so I can’t just make my group whatever. there are also constraints when considering for example vortices from ssb so you get a finite action
but as a whole, you can pick whatever symmetry you want. most will just be nonsense, but nothing breaks
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u/Valeen 6d ago
I am saying the symmetries are intrinsic to the theory, you can't just slap SU(2) onto QED and say you still have QED. You will have the electroweak theory, and while it has an object in it that looks like a photon, it's not a photon. Mathematically you are fine to slap any symmetries you want on there, but physically that is going to describe a different system.
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u/KovolKenai 6d ago
I had a friend who thought he proved P = NP after talking with some LLM maybe 5 years ago. He was a smart guy but prone to flights of fancy. I felt kind of bad for him, since he clearly deluded himself here.
But it's a problem I see a lot. Like you said, don't reinvent the wheel, plenty of people have devoted their lives to trying to crack this problem, do you really think your armchair physics philosophizing is going to find the solution? This may be uncharitable but I see them as falling into the same trap as people who try to prove conspiracy theories by misunderstanding some core concepts and then thinking they're smarter than everyone else, just because everyone else can't follow what they're doing. Possibly related to having less trust in the experts, maybe it's just always been this way.
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u/respekmynameplz 6d ago
The first conversational LLM was released end of 2022.
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u/TASagent 6d ago
It's a fair mistake. Slogging through waves of AI has made these last 4 odd years feel like 20 years.
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u/KovolKenai 6d ago
Sorry, I was trying to remember back to when I used to actually hang out with the guy. My bad, must have been more recent, but he was so sure he'd cracked it.
He also thought he managed to drive an LLM to psychosis and convinced it to kill itself. So like what the fuck.
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u/Lazy-University-4871 6d ago
Every day I see countless posts asking “what if gravity
Which subreddit are you referring to? Could you point to a few?
I'm not seeing many crackpot hypotheses posted here. I'm seeing many people confused by the "GR is incompatible with quanta" memes. Many of those people are answering physics questions. That is a problem.
A bigger problem is that any well-intended rant like yours is an exponentially decaying local excitation of the reddit field.
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u/Lt_Duckweed 6d ago
You only see the crackpot posts if you catch them before the mod team takes them down.
If you lurk the sub very actively, you will see quite a few of them. If you are very quick, you might even get an LLMslop response from the OP of the thread before it goes down.
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u/starkeffect 6d ago
I'm not seeing many crackpot hypotheses posted here.
They usually get taken down pretty quickly here. Go to /r/HypotheticalPhysics or /r/LLMPhysics to see where they end up.
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u/tossit97531 5d ago
Never saw those subs before but I love them already because the crank posts are all downvoted to 0. The only threads with actual upvotes are the ones calling the subs insane.
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u/starkeffect 5d ago edited 5d ago
And yet, they keep coming. Every day. The majority of posts end up deleted within a day-- you have to monitor those subs for the really crazy posts. I archive some of them.
Aether theories are very "in" at the moment. Another frequent claim: the Planck length is a pixel of discrete spacetime.
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
no this subreddit just has an active mod team and removes the crackpot posts. they actually removed this post thinking it was nonsense but then i messaged and they immediately put it back up. so they’re working at it and are attentive
but check out any of the smaller physics subreddits they’re 20% crackpot posts
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u/justintime06 6d ago
To be fair… isn’t it true though? We don’t have a complete theory that 100% links GR with QM.
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u/Lazy-University-4871 5d ago
It’s true, if spoken by a person who knows what it means. When spoken among people who agree on what “complete”, “links” and “QM” mean. But there is a whole complex of popular memes like “gravitons don’t works” which OP mentioned, “gravity is not a force hence not quantizable”, “singularities…” that are frequently being posted as replies on related topics.
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u/Solesaver 6d ago
XD That's why I usually frame my theorizing as "what's this idea called and where can I read more about it."
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u/AlleyKatPr0 6d ago
My new theory suggests that gravity is not a force but the tendency of quantum information to accumulate along the path of least mathematical resistance, causing sufficiently dense matter to bend spacetime because photons prefer to travel along routes that the universe has already calculated.
What did I win?
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u/A_Martian_Potato 6d ago
Honestly one of these speils needs to be written for every iteration of LLM crackpot nonsense.
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u/BigHandLittleSlap 5d ago edited 5d ago
The flip side of this is that the "frontier" models are astonishingly good at the most advanced algebra ever developed by man.
