Markus Hanke

I know, and I’m not at all blaming the mods here - I think you’re all doing a fantastic job :) It’s just a sign of the times I guess. Sure I will, I’ve no intention of disappearing, it’s just that I find it frustrating that everyone is suddenly the new Einstein, just because whatever LLM they’re using is designed to not outright tell them that their ideas are nonsensical. Science cranks have always been around, but since LLMs came along the issue has taken on a different quality - it often looks like they know what they are talking about, while in fact they don’t understand much of the subject matter, because they’ve never taken the time to study it in-depth. It’s just harder and more frustrating to debunk, because these LLMs are good at talking people into having the perception that they’re onto something, with superficially plausible-looking maths and all, even if they’re not. At least in the old days, the maths weren’t quite as easy to come by, you needed to actually make a real effort to develop it - nowadays, Lagrangians and tensor equations are a dime a dozen, even if they’re meaningless.

Unfortunately neither of these suggestions work for me - I’ve tried on Safari, Opera, Chrome and Firefox, scrolled and reloaded, but the partial quote button never appears. I haven’t actively posted here in a while (the flood of AI-generated posts/answers we’ve been seeing have spoiled the fun for me), but last time I did, this still worked fine :/

Does anyone have problems with the quote function? I can quote an entire post using the button underneath, but when I select just a snippet out of the post, I no longer get the option of just quoting that snippet…?

Suppose there’s a region filled with some form of energy-momentum distribution, perhaps a radiation field, not necessarily assumed to be uniform, plus some extended body with given mass located at a given point within that region. Suppose further a test particle enters this region, at some given point and instant, with some given initial velocity vector. Assume further that the test particle moves under the influence of gravity only. Can you show us exactly how you calculate the trajectory of this test particle? Does it hit the body, or not? Remember you cannot use any concept of coordinates, you don’t have a field equation, you don’t have a metric, you don’t have a concept of geodesics, nor do you have access to tensors or any other type of covariant object. I’m interested to see how you encode the gravitational sources, and how you find the trajectory of the particle, as test whether or not it hits the solid body.

PS. One more thing to consider is that for an outside stationary observer lowering a rope, its loose end would never appear to reach the horizon, even if he lets go and allows it to free-fall. The loose end would just appear to move downwards more and more slowly, while getting dimmer and dimmer, until it eventually fades out. Actually hitting the horizon would take infinitely long on his own clock. For a clock moving downwards alongside the rope, on the other hand, the (freely falling) rope would cross the horizon in finite time. So nothing about this seemingly simple scenario is quite straightforward.

The crossing of the horizon would happen in a tiny fraction of a second, orders of magnitude shorter than even the electrochemical signals in your nerves could propagate. So no, you wouldn’t notice anything special. Below the horizon there are no stationary frames, so if you lower a rope through it, it would simply break. In practice it would in fact break quite a bit before it even reaches the horizon, since at the horizon itself only massless particles could remain (at least in principle) radially stationary under the right conditions, though this would not be an equilibrium. So no, you can’t pull it back out. What you pull back towards you will be the broken, shortened end that hadn’t crossed the horizon yet. Actually, your head and legs won’t share a common notion of simultaneity in this situation, so it’s rather more complicated than you think. What’s more, for your head the horizon is below, whereas for your legs the horizon is in the past.

You’re right, the two are not necessarily the same - you can eg have “false vacuums”. So long as you assume that the laws of nature also apply to a “perfect void” of the type you describe, then yes, the void must have these properties.

Of the top of my head, so probably not an exhaustive list, and assuming you mean actual physical space: Topology, ie properties such as dimensionality, connectedness, orientability etc Geometry. Pick any set of points in your space, and there will be well-defined notions of distances, angles, volumes etc. IOW, a metric. Note that the absence of gravitational sources does not necessarily imply that this geometry is trivial. Permittivity and permeability, ie an ability to support EM fields, as well as a particular value of c. Yes. In an empty universe all quantum fields are in their ground (vacuum) state, and that state may be associated with non-zero vacuum energy. Could one conceive of a universe that does not contain any quantum fields? I don’t know. Possibly.

They could show themselves.

I think euthanising a living being for no good reason other than that is “unwanted” is ethically problematic. If you can’t or don’t want to keep your pet any longer, there are more appropriate options available. Also, keeping animals locked up in zoos just so we can gawk at them, is likewise ethically questionable.

Thanks for the recommendation! I haven’t heard of this story, but I do like Clarke in general, so I’ll try to find it somehow :)

Yes, and I still do. Well, what is “it” that you think is “going” someplace? I don’t know, it’s not something I’ve thought about much (and I haven’t been following developments in AI too closely) - but this is a good question. In my tradition, and at this point, it plays no role at all, and probably never will; but it may be different in other religions.

I’m not yet that old, but yes, I’ve found my way in life. That didn’t happen over night though, and took some doing.

It’s generally unwise to disclose too much personal information on social media, so I can’t comment on these.

Yes, I live in a small forest monastery together with some other monastics.

Because I’m an ordained monastic, and in our contemplative tradition we (the individual monks and nuns) live entirely without owning or handling money. Thus, accessing things that aren’t free is complicated for me.

I have not been following developments in this area, so I’m wondering, what AI’s that are specifically designed for symbolic maths (other than Wolfram Alpha) are freely available (ie no payments) out there?

This is not a valid tensor equation.

Because it’s pretty much standard textbook material, and thus already well known. There’s simply not a lot to discuss here.

You can’t start with “photons” and “collapse” processes at all, since these are meaningless concepts in the absence of an already well defined spacetime. As I said, you’d need to start with something that does not itself require any notions of space or time, so particles or any kind of “process” are out of the question.

“Lightlike”, “frequency”, and “pulse” are likewise concepts that are meaningless unless you already have a notion of spacetime. The problem is that you’re using concepts that intrinsically require space and/or time to be defined, and then claim that they give rise to an emergent spacetime, which of course doesn’t work. What you need to do is start with some system that is not itself reliant on notions of space or time, and then use its dynamics to show how classical causal structure and geometry emerge from this in the appropriate limit. Also, your answer reads as if it’s pretty much 100% AI-generated.

This doesn’t make sense to me. Concepts such as particles, spin, excitations, energy etc all already presuppose the existence of spacetime; you can’t meaningfully have any of those things without some notion of spacetime. Therefore, spacetime somehow emerging from some dynamics involving photons etc doesn’t make much physical sense.

The forum rules expressly forbid the hijacking of threads located in the mainstream sections with personal theories. Please keep it to “Speculations”.

Sure, there’s quite a large number of alternative theories of gravity that have been and still are being explored; it’s an active research topic. Have a look here for example: https://emis.de/journals/LRG/Articles/lrr-2013-9/articlese2.html Note that that is by no means an exhaustive list.

To make a long story really short - GR is a purely classical theory (by design), whereas the HUP concerns observables of quantum systems. Thus the HUP does not apply to GR, or to any other classical theory, for that matter.