Re: Getting out of this world?

On Oct 15, 12:21 pm, Tina_H...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Tina Hall) wrote:
N...@xxxxxxx <Alien8...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

That's rules you or your subconscious make, though; you think
they're no use for digging tunnels.

Those are the rules of the place; that's the only point.

... they probably don't properly speaking live in what could
be called a 'universe'.

Exactly! :)'

That's the sort of linkage I'm talking about, not a one-to-one
correspondence between our mundane phsyical constants' values
and any putative ones there. The existence and values taken of
any, all, or none of the physical constants can be willed by
the locals, but the warp and weft of the place itself must be
amenable to being made into a livable environment for humans.

There's nothing that the place itself is. The place itself isn't
really.
That's one thing...

...?

That the place itself, isn't, really.

I heard about that, but don't even see the problem.
Relativity only works if spacetime is continuous, but quantum
mechanics shows that it is likely itty bitty discrete chunks.

I accept that that's what people who know that stuff works,
while suspecting that they just don't know enough to actually
see what's really going on.
As in you believe that what's 'actually, really' going on is
that spacetime is continuous?

I don't know what you mean by discontinuous in this context. Last
time someone mentioned it, he was talking about (I think) chaos
theory, and it sounded as if he meant that things happen without a
reason, not based on what happened before. I on the other hand say
that the folks observing that can't predict it accurately because
they don't have all the billions of parameters that play into it,
only perhaps (relative to the billions) twenty. They don't see the
rest, and thus think stuff happens out of nowhere, unpredictable.

No, that's something entirely else.

Which is pretty silly.

Anyone who tells you chaos theory disconnects cause from effect
doesn't know what they're talking about; what it does do is show that
what we used to call 'completely random' events and processes, like
say Brownian Motion (you want to look that one up) actually has rules
and limitations on _how_ random they can be.

If that upsets you, you aren't alone.

I don't know what in that should upset me.


You know the strings of the net merely represent the general
direction a mass will follow if it's rolling around on the net,
yes?

Which then loses it any connection to what it's supposed to
depict.
Only because you keep looking at the space between the strings
and thinking it's the same as the narrow strips of space occupied
by the strings,

Not really, I think it would be the space between the strips of
space occupied by the strings. Which doesn't match space; it isn't
strings. It's 3D.

That's just the point; space is evidently _not_ entirely 3D.

Btw, my objection to the net&ball thing is that the space between
the strings and knots can't be part of what's really going on; in
other words they ain't there. Thus the model simply doesn't work to
explain anything.

That's just it; the strings and knots are all that's needed to
explain what we see.

If it were, there'd be more strings and knots,

No, there'd be a 3D 'plane' (in other words: space). If you want to
use anything material (to depict mostly empty space, whyever you'd
want to do that), you'll have to use a giant elastic blob of
plastic. Or the inside (not the surface!) of an air-filled mattress.

No. You are trying to model empty space with your _continuous_
elastic blob of plastic (or what you imagine to be continuous air).
That model is exactly the opposite of right. How can I possibly say
anything so silly? Because serious scientists no longer try to use
anything like it to model reality in actual theories.

The new picture is that space itself is made of little discrete, non-
continuous bits that interact along specified pathways. That's what
spacetime _is_, not a continuous anything.

Again, you may not like it because it doesn't fit your intuition,

I don't like it that you keep going on trying to explain something
with a model that makes no sense to me, and thus can't explain
anything, because I have no idea what you're talking about.

Why don't you say plain out what you want to say?

I have, repeatedly. The mesh is a correct model of space and time.
Your continuous blob of plastic is exactly not.

You asked about current theories, not about what makes sense to you.

What happens at really small scales doesn't directly influence our
survival so we didn't evolve senses that allow us to see what's
'actually, really' going on.

I am not thinking about small scales, but large. Space, with planets
and stuff.

Large scales are composed of many many small spaces. If you don't
understand how the small ones work you'll miss many subtleties when
you try to figure out how the large ones work.

I can only guess what small scales you are thinking about.

Around 10 to the minus 43rd or so meters.

