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graviton comments on No need for gravity? - Less Wrong
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Comments (16)
Is this consistent with the fact that my father can demonstrate the gravitational attraction between two lead spheres in our basement?
Also, general relativity has consequences that are relevant to GPS satellites.
Anyway, you'd need equations for any of this to be really meaningful. I suspect that, if you tried to model this mathematically, you'd end up with something that basically matches Newtonian gravity.
EDIT: It turns out it doesn't, to the detriment of a theory of this kind.
Which would imply that, on net, two galaxies would tend to attract each other, even if only weakly, because they do shield at least somewhat. I don't think this actually gets anywhere, other than simply pasting something akin to Newtonian gravity on top of an all-pervading repulsive force, such as Einstein's cosmological constant - which is what we already have.
Anyway, if it disagrees with Einstein, it's probably wrong, and if it agrees, then who cares?
Yes. Why would scaling it down more than I did make it disappear?
The only predictive difference I can think of is that with this model there would be regions in the universe where greater dark energy flow would result in a greater gravitational constant.
I would want to be more confident that it was meaningful before taking on a whole other branch of science at a professional level. And if I was already approaching it on that level, I would take it to a physics journal and not a blog.
I think there is some suggestion that this would be more appropriate on a physics blog and not a rationality blog.
The ability to tell apart a crackpot physical theory from a sensible one, at least on this visible level of crackpottery, does need very little specialised knowledge of physics and definitely is a rationalist skill.
So you would like people to post crackpot theories so that we can practice on them? I was trying to help by pointing out that there is a step between "physics journal" and nothing physics related. Perhaps I should have held my tongue and moved on with Mitchell_Porter and shminux 's comments being sufficient.
I wouldn't like people to post crackpot theories here so that we can practice on them. Also, I wouldn't like people to post crackpot theories on a physics blog so that somebody else could practice on them. But I would definitely like people have the freedom to explain, once the crackpot theory is posted, why it is wrong and how can we tell. The explanation can be useful for the author of the crackpot theory who may not be himself an incorrigible crackpot, and I believe we can explain the problem better than a physics blog audience, because typically believing in a crackpot theory isn't mainly a failure of the author's mastery of physics, but rather a problem with his general rationality skills.
In short, I don't say that this post is a net positive, I say it is not off-topic here.