I love science. I don't love religion, but I don't hate it either. Mostly I give little thought to religion, aside from when I write about its shortcomings on this blog.
Science appeals to me because I admire its dedication to truth, something that can't said about religion without being, well, untruthful. Yes, science often gets something wrong. However, rather than being upset about this, science views error as an opportunity to learn from the mistake and seek truth in another direction.
Religion, on the other hand, abhors the possibility that what is considered to be true, actually isn't. Blind faith is a virtue for religion, while it is a vice for science. Recognizing that what was viewed as true actually is false will earn you the title of heretic in religion; science will offer you acclaim.
One reason I subscribe to Scientific American is to be able to read about how science is practiced. Even when I have difficulty grasping some of the content in an article, I always enjoy being exposed to the nitty-gritty methods of scientific inquiry, and how scientists view their search for knowledge.
The September 2024 issue has a fascinating article by Nick Huggett and Carlo Rovelli, "Quantum Spacetime." Huggett is a philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist. Here's a PDF file of the article with the online title.
Download Do Space and Time Follow Quantum Rules? These Mind-Bending Experiments Aim to Find Out |
The basic problem being addressed here is fairly easy to understand. It's a big one. What's the foundational nature of reality?
We live in a universe with three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. Space and time appear very different, but the genius of Albert Einstein revealed that they aren't. They are aspects of a single whole, a spacetime continuum. His theory of relativity describes how this works in equations that I'm clueless about on a mathematical level, yet admire on a conceptual level.
Einstein showed that gravity is the result of curved spacetime. The wonderful way this can be expressed is shown in the boldfaced passage below from the above linked Stanford web site.
Einstein eventually identified the property of spacetime which is responsible for gravity as its curvature. Space and time in Einstein's universe are no longer flat (as implicitly assumed by Newton) but can [be] pushed and pulled, stretched and warped by matter. Gravity feels strongest where spacetime is most curved, and it vanishes where spacetime is flat. This is the core of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which is often summed up in words as follows: "matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move".
A standard way to illustrate this idea is to place a bowling ball (representing a massive object such as the sun) onto a stretched rubber sheet (representing spacetime). If a marble is placed onto the rubber sheet, it will roll toward the bowling ball, and may even be put into "orbit" around the bowling ball. This occurs, not because the smaller mass is "attracted" by a force emanating from the larger one, but because it is traveling along a surface which has been deformed by the presence of the larger mass.
In the same way gravitation in Einstein's theory arises not as a force propagating through spacetime, but rather as a feature of spacetime itself. According to Einstein, your weight on earth is due to the fact that your body is traveling through warped spacetime!
This is so cool. It boggles my mind, but I enjoy the feeling of boggling. Yet at least we can picture spacetime in everyday terms such as a stretched rubber sheet. Einstein's spacetime is continuous with no gaps. This puts it at odds with the other great theory of what reality is all about, quantum mechanics.
Quantum systems come in bits of matter and energy. Like the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics is exceedingly well proven. So much so, most physicists believe that in order to reconcile the continuous spacetime picture Einstein gave us with the discrete nature of quantum mechanics, somehow gravity needs to become quantized.
Here's how the Scientific American article starts out:
There is a glaring gap in our knowledge of the physical world: none of our well-established theories describe gravity’s quantum nature. Yet physicists expect that this quantum nature is essential for explaining extreme situations such as the very early universe and the deep interior of black holes. The need to understand it is called the problem of “quantum gravity.”
The established classical concept of gravity is Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This spectacularly successful theory has correctly predicted phenomena from the bending of light and the orbit of Mercury to black holes and gravitational waves. It teaches us that the geometry of space and time—spacetime—is determined by gravity. So when we talk about the quantum behavior of gravity, we’re really talking about the quantum behavior of spacetime.
We don’t currently have an established theory of quantum gravity, but we do have some tentative theories. Among them, loop quantum gravity (which one of us, Rovelli, helped to develop) and string theory are two leading contenders. The former predicts that the fabric of spacetime is woven from a network of tiny loops, whereas the latter posits that particles are fundamentally vibrating strings.
Testing these theories is difficult because we can’t study the early universe or black hole interiors in a laboratory. Physicists have mostly assumed that experiments that could directly tell us something about quantum gravity require technology that is many years away.
