joigus

Thanks for understanding the subtleties implied. +1. I surmise @Dhillon1724X wants to become a theoretical physicist some day. I don't want them to waste their efforts in too premature an attempt to "understand it all", to make everything click with just one simple idea. Also, I love physics, and I don't want students to miss on the wonderful journey of discovery that's ahead of them. Unifying all the forces before understanding the beauty of the Lensmaker's equation? Forget about it! Thanks for so judiciously playing the good cop while I was trying to play the bad cop.

You have passion and your whole life is ahead of you. And you strike me as an intelligent person. Don't give up. But let me repeat something I told you on a parallel thread: Real understanding doesn't come from strong ideas. Strong ideas are born out of real understanding. Very common mistake. Learn mechanics, electricity, thermodynamics, gravity, optics, quantum mechanics. Understand why all this gives rise to chemistry, biology, and the almost unending variety of the world. Keep going up the ladder to the great unifying principles: Symmetries, the principle of least action, entropy, etc. As you do this you will lose focus of many details, but you will gain the ability to synthesize. I can do no better than to repeat what I said. And let me repeat words from one of the greatest physicist of the 20th Century that I think have the potential to replenish your courage: "Most such ideas are eventually discarded or shelved. But some persist and may become obsessions. Occassionally an obsession does finally turn out to be something good." -- C. N. Yang talking about an idea that he first had as a student and that he kept coming back to year after year C. N. Yang, Selected Papers 1945-1980 with Commentary, p. 19.

Mind you, \[ \lim_{\textrm{number of corrections}\rightarrow\infty}\textrm{Bad theory}\neq\textrm{Good theory} \] I hope you know enough calculus to get the point. Please refresh the page for LateX display.

\[ \lim_{\textrm{number of corrections}\rightarrow\infty}\textrm{Bad theory}\neq\textrm{Good theory} \]

That's not what "boundary condition" means in physics. Neither is it a "classical geometric boundary". It is about fixing the value of a field subject to a differential equation at the boundary of a given region. You must mean something like a phase transition. There's no phase transition from classical to quantum. Those are not different temperature regimes, and no phase transition that I know of transforms a numerical value into an operator. They are different toolkits altogether. What is this, a Socratic dialogue?

Real understanding doesn't come from strong ideas. Strong ideas are born out of real understanding. Very common mistake. Learn mechanics, electricity, thermodynamics, gravity, optics, quantum mechanics. Understand why all this gives rise to chemistry, biology, and the almost unending variety of the world. Keep going up the ladder to the great unifying principles: Symmetries, the principle of least action, entropy, etc. As you do this you will lose focus of many details, but you will gain the ability to synthesize. Learn your maths: Calculus, complex numbers and functions, complex calculus (really a revelation!), geometry, algebra. You don't have to be Ramanujan, just understand it and know how to use it. As to the main point of OP, I will make comments ASAP, because I do believe I can say something significant after having read all the relevant comments. I'm sorry I got sidetracked by our very enthusiastic but somewhat naive friend.

Don't worry. I've changed my diaper and I'm all ready to think again. What boundary condition? There is no fundamental length scale in electromagnetism. How come a boundary condition for the electrodynamic field produces a fundamental length scale without gravity being involved? Show me that magic. What kind of "collapse" is that if there is no gravity? Electromagnetic collapse? Do you even understand what collapse means? This is just plain silly. I think I've had enough. You don't seem to understand any of the arguments. Bad ideas cannot be fixed by incrementally changing them invoking new magic words.

Yeah, once someone changes our diaper we become much more open-minded. I'm sorry if I've offended you by being sarcastic. But please be aware you're gonna find a lot of that, so take it as a form of training. Many important physicsts have been known to be sarcastic. I'm sure like none of them, but one needs some sharp tool to slash through the nonsense sometimes. I'm reminded of the great Sidney Coleman with "quantum mechanics in your face". It's very difficult to take your idea seriously because it's obvious you don't fully understand the physical ideas involved. You said something to the effect of "I'm not assuming gravity, I'm just assuming the Planck scale". I already told you, or implied, that if we have a Planck scale it's only because we have gravity. If you had classical gravity (Newton), SR, and QM, you would already have a Planck scale. It wouldn't be very consistent theoretically, as Newton's gravity is consistent with Galilean relativity, not with SR and the Lorentz group, but you would have that scale and ponder about what it means. It would be pointing you towards the need for a general theory of relativity. And of course, there is such possibility. If you already had GR and QM, that would automatically define a Planck scale too. And so we are forced to ponder what it means. You see. Universal theories have universal constants. I could devise a problem in Lagrangian mechanics in which an oscillator is somehow or other forced to oscillate only in integer multiples of the Planck action, like a constraint. The whole thing would be completely classical, and yet Plancks constant would be there. There is no QM, but I've forced Planck's constant into the problem. Fundamental constants, universal constants, don't come from a mechanical constraint, they're always telling us something much deeper. You also say in your theory there is no pre-existing space-time, either. But then you talk about a density. Swansont asked you where your density came from, and he asked you for a reason. So let's rephrase: Where does G come from if there is no gravity and where does a density come from if there's no space time?

They don't. Only at very high energies photons scatter other photons in QED. If you introduce gravity, they do interact gravitationally, but very softly. Photons can do very funny things without interacting though. They can form optical skyrmions, and other topological quasiparticles, as has been found recently.

