This is the announcement that was being hyped up in that aliens or time-travel thread a few days ago.

The announcement is that the scientists who were studying gravitational waves found gravitational waves. This was perhaps a bit overhyped.

To be fair, it's a very big experiment and it's nice that they got it all to work. They also found more gravitational waves than expected.

  • culpritus [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    First, I'm just a sciency dork. I don't have any real expertise myself.

    There's a specific distinction between gravity waves and mass aka plain ole gravity.

    Gravity waves are supposed to be space-time distortions that propagate from what I'll call strong dynamic mass events. This distortion propagates at C, but mass information itself seems to be instantaneous as far as I know. So that's pretty interesting. If the medium of space-time has an info speed limit, then how does mass work on everything everywhere all at once? And if it does work like that, then why do these special events create these distortions. Could they provide a way to examine this assumption of instantaneous-ness? Does a distortion in space-time aka gravity wave potentially represent a violation of this instantaneous-ness?

    Examining these events via special relativity seems to work pretty well, but we still have no quantum gravity understanding. And the only things that actually travel at C (or near C) are massless particles. Entanglement is the only phenomenon that provides a form of instantaneous-ness. So it would seem mass might not be related to particle info (gravitons) because that would mean they would have to move faster than C, right? So is mass just the result of some entanglement originating from the big bang? That'd be pretty freaky.