Markus Hanke

Well spotted 😄 Never consciously registered with me. What did register though was the fact that all drive systems appear to be facing rigidly backwards...kind of hard to steer or decelerate that way 😏 Same issue in Star Wars and many other movies as well. The other issue of course being that it is very difficult for screenwriters to even conceive of something that is truly alien in that sense, because we are trapped in our own frame of reference. Most sci-fi creatures are just variations on various animal/plant life, or on mythological archetypes such as ghosts etc. It’s very hard to imagine something that is scientifically feasible (at least in principle), and at the same time entirely alien. PS. As a young kid I used to be captivated by Space:1999 and The Tripods. Nowadays these seem rather old fashioned and poor quality, but back in the day they were great! Star Trek and Star Wars as well, needless to say.

Correct - but with the caveat that the concept of ‘gravitational potential’ can only be meaningfully defined in certain highly symmetric spacetimes, such as Schwarzschild. It is not a generally applicable concept. Indeed. It vanishes locally in those regions, but not globally. Yes, correct. Think back to your math lessons in high school - remember how you drew simple graphs such as y=x^2. No question that the graph is globally curved. But now imagine you were to choose some point (eg x=2), and zoom into the graph there. What happens? The more you zoom in, the flatter it will begin to look. It’s just like that. This takes a while to really get your head around. I’m sorry I won’t try to offer a proper answer here, as typing LaTeX code on an on-screen phone keyboard is just too cumbersome and time consuming. What I will say though is don’t focus on the components, but on what objects you pass to the tensor, and what you get out as a result. Rough outline: Imagine you have two test particles, whose world lines are initially parallel. Now choose a point on one of these world lines - take the unit tangent vector at that point (which is physically just that particle’s 4-velocity). Then, still at that same point, take the perpendicular separation vector that connects it to the other particle’s world line. Now imagine the Riemann tensor as a machine with four slots (the four indices). Input the tangent vector into slots 2 & 4, and the separation vector into slot 3; leave the first slot empty. The output of the machine then is a new vector (because we left one index open) - it tells you how fast the separation between the test particles begins to change, and in what direction (relative acceleration between the test particles). Writing this down in math notation immediately gives you the geodesic deviation equation, bearing in mind that we need to use a covariant, not ordinary, second derivative. So the Riemann tensor is a machine that takes the tangent vector on one world line, and the separation vector between them as input; and produces as a result an acceleration vector that tells you how that separation between particles changes over time (geodesic deviation). This deviation can be a combination of any space and time direction, and can be complicated - you can get the world lines twisting around one another in a helix configuration, and all kinds of fancy stuff like that. This is really most of what there is to it in a GR context - Riemann has other uses as well (eg one can calculate tidal forces from it), but I won’t get into this here. It does in fact reflect all possible degrees of freedom of gravity. The individual components of the tensor represent tidal effects between various combinations of directions, but I really don’t think it’s helpful to try to look at it this way - it won’t help you understand. Better to think of it as a machine with slots that take an input, and produces an output; with the indices of the tensor being those slots. Any tensor can be conceptualised in that way - eg the Ricci tensor takes a future-pointing time-like unit vector into both slots, and produces a real number that is the rate at which a small volume changes when in free fall. In vacuum R(u,v)=0, so in vacuum a small volume in free fall is conserved (but its shape will get distorted, which is described by a different tensor). Inside a matter distribution, neither volume nor shape would be preserved. (Note carefully that this geometric interpretation only holds so long as there is no expansion, shear, or vorticity, which is true for most simple spacetimes) Hopefully this makes any kind of sense to you.

Yes, that’s right. As pointed out earlier in the thread, spacetime is only locally flat. If the accelerometer is too large, it will begin to measure tidal effects.

