Tom_McCabe comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 August 2007 10:10PM

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Comment author: Tom_McCabe 28 August 2007 02:34:54AM 1 point [-]

"As a result, the theory wasn't scrapped;"

By "the theory" you mean general relativity, which is one of the most well-confirmed theories in all of physics. You can't just come up with a slightly modified version of GR to accommodate weird observations; the Einstein field equation is a unique solution because of all the demands placed on any reasonable theory of gravity. If you assume:

- Spacetime is flat in the absence of matter; - Spacetime curvature is linear with respect to the density of matter; - The standard principles of mathematics (eg, two matrices with different dimensions cannot be equal); - The laws of physics are invariant under coordinate transformations (no preferred coordinate system); and - Spacetime does not have an a priori curvature not affected by matter;

you are forced to use general relativity.