

The Myth of Gravity - cromulent
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/132

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cousin_it
I don't like how advances in theoretical physics are now being sold directly
to the public. First E8 ("surfer dude stuns physicists"), and now this.

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cromulent
I think that people seem to be turning away from science and the scientific
mindset, and the more that the scientific community engages with the public,
the better.

Who (or what) would you suggest as an intermediary between the public and the
scientists?

I believe that this is exactly what the web is for.

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goodside
"Who (or what) would you suggest as an intermediary between the public and the
scientists?"

It's not a matter of having an intermediary, it's a matter of listening to
scientists who are trying to educate rather than promote their own theories to
a public that doesn't have any hope of understanding them. It's like if you
saw Steve Jobs stand in front of an audience of eight-year-olds and tell them
they should grow up to learn Obj-C instead of Flash.

The public has an absurd fetish for shiny, new science while the theories of a
hundred years ago would keep them scratching their heads for years. Older
science is better not only because it's a necessary foundation for
understanding modern science, but because it's more likely to be true. Somehow
we've turned the reliability of our sources into an embarrassing flaw, and we
get all our information from the dark corners that science isn't sure about
yet.

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cromulent
cousin_it doesn't like the "sold directly". So, I'm asking about how he/she
would like to do it indirectly, or how you would suppress reports of new
theories from reaching the public until they are proven.

Whether you like the role the media play or not (and here it is definitely the
scientific media), it is not a new phenomena. News == news.

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crazydiamond
"but the approach implies that gravity is nothing more than the result of a
system maximising its entropy, or disorder. ...

Smolin, a long term proponent of loop quantum gravity (LQG), believes that
Verlinde’s work is not only compatible with LQG, it could even help to explain
how familiar Newtonian gravity might emerge in this picture. According to LQG,
spacetime isn’t the smooth fabric that Einstein envisioned; rather, if you
zoom down to scales of 10^-33 cm, the fabric turns out to be woven from
quantum threads. The key point for Smolin is that the holographic principle is
also valid in this framework, allowing him to apply a version of Verlinde’s
argument to demonstrate directly for the first time that loop quantum gravity
has a limit that yields Newtonian gravity."

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yxhuvud
Occam's razor is the answer to that. Let him make predictions that the more
simple model doesn't do, and test them.

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ck2
All I want to know is if this brings us closer or further away to an anti-
gravity device.

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Qz
It would seem farther.

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jimfl
Ooooh! My wife (trained as a chemist) gets upset when I equate information
entropy and thermodynamic entropy. I can't wait to antagonize her with this.

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gweinberg
_Newton told us that apples fall towards Earth with an acceleration that
depends on the Earth’s mass, the apple’s mass, and its distance from the
centre of the Earth,_

Fail.

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herdrick
Linkbait title.

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zeynel1
"There isn’t a fundamental gravitational interaction. Is that crazy enough?"

A decade ago a physicist who would say something like this would have been
dubbed a "crackpot" by his colleagues.