No, this one is new to me. Thanks for bringing it up. Having skimmed through the link, my first impression is that this formalism is not nearly as elegant and intuitive as the standard one (and full equivalence with GR is yet to be shown). I kind of fail to see the advantage, though the point about substructure is interesting. See studiot’s comments on intrinsic vs extrinsic to begin with. Furthermore, there is not really any force involved in gravity - when you have initially parallel test particles in free fall, and attach an accelerometer to them, it will always read exactly zero, so no forces; nonetheless in the presence of gravity their geodesics will begin to deviate. Good question! This point is a bit subtle, and really the answer should be “both of the above, depending on context”. The physical manifestation of curvature is geodesic deviation - meaning that initially parallel world lines will begin to deviate as they extend into the future. It is thus necessary for world lines to have at least some extension in spacetime before “parallel” and “deviate” even make sense - you can’t speak of parallelism at a single event. Thus curvature has measurable meaning only across some distance. I’m highlighting the word ‘measurable’ because counterintuitively the mathematical object describing curvature (Riemann tensor) nonetheless is a local object, like all tensors. For clarification on this point, refer back to the example about calculus in my previous post. However, there are also scenarios where the effects of gravity are in some sense ‘relative’. Consider a hollow shell of matter, like a planet that has somehow been hollowed out (not very physical of course, but I’m just demonstrating a principle here). Birkhoffs Theorem tells us that spacetime everywhere in the interior cavity is perfectly flat, ie locally Minkowski. There’s no geodesic deviation inside the cavity. Now let’s place a clock into the cavity, and another reference clock very far way on the outside, so both clocks are locally in flat Minkowski spacetime. What happens? Even though both clocks are locally in flat spacetime (no gravity), the one inside the cavity is still gravitationally dilated with respect to the far way one! This is because while both local patches are flat, spacetime in between them is curved - if you were to draw an embedding diagram, you’d get a gravitational well with a ‘Mesa mountain’ at the bottom; and the flat top of that mountain sits at a lower level than the far away clock, thus the time dilation. So in this particular case one could reasonably say that gravitation effects are ‘relative’ between local patches. Or you can put it like this: both regions are Minkowski, but one is more Minkowski than the other The isn’t very intuitive, but mathematically perfectly consistent - if you look at the world lines of the clocks, you’ll find that while they appear parallel in space (they’re simply at rest wrt to one another), they deviate in spacetime. In GR it is crucially important that one fully understands local vs global, or else there’ll be no end to misunderstandings and problems. This point is where most, if not all, apparent ‘paradoxes’ in GR arise. In general, no, it’s not a scalar - it’s a rank-4 tensor field, the Riemann tensor. However, you can choose to look at only certain aspects of curvature, such as how volumes change (rank-2 Ricci tensor), or how areas differ from Euclidean counterparts (rank-0 Ricci scalar), or the average Gaussian curvature of a small region of space (rank-2 Einstein tensor). But to capture all aspects, you need the full rank-4 tensor with 20 independent components. Tensors are not invariant, but covariant - meaning their individual components do vary in just the right ways so that the relationships between the components remain, hence the overall object is the same for all observers. Remember a tensor is all about the relationships between its components.

Do you mean Euclidean geometry by ‘old geometry’? If so, then yes - Euclidean geometry cannot guarantee that the spacetime interval is the same for all observers; physically, this means that all observers experience the same physics, irrespective of their states of relative motion. That’s what we see happening in the real world, so we need any good model to reflect that. Minkowski geometry (and Riemann geometry in GR) do this natively and very elegantly.