But it's no good talking about images that don't work. Can you
explain it another way?
No. I could lie to you and give you a nice, comforting
continuous imagery, but I will not do that.

Well, in that case I have no idea what you're talking about, or what
you want to be (dis)continuous.

Not what _I_ want to be discontinuous, merely what _is_
discontinuous, namely spacetime itself.

I still don't like the strings. Why not space? Why something
that's just made up of lines, with lots of room in between where
nothing happens? (Even if you line them up with a millemeter or
less distance, it's still just strings, not the whole space
filled.)

Exactly; the "whole space filled" is an illusion only seen at large
scales. At small scales all there is is the mesh.

I don't think that what really happens happens along lines, I
think it happens everywhere in the area, without joints or holes
in between, and for that the net example doesn't work.
What you or I or Einstein or anyone 'thinks' does NOT matter.
What matters is what 'actually, really' happens, and it simply is
not continuous.

Since you're not thinking about large scales, planets and stuff, I
don't know where you think what actually really happens is not
continuous. I'm thinking about bent space, why light does funny
things 'going around' stars, as observed from here.

What are you thinking about?

That how the large space works is intimately dependent on how the
small spaces work.

If you want to write a 'travel between worlds' story in which the
'real world' side is set in a continuum universe, it won't be
science fiction, it'll be straight-out fantasy.

What do you mean by 'continuum universe', and what makes you think I
want to do that? (Really, I have no idea how you got there.)

Your "continuous blob of plastic" model.

Now hold onto your hat because we're nearing the good part.

I hope the 'good' in it is that I'll know what you're talking about.

You'd have to get down to atoms/molecules to find room in
between, and when you're there you might as well say what's
really going on.
This is the last important bit. Quantum Loop Gravity
specifically talks about 'atoms of spacetime' analogous to matter
atoms;

Which has nothing to do with the net&ball that's got lots of empty
space between it. The analogy has larger-than-planet sized holes in
it, and that's what doesn't make sense in the model.

No, it doesn't. You may be thinking of the usual presentation that
has bowling-ball-sized spheres rolling around on tennis-net sized
mesh. That's irrelevant. The actual mesh is exquisitely finer than
that.

I hope you didn't think I was trying to tell you that the space you
can see is made up of mesh with oh, ten-centimeter holes!

No, the actual mesh I'm talking about has holes in the neighborhood
of 10 to the minus 43rd meter or so.

(Further references to impossibly large mesh snipped)

discrete chunks of spacetime that connect up in lattices.

You've already got chunks of matter in space. If you want something
analogous to matter atoms, you'll have to kick out the 'space' in
'spacetime'.

Atoms of matter exist in time too, you know. That existence has a
"length" usually called "duration".

But that's not relevant, and it isn't what _I_ want, it's what the
theory you asked for says; that spacetime itself comprises teeny
chunks, not a continuous blob.

That actually isn't. Unles by 'here' you mean 'all of this universe
squeezed into something smaller than an atom, then thrown out the
door to look at from the outside'.

Nope, just in between the lattice lines.

A place whre the 3D world doesn't exist is what I have in mind
for their reality/dimension, though. And their made homes being
just illusions out of the complex minds that contain their space
doesn't sound too far off.
That was the final thing that lit the flashbulb above my head.
Suppose the Other Place is _in between the lattice lines_ of our
universe?

There are no lattice lines.

But there are.

Oh my, you dropped your hat.

No. I'm wondering that if you were talking about empty space inside
atoms, what you're saying would actually make sense[*], but you're
not. You're talking about planet sized square 2D holes in 3D cosmos.

No, the "empty space inside atoms" is covered by ordinary physics,
until you get to trying to measure forces like electromagnetism or
gravity over really small distances, and that's where spacetime starts
getting "not smooth".

No, I'm not talking about planet-sized holes. I am talking about
'holes' much, much smaller than pretty much anything (except possibly
so-called 'point particles' like electrons, but that remains to be
seen).

