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Gravity = quantum superposition?


Culture Citizen

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Hello. I have perhaps a high-level lay understanding of the Natural World, and a bit of an imagination. I watched a video explaining the conflict between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. At 11:12, this idea came to mind: does superposition indicate or result from gravity at the quantum scale?

 

 

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2 hours ago, Culture Citizen said:

does superposition indicate or result from gravity at the quantum scale?

No.
What he is attempting to explain, at that point, is that anything with mass-energy ( and momentum ) curves space-time, just like the curved grid lines around a ball with mass in the 2 dimensional representation.
Since the electron has very little mass-energy, the curvature is very small and localized, but the electron has a probabilistic nature and cannot be localized. The curvature, then, has to be probabilistic also. IOW, just as the electron has varying probabilities of being in different places, so should its gravity, or space-time curvature.
GR, however is a classical deterministic theory.
The space-time curvature is where the event ( electron ) is in space-time.
QM and GR are based on differing paradigms, and GR, as it stands, cannot handle the indeterminateness of the electron's state ( or position, momentum, energy, or even time ) prior to wave function collapse.
Google SuperString theory or Loop Quantum Gravity.

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Do you sit on a 3-legged stool or a 4-legged stool ?

They are different so in some circumstances they cannot do the same job.

But most of the time the differences don't matter.

Does that make them incompatible or 'in conflict'

The same can be said of gravity and quantum theory.

Which is, at least in part, the difference between continuity and granularity or continuous v discrete systems.

We do not know if, at the smallest distances , reality becomes granular or remains continuous, this is still a subject of scientific investigation and debate.

Like the stools, the differences between continuous gravity and granular quantisation are unimportant at the atomic scale since the electric forces that hold the atom together are many thousands of times larger than gravitational ones.

So the electron keeps 'going round the nucleus' despite any small bumps in the road, just as you keep going on your bicycle, despite small bumps in your road.

 

Does this help ?

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@MigL: I have, as well as many related things over the years, and did and looked around the forum a bit before posting the question. Perhaps my circumstance comes out of the speaker's wording: "Since the electron has mass, according to General Relativity, it MUST curve space-time....but it is in mul-tiple lo-cations...at the same time. The question is, where is the curvature? Is it also in multiple locations at the same time?"

 

@studiot : does the electron move, or does it pulse?

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14 minutes ago, Culture Citizen said:

@studiot : does the electron move, or does it pulse?

You seem to have missed the point of my post.

This was that the electrostatic energies of an electron in an atom are many orders of magnitude greater than the gravitational energies.

So the electrostatic energies (which are quantised) dominate.

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I don't see how you get that from Studiot's comment.

GR assigns a 'curvature to space-time at the exact location of the electron's mass/energy/momentum.
But QM says the electron doesn't have an exact location.

Now do you see the problem ?

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7 hours ago, Culture Citizen said:

@studiot : it seems to say, 'do not bother with quantum gravity'.

The thing about scientists is that they try to (or should try to) include the conditions of applicability in their statements.

I did just this  when I said

On 10/22/2020 at 9:43 AM, studiot said:

since the electric forces that hold the atom together are many thousands of times larger than gravitational ones.

 

A few simpler examples of this are phrases such as

"A light inextensible string"

"A frictionless pulley"

"An incompressible fluid"

"If I pour a kettle of boiling water into the ocean it makes no difference to the temperature of the ocean since the energy added is insignificant compared to the heat content of the ocean"

Edited by studiot
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