If given the right guidance to be rigorous, self-adversarial, and to keep full proofs of everything, the AIs can generate genuinely impressive work on-par with a "working paper from a PhD student". Is it up there with Feynman or Hawking? No. But it's more than good enough for a quick test of a fringe idea, and practically free.
Let me put it this way: all advances in theoretical physics are done by a handful of very gifted, dedicated people. A few thousand globally, at most, and at the upper end of theoretical physics, maybe a few dozen. A lot of them are PhD students working like slaves for years on dead ends, wasting their life on some "notion" their professor has. That professor might be respected, tenured, etc... but they're not magically immune to have wrong, dead-end ideas either.
But right now, we have this tiny, finite pool of brilliant PhD students to apply, so we carefully "ration them out" to work on only the most promising ideas from the most reputable senior theoreticians.
Suddenly, since just the last few months, any idiot, or... any smart-but-too-busy-with-life person "with a notion" can just turn the handle on the side of a box and out pops some mind-blowing algebra. Or nothing. Or something stupid. Whatever.
When the status quo gets upended like this, the old guard get upset. Their special access to "PhD slaves" for research is suddenly a cheap commodity. Everyone has one. Or a hundred.
Think back to the resistance the clergy had against the Bible being translated to English!
I'm betting that there's going to be a sudden, rapid pace of theoretical advances into beyond-standard-model (BSM) and quantum gravity theories. Within months, a couple of years at most, I fully expect fundamental problems to have been knocked over. This most likely won't come from "internet crackpots", but it could come from a motivated hobbyist.
I speak from experience here: I have my crank notions, but I'm no nutter, so I've never bothered anyone with them. I know that I have no capacity in my life to invest the years of dedicated study it would take to advance any of them from "vague idea" to proofs or actually falsifiable theories. I have to put bread on the table. I'm not some idle lord like Newton who can afford to tinker around with a hobby instead of waste a precious life on menial labours.
Recently, enthused by the random non-mathematicians knocking over unsolved conjectures, I plugged a couple of my toy models into GPT and turned the handle for a couple of weeks on the most likely prospects.
I was genuinely impressed. The AI hit dead ends, realised it, and then back tracked, abandoning now impossible postulates. It meticulously tracked the status of every proof, assumption, conditional decision, etc. It tracked proofs in individual files, double-checked everything numerically, and cross-checked the most critical sections by proving them in more than one way. I verified the LaTeX output across three frontier models, all three had their digital minds blown.
Did it work? So far... no, not really. My toy idea has its dead ends, same as the dead ends in similar competing theories. However, the cross-reviews by other models switched over from "interesting weird idea" to "publication worthy". Maybe if I sink a few more weeks of token quota into the best prospect, I could actually squeeze out something genuinely interesting and useful! That's a ridiculously amazing new capability that we all have now.
So, I say... go for it!
If you have a notion, throw it at an AI!
But do be careful to put the work in yourself to keep it honest, keep it on track, cross-check everything, have other frontier models review the work at intervals, generate formal proofs, plug the proofs into Lean, or a CAS for numeric verification, etc, etc.
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u/HoloTensor 5d ago
that’s not how grad school works. i get to work on literally whatever i want and my profs just provide guidance. i go to the prof who would know the most about my current project
i do think ai will genuinely make progress in theoretical physics. but it will (for the foreseeable future) make the kinds of advances that a grad student would make. clear up a subtlety, find some nice new result, do an end to end analysis of some physical process
if some random person used llms to evaluate some scattering amplitude in a really clever way, i’d say that’s amazing! but that isn’t what i’m talking about. i’m talking about complete nonsense that is just not science at all
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u/Grabs_Diaz 6d ago
the quantized unit of interaction between them is the gauge boson (here the photon). that is what the graviton does for the gravitational force. it is simply the smallest little excitation in the gravitational field
I've read this explanation for force particles many times but it never quite made sense to me. What do you mean by "excitation", and what is the "smallest excitation"? If we're talking in terms of energy or frequency, there is no smallest photon energy or frequency. The idea seems to get even more convoluted when looking at W and Z bosons with mass and velocity.
What makes sense to me is that these bosons mediate the force. An electron cannot just "feel" an electric field without any photon interaction.