[*] If you kick out the lattice lines and look at just the atoms.
I'm using that space in the ME; that's where they've got their extra
magic bit. Things get weird on sub-atomic levels, so I can just
decide that on that scale, everywhere is the same, thus the ability
to 'reach' across human-scale distances, going through the no-
distance on a sub-atomic scale. (Like reaching in here and coming
out there, if you could.)

But that's another story.

It's also not something that can happen in this universe; the rules
of such spaces are as I said covered by ordinary physics.

For the Nodeworld, that doesn't work. That isn't just 'here on
subatomic level', it's not here.

Exactly; the spaces between the strings _is not accessible_ by any
phenomenon that has to do with the strings (like particles or forces),
therefore it's not "here".

The lattice that is our space is described and limited by what
sorts of vibrations the lattice can support and how fast those
vibrations can propagate; that generates what we call 'physics'
including speed of light limits and so on.

As the whole lattice idea makes no sense, that paragraph doesn't
either.

You mean "the whole lattice idea makes no sense" to your intuition?
Tell your intuition this isn't the 18th century.

It might be better for you to shut down your newsreader and
open your web browser, and go to Wikipedia for instance:

I'd prefer a source that's reliable, not something anyone can edit.
Without knowing about the subject, I have no way to check whether
what it says is true. Thus I'm not going to that website for
anything.

Sigh. Wikipedia is a good starting point because it usually has
external links to trustable sites.

You could just plug "loop quantum gravity" into your favorite search
engines.

If I tried to write them here you likely won't be able to read
them properly what with all the subscripts, superscripts, and
Greek characters. ;>)

That's why I said 'spelled out rather than just as characters'; the
characters in a formula don't tell me anything, so no need to look
at (or type) them.

The terms our scientist would be thinking in would include the
Ricci curvature tensor, scalar curvature, metric tensor,
cosmological constant, gravitational constant, speed of light,
and stress-energy tensor.

Allright. I don't know what he would mean by 'tensor', or what that
'Ricci' is.

Um, search engines...

That's the terminology of the Einstein field equations, the
solutions to which describe the metric (form of the structure) of
spacetime including the inertial motions of masses in it; for Loop
Quantum Gravity:

Sounds interesting.

you can add renormalization, Planck length ( also Planck scale,
mass, time, energy),

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about Planck.

Max Planck. German physicist. 1858-1947. Considered the 'father of
quantum theory' in that he provided the first solid break from so-
called 'classical theory' (which includes among other things the
continuum assumption). He showed the correlation between the energy
states of an oscillator (say an electron in an atom) and the
wavelengths it can emit is quantized, proportional to an irreducible
minimum unit of angular momentum (AKA spin). He himself at first just
thought of it as a 'mathematical formality' but eventually came to
grasp its deeper significance. Nonetheless he proceeded to take the
idea to its (to him) logical conclusion and proposed a set of units
based on the measured values of many physical constants, the Planck
length, the Planck time, and so on.

The idea is that physical systems cannot have those quantities in
smaller amounts than those units; if you had a ruler marked in Planck
lengths there would be no physical object or phenomenon that could fit
between the marks.
..
diffeomorphism, quantum field theory, spinfoam, gauge groups and
quantum groups, torsion (of spacetime, meaning empty space with a
built-in twist), and so on.

Sounds interseting (no idea what diffeomorphism is, though, and can
only guess at the rest).

It's extremely interesting to a certain kind of mind, and even those
of us who can't manage the complex math can be fascinated by the
concepts it exposes.

(That's the really important bit of this post; the following is
another digression into details that may or may not influence
your understanding of what I've written)

I might have understood it if you had left out the solar system
sized nets.

SMALLER, DAMMIT!

Sorry.

What do you think magic is?

Something that's outside physical laws.
No, that's what gods do.

Or magic. To me it doesn't matter much whether it's god-gifts or
magic, the only difference is that a god would be a character
(for which I need, for example, source and motivation, both not
comparable to human), and that magic is just something extra
without a person attached.
Not 'god-gifts', I mean literally what they do, as in
'miracles' being unphysical events in the sense that physics does
not apply.