There isn’t really any kind of ‘action’ in the mechanistic sense of the word. It’s just that test particles and their world lines are themselves part of spacetime, so they cannot do anything other than follow its underlying geometry. There’s no duality of any kind. See below analogy for clarity. As I’ve mentioned in my last post, there is information, in the form of the metric which determines the relationship between points. So it isn’t a ‘zero set’. This is true even very far from any sources - even spacetime without gravity has geometric structure that is different from that of Euclidean space. This is (eg) why you can’t accelerate to the speed of light - the fundamental reason for this is geometric, so geometry has real measurable consequences. It’s exactly like the calculus you learned at school - the derivative of a function is defined at a single point, yet gives you information about the slope of the entire function. That’s because what it really does is tell you about the relationship between neighbouring points on the graph of the function - how it changes from point to point. If you’re given just the (local) derivative, plus boundary conditions, you can reconstruct the entire function, even though any one single point of the function is just an (x,y) pair. To give an analogy (!!!) - suppose you have two people starting out on different points along the equator, and flying north simultaneously at a constant altitude. When they start out on the equator, let them be - say - 1000miles apart. What happens? The further north they get, the smaller the distance between them becomes. Eventually they’ll meet at the pole. Why? There is no detectable ‘action’ or force between the two planes. Each plane starts off at 90 degree angle from the equator (so their trajectories are initially parallel), and they always fly straight (there’s never any detectable change in direction from their initial trajectory). Yet they approach one another. That’s because they are both confined to the surface of the Earth, which is a sphere; so they must follow its intrinsic geometry. The metric governing this has real, detectable consequences. There is no detectable information about this at any one point on the Earth’s surface. This is because the geometry concerns relationships between points, so what you do is take measurements of path lengths, areas, or angles. For example, you’ll find that the sum of the angles in a triangle on Earth’s surface is no longer exactly 180 degrees - it’s possible to directly measure this deviation. But you can’t do it at a single point, you need to measure across some distance. That’s because the effects of a non-flat metric are accumulative - mathematically, you integrate components of the metric to obtain path lengths. To put it differently, the metric defines an inner product of tangent vectors, so it’s a local object, but with global effects across the manifold. Similar principles are true for curved spacetime as well. You can measure path lengths through spacetime pretty much directly (Shapiro delay, Pound-Rebka, gravitational wave detectors,...) and find that they differ from what you’d expect in a flat geometry. You can also directly measure angular distortions in the geometry, ie gyroscopic precessions, frame dragging etc. Gravitational light deflection is in effect a demonstration of the angle sum in a large triangle being different from 180 degrees close to a massive body. And so on.

I can only second that +1

Yes - but you can see how test particles in free fall (ie only gravity acts on them) move in space as they age into the future. In particular, you can see what happens over time when test particles initially move in parallel. That’s because in a small enough local area, spacetime appears flat, just like the surface of the Earth looks flat if you only look at a small patch of it. Global curvature emerges from the way many of such small local patches are assembled. To put it differently, a single point contains no information; but there’s information in how such points are related to one another. The physics are in the relationships, not the points themselves.

That’s an interesting perspective, I’ve never looked at it quite in that way. Thank you for bringing that in here. Given this, how would you characterise the relationship between QM/EM that governs the interaction between individual H2O molecules, and Navier-Stokes that describes the dynamics of very large ensembles of such molecules (ie flows of liquid water, for example)? The dynamics at play are remarkably different, it seems to me. I don’t quite get this example, since the scale this process (molecular vibrations) happens on is the same both here and far away. They’re just separated in space.

Yes you are right - but I disregarded this (and other effects) here, for clarity and simplicity. I think current models suggest it will be Mercury and Venus only.

That’s because the sun slowly looses mass and angular momentum through radiation and emission of particles (‘solar wind’), so it’s total mass decreases over time, making planetary orbits larger. The effect is really small though.

Yes, exactly. Do note that at this point the total mass of the sun does change, so absorbing these planets will have a slight effect on all the other planets. I’m not sure whether the effect is large enough to really destabilise any other orbits - probably not.

As studiot already said, you only need to know about this tensor if you want to look at spacetime in the interior of an energy distribution, where it functions as the source term. In vacuum it is identically zero. Curvature itself is described by other tensors.

Relationships between events - measurements of space and time differ in the presence of mass-energy, as compared to some far-away reference. The mathematical object that describes these relationships is called the metric.

The orbits of planets depend only on the total mass of the central body. If you change only its radius, all other things remaining equal, the planetary orbits will not be affected. This is a direct consequence of Birkhoff’s Theorem (using a simple Schwarzschild model).

