Re: do photons interact with gravitons?
From: zigoteau (zigoteau_at_ausi.com)
Date: 07/25/04
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Date: 25 Jul 2004 03:11:59 -0700
Uncle Al <UncleAl0@hate.spam.net> wrote in message news:<41015795.7BAD57EF@hate.spam.net>...
Hi, Uncle Al,
> Gravitation is geometry. Gravitons are a mathematical
> construction with no empirical support. They would be unique for
> being tensor bosons (spin-2) rather than vector bosons (spin-1).
>
>
> http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9909014
> Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 (2004) 121101
> falling light
>
> Gravitation is geometry.
It's a good thing I was sitting down when I read that. There is a
contributor to Usenet, whose name escapes me, who claims that current
geometrical theories of gravitation have inadequate experimental
support, and that it is possible for chiral bodies to fall at
different rates, thus disproving Einstein's equivalence principle. Is
there empirical support for the idea that one can have one's cake and
eat it too?
But apart from that, to get back to Jefferson's original question,
gravitation has a certain amount of experimental support, as does
gravitational radiation (e.g. loss of energy from systems involving
black holes). If everything else is quantum, and exchanges energy in
packets of E=hf, then the gravitational field is obliged to, as well.
I'm putting my money on the universe turning out to be objectively
real, after all. Current quantum theories have certain difficulties,
particularly where gravitation is concerned. However we obviously
can't go back to 19-th century realistic theories of physics, either.
Let's hope that the eventual synthesis allows us to reclaim the
English language for common sense. It has been pointed out by many
people better than myself that there is nothing in modern quantum
theory with the individuality which is implied by words photon,
phonon, gluon, graviton and hence by extension also electron, muon,
etc. I remember a media storm a couple of years ago about the report
that an electron can be split up between two microbubbles in liquid
helium. In fact it had previously been established in connection with
the Coulomb blockade that a metal nanoparticle can have a fractional
charge, and in chemistry the concept of fractional charge on an atom
has been around even longer. You just can't imagine one of those
early-20th-century-type gedankenexperiments to demonstrate the
particulate character of the electron, which would not simultaneously
bugger up the whole experiment.
So the word 'graviton' is just a quantum circumlocution for the
gravitational field, and 'photon' is a way of talking about the
electromagnetic field.
If this meaning of Jefferson's words is assumed, then Eddington's
confirmation that starlight is deflected by the gravitational field of
the sun was just the first of many confirmations that photons and
gravitons interact.
Cheers,
Zigoteau.
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