For me that's the same as magic, only it has a deity doing it (among
other things handing out gifts, thus 'god-gifts'), which puts it in
a different mental category. The working is the same, only it
doesn't need a deity as source. Instead it's part of the world some
way. An extra doesnt't-adhere-to-phyiscs bit.

The Xtian example of Jesus multiplying fishes and loaves of bread
for instance violates the conservation of mass and energy; where'd
the extra mass of the fish and bread come from?

For me, the thing that violates physics would be (with an example of
turning a pebble into a strawberry) that someone does that with just
their thoughts. He picks apart the atoms and puts them back together
in an order that is eatable, with vitamins and everything, turning
excess matter into air (oxygen, nitrogen, carbondioxide, whatever
else in the correct percentages), or taking missing matter from the
air or something else in the surroundings. It's manipulating matter
in a way that you can't really manipulate it. Starting with thoughts
influencing a pebble a foot away from the brain having said
thoughts.

The character could have it look like multiplying strawberries, too,
and you wouldn't know where the mass came from, that it's actually
taken out of nearby ground. (At one point in the ME, a character
moves a small rock into his trouser pocket and changes it into a
precious ring - just for a cover story explaining their presense; in
the country they're in magic isn't well known, and he claims they've
been robbed and left with nothing but what they have in their
pockets, using the ring to properly get the local currency. He could
make that himself, too, just as almost anything else, but as
mentioned they need a cover story.)

Well, that's just "plain vanilla" telekinesis (which as was
mentioned elsethread, hasn't been demonstrated). It doesn't violate
physics, and could be shown not to do so if the telekinetic were
limited to the mass available in a locked room (though imagining locks
that a telekinetic couldn't bypass is a bit tricky). The total mass
inside the room wouldn't change, it'd just rearrange according to the
telekinetic's projected will. What physics can't explain is the
channel by which information is allegedly transferred from his/her
mind to the matter that gets rearranged, but if a telekinetic ever
presents themselves for testing I'll bet it could be figured out.

...My whole point is that... a magical interaction [is]
something you wouldn't get with physics.
That's what gods do.

And magic.
See, what you're calling 'magic' isn't what most others call
'magic' because magic has its own rules that usually involve some
sort of 'payment' for the obtained effect.

No, that it _doesn't_ have to is what makes it magic. The 'payment'
is derived from physical laws.

The 'payment' doesn't usually have anything to do with the mundane
type, but it's there- cf Faustus or even Rapunzel.

And in the ME, doing things with magic is easier than doing them the
mundane way. Plus there's no metaphorical cost (soul or something).

Well, you probably won't be surprised to find that it grates on me
as 'unrealistic'. Odd thing to say about magic, I know, but still.

I can see potential for all sorts of correspondences and
proportionalities in what you wrote.

Correspondences and proportionalities to what?
Not to ordinary physics; I mean the parts of the magical system
have correspondences to other parts of the same system that make
internal sense, not sense-according-to-mundane-physics.

They make sense in that system, everything has to or else it's just
contrived junk, not a worthy story. That's a writing-requirement,
not a physics-requirement.

That's much less grating.

Dryness and coldness are properties that submit to manipulation
according to predictable rules, that is, predictable to those
that can use the whatever-it-is that allows them to do it which
you insist is 'magic' but not 'physics'.

That's the laws of the setting. That it does things you can't do
with physics, not that way (you can boil water, but not heat it the
way, say, a Fire Priest would), is what makes it magic.

That it all makes sense in itself is what my backbrain takes care
of. It has to, too (else I wouldn't find peace, a quirk).

To them though it's merely what action is taken (draw out the
cold) in order to get a given effect (keep something warm). The
idea of cause-and-effect I suppose is key here; they would not try
to use an irrelevant cause (draw out the dryness) to get that same
effect because they know that it cannot work.

I don't think the guys who can draw dryness out can keep cold out,
and the other way round; they've got different magic. Dryness is a
Summer thing (dry and hot, but they can't heat/unheat things
directly), cold is a Winter thing, and they can't dry/undry stuff.
(Now you got me wondering about wet snow. At least I know that the
Summer tribe can at best 'heat' females, so the 'hot' angle is taken
care of that way.)

