A veteran science writer interviews four physicists, including Claudia de Rham:
If gravity were any other force of nature, we could hope to probe it more deeply by engineering experiments capable of reaching ever-greater energies and smaller distances. But gravity is no ordinary force. Try to push it into unveiling its secrets past a certain point, and the experimental apparatus itself will collapse into a black hole.
Natalie Wolchover, “Why Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces” at Quanta
Your experiment to get to the bottom of gravity collapses into a black hole? Well, that’s just gravity’s way of declining an interview. Suck it up. 😉
We know gravity exists as a fundamental law of physics, but almost nothing else. People can’t even agree on pushing or pulling. Perhaps one of the secrets lies in the probability that gravity pushes and pulls. Rather than a singular force, might I suggest something along the lines of gravitational balance.
Actually, gravity is EXACTLY LIKE the other forces.
https://energywavetheory.com/forces/gravity/
@BobRyan: Interesting thought. The other forces have north vs south, positive vs negative. Magnetic monopoles are contrived, but gravitational monopoles seem to be universal. Maybe we should ask whether gravitational monopoles are also a contrivance caused by looking from the wrong perspective.
I liked this following comment from the article since it, mathematically, gives us a very good picture of exactly why Gravity simply refuses to ever play ball with the other three fundamental forces:
Likewise, Professor Jeremy Bernstein states the situation as such, “there remains an irremediable difficulty. Every order reveals new types of infinities, and no finite number of renormalizations renders all the terms in the series finite.”
General relativity simply refuses to be mathematically unified with quantum mechanics in any acceptable way. As the following article states, “Even after a sustained effort lasting more than half a century, no renormalized quantum field theory of gravity has ever been produced. Renormalization means a theory that’s free of infinities at zero distance or infinite energy because 2 point particles can interact with each other at zero distance. A non renormalizable theory has no predictive value because it contains an infinite number of singular coefficients.”
As to, “Renormalization means a theory that’s free of infinities at zero distance or infinite energy because 2 point particles can interact with each other at zero distance”, he is apparently referring to the zero/infinity conflict that arises between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
This zero/infinity conflict between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics has some fairly disturbing theoretical implications. Specifically, when theorists try to combine the two theories, then the resulting theory predicts that spacetime, atoms, and even the universe itself should all be literally blown apart. Here are a few references that get this point across.
And yet, despite both theories contradicting each other to the point of literally blowing the universe apart, quantum mechanics and general relativity are both tested to extreme levels of precision, (in fact, both general relativity and quantum mechanics are consider to be our most successful theories ever in the history of science),
And since quantum mechanics and general relativity are both tested to such an extreme level of precision, (and we can thus have a very high level of confidence that both theories are, in fact, true mathematical descriptions of reality), and since Godel’s incompleteness theorem itself requires something to be ‘outside the circle’ of mathematics,,,,
,,, then it is fairly safe to assume that there must be something very powerful that must be holding the universe together in order to keep it from blowing itself apart. ,,,
For the Christian this theoretical finding from our very best theories in science, (i.e. that something very powerful must be ‘outside the universe’ that is holding this universe together), should not be all that surprising to find out. Christianity, a couple of millennium before the zero/infinity conflict between the two theories was even known about, predicted that Christ is before all things, and in him all things hold together,,,
Of supplemental note,
Dr. William Dembski in this following comment, although he was not directly addressing the Zero/Infinity conflict between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, offers this insight into what the ‘unification’ of infinite God and finite man might look like mathematically:
Moreover, if we rightly let the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into the picture of modern physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders of modern science),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion (trillion) Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”
Verse:
Bornagain77 @ 4
You mean something that is “omnipotent” and “omnipresent”?
Or maybe it’s just a feature of “aether”
https://energywavetheory.com/explanations/what-is-dark-energy/
Awstar, of related interest to so called ‘Dark Energy’ and just how embarrassing it is for atheistic astrophysicists,,,
In the following video(s),
,,, at the 3:45 minute mark of the first video, Dr Hugh Ross cites the following paper by three atheistic astrophysicists, “Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant”, A paper in which they state, “Arranging the universe as we think it is arranged would have required a miracle.,,,” “The question then is whether the origin of the universe can be a naturally occurring fluctuation, or must it be due to an external agent which starts the system out in a specific low entropy state?” and “A unknown agent [external to time and space] intervened [in cosmic history] for reasons of its own.,,,”
Since, being atheists, they did not like the implications of an “unknown agent [external to time and space] intervened [in cosmic history] for reasons of its own.,,,”, they ended up denying the existence of a “true cosmological constant”, They stated, “”The only reasonable conclusion is that we don’t live in a universe with a true cosmological constant”.
But here are the 9 lines of evidence that Dr. Ross mentioned which came out shortly after the preceding paper was listed as a preprint on the Los Alamos’s website. Evidences which made Dyson, Kleban and Susskind ultimate pull their paper from consideration since the evidence became overwhelming that we do indeed live in a universe with a ‘true cosmological constant’,,,
And here are the verses from the Bible which Dr. Ross listed, which were written well over 2000 years before the discovery of the finely tuned expansion of the universe, that speak of God ‘Stretching out the Heavens’;
And, being a Christian, here is my favorite verse out of those group of verses. Job 9:8 in the Old Testament
The reason that is my favorite verse should be fairly obvious,
BA @ 7
Why are so many scientists “science deniers”?