This situation might be changing. Recent developments suggest it may be possible to perform laboratory experiments that will reveal something about the quantum behavior of gravity. This potential is extremely exciting, and it has raised real enthusiasm among theoretical and experimental physicists, who are actively trying to develop the means to carry out the investigations. The proposed experiments could test the predictions of quantum gravity theories and provide support for the assumptions they’re based on.
The experiments all involve events happening at low energies, where the predictions of strings, loops, and the like agree, so they aren’t going to tell us which specific theory of quantum gravity is correct. Still, experimental evidence that gravity is actually quantized would be groundbreaking.
We already have plenty of observations about gravity’s effects on the quantum behavior of matter. Albert Einstein’s theory works fine in these situations, from stellar dynamics, to the cosmological formation of galaxy clusters, all the way to laboratory experiments on the effect of Earth’s gravity on quantum systems. But in all these scenarios, gravity itself behaves in a way that is consistent with classical physics; its quantum features are irrelevant. What’s much more difficult is to observe phenomena in which we expect gravity to behave quantum mechanically.
I won't attempt to describe how the authors propose carrying out those observations. Read the entire article via the PDF file to learn this. What I want to emphasize is the end of the article, where Huggett and Rovelli speak about the "momentous" effect if the current foundation of physics were to be overturned by future experiments.
You won't find anything like this in religious writings. There's no way religious leaders would say, "We're anticipating the possibility that God will be found to be a fiction."
There is still a long way to go over the next few years to carry out such trials (and there would be an even longer path toward enacting our own thought experiment). But if they can be successfully accomplished, they will test the low-energy domain on which almost all theories agree.
If researchers find evidence for spacetime in superposition, then they will have the first direct evidence for the basic assumptions of our theories of quantum gravity. We will substantially rule out the possibility that gravity is classical, a significant and previously unexpected step forward. More than that, experimentalists would have reached a new horizon of the physical world, producing a region of spacetime that is observably quantum in a macroscopic laboratory. At last physics will have concretely entered a realm that for now remains a land of hypothesis.
If signs of superposition are not observed, the experiments will instead support speculations that gravity is intrinsically classical, confounding the expectations of much of the physics community and plunging a huge amount of work from the past 40 years into crisis. Such a result would require a significant revision of our understanding of the world and of the connection between quantum theory and gravity.
In either case, the effect would be momentous.
RSSB is old technology to enter the other worlds. Neville Goddard sums up the new techniques in- Out of This World. You can find it on youtube.
Posted by: Jim | September 22, 2024 at 11:01 AM
Glanced at the PDF. Interesting reading, looks like. (Haven't actually read it yet.)
Heh yes, agreed, that's one of the things that sets apart religion from science. The fact that science celebrates the overturning of established theory, while religion froths at the mouth when such happens.
----------
Although there's that old chestnut from Julian Johnson. About that guru --- I forget who, Sawan Singh, was it? --- who'd apparently said to him (Johnson) that, should someone be able to show him regions higher than he'd traversed, then he'd thankfully follow him down that path.
All of which sounds very reasonable. Until one is able to finally un-knot oneself, and remove one's head from up one's ass, and realize that all of it is unmitigated, unsupported flights of fancy, beginning to end.
Quantum theory is esoteric, complex. Involved discussions about how many angels can fit on the head of a needle also can be esoteric and extremely complex (as well as discussions about whether, as in Phelps' Notes, the Lord is differentiated or undifferentiated). But the one is nothing like the other. Astonishing that even in this day and age, the religious don't realize this. Astonishing how, even in this day and age, when this is clearly told to them, the religious still don't realize just why the one is nothing like the other. Just as Trump doesn't realize why he's wrong to conclude that immigrants are rampaging around in Springfield, devouring people's pet cats and dogs. Not to mention others of his ilk in other parts of the world, in the Islamic hellholes, for instance, and in countries like India.
God preserve us from these halfwits running around amok. They're funny, sure; but they do represent a very, very real danger. Same as a certain someone --- who also was hilarious, sure, but at the same time proved to be very, very dangerous --- who'd started on his political career around a hundred years ago now.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | September 22, 2024 at 11:38 AM
Yes, because most people have a deep interest in spacetime and gravity, which is why they join religions.
Another swing and a miss.
Posted by: sant64 | September 23, 2024 at 01:37 PM