And finally, the Michelson-Morely experiment showed that the "aether" was always stationary relative to Earth, even though the Earth changed direction every six months as it moved about in its orbit! Shortly thereafter, the inconsistencies were resolved with Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, and everyone realized that aether was imaginary.
I actually think this is a misleading characterization. Those inconsistencies with resolved by positing that physical bodies contract as they move through the aether. Lorentz even gave us the math to show us how this worked. Then Einstein posited a theory empirically equivalent to Lorentz's. People liked Einstein's theory more for various reasons (good reasons, I think) but aether has never been ruled out in the way, say, phlogiston has been ruled out.
Theories of physics have a known tendency towards elegance and simplicity, and nothing we have come up with in the past forty years is either simple or elegant, let alone both.
I don't think the fact that all our false theories have been elegant and simple could possibly count as evidence that reality is, in fact, elegant and simple. And certainly those concerns aren't reasons to reject an approach that has been mind-blowingly accurate in it's predictions.
Of the explanations that have been proposed, string theory is currently the most popular. The idea that a theory of physics can have "popularity" should, in and of itself, be a warning sign.
Is it really? That is depressing. Though I don't at all have any problem with theories being popular or unpopular so long as the empirically invalid theories are always really unpopular. Why would there be something wrong with this?
Gravitons have, of course, never been detected.
Try jumping off the earth. :-)
The classical theory of gravity that we know works well, General Relativity, makes no mention whatsoever of gravitons, and describes gravity in terms of the curvature of space-time.
Sure if you don't mind having two totally different and wildly incompatible theories to describe reality.
While I think string theory is a mess too I don't think I see evidence here that all quantum gravity approaches are flawed.
People liked Einstein's theory more for various reasons (good reasons, I think)
As far as I can tell, people like SR because Einstein produced GR. That is not a terrible reason, but it seems to me that they rewrote history to exaggerate the differences, even though contemporaries could barely tell the difference and tended to like them all or dislike them all, and more the latter.
I was very surprised when the article h-H found yesterday spent so much time on Minkowski.
ETA: what I meant was that people praise SR because the same guy produced GR (ad homin...
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Collapse Postulates
In the olden days of physics, circa 1900, many prominent physicists believed in a substance known as aether. The principle was simple: Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism had shown that light was a wave, and light followed many of the same equations as sound waves and water waves. However, every other kind of wave- sound waves, water waves, waves in springs- needs some sort of medium for its transmission. A "wave" is not really a physical object; it is just a disturbance of some other substance. For instance, if you throw a rock into a pond, you cannot pluck the waves out of the pond and take them home with you in your backpack, because the "waves" are just peaks and troughs in the puddle of water (the medium). Hence, there should be some sort of medium for light waves, and the physicists named this medium "aether".
However, difficulties soon developed. If you have a jar, you can pump the air out of the jar, and then the jar will no longer transmit sound, demonstrating that the wave medium (the air) has been removed. But, there was no way to remove the aether from a jar; no matter what the experimentalists did, you could still shine light through it. There was, in fact, no way of detecting, altering, or experimenting with aether at all. Physicists knew that aether must be unlike all other matter, because it could apparently pass through closed containers made of any substance. And finally, the Michelson-Morely experiment showed that the "aether" was always stationary relative to Earth, even though the Earth changed direction every six months as it moved about in its orbit! Shortly thereafter, the inconsistencies were resolved with Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, and everyone realized that aether was imaginary.
Shortly thereafter, during the 20th century, physicists discovered two new forces of nature: the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. These two forces, as well as electromagnetism, could be described very well on the quantum level: they were created by the influence of mediator particles called (respectively) gluons, W and Z bosons, and photons, and these particles obeyed the laws of quantum mechanics just like electrons and mesons did. The description of these three forces, as well as the particles they act upon, has been neatly unified in a theory of physics known as the Standard Model, which has been our best known description of the universe for thirty years now.
However, gravity is not a part of this model. Making an analogy to the other forces, physicists have proposed a mediator particle known as the "graviton". The graviton is thought to be similar to the photon, the gluon, and the W and Z bosons, except that it is massless and has spin 2. I posit that the "graviton" is essentially the same theory as the "aether": a misguided attempt to explain something by reference to similar-seeming things that were explained in the same way. Consider the following facts:
And, with reference to the graviton itself:
So, what's really going on here? I don't know. I'm not Albert Einstein. But I suspect it will take someone like him- someone brilliant, very good at physics, yet largely outside the academic system- to resolve this mess, and tell us what's really happening.