Wet and dry snow is exactly what I had in mind; wet snow can't be
colder than (or even as cold as) dry snow because it has to contain
unfrozen water in order to _be_ wet. Frinst I wondered: if a Summer
guy had to take a long trip through snow country and got too cold,
could he draw the dry out of some snow and thus warm it indirectly?

Hot and cold females, well, that's your story characters'
problem. ;>)

Another way to compare them is by similarities executed differently;
both can keep food fresh: the Winter tribe simply freezes stuff, the
Summer tribe can make dried meat (and probably other dried stuff).
That's the kind of balance I find while writing. They've got things
in common even though they're opposites. (I very much like balance
and symmetry, and particularly in the S&E stuff like that is all
over the place.)

That's also 'physics', just not part of the 'physics' known in
_this_ world.

That's not physics, that's magic. You're not going to find any
physical laws that allow for the same to be done without magic.

Again, I say "physics" and you automatically read "not magic". Your
magic has stuff (and "stuff" doesn't necessarily mean atoms etc.)
interacting according to consistent rules. That's practically the very
definition (except for the word "magic") of "physics".

I wouldn't call it 'just' another one though.

Anything explainable by physical laws is just another physical
aspect, nothing magical.
Allow me to quote Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Which I think is nonsense. It talks about viewpoint, while I
talk about absolutes.
You can _talk_ about them, but there aren't any.

That's misunderstanding what I said.

A hypothetical all-understanding being would be able to tell the
difference, and that's all that matters, not the potentially
primitive viewpoint who looks at it.

Now we've wandered into philosophy. What does "all-understanding"
mean, and in what context does it do its understanding in? If you're
going to say that it would understand in a way we couldn't, that's
cheating.

In waveguides and such it's any deviation from perfect smoothness
and consistency in the dimensions of the waveguide; think of it
along the lines of 'speedbumps' for the guided waves.

This is a good example for why it's better to talk about the real
thing than analogies: I'm much better imagining that than first
drawing up the image of the analogy, then trying to find out what
that's supposed to be analogous to, while never getting an actual
picture of the real thing, and thus never getting any idea of what's
meant. I'd never have thought about an opening in the waveguide if
you didn't mention it, and would have been stuck on the 'speedbump'
just as I do on 'lattices'. (There are no literal street speedbumps
on the metal of the construction, just space isn't a fishernet.)

Well, actually there can be literal speedbumps. The metal had better
be very smooth at certain places (where the electric field is large,
also known as "anti-nodes" along the guide). If it isn't, if there are
lumps, the electric field will concentrate at those places (exactly
the way Saint Elmo's fire concentrates on sharp-pointed objects during
thunderstorms) and the microwave energy will reflect back the way it
came (just as a slow-moving car will bounce back from a real
speedbump) or, if the field strength rises far enough, be dissipated
as an electric arc within the waveguide.

I wish you'd fire up your browser and look at:

For that I'd have to quit the software I'm using now, wind down the
computer, turn it off, plug in the windoze drive, turn it on, tell
it to boot that drive, wait endlessly for windoze to boot, start the
dialler and browser and stuff, choose a provider (internet-by-call),
establish a connection, and then go there.

What software do you use to read usenet groups? I'm sure there's a
good browser for it that wouldn't require you to go through all that.
I use the WIndoze version of Firefox, but there's also Unix versions.

I'll put the links in a file to look at later, but that's it.

Those links are to the simple, direct manuals the US military
used to use to teach transmission line and microwave fundamentals
to technicians who would have to work on them. Lots of pictures.
They're available in either plain text or PDF.

Sounds interesting.

They are very accessible and arranged in simple-to-complex order,
one thing laying the foundation for the next. You probably will
remember enough from your 'retraining' to get you started.

(waveguide fu)

That's what I imagined.

This is, technically, an 'antenna' though it's pretty crappy as
such things go because it reflects much of the energy back into
the can; the waves don't like to make the velocity transition so
abruptly. Flaring the cutoff end to the proper degree makes it
easier for the waves to 'slide out' so to speak.

