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

[kengr]

Well, if certain theories are anywhere near right, it;s possible that somebody could trigger a domain transition and that'd end the universe.

Of course, the fact that the universe *is* here argues that it's damn hard to do that.

But we're still stuck with the fact that every year the IQ required to end the world drops....

[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!