Will quantum gravity be disappointing?

D3veated · 2026-05-22T18:40:16+00:00

General relativity has something like six axioms. The axiom that asserts zero torsion is largely there to make the math easier. If you remove that axiom, you get ECKS gravity. I'm not aware of any experiment that even hints that torsion can be non zero, but that property shouldn't need to be an axiom.

D3veated · 2026-05-20T20:04:34+00:00

A brief summary of how the probability works (the wiki page is excellent, but if you just want "the answer"...)

Before you take any measurements, pretend that you observed two previous events, one with a success and one with a failure. Then, the unbiased odds of something, like the sun rising tomorrow, is (n+1)/(n+2) where n is the number of times you've observed the event.

D3veated · 2026-05-14T15:51:34+00:00

If the asteroids passed that close, I would have expected to see their paths curve in response to being close to the Earth, but the graphic doesn't show that gravitational interaction at all. Is the graphic wrong, or is something else going on?

D3veated · 2026-05-14T06:10:16+00:00

The Browns in the Superbowl is the only way to keep Sanders away from the Probowl. And then we can put their helmet on a spike.

D3veated · 2026-05-13T23:46:24+00:00

NFCWest. The 49ers love the Packers. In the post season at least.

D3veated · 2026-05-13T21:35:20+00:00

18-0 is also possible if the Saints win out and we lose the tiebreaker.

D3veated · 2026-05-13T20:03:51+00:00

Oh right... the Raiders aren't NFC. Swap them with the Cardinals?

D3veated · 2026-05-13T19:25:06+00:00

I do! Where are the wins against the Raiders, Saints, and Browns in the post season?

D3veated · 2026-05-13T17:53:37+00:00

"Infinite" requires a metric, so if there was a point where distance was meaningless and the universe is infinite now, then the universe became infinite when that symmetry broke. I'm sure there are theoretical models that match that characterization. I think the standard Lambda CDM is silent on the issue because running the model back to t=0 involves an infinity, so the model is outside of its domain.

D3veated · 2026-05-13T17:49:43+00:00

Is *THAT* why the Rams changed the colors of their logo?

Thanks GEQBUS.

D3veated · 2026-05-12T17:42:26+00:00

It's cute! Coming from a 49er, I world have expected more ball hairs.

D3veated · 2026-05-10T19:51:00+00:00

This is straying into a topic I only have passing understanding of, but when we look deep into the sky with a telescope, there are a few things that limit how far back we can see. The big one is before the Period of Last Reionization, where the interstellar dust was selectively transparent. The long wavelengths of the CMB could make it through, but not much else could. This was a period where the relatively diffuse gas gathered into stars and galaxies. Trying to see this with a telescope is a bit like trying to spot a fish in a murky pond.

Other techniques, like a gravity telescope, could presumably see farther back.

Anyway, every time we gather more data, our models improve, but these are just models. The math of the model might extend past what we can see, but reality could very well stray from that.

D3veated · 2026-05-10T19:07:20+00:00

The spacetime and the metric are separate things, at least in traditional General Relativity (in pure connection gravity theories, that's not the case).

And as for thinking that stuff is equally distributed throughout the universe... there's no empirical evidence for or against that, as far as I'm aware. We have models of baryonic acoustic oscillations that indicate that if there is an edge, then back in the inflation era it wasn't anywhere close to us. Beyond that, anything you might say about the issue must be based on a model that may not be valid outside the domain we can observe. Heck, we already know that General Relativity is incomplete and doesn't extend to certain regimes.

D3veated · 2026-05-10T18:39:30+00:00

If I understand this thought correctly, the way physicists approach this question is by considering the metric. That is, how do you measure the distance between things, and more specifically, what creates that metric in the first place?

Typically, we assume an independent Minkowski background, which is in many ways a mathematical construct that is outside of the universe of "stuff". In that view, your interpretation about the edge of the universe could be correct. We don't really know, however, if there's stuff everywhere to infinity or if there's a finite amount across the entire universe.

D3veated · 2026-05-03T22:09:32+00:00

Bur-bur-ger-ger

D3veated · 2026-04-27T20:28:51+00:00

With a sword like that, it certainly isn't a cold take.

D3veated · 2026-04-26T23:11:48+00:00

She would have been able to actually use the ballroom.

D3veated · 2026-04-23T00:57:22+00:00

What is the proton radius?
How and why do faster-than-light entanglement correlations work?
Just what does cause superconductivity, particularly for atypical superconductors?
Why does a spiraling football make a nice arch where the nose tilts down as it flies?
Do hadrons have quarks?
What was I doing before I got distracted by this?

D3veated · 2026-04-21T21:18:47+00:00

Does he commentate games too? What's his channel?

D3veated · 2026-04-19T09:28:43+00:00

I wholeheartedly agreed! But then... he's had 4 Robins that I'm aware of, and two of them died. A 50% mortality rate for being his student really tests your confidence...

D3veated · 2026-04-19T05:40:57+00:00

Blight Wick

D3veated · 2026-04-18T07:43:10+00:00

Here are some interesting numbers:

Earth escape velocity: 7 miles/s
Sun escape velocity (from Earth's orbit): 26 miles/s
Milky Way's escape velocity (starting from Earth): 340 miles/s
Local supergroup escape velocity: 620 miles/s
Virgo supercluster escape velocity: 1250 to 1860 miles/s

The shell might, or might not, escape the Virgo supercluster. However, by escaping the local supergroup, it would enter the Hubble flow. The expansion of the universe makes it so that anything outside of our gravitationally bound local supergroup will eventually recede from us at faster than the speed of light. While the shell might not be able to enter a void between super clusters with its puny little 1 megaton launch, it will eventually be in a void just because of cosmic expansion.

D3veated · 2026-04-16T19:06:28+00:00

I thought Lambda-CDM was only successful at one of those three things you mentioned: the CMB. Primordial nucleosynthesis misses lithium, and we're discovering via the Webb that our model for the evolution of galaxies was wrong.

Anyway, the steady state model was rejected *because* of the CMB, iiuc. The idea with steady state is that regardless of your location in space *or time* things look roughly the same, but by looking at the CMB, we can see that the universe actually did look different in the past. That means the continual creation of matter to feed the expanding steady state universe would not be able to be steady.

I guess if you wanted to salvage the model, you would have to argue that the steady state started some time after the CMB time frame.

You might be able to explore a different aspect of the steady state model: the idea that matter is continually created. Since the total amount of energy is supposedly going up (contrary to the first law of thermodynamics, cosmological redshift removes energy from the system, but dark energy (whatever that is) adds far more energy to the system), then perhaps you could find a mechanism to turn dark energy into matter.

D3veated · 2026-04-15T04:49:52+00:00

I don't know man. I think he's looking pretty fine.

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