I've been thinking of a giant leg-pulling mechanism to explain confinement of opinions and saturation of patience in this particular thread too: ✅ Clarified the misguidance of foundational principle (circular falacy) ✅ Added comments on basic confusion gravity/non-gravity ✅ Checked it lacks basic understanding of gauge principle (void gauge parlance) ✅ Confirmed the level of understanding fits current post-AI gibberishness ✅ Clarified the difference between knowing something and not having a blooming idea of what is means Oh, thanks for dumbing it down for me. I'll reply in kind: Planck scale implies gravity. It does, it does, it does! 🧠 This is about the sanest thing you've said so far.

"Quantum-scale confinement and energetic saturation" is a wording that strikes me as word salad. And we're not having the discussion again on how the Plack scale itself is a consequence of gravitation.

Agreed. A bunch of photons could. A simple picture of black-hole formation is actually modelled with a number of photons converging towards a point in space with a distribution of momenta that's ingoing and spherically symmetric. At some point I think I understood the OP as implying it was pairs of photons that gave rise to the gravitons though. The argument also surfaced that at the level of spin it also fits: (1+1 = 2 ). Maybe you've dug deeper into that. Anyway, as I said, invoking gravity to explain gravity is so logically flawed it's my head that's spinning.

Both concepts are related. But the CMBR is a bulk, while the surface of last scattering corresponds to the last photons of that CMBR we can see (and therefore the oldest and hottest at the cosmic time we see them) and are about to get lost forever to our sighting.

Exactly.

And I yours. Whenever you have a G you have gravity. Otherwise, it would have been named otherwise. "Collapse" just means gravitational collapse. When you introduce G and c, it signals GR, when you further have h-bar your dimensional analysis signals quantisation of the horizon areas. I think it's safe to assume we still don't totally understand why the combination of the three leads us to an almost unfathomably-small distance (and therefore area, and volume), an almost unfathomably small time, and a chunk of energy that's approximately the relativistic energy of an amoeba. I have a feeling that might be significantly related to some amount of minimal information that does something. I'm not sure of what that is or does.

The Planck threshold is defined by G, besides c and h bar. Please, do study elementary physics.

I don't think it's arrogant. You want to explain gravity (the quantum version, that is; gravitons). In order to do that you need photons to "collapse". I'm assuming you mean "gravitational collapse". If you mean quantum mechanical collapse, say so. But then quantum mechanical so-called "collapse" is not well understood and/or presently disfavoured as an interpretation of quantum mechanics. If you mean "collapse" in other sense that's completely new, the new ambiguous concept deserves an explanation/introduction. Therefore, the idea is ill-conceived because you're appealing to gravity to explain gravity. Your basic assumption rests on a monumental begging-the-question fallacy, it seems to me. If not, please clarify. When the idea is ill-conceived from the start, you don't need to look any deeper. Other times you do. Some of the greatest physicists of the 20th century were known to have dismissed silly ideas very quickly. Heisenberg himself generated some of the craziest, silliest ones after WWII. It seems he had 'lost it' by then. Other members are giving you more specific criticism. I suggest you examine that.

Yes, I think some ambiguity between CMBR and the surface of last scattering is slipping in here, probably. With gravitational waves we can even see further out, because everything is transparent to those. So one thing is the background of whatever species are out there, and a different thing is the farthest out we can se those things...

Exactly. This is a pattern. At least at the point we are now in the development of language-based AI. It will almost never say: "Your question is flawed". Many questions and instructions one can think of are flawed. "Move five meters north of the North Pole " is flawed. IMO, gravity (collapse is a mechanism of gravity) explaining gravity (gravitons are the source of gravity) through photons must be flawed. It must be. I don't have to think about the details.

Metaphors won't get you where you want to go. Do you realise you're trying to use gravity to explain quantum gravity via photons? That's what your LLM of choice is suggesting you to do. Doesn't that sound ill-conceived? Remember the most useful tool for a theoretical physicist is actually the wastepaper basket.

Oh, I'm absolutely convinced it's got the potential to be for us what the asteroid was for the dinosaurs. Some furry scuttling things will take over. It's time to keep a low profile perhaps, find a cozy niche of some kind.

A message from God? You've been quite involved in religious topics lately. Think about it. To positive effect in the eyes of the Lord no doubt. 😉 Congratulations on your kid's graduation, btw. A proud day for any father.

Well... Yes and no.

But my point didn't hit the target then. Gluons don't have a mass of their own. They're fundamentally massless. They acquire mass because they do a dance of three colours (and their anti-colours) that we call chromodynamics. They exchange other gluons with each other. In doing so, they "dress" themselves with self-energy, like electrons do in QED. Photons don't do that. Photons do not attract or repel each other. They go past each other like there were nothing there. Gluons do wha they do because they are sources of chromodynamic field, besides being messengers. Photons are pure messengers, without sourcing any field. When a gluon "sees" another gluon, it says "huh, there's another coloured thing out there" and spits a further gluon. The other gluon follows suit. A photon simply does not "see" another photon. That's why gluons get dressed with (dynamical) mass even though they do not have mass at all. I know it's a lot to take. You have to study some quantum field theory first. Before that, you must study quantum mechanics, to see where the "quantum" comes from. In order to do that, you must study "mechanics", to see... And so on. My advice is: Trust in the time-honoured system of studying from the ground up, and don't put too much stock in what AI tells you. It's sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. And in order to tell one from the other you need a magic word: criterion. You have to develop criterion. I know no better way than what everybody else has done from time immemorial.

Indeed.