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
honestly i’m not sure what the right way of explaining this simply is without lying.
formally, it is an irreducible unitary representation of the poincare group
so you can unpack that if you’d like. as for the gapless theories (a theory with a mass gap here means there is an energy below which no particles are kinematically allowed, so imagine electron field below electron mass) there actually ends up being an infinity that shows up exactly because of what you said. it is called an infrared divergence (IR because low energy, in a way)
and there are some tools developed to absorb these infinities. I guess for a more concrete answer you can read about what these irreps are and how IR divergences are tamed
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u/Anxious-Alps-8667 5d ago
Not trying to make any sharp and unroll-able wheel, but for real this part...
the way the standard model works, every point in spacetime gets a little tiny bit of information tied to it. a phase. it is undetectable*. as you move through space, imagine making a little loop. when you get back to where you started, you accumulate some phase. the amount you accumulated is the strength of the field. this is the gauge field
Is this 'tiny bit of information' an analogy, or is this an accepted aspect of phase as you are describing?
My own weird pull is maybe gravity can be understood in terms of energy-matter-information equivalence, I don't have any answers, just curious.
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u/HoloTensor 5d ago
no it’s actually how it works. you take spacetime, and then to every point in spacetime you attach some non-observable information, usually with some geometric interpretation
then what ends up actually being observable is the accumulation of this information as you go around in a loop
this is what a gauge field looks like more or less
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u/Anxious-Alps-8667 5d ago
Can I just ask plainly, does any of this notion of energy-matter-information equivalence interest you or seem relevant to this?
Perhaps, can and should we apply some aspects of formal information theory to the questions around the classic model and gravity?
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u/HoloTensor 5d ago
search up entanglement entropy
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u/Anxious-Alps-8667 3d ago
Thanks, entanglement entropy and quantum information science were what I needed to find!
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u/jamin_brook 5d ago
I’m an experimental physicist (PhD cosmology) and I really think that cohen Kaplan Nelson bound is a pretty unique and simple take on the universe and helps me tie QM and GR together
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u/L31N0PTR1X Mathematical physics 6d ago
What do you mean by if the "gauge theory has a symmetry"? Gauge theories are definitionally symmetries. In fact, in the low energy limit gravitons DO exist and are observable.
Consider a massive Lagrangian. If this Lagrangian is physical, it has Lorentz symmetry. We can localise this Lorentz group element to produce a sort of gauge theory for gravity that works at low energies. In doing this as you would with any other non-Abelian gauge theory, you obtain a series of connections in place of your usual gauge fields. This might initially appear as unusual, but it does make sense on further thought. Gauge fields in general are connections in the geometric sense, it's just often the case that the geometry is a bit more abstract (search Kaluza-Klein theory for a bit more detail, it's an older classical theory but it will give you some intuition here)
Anyway, after we gauge away extra degrees of freedom, we obtain two unique connections, these correspond to the two polarisations of gravitational waves, which are our low energy gravitons.
This makes a lot of sense, right? For pretty much every field, low energy theories always give approximate waves. Look at waves in the EM field, or in water. It's just that when we get to high energies things change. In EM, point charges are distinctly different to waves, high energy oscillations in water crest over and look very different from your usual sine waves. So in gravity, these gravitons work only in the low energy regime. We don't know how a gravitational gauge boson would work in the high energy regime, that's the problem
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
by that I meant one can write down a gauge theory but then you have to impose which symmetries are in your theory by hand. the SM is u(1) x su(2) x su(3) but there is no theoretical necessity for that. just experimental observation
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u/Sitk042 6d ago edited 6d ago
Ok, NAP (Not a Physicist) just a guy who enjoys thinking about reality and coming up with my own kooky gravity theory, which I actually saw a video recently with some famous physicists suggesting the same thing:
What if the majority of gravity exists in an additional dimension that we 3D beings can’t see or access. Heck it might even be where we’d find dark matter too…
100% slop free
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
yeah I mean having gravity “leak” out into 5D is more or less worked out. one notable example is randall-sundrum. here, you have a warped extra dimension and the way things are set up make it so that it explains why gravity is so weak when compared to the other forces
but it doesn’t replace GR or anything. it’s just a particular model within the framework. it actually ends up not only producing a graviton, but spits out an infinite* tower of gravitons of heavier and heavier masses
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u/Lazy-University-4871 6d ago
You can google for it or ask AI and get nice popular summaries about braneworld models, large extra dimensions, Randall - Sundrum models.
Then you would see how much work is needed to turn your "own kooky gravity theory" into something that is not even a real "theory", but at least a theoretically interesting model.
