AskPhysics @lemmy.world josephmbasile @lemmy.world 3w ago

Do gravitons exist?

Just musing here, I've been a proponent of new ether theories the past few years and so there's some assumptions that go into this.

Spacetime is a fixed grid with planck-length-cubed voxels.
Information can travel through the grid at 1 planck-length per planck-second.
Particles evolve from this grid to perform some function, typically related to self-propagation.

I would posit that the big bang theory makes no sense. A tiny spec of everything which may or may not be finite just kinda gesundheit's itself into existence for no particular reason and then sputters out over trillions of years.

Nah I'm with Max Tegmark, we're an information set, since everything in physics really boils down to information anyhow. What makes more sense to me is if the big bang is instead a white hole, spewing information from some source of random information, possibly the digits of pi or some such.

Back to ether theory, the Permittivity of Free Space can be looked at as the inverse and called the "Electric Tension" [Roychoudhuri 2021]. This is the fundamental resistance of space to accept new information, and conducting Roychoudhuri's experiment (Michelson/Morely in hard vacuum) could verify that this is indeed the bedrock of reality.

So back to a graviton, what would it need to do?

Undetectable. The graviton must be smaller than a photon and much smaller than an electron. The diameter of an electron seems to be 10^20 Planck-Lengths.
Emitted from all massive particles.
Carries information about where the massive particle that emitted it is.
Collides with larger particles, with the negative direction vector being the source of the emission.

So what about the particles? Well an electron is ~~(10²⁰⁾3~~ 10^20-cubed voxels, so there is room for extremely complex structures in there, and I would posit that massive particles (and photons) exhibit intelligence and try to survive. What would they use gravitons for?

Emitting gravitons causes the particle to decay. Absorbing gravitons prevents this decay, therefore it is advantageous for the particles to move close together, as this increases the absorption of gravitons.
The direction vectors of incoming gravitions are summed up and the direction with the most mass is where the particle tries to go.

So what do you think? Do gravitons exist? If they do they're basically the particles shooting spit balls at each other. We can talk about time dilation next.

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3 comments

From your first 3 points:

Spacetime is not a fixed grid. Einstein's theory of curved spacetime has been supported by numerous experiments: mercury precession, observations of stars near the sun during a solar eclipse, gravitational waves, etc.

Planck time is defined from the Planck length and the speed of light, so yes, this is by definition true.

Define evolve and self-propagate. Protons or electrons certainly do not produce copies of themselves, at least to my knowledge, as this would violate conservation of energy, momentum, spin, lepton number, etc. Show me a proposed process where an electron creates two electrons that does not violate conservation laws.

Big bang theory makes a hell of a lot of sense, and currently explains CMBR extremely well. The cause of the big bang is obviously still unknown (if that is even a reasonable question.) Not liking, or understanding, the theory is not reason to dismiss it. "Spewing information from digits of pi?" This is pure stoner talk. Digit of pi are arbitrary, and are different in different number bases: decimal, binary, hexadecimal, etc. Numbers are also not things in physical reality, only conceptual concepts.

From your properties of a graviton:

Size is unrelated to being detectable. In addition, in particle physics, size is a bit fuzzy, since all particles are waves, and "size" might be defined by the wavelength of the particle.

Gravitons are proposed as the force carrier for the gravitational force. But possibly don't exist since Einstein's theory demonstrates that mass curves spacetime instead, and gravity is not an actual force, and thus no force carrier required. This contradiction is one problem with merging quantum theory and general relativity.

Sure, if a graviton was emitted, dynamics could be worked out to determine where the emitting mass is, similar to emitted photons indicating where the object that emitted the photon is.

Vector directions are arbitrary. A vector is not a thing, but a mathematical construct used to define magnitudes and directions. Negative vector is only an instruction to reverse the direction of that vector.

Particles exhibiting intelligence? Define what you mean by intelligence. How does a photon "try to survive"? Current understanding of particles is that they obey very predictable rules governed by quantum theory, which doesn't indicate any intelligence or decision making from the particle.

Finally, for your use of gravitons:

This could be measured in a lab. One could measure a particle decay through an unknown mechanism. As far as I'm aware, this has not been observed.

Mass is gravitationally attracted to mass. Sure. Gravitons are the proposed force carrier for gravitational force. If they existed, this is how they might work.

You have an interest in physics, which I applaud, but you should read some introductory physics textbooks, or enroll in undergraduate introductory physics classes, and master the fundamentals (Newtonian mechanics, classical electrodynamics, quantum, stat/mech).
- On particle decay, we can only measure decay which is the delta between gravitons emitted vs gravitons absorbed, thus decay would be faster far away from other masses. Decay is also limited by how small a graviton can be. It must be many orders of magnitude smaller than the particle it is emitted from in order for decay to be undetectable by us.
- Thank you for your reply my friendly toaster! I'll go through your points but I appreciate the thoughtful discussion.
  
  My background is in engineering, specifically computational fluid dynamics. I have a hard time understanding how I'm supposed to simulate an infinitesimal yet nearly infinite mass a t=0 with no grid. Doesn't work, and it's not that I don't like the Big Bang theory, it's clearly on the right track, but as you said it's clearly incomplete. Same with Einstein, yes he modeled spacetime as a flexible medium, but that's because he was observing the behavior of particles, he was not directly observing spacetime itself.
  
  I don't mean that a particle is intelligent like a person, but it seeks to survive like a bacterium, or an insect, or a piece of self replicating code. You're correct "propagate" wasn't really the right word, I was thinking more of photons for that. Survive is more like it. They do things that decrease decay like absorbing more gravitons by being near other masses.
  
  When you accelerate a particle, all the parts of the particle have to move along with whatever wave structure is inside of it. So the whole pattern has to move along the grid and as a result the interaction of the particles themselves has to slow down, thus you get time dilation. Basically, the particles are like little computers and if you give them too much to do they run slower.
  
  Anyway I don't expect people to give these theories a fair shot because the Michaelson Morely experiment still needs to be repeated in hard vacuum before the truth of it dawns on people. And who knows perhaps the grid really isn't there as you say.
  
  Going back to high school physics, one of the first things you should remember is that everything is only a theory and if you assume something is true, like a curvature of spacetime, you may miss the bigger picture in front of you.