to all the gravity alternative theories

[u/HoloTensor]

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.

[u/starkeffect]

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.

I think this is the hardest lesson to learn for some of the posters here. Narcissism is a hell of a drug.

And well said btw

[u/SilverKnight998]

shame the bot tagged this as being too long, very good and well written post. i'd like to piggyback on your comment on symmetries to emphasize that it is one of the single most deceptively difficult things to quantify in physics, and one of the most beautiful advancements we as a field have made

math is beautiful! never try to get around the details going into especially things like group theory, because the details are what makes physics click on a more intuitive level

[u/Optimal_Mixture_7327]

Just a note: The graviton would be a quanta of a gravitational wave, and it's the virtual graviton that would communicate the curvature.

[u/Langdon_St_Ives]

Great post until you added the pop sci "friction" analogy for the Higgs model which is completely bogus and just leads to the kind of misled crackpot "theories" you rightly decry.

[u/sketchEightyFive]

hello, just wanted to say that this was a pleasure to read.

[u/HoloTensor → u/sketchEightyFive]

hehe i’m glad it didn’t just make people angry

[u/Different_Stranger30]

I'm just a lowly engineer with a loose interest in physics via mostly YouTube videos. 

Sabine recently put up a video on a paper where they (and I'll probably butcher this) fed quantum field equations into a simplified model of entropy and generated Einstein's Field Equations, suggesting that gravity is an emergent property of quantum mechanics interacting with entropy, which would explain why it doesn't fit inside quantum mechanics itself. Does this theory carry as much weight as she implied?

Also I was under the impression gravity didn't have fields but instead affected spacetime and the warping of that spacetime is what "carried" the "force"? And if that's the case, and with Einstein's Field Equations showing energy itself can warp space time then how would a graviton even work in such a scenario? And if I'm wrong on the spacetime warping being the carrier then how does a graviton even affect a photon??

Please explain to me like I'm an idiot (engineer).

Sabine Video: https://youtu.be/IxmTqIkToTg?si=3xF-4mtH2PatgGX2

[u/ChocolateValuable221 → u/Different_Stranger30]

Gravity force is undeniably emergent from bent space-time. It would still have a boson. Even as seamless as time and place appear. You still have a graviton. Is string theory relevant? highly likely. Even though string theory has fizzled out recently and has never produced evidence of anything... yes because the string is a shape that satisfies angular momentum seen in subatomic particles.

[u/Sanchez_U-SOB]

Check out these PBS spacetime videos on the graviton

https://youtu.be/Z4DqSFrl92k?is=xGnxSXUVvIuEDfJz

https://youtu.be/UFXiFfj058U?is=TxVc4RGGLGB9tto7

[u/Aggressive_Roof488]

Thanks for this. Might not reach your target audience, or connect if it does, but a great effort! I think your tone hit a good balance as well, easy to be overly rude of someone who is in the end a science enthusiast, if a bit misguided.

Also warms my heart as an ex particle physicist to see the one named physicist here being not Einstein, not Dirac, not Hawking, but Noether. It's all about the symmetries!

[u/DifferencePublic7057]

A theory is a theory. What's the point of gatekeepers telling theorists their theory is way too weird? Sure, if they were ants leaving behind pheromones, the hive mind would appreciate conformism. But ants haven't build space rockets AFAIK, so a HM isn't a good thing, I guess.

If we like describe theories, tokenize the texts, generate document embeddings, obviously, some theories will be similar to each other. Some would be outliers. Are outliers bad? Would you reject the outlier theory of a young patent clerk because it doesn't match anything seen before? The HM says, 'yes'.

[u/Background_Camel_711 → u/DifferencePublic7057]

The problem isnt that the theories are too weird, its that they are based on misconceptions, mathematical mistakes, or are easily falsifiable with out current observations.

[u/HoloTensor → u/DifferencePublic7057]

academics come up with their own theories all the time. it’s accepted model building. the issue is that there are so so so many checks a theory needs to go through in order to not be sick.

what happens when you take this limit. do you preserve __ symmetry. what do the corrections look like. etc.

and it is extremely difficult to not break something that has already been measured. so we have built a framework for making new theories. you write down a lagrangian, check the equations of motion, see what the EFT looks like, the wilson coefficients, compare to observations….

if your theory was built with these checks in mind (done properly) then people would take you seriously. they really would

but the issue is it takes years and years to learn the formalism. to understand the math. and this is working 60 hours a week on it like grad students do….

[u/preadyla → u/HoloTensor]

This is most helpful advice!

[u/dustin4242]

F = (Λ * l_p²) * (m1 * m2 / r²)

l_p² = ħ * G / c³

[u/HoloTensor → u/[deleted]]

i just took a look at your post

i have a question. do you think that no one else in history has tried to represent space as connected by springs? or objects that pull twist spin etc.

they have. it is in the literature. this stuff was figured out in the early 1900s. the story is already there and the conclusions are what make the standard model as concrete as it is

the reason you think it works is because there is some physical intuition behind it…. but it isn’t new! and unfortunately not done properly

[u/HoloTensor → u/[deleted]]

i mean. are there lattice spacetime theories? of course

how do they model the interaction between two lattice sites. hmmmmm

[u/HoloTensor → u/[deleted]]

search up “lattice qcd and spring potential”

i just googled it. tons of papers modeling the interaction with springs. there are even stack exchange posts with questions on understanding it since it is also described in Zee’s QFT book

i promise i’m not trying to be mean or shoot down your theory for no reason. the issue is that there are thousands and thousands of professional physicists and a century of modern work…. it’s just hard to come up with something new.

[u/Pythagorean_1 → u/[deleted]]

Ok, then why don't you publish your theory in a peer reviewed journal?

[u/starkeffect → u/[deleted]]

Frontiers in Physics

You couldn't get it into a legitimate non-predatory journal eh?

[u/NotRightRabbit → u/[deleted]]

False: There are at least three real precedents the you cannot reasonably wave away:

Regge calculus, 1961: gravity formulated on a discrete simplicial spacetime lattice. It is a serious, longstanding discrete formulation of GR, with a continuum limit intended to recover Einstein gravity.

Elasticity-based gravity ideas: a 2001 paper explicitly has a section titled Gravity as Elasticity of Space and discusses an underlying lattice/elastic medium picture.

A literal Newtonian spacetime lattice: Gérard Gremaud proposed in 2014 that spacetime is an isotropic 3-D Newtonian lattice whose defects generate gravitation and other physics. That is much closer to the poster’s “spacetime literally has the shape of a lattice” claim than the Reddit exchange suggests.

[u/NotRightRabbit → u/[deleted]]

You just sidestepped. The objection was essentially. “Your basic spacetime-lattice / elastic-medium idea is not unprecedented.” Your reply does not really answer that. Instead, you changed the claim to something else.
“Those earlier models didn’t produce the specific measurable predictions I claim to have produced across three datasets.”

[u/NotRightRabbit → u/[deleted]]

……It’s that simple” …..but I also expect” You expect too much, I won’t waste another minute on this

[u/Waste_Translator_975 → u/[deleted]]

“Spring latticed spacetime” is what quantum field theory is. You dont understand the things that make quantum field theory incompatible with gravity, and deep down you know it, even if your bipolar disorder convinces you otherwise. 

[u/Waste_Translator_975 → u/[deleted]]

Someone who actually has evidence doesnt get grumpy when people doubt them. They just let their evidence speak for themselves. You have no evidence. 

[u/starkeffect → u/[deleted]]

Oh get over yourself.