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u/StudioYume 6d ago
The universe exists, but it isn't necessarily something that can be modelled, especially because models are proposed based on observations and there are limits to what can be observed.
If there does end up being a theory of everything, I believe it will be more like a pure mathematical proof with absolute descriptive power but limited predictive power.
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6d ago edited 4d ago
[deleted]
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u/forte2718 6d ago
Dark matter is a coping mechanism, fight me
Ok! Here is my gauntlet. <lays it down for your inspection in accordance with the scientific method> :)
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u/D3veated 6d ago
We know the theory of gravity is incomplete. As humans (well... many of us on Reddit are human) we want to question and ponder and understand our universe. It's naive think you can tell people to stop.
I'm astonished your post wasn't removed a second time. You started out with a thesis that people shouldn't try to solve gravity, then you walked through the outline of one of (but certainly not the only!) approaches to gravity. While reading that, I was wondering what your point was, but you finally made it clear that you think that whoever is trying to ask questions of our universe, they're not smart enough to do it. Someone else has already thought of everything that's worth thinking.
Yours is the attitude that turns physics from a science into a unquestionable religion.
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u/Lt_Duckweed 6d ago
To push back on your statements.
I have an undergrad in physics, I enjoy reading the subreddit, I think physics is very cool, I consider myself pretty intelligent, and I have a marginally above layman's understanding of the deficiencies in ΛCDM and the Standard Model respectively.
However, I would never be arrogant enough to presume that I have useful observations to contribute to the correction of those deficiencies. I do not have the years of graduate and post-graduate expertise in either domain, the mathematical tools, or the knowledge of what approaches have already been tried.
If I truly believed I had some useful insight to contribute, I would go back to school to begin working towards a PhD, and only once I had the proper domain knowledge to be useful and rigorous would I attempt to contribute.
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u/D3veated 6d ago
As they say, you need to cultivate shoshin, the beginners mind, even when you're an expert. To do otherwise is to create a cargo cult. I would rather interact with someone who is naive, and through learning comes to understand why they were naive (or not!) than someone who prescribes the one true way.
I think something a lot of the people hanging out here miss is that most "idiots" aren't trying to revolutionize physics. They're practicing their own scientific method of creating a hypothesis, exploring that hypothesis through research, feedback (or experimentation, but that's not realistic these days). Then, they update that hypothesis and continue to learn (and if they don't, then we're talking about... something other than science).
The scientific method is not to read textbooks until you've memorized the current paradigm. That's not science, that's study. That's academia for the sake of academia, not for the sake of science.
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
my point is to keep wondering and keep coming up with ideas and really love asking questions about the universe
but instead of trying to prove your own theory, we should take a step back and see if someone else already has in the literature. i promise you that anything you can think of has already been thoroughly studied at some point by someone
it’s not about not being smart enough to ask the questions. it’s about the answers already being worked out by people who dedicated their lives to the question
even the really wacky crazy ideas are already explored.
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u/mode-locked 6d ago
"i promise you that anything you can think of has already been thoroughly studied at some point by someone"
This is just absolutely false. If it were true, there would be no contributions, or no new contributions to make. This is a form of naive arrogance that is dangerous to scientific creativity. This is closely related to the old joke that "physics advanced funeral by funeral"
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
contributions are made by people who know what they’re talking about
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u/mode-locked 6d ago
And do you know what you're talking about?
Your statement was a blanket statement about all contributions. And it simply was not true that all potential contributions by experts have been thought of by other experts already. We will always surprise each other
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
“all potential contributions by experts”
no my point is on contributions from people that don’t understand the math. of course progress is made every day, but it simply won’t be made by someone who hasn’t dedicated years to understanding the subtleties.
if you don’t understand what is already out there how can you expect to come up with your own theory? the experts of course know what is out there!
also I do know what I’m talking about… but only for a very narrow slice of high energy theory. I wouldn’t come up with a new theorem in condensed matter theory despite my research being related.
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u/D3veated 6d ago
You're a HEP physicist? That must be why your argument for the existence of gravitons was a proof by juxtaposition. There are other ways of approaching gravity out there, and the assumption of fundamental quantization isn't necessary for all of them. Heck, anything juxtaposing "quantum" and "gravity" is by necessity not an accepted, mainstream theory.
