Comment on The Graviton as Aether

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:28:56 GMT

It wasn't ruled out in 1905, but it was as soon as quantum mechanics was invented. We really do know how light works nowadays, and it's very, very definitely not disturbances in some sort of material substance.

Wait, a theory was falsified by the invention of another theory?

Why not? You know that all those "false" theories were accurate up to the seventh or eighth decimal place, right?

Why put false in quotes? And, well, thats some shady induction. So you had a simple theory that explained some class of phenomena. Now there is some other phenomena that your theory fails to explain, why should simplicity be conserved here?

Because coupling theories about how the universe works to political factions is a HUGE impediment to discovering the truth. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/.

Well yes, people deciding which approach to work on for political reasons is bad. But the existence of competing approaches with varying degrees of popularity does not entail that. Indeed, if people are deciding which approaches to work on for political reasons only having one approach would be a lot more troubling.

If you don't understand the difference between observing that gravity exists, and observing that there are particles which obey the same laws of quantum mechanics as photons and electrons, which are massless and have spin 2, and are responsible for gravity, you should go back and read some of the earlier stuff on this blog.

The smiley face was supposed to indicate that I was joking.

The whole point is that saying "suppose gravity is transmitted by carrier particles called gravitons" starts off by completely ignoring all of GR, and then tries to patch it up afterwards (with little if any success). Newer theories should supersede older theories, not ignore them.

This does sound like a good heuristic to work with.

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