[Rated "overly speculative" in sci.physics.research]
"John Baez" <baez@galaxy.ucr.edu> wrote in message
news:bm9h4t$dfv$1@glue.ucr.edu...
In article <blg8b0$s4t$1@lust.ihug.co.nz>,
Ray Tomes <rtomes@ihug.remove.co.nz> wrote:
John Baez wrote:
...snip...
relativity. I'm pretty sure the answer is "they don't - at least
not enough to care about!"
"Pretty sure"? "Not enough to care about"? I disagree.
The smaller the effect/influence, the more significant and the more one
ought to care about it as far as groking an improved explanatory and then a
predictive physical model.
You hide behind the shaky pillar over on the quivering tectonic platelet of
GR to give your authoritative sounding answer ;-) but the fact is
gravitational waves ARE more concentrated near chunks of mass than where no
masses accummulate or have accummulated. Anyone can see that. Otherwise
the masses would be/collect somewhere else. have you never watched flotsam
and jetsam collect on a polluted stream?
What you are forgetting is all of the elegant curvy spacetime imagery can
also be decompiled into its underlying system of gravitational waves that
impinge from many directions in the many-body dance, so to speak, to give
the appearance of the familiar and much loved curvature/mathematics. The
curvature imagery is a simiplification, a metaphor, an apparently very
useful approximation or placeholder. But, to get to the emerging, more
unified models, obviously, the next generation of mathematicians will have
to buck up and face the facts that GR at least be wavelinear like stuff on
the other tectonic plate.
...the usual sort of gravitational lensing caused by galaxies
will apply to gravitational waves just as to light. This is the only
...snip...
... to do with gravitational
waves causing earthquakes or any other outrageously humongous effects
of the sort you mention.
You're holding on to the old curvature model, John. Of course your
argument seems ~sound as presented: monolithic curvature (albeit ~always
flat) with a few inconsequential shimmering waves on its "surface". But
take the imaginary lid off and look at the under lying bubbling brew and
what Ray and I are saying is the total quantum gravitational wave function
hits a tone at some frequency in the local region and influences the plate
mechanics.
If you NEED to trace this back toward a curvature, consider the multiple
curvatures which impinge in our local region to be "flexing" in some sort of
"wink-blink" fashion.
What Ray is referring to is akin to a straw that breaks the camel's back
type of thing. The camel would likely not think just one straw could have
such an outrageously humongous effect either.
Hey, I'm not saying you are wrong within the bounds of the dominant model.
I'm just saying that WHEN you shift over to a more robust qunatum gravity
model where you at least have the QM and GR on a common wavelinear imagery,
then see something different.
I think Tomes and Frost are radically underestimating how weak
gravitational waves are.
I think you are missing the point. You seem to be saying that as
gravitational waves shimmer by that, to thhunk it down into your lingo,
they have absolutely ZERO influence on the flexing "curvature" -- none -- no
influence on the spatial location of even the most highly stressed nuclei or
atoms.
That seems like unrealistic wishful thinking. I don't think it holds up
under scrutiny long term.
- --
Ralph Frost,
Who does all his math in his head, in analog, using a delicately balanced
1950's styled ordered water quantum gravitational computer, like others of
that generation.
http://flep.refrost.com
.
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