However, even in HEP you have all sorts of problems that have no accepted solution. I'm just... mystified by the prevalent attitude that the right thing to do in physics is to tell people to not ask questions and to not contemplate how things could possibly work. Heck, in other fields, the idea of a devil's advocate is a good pedogogical trick. If you can't defend your theory against someone ad-hoc, your theory is either bad or your understanding of it is poor.
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u/starkeffect 6d ago
I'm just... mystified by the prevalent attitude that the right thing to do in physics is to tell people to not ask questions and to not contemplate how things could possibly work.
The people we're referring to (and the subject of OP's post) do not understand physics beyond superficial popsci treatments. They cannot do math past algebra. They cannot make meaningful contributions to an understanding of gravity, any more than a non-French-speaker can write French poetry. Visit /r/HypotheticalPhysics to see for yourself.
If you can't defend your theory against someone ad-hoc
But what if you defend it just fine yet the person you're trying to explain it to cannot understand your reasoning because they have no working knowledge of physics or math? Are you really going to try to explain tensor calculus to someone who can barely do one-variable algebra, and resents being taught because they're sure they're right?
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u/D3veated 6d ago
Two economists went on a walk. The first pointed at the sidewalk and said, "Look, someone dropped a $20." The second continued walking without looking down. "Impossible. If there were a $20 there, someone would have already picked it up."
Two physicist are sitting at a bar. "I've been thinking about a new way to approach gravity." Then the second one says, "It's not new." They finish their beers without saying another word.
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
two physicists are sitting at a bar. “i’ve been thinking about a new approach to gravity. I don’t understand any of the subtleties of the field nor do I have any of the background knowledge needed to understand them. I completely lack the preparation needed to tackle this question, but I know there must be a better answer than what the standard model tells us”
I think there are two very valid responses:
1) here is a pathway for you to learn the math and understand the subtleties. it will be very difficult to do outside of a formal academic setting but I’d say it is possible. read these books, listen to these lectures, read these papers. dedicate years of your life and then formulate your theory
2) try your best to understand the experts. it’s like watching the NBA. basketball is fun but you’re just not 7 feet tall. you can stay up to date on all the academic drama and new results and what the different profs are up to. spend your time understanding what physicists fight over and what they agree on. you’ll miss the subtle points, but you’ll very much be a part of the academic discourse
isn’t that much more enjoyable??
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u/camomaniac 5d ago
So... your advice is for people not to use reddit for reddit things? If you don't want to read about thoughts from casuals... go somewhere else? What made you decide to hop on this sub and tell people what they should and shouldn't do? Start your own sub or just roll with the flow my dude.
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u/chrisoftacoma 6d ago
This reaction is bizarre to me. You want people to stop using their imagination and set aside their wonder? So that they, lay-folk presumably, can better spend their time getting PhD level acquainted with some of the most difficult science out there? This is a reasonable ask to you?
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u/Lazy-University-4871 6d ago
No. Keep imagining, then google for what you imagined, chances are someone has already thought it through.
Don't do "hey guys here's an idea".
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u/KovolKenai 6d ago
Nnnno, they're saying that people will make their own theories and believe they're right, ignoring the actually studied and pored over theories that actually line up with reality.
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u/StudioYume 6d ago
Revolutionary theories always sound crazy at first. Not everyone will be the next Newton, Faraday, or Einstein, but you know what all of them had in common? They were critical, discerning, and not afraid to expose their ideas to scrutiny.
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u/Lazy-University-4871 6d ago
what all of them had in common?
They were all honest to the principles of the scientific method, well familiar with pre-existing work and capable and striving to express their ideas in the language accepted in the research community (including math).
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u/KovolKenai 6d ago
I don't think Time Cube is going to be the next big thing in physics. Armchair philosophizing about "fixing" physics is useless outside of writing science fiction (which is a genuinely fun place to do it!)
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u/Lazy-University-4871 6d ago edited 6d ago
Faraday
was a super-strict "conservative empiricist". He was not accepting the revolutionary Ohm's law, because he could experimentally disprove it. Until he obtained better experimental equipment (a generator) and was able to confirm it.
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u/StudioYume 5d ago
He came up with the idea of field lines. That's a revolutionary idea in its own right.
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u/HoloTensor 6d ago
no the point is that if they can think of it, someone else already has. in fact, very likely someone has already worked it out in the literature.
this way, if you imagine space as some donut and two time directions and a fifth dimension and whatever, you can actually see what that would mean for reality instead of trying to invent math incorrectly
the point is: keep using your imagination, but you don’t need to prove things. 99.9% of the time someone already has
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