Mind you, I never bothered to read Gravitation, I only looked through a bit of it. I learned GR from Wald and from Schultz, and I didn't do a very good job of it.
And we're ahead of ancient astronomers simply because we know that something is wrong with our system. We just don't know what. So we sit there, trying to figure out a good way to explain why all these convoluted charts are sitting on our desks don't add up to something simple and finally jumping off of cliffs in the meantime.
GUT stands for Grand Unified Theory, and the GUT scale is the energy at which all four forces are reduced to one. We know that at certain energy scales the weak and electromagnetic forces are reduced to one general force. At extremely high energies even the strong and gravitational forces will act together. At that range all of our physics breaks down totally and completely. It's considered a realm of New Physics, whose nature we have yet to discover.
Gravity is the strangest of the forces because the two explanations do not get along. The curvature of spacetime cannot be explained by the quantum theory, but the GR theory cannot deal with particles. We've had all manner of theories to explain why gravity is so weak, from the concept that gravity is mostly wrapped up in another dimension to theories about weak coupling. Discovering how gravity actually works will be a monumental feat, but it probably won't occur in our lifetime. The energies you have to work with are simply too high.
And physicists have lots of crazy theories. We would dismiss them all, but some of them are probably right, and that's the craziest thing of all.
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Date: 2006-05-30 01:54 pm (UTC)And we're ahead of ancient astronomers simply because we know that something is wrong with our system. We just don't know what. So we sit there, trying to figure out a good way to explain why all these convoluted charts are sitting on our desks don't add up to something simple and finally jumping off of cliffs in the meantime.
GUT stands for Grand Unified Theory, and the GUT scale is the energy at which all four forces are reduced to one. We know that at certain energy scales the weak and electromagnetic forces are reduced to one general force. At extremely high energies even the strong and gravitational forces will act together. At that range all of our physics breaks down totally and completely. It's considered a realm of New Physics, whose nature we have yet to discover.
Gravity is the strangest of the forces because the two explanations do not get along. The curvature of spacetime cannot be explained by the quantum theory, but the GR theory cannot deal with particles. We've had all manner of theories to explain why gravity is so weak, from the concept that gravity is mostly wrapped up in another dimension to theories about weak coupling. Discovering how gravity actually works will be a monumental feat, but it probably won't occur in our lifetime. The energies you have to work with are simply too high.
And physicists have lots of crazy theories. We would dismiss them all, but some of them are probably right, and that's the craziest thing of all.