Thus sattelite antennas looking like a chunk cut out of a ball, I
guess.

The big dish is just a reflector to focus the microwaves; the actual
antenna is in the center of the dish.

What we call 'matter' is, in the Loop Quantum Gravity view, merely
coherent patterns of vibration of the strings in the 3D mesh.

What do they really talk about? (The analogy is only used to describe something, after all,
build an image for people.

That spacetime (space in all four directions; left-right, up-down,
back-front, and past-future) has texture like a knotwork fabric with
extremely small mesh. It is not smoothly continuous.

That the character of those bits of string, the knots, and how they
can vibrate, is extremely simple yet can explain everything.

As example, there's the old model of 'atoms like a solar system',
which isn't correct either. And for me it's much better to imagine a
shell where the dot of the electron is everywhere at once (thus
shell, even while it's a dot). Improving that closer to what's
really going on would be even better; my imagination isn't limited,
the analogies are (in leaving out what's really going on).

If you could see atoms directly (I'm sure you've heard this bit
before) you'd see the nucleus as say a soccerball-sized sphere
surrounded by intersecting, layered cathedral-sized clouds of electron
orbitals.

But at that scale you _still_ couldn't see the spacetime "mesh-
ness". If you zoomed in on the nucleus, then in on one of the protons,
then in on one of the quarks in that proton, you would start to notice
the mesh-ness.

Just as the usual depictions of magnetic fields have space in
between the lines that don't make sense (it should be a coherent
field), your empty space between the lines don't make sense. An
amorphous or squeezed 3D field, fine, just lines, no. Because it
doesn't depict real space.

Yes, it does. Tell your intuition I'm sorry, but it does.

Gravitational radiation is also coherent patterns of vibration,

I've got a problem with 'gravitaiontal radiation'. For me radiation
means something going out, rather than attracting something. But
gravity 'keeps' things, it doesn't spout bits around like a
fountain.

You are now trying to make physics fit your "rules of magic". That
isn't what gravity does at all; gravity bends spacetime around masses
so that masses move together. If two masses move near each other, but
don't touch, then move apart, and do so at the right speeds, then the
bent spacetime between them can indeed spout out a coherent ripple
that propagates (radiates) away.

Eh, the bits in the mesh are holes in space where there is no space,

EXACTLY! Except you're using the same word (space) to describe two
very different things; the domain of the strings, and the domain in
between all of them.

as I see the analogy. It's what you try to depict 'empty space'
_with_.

The mesh domain is what _we_ call "space", the domain in between is
what The Others call "home". Ordinarily they can't see us (or more
likely have decided not to pay any attention to since we're no fun due
to the fact we can't see them at all).

The Others see them drifting free and decide to rescue/play with
them.

Not really. They just arrive there unexpected.

Huh. So, they can't see our world at all.

Here's another option- alternatively we can talk about the
vibrations obtaining some sort of existence separate from the
supporting mesh (they sort of 'slide off' the spacetime mesh when
the scientist vibrates it out from under the travelers) but
that'll be harder to justify. Well, maybe not; sound is
vibration, and vibrations can 'slide off' say violin strings and
travel through 'stringless' empty space (as long as there's air
to support the vibrations, which is the catch to this; there's no
equivalent of 'air' in the Other Place).

It doesn't work because with the analogy of the mesh, you've got one
line every some kilometers for the sound to move along, with
absolutely nothing in between (the holes in the net), no cities, no
air, nothing at all. Which simply isn't true.

Replace "kilometer" with "10 to the minus 43rd or so meter" and try
again.

Standard theory predicts free-flying gravitational quanta
called 'gravitons',

Why do they always want something flying around? :) (Somehow,
something flying around doesn't match my idea of gravity.)

Your idea of gravity is your problem, especially if it doesn't match
the real thing, and it does not.

Gravity reaches out through visibly empty space, so something
must be mediating the reaching. Things in motion interact
differently than do things that aren't, which is taken care of by
'flying gravitons'.

