= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jack comments on No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (104)
How do you know when you've "hit the bottom" of a stack of explanations?
When I first learned about curved space and spacetime, I took some of the standard metaphors too literally. I remember speculating that space was a trampoline, but extending in three dimensions rather than two, infinitely thin in the fourth dimension, accelerating (forever!) in the fifth dimension, and of course not actually made of anything. (The acceleration was necessary to make the pieces of matter sitting on the trampoline stretch it.)
Years later I ran across the writings of a crank physicist (edit: I think I found him) whose big idea was that everything is constantly getting bigger (or maybe smaller), and that this explained gravity and maybe some of the other forces too.
Now I see both of these as taking a metaphor too literally because it seems to provide a mechanism. John Baez's Crackpot Index provides
(This artice by Ronald Merrill, "Sufficient Reason and Causality", is related, though it's been a long time since I've read it.)
Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has also proposed the "everything is constantly getting bigger" theory of gravity.
So I suppose asking how a crank physics theory is supposed to work is like asking Lewis Carroll for proof of concept but... what exactly is the the appeal of this? I don't even see the surface plausibility.
I liked Ali's review best. She wrote,
You jump into the air -> Earth expands -> voila, now you're touching the Earth again.
Bwahahahaha. Alright. I see it. Thanks. :-)
But what does this theory say about orbits? or escape velocity?
"Shut up"
I think a better question would be, what does this theory say about mass? As opposed to volume and distance? How can an object be equidistant between two other equally-sized objects and be attracted to one of them more than the other?
It fails even as a crank theory.
I too have stumbled on "The Final Theory", and was wondering what it was all about - though not enough to actually spend money on the book. Thanks for digging this up!