Albert Einstein was a smart man. There’s no doubt about that. But even he knew that his theory of general relativity, his 21st century answer to Newton’s universal theory of gravity, was not perfect.
It handles daily errands just like the used car I bought with my first paycheck. Climbing a steep slope with too much force Or if you park near a quantum strip mall, the engine shudders and stalls.
The solution for Hamidreza Fazlollahi, a graduate student in astrophysics at Russia’s People’s Friendship University, is to go under the hood and see which components are not as important as they seem.
He believes that general relativity may be able to get over a few more speed bumps by deducing laws that preserve the mathematical properties of energy and momentum.
Gravity refers to the tendency of objects with mass to gather together. Whether it’s a collision of galaxies, a moon struggling with inertia towards a planet, or an apple falling from a tree branch to Earth, gravity models need to explain why mass is attracted to it.
But such a theory would also work in a universe where objects of the same charge repel each other, and would have to explain why atomic nuclei stick together with incredible force, or why neutrons spontaneously decay to form protons. There is also. It must also remain stationary and function even when mass becomes so dense or spacetime becomes so compact that light itself can no longer escape.
And frankly, general relativity, as good as it is, is simply not up to the task.
“The problem of the nonnormalizability of Einstein’s gravity is well known. It led to dozens of attempts to treat it as a low-energy theory,” Fazlollahi said. To tell.
renormalization This is a magical trick used by theoretical physicists to eliminate the frustrating infinities of quantum fields. When the loop of reality seems to have drifted away forever in a confusing fractal, pulling out some of these techniques can get your model back on solid ground.
This is not easy in general relativity. As such, the undulating region of spacetime depicted in this work cannot mesh with the sands of quantum mechanics, and as a result requires two theories of nature, one of which makes far more sense than the other. Immiscible physical systems arise.
Fortunately, Einstein’s formulation of general relativity was also based on a number of assumptions. He had good reason to include them, but in the end, the universe might just have a different idea of whether they’re legitimate or not.
One of the more fundamental assumptions of general relativity is that the curves of space and time are consistent with the following conditions: energy and momentum are conserved. In other words, navigating the ocean of spacetime from A to B has no effect on energy or speed unless there is a change in force.
This assumption is perfectly fine in a flat, empty universe. However, the universe has dimples and curves, and is overgrown with galaxies, electrons, and virtual particles that come and go.
1976british physicist peter lastall They devised a subtly different model of gravity that suggests that matter and the curvature of spacetime are connected in a non-trivial way. This left room for the standard energy-momentum conservation law.
Pioneering a different path along similar lines, Fazlollahi used relativistic thermodynamics, that is, under fairly extreme conditions, to find transformations of energy and momentum reminiscent of the equations used in general relativity. We focused on the physics of energy exchange in .
The result is a new way to explain the appearance of gravity due to the curvature of space-time. While this is useful, for example, to explain how the universe expanded, it ignores some fundamental assumptions.
That’s all well and good, but it’s clear that Einstein’s great ideas are wrong on some level. There is no point in being overly conservative when the fate of everything is at hand.
This research European Physics Journal C.