That makes sens up to 'flying gravitons', where it stops.

I can't really describe it much more clearly. As Uncle Al of
sci.physics says, I can _explain_ it for you but I can't
_understand_ it for you.

An explanation is fine. To understand I just need the right images.
And 'flying gravitons' look like dots whizzing around. Which doesn't
match the image of 'gravity', thus there it stops making sense.

Not 'dots', ripples in spacetime. Do you have trouble seeing waves
traveling on water? Do you have trouble understanding that there are
waves traveling _in_ the water, under the surface, that you cannot
see?

Gravitational waves are waves traveling as ripples in spacetime that
you cannot see.

What would make sense would be going down to atoms, or somewhere,
explaining why one bit of matter attracts another. I already know
about the electronic side, but that's not it, after all. So I
imagine some very weak but very large field around something (atom,
or subatomic particles, I have no idea), that does the attracting
part. And the more you get together, the more fields (all 3D, mind)
overlap, strengthening the effect. Up to the point of holding a
person on the globe, or cancelling each other at the Earth's core
(or perhaps addinig up to squeezing point, that's stuff I don't
know, but I can imagine either).

All matter attracts other matter; the bit about bending space was
Einstein's brilliant interpretation, and experiments like the
observation of the precession of the orbit of the planet Mercury
proved him right. Gravity bends spacetime, period, (okay, comma) and
that knowledge led directly to the balls-on-the-rubber-sheet imagery.

You mentioned some knowledge of electronics; I'll mention two
scientists whose names are forever linked so: "Kaluza-Klein". They
tried to link gravitation and electromagnetism by adding two more
dimensions to spacetime. The general idea was to show that gravitation
and electromagnetism are simply two slightly different ways to bend
spacetime, one of which only acts on matter that carries an electric
charge while the other acts on all matter whether it has a charge or
not. This goes back to 1921.

Since then, other scientists trying to figure out if they were right
generated whole other theories including loop quantum gravity.

Now I wonder whether that would also explain why making things move
faster requires such energy; I could imagine that the fields like
things being static, or at least moving steadily against it ('with
it' does speed you up to a point; all things fall to the ground, at
the same rate, within the gravity strength), and the more you try to
go against that, the more it tries to hold you back (a bit like
being stuck in rubber). But that's just a fancy idea that came to me
just now. No idea whether gravity has anything to do with trying to
speed up spaceships in theoretically empty space.

It does, yes. There's this effect called Unruh Radiation;
They're just the free-flying form of ordinarily static gravity
fields,

Ok. Flying fields sound much better than something that sounds
like 'gravity particles'.
Um, yeah. No, they're not considered to be 'particles' any more.

But something that's called 'flying gravitons', or just gravitons,
sounds (and looks) to me like particles. It's small dots, not an
effect.

The "-on" ending does not necessarily indicate a dot-like matter
particle, any more than you ought to expect "photon" to be a dot-like
particle.

the same way that light photons are the free-flying forms of
ordinary static electric and magnetic fields.

In the way that they wobbling about in waves? (Can't insert the
'static', though.)
Yes. You're trying to do the inserting backwards- just think
about an unmoving electron; it has a static electric field
filling space around it that you can easily measure as a simple
directional force on another charged particle placed nearby
(known as a 'test particle').

Right.

Electrons have something called spin, meaning they sort of act as
if they are tiny current-carrying loops, creating a circular
component to their static field.

Like rings? Or like a shell? (Don't know where to place the loops,
or the spin.)

See, this is where it gets awkward; as far as experiment can tell,
electrons are _point_ particles. They have no physical extension
within which their charge might be carried in a circle by their spin,
yet they sure seem to act as if they do just that. Mind you the
current best observational evidence only puts their lower size limit
at around 10 to the minus 22 meters which in quantum mechanical terms
is enormous. In a universe described by LQG there's plenty of room in
that 10^-22 m for the charge of a single electron to form a loop with
a radius measured in Planck lengths.

This does non-linear things to the force felt by test charges
moving nearby depending on how the spin of one is oriented
relative to the other