Re: The Traditional Superficial Explanation of Relativity

PD wrote on Fri, 04 Apr 2008 06:54:59 -0700:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=668#comment-36092

I copy and paste:

{BLOCKQUOTE
Einstein and his successors have regarded the effects of a
gravitational field as producing a change in the geometry of space and
time. At one time it was even hoped that the rest of physics could be
brought into a geometric formulation, but this hope has met with
disappointment, and the geometric interpretation of the theory of
gravitation has dwindled to a mere analogy, which lingers in our
language in terms like "metric," "affine connection," and "curvature,"
but is not otherwise very useful. The important thing is to be able to
make predictions about images on the astronomers' photographic plates,
frequencies of spectral lines, and so on, and it simply doesn't matter
whether we ascribe these predictions to the physical effect of
gravitational fields on the motion of planets and photons or to a
curvature of space and time. (The reader should be warned that these
views are heterodox and would meet with objections from many general
relativists.)

}

--http://canonicalscience.org/en/miscellaneouszone/guidelines.txt

It is also heterodox among a lot of particle physicists as well.

Some list, statistics confirming your statement?

These people look at Feynman diagrams as more than
just mnemonics for writing down terms in a perturbative expansion of a
scattering matrix. Interestingly, Feynman would have been the first to
disagree. He was fond of pointing out that different approaches to
solving the same problem often have completely different pictures of the
underlying reality -- and it's completely impossible to determine which
one of them is "more right", because you can do the same level of
computation with any of them.

Well we may speculate about Feynman thinking on his own diagrams or we
can just quote Feynman thoughts about the geometrical picture of gravity:

{BLOCKQUOTE
The geometrical interpretation is not really necessary or essential to
physics.
}

There is no good quantized theory of gravity at the moment, and so there
is no way to even probe whether there is a mathematical or conceptual
equivalence (cf the caveat above) between the geometric approach and the
perturbative quantum approach.

My postings on this thread were about the geometric and the *classical*
field approach to gravity. The references cited were also about
formulating classical gravity as a relativistic field theory.


--
http://canonicalscience.org/en/miscellaneouszone/guidelines.txt
.

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