Pushing the Standard Model

[ysabetwordsmith]

Here's a review of physics from 2021. 

I keep waiting for people to find gravitons, but honestly, I'm kind of glad they haven't.  As much damage as they've done with other scientific advances, they don't need graviton technology where fuckups can crack a planet's crust or fling a space station across the galaxy.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

I suspect the problem with Gravitons and finding them, is that they don't actually exist. There is a case to be made that the reason the Standard Model and Special Relativity don't reconcile is that the SM describes particles, and SR is describing a distortion or stretching in space/time, which only behaves somewhat like a force, but isn't really, and thus it doesn't have a particle to act as it's mediator.

Of the fundamental forces, gravity is a different animal really.

Except that gravity kind of does have gravitons. Down at the Planck scale of the universe even the fabric of space/time is 'granular' or quantised. So, a gravitational distoritian behaves as if it is made up of particles or wavelets... basically, virtual particles that don't exist, but reality behaves as if they do. (boojums, not quarks if you like)

Of course, I could be wrong, but that's how it seems to me. Not sure if that advances things however... which is probably just as well as you say. Because one of the things you could do with gravitions is create some nifty wormholes with fairly little power.

Which doesn't sound bad, until you realise you could open a 1cm wormhole connecting outer space with the inside of someones skull. Death by slurrrp!

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>Except that gravity kind of does have gravitons.<<

They're probably closer kin to photons than anything else: wavicles, which can behave like a wave or a particle depending how you try to measure them.

>> Which doesn't sound bad, <<

Only to someone with little imagination. You can also suck the air out of a room. That's before getting into the hazards of suddenly increasing or decreasing the pull of gravity.

Re: Thoughts

[siliconshaman]

The problem with sucking the air out of a room, is that most rooms aren't air-tight. (although I can see why that would slip your mind.)

Mucking about with the local field might be possible. But Planets have honking big fields that would take a LOT of energy to fiddle with, even on a small scale. I don't think you could do more than reduce or increase a small area by a barely measurable percentage.. at least, not with the power our tech level makes available. Hence why really small wormholes would be more likely at first. Another reason why venting rooms isn't likely to be practical. I mean, you could, but it would take a really long time. (although, tiny wormhole and a high pressure air line would one way of getting fresh air into somewhere that needs it.)

And yeah, Wavicles probably, just virtual ones that don't exist, but everything around them behaves as if they do.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>The problem with sucking the air out of a room, is that most rooms aren't air-tight. (although I can see why that would slip your mind.)<<

1) You don't need to remove anywhere near all the air from a room in order to drop below human breathing capacity. People need oxygen to climb Mt. Everest.

2) Sudden changes in pressure kill humans very effectively. It takes surprisingly little change and time for someone to get lethally bent.

Granted, this won't work in a large space or highly ventilated space. But even a casual glance at fire science shows that many rooms are sufficiently isolated to sustain substantial differences of pressure, temperature, gas/smoke, etc. Poor homes will be more permeable, wealthy ones better sealed for heat efficiency, and places like labs or government buildings have excellent to airtight sealing.

>> Mucking about with the local field might be possible. But Planets have honking big fields that would take a LOT of energy to fiddle with, even on a small scale. <<

You just need to connect gravity with electricity and magnetism. We already have decent control over the attract/repel functions with electromagnetism.

>>I don't think you could do more than reduce or increase a small area by a barely measurable percentage.<<

The planet-cracking accidents are things like that time a guy released a ton of radiation because he was holding two halves of fissionable material apart with a screwdriver. It's not so much the human generating the power, as controlling something that has or could have the power ... and at the bleeding edge of science, they don't always even know what that is.

>>And yeah, Wavicles probably, just virtual ones that don't exist, but everything around them behaves as if they do.<<

*laugh* You just described the whole of existence: little whizzing bits of energy pretending really hard to be things. Solid matter isn't solid at all, but it behaves as if it is.

[kengr]

Well electric and magnetic forces can be described as distortions of space-time too. Really.

It's just that the equations are *different* for gravity. Don't recall details, it was a long time ago, and involved stuff like tensor calculus.

The late Dr. Robert Forward described a bunch of ways we *could* play with gravity that aren't that far outside the box.

Mostly a matter of engineering problems. Mostly needing to create hyperdense matter and stabilize it. Likely doable, but a major pain.

Check out his book Indistinguishable from Magic

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Well electric and magnetic forces can be described as distortions of space-time too. Really.<<

They're forces, but they also involve electrons. I mean, come on, a universe isn't a simple thing. A cone can look like a cone, or an oval or a parabola or a dot depending on how you slice it. Just because something looks like one thing from one angle, doesn't mean that's necessarily what it "is."

>>Check out his book Indistinguishable from Magic<<

LOL good title.