Yes, I agree. I didn’t mean to apply anything different in my post; apologies if it gave that impression. What I attempted to say is what you see depends on how you look - using human eyes, you see only bricks and mortar. Add a microscope, and you see minerals as well, and both are true. But what if you were to only look at it at a much smaller scale? What if you were a virus sitting on that wall? You might see minerals as well (the size of Mount Everest!), but would you be able to infer bricks and mortar? Or the house? A different example: say you have access only to atomic scales. You know all there is to know about the properties of hydrogen and oxygen, and how they combine, and their dynamics. Would you be guaranteed to be able to infer the concept of ‘liquid water’ as we know it on human scales? It’s scale dependence in that sense. In other words, the question is about scale, emergence, and reductionism. Does knowing about minerals necessarily allow you to know about the house? It’s not really obvious, but what you are missing is that our universe empirically is in violation of Bell’s Theorem. That means that local realism cannot hold on quantum scales. You need to let go either of realism, locality, or both. All three of these hold major philosophical challenges. As for soccer ball - it is both local and real, in the scientific sense of these terms. Simultaneously, the elementary constituents making up that ball empirically are not. So what gives? PS. Just to add a bit more clarity as to what I am getting at @studiot: the laws that govern ‘reality’ are not scale-invariant; you can’t use classical mechanics to describe an atom, use Navier-Stokes equation to describe a quark-gluon plasma, or quantum field theory to describe a galaxy. A bit flippant - but between us, I think you know what I mean. So the question is: does knowledge of the laws on any given scale - say eg quantum mechanics - necessarily imply knowledge of all dynamics on larger scales? Alternatively, are all dynamics on this given scale uniquely determined by whatever goes on an smaller scales? How could one formally (dis-)prove this? Can one formally prove that reductionism holds (or not)? This is supremely important. For example, we accept that laws differ as we go to small scales. But at the same time, we quietly assume that solar-system scale laws apply unchanged to all larger scales as well. Now, this may well be the case, but how do we actually know this for certain? Historically, everytime we investigated new scales, we had to adjust our paradigms - so it’s not like there’s even a historical precedent for this assumption.

This sounds reasonable to me - I’m ok with the above. Also, scientists very often use convenient conventions simply because they are what it says on the tin: they are very convenient and useful. ‘Atom’ is much more convenient than ‘quantum mechanical ensemble of bound particle states’, or the even more cryptic quantum field theory version of it. I don’t think you are ‘wrong’, I can see where you are coming from. But I do think you might be reading some of these quotations a little too literally. Scientists often forgo rigour and use sloppy terminology when speaking to lay audiences. What we say and what we mean are sometimes different things! But I think the main issue is what we mean by ‘reality’. And as I’ve tried to show in my previous post, this is not at all a straightforward concept, because it isn’t absolute - it’s relative and contextual, and depends on how you detect it. Quite a bit like space and time in fact!

