Re: I'm sure this is a silly question

:: David Mitchell <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
:: Given that it's canon that particles appear and disappear from the
:: "quantum foam", all the time, (with a nod to Heisenberg so that they
:: Don't Really Count), and that gravity is always positive.
:: What happens to the mass of all those particles? IOW, pick a point,
:: any point, draw a line in any direction to the edge of the universe.
:: Along that line there are particles appearing and disappearing all
:: the time.
:: So why don't we notice the mass of all those particles? Is it that
:: they cancel out? Or that they are only around for so short a time
:: that they don't count? Or am I missing the point?

: Aaron Bergman <abergman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
: You've basically discovered the cosmological constant problem.

Are you sure you don't mean he discovered the "where's the
mass of all the zero point energy" problem? Or something?
Or are they the same problem?

I'm not sure I understand what is supposed to happen because
of the virtual particles described above, one reason being that
they occur with both positive and negative energy, and the other
being that if a particle winks in and then back out several light
years away, you won't know about it, and even then, it's not clear
it'd produce a gravitational interaction at all; we're down at the
planck scale, so we're not talking the classical approximation
of general relativity.

So. Anyhoo. I'm not sure what the problem is supposed to be, exactly
But if I had to guess, I'd say the solution is a mixture of both "cancel out"
and "so short a time" (and small a distance).


Wayne Throop throopw@xxxxxxxxx http://sheol.org/throopw
.

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