Whoa! Remind me to visit your house some day, sounds like the place to be... I must admit I am baffled by this - you are a philosopher yourself, so surely you must see the issue with this? When you probe a sample of matter on atomic scales, what are you really going to find? Will you find ‘atoms’? Of course not. What you will find are ensembles of electrons, protons and neutrons, in various configurations, plus an abundance of vacuum. That is all. What we call ‘atom’ is a convenient convention to give a short name to such quantum mechanical ensembles, largely for historical - not scientific - reasons. They are real, but only in a conventional sense; ontologically there is no such thing. No experiment will ever detect the ‘atom-ness’ of an atom, because the only thing there is on that scale are electrons and nuclei. But it gets worse. If we decide to crank up the energy and probe said protons and neutrons, we find that they themselves are also ensembles of more fundamental particles, being quarks and gluons. So on subatomic scales, there’s no such thing as protons and neutrons either, they are convenient conventions too, but don’t exist as independent entities in and of themselves. So what about quarks and electrons? Surely they are ‘real’? When you try and take a closer look at them, they turn out to be pretty slippery bastards - try to confine them into smaller and smaller areas, and they move about more and more wildly. Try to measure their momenta, and suddenly you can’t pin them down any more. Send them through a double slit, and they behave like waves; try to measure their spin vector, and each time you laboriously determine one component, the other two get erased! It’s like trying to nail jelly to the wall. So to our dismay, even the very notion of ‘particle’ turns out to be just a convenient tool. Even such a seemingly innocuous concept as ‘number of particles in a given volume’ turns out to depend on who’s counting them! There’s not really such a thing in reality - there might be something there, but it’s nothing like our intuitive notion of a particle, unless you zoom out far enough so that quantum effects become negligible. So what are we left with? The most basic elements of reality we currently know of - and this is almost certainly not the deepest level - are quantum fields. So we don’t have a universe with 10^120 particles with independent existence - all we have is one spacetime with 37 (depending on how exactly you count) quantum fields. That is all. You don’t have any more independent existence than does that flock of birds, since both are just complicated ensembles of the same 37 quantum fields (according to current knowledge). On those scales you are not different from those birds, and on other scales you are not the same. There’s no contradiction - both are correct. You take what is found on human scales to be absolutely real only because that happens to be the scale your sensory apparatus is able to probe. And that’s my central point - if you probe reality on human scales, then you and me and the birds are ‘real’. If you probe it on molecular scales, then atoms are ‘real’. If you probe it on atomic scales, then ‘subatomic particles’ are real...and at the bottom, what is real are quantum fields, according to current knowledge. Hence, there is no one reality - what is real depends on the scale of the instrument that probes reality. It is scale-dependent. This is called contextuality. You will never find a ‘bird’ if you use the LHC to look - even if you look in the same region of spacetime. And when you look at subatomic constituents, then sometimes you’ll find waves, sometimes various quantum objects, depending on how you set up the probe. Mostly, you’ll find nothing at all. I will for now forgo any mention of counterfactual definiteness and the empirical violation of Bell’s Theorem, which puts further nails into the coffin of ‘reality’. Or what might happen if you look still deeper, beyond quantum fields. Or you could go the other way - what happens if a hypothetical very large organism (~10 billions of light years in size) tries to build a machine to observe my cat? Because the speed of light is so slow on such scales, metric expansion would rip this life form apart long before he could become conscious of the outcome of that measurement. My cat could never become part of his reality. So what is real depends on how you probe! That is why both ‘bird’ and ‘37 quantum fields’ are equally valid realities, but in different contexts and on different scales. Neither one is more ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ than the other, but both are contextual and scale-dependent conventions. They are both real enough and useful, but only in their own contexts. I will leave it at this for now. Personally I think the rabbit hole is much deeper than this still - I happen to think that reality doesn’t just depend on how you look, but also on who’s looking. But I won’t get into this here.

Of course not (and I have only read the last few posts, not the whole thread). My position is that the heliocentric model contains only observables, and is not quantifiable, so this is a trivial case. It is also not a ‘theory’ in the modern sense, but simply a statement of something that is easily and directly observable. Observables like this map directly onto aspects of reality, I think we can all agree on that. The real question is what happens when we have a theory which, in addition to observables, also contains mathematical machinery that allows us to quantify these. This is what we have with all of modern physics. The question is then whether it is just the observables that map into reality, or also the various parts of the mathematical machinery behind it, even if it is not itself observable. Is spacetime real? Are tensors real? Is a wavefunction real? What about symmetry groups? Etc. My position is that if the machinery employed is non-unique, then it almost certainly doesn’t map into reality. For example, I don’t think that curvature tensors directly map into any element of reality (in the context of GR), because there’s other ways to describe gravity. You will never observe a tensor. If an element of a theory is unique, then it is possible that it could map into an aspect of reality, at least in principle. In GR for example, you can do without curvature tensors, but you can’t do without diffeomorphism invariance, being its fundamental symmetry from which most of the physics arise. So I think the symmetries captured by whatever formalism you use might correspond to something real out there - as far as symmetries can be considered ‘real’. As to whether such unique elements necessarily map onto reality, or just potentially - I profess myself agnostic. I don’t know. I’m wondering though - how do you even define ‘reality’ in this context? As you well know, philosophically speaking this is a pretty slippery concept! Thank you, I was looking for this term!

Spot on +1 And there’s another issue that isn’t often spoken about. Consider solid state physics and statistical mechanics - large ensembles of constituents give rise to certain dynamics and laws governing the ensemble. The interesting point is that these laws do not explicitly depend on the precise nature of the constituents. Eg you can describe the dynamics of water without knowing anything about H2O molecules, and if you replaced them with something different that happens to exhibit similar properties, in principle at least you’d get a liquid that would be similar to ordinary water (maybe not the best example, but you get my drift). This is why we could do chemistry before we knew of elementary particles. Reality isn’t just what humans experience, it’s a scale-dependent tree-like structure. So there’s a certain epistemological non-uniqueness in what constitutes the fundamental building blocks of the world, and you can only be sure of their nature if you have the means to probe them directly or indirectly (which opens another can of worms though).

Yes, true indeed. The concept of ‘extremum’ is much more precise. Whether it is the longest or shortest path is simply a matter of which convention one chooses. I’ve seen both used in various books, but personally prefer ‘longest’ since the concept of ‘time dilation’ then takes on a nicely intuitive geometric meaning.

Ok, no problem, no offence taken. But I’m genuinely curious - why do you keep going on about the idea of replacing GR with a model based on a gravitational potential? It has been explained at length, in different threads, why such a thing cannot work; but you seem to keep pursuing it regardless. The point is simply this: you need a certain amount of degrees of freedom to accurately capture all features of gravity - including gravitational radiation and its polarisation states. It can be formally shown (ref Misner/Thorne/Wheeler and others) that no scalar theory can do this, irrespective of its details; also no vector theory can do this. You need at the very least a rank-2 tensor theory, such as GR. That’s because gravitational radiation is quadrupole radiation with two polarisation states at 45 degree angle, and couples to the energy-momentum tensor as source. So nothing less than a rank-2 tensor will ever do (which corresponds to massless spin-2 radiation field). Given this, why not just let the gravitational potential thing go? It won’t work because it can’t work. At best you’d get something that works as an approximation under special conditions, like Newton. GR is much more complete and general. I just feel there’s no value in flogging a dead horse - you could be spending your time in more useful ways, wouldn’t you agree?

They follow paths in space-time, not just space. That’s a crucial difference. When in free fall, they will follow precisely that path which maximises proper time; so they tend to follow the longest possible path through space-time (‘geodesic’), which is also that path for which acceleration vanishes everywhere (hence free fall). This is called the principle of extremal ageing. Writing this mathematically gives an equation the solution to which is precisely the path followed by the falling body. Very simply put, the mathematical description for simple cases like the Earth (but not in more complicated cases!) ultimately depends on just two terms - one for time, and one for the radial coordinate. The former carries an additional factor of c^2, so it is much larger than any spatial effects. In that sense, time is the crucial thing here. Note that this is not necessarily true in more complicated spacetimes - just for some simple cases.

As I already explained in my previous post, there is no such thing as ‘gravitational potential of the universe’; the concept is meaningless. It’s very frustrating when something is being explained at length, and then goes ignored. Besides, gravity is nonlinear, so even in cases where potentials are meaningful, you cannot just add them linearly. And yes, GR reflects Mach’s principle explicitly, since in order to find solutions to the field equation, you must specify both local sources, as well as distant sources as boundary conditions. This has nothing to do with any potentials, it’s about initial and boundary conditions in a differential equation. In fact, the aforementioned asymptotic flatness is an example of this.

It’s more the other way around, in a sense. What we ordinarily experience as gravity in a scenario like being ‘attracted’ to the earth is almost exclusively due to time dilation, which can be considered ‘warping of time’. Curvature of space then produces tidal effects. Ultimately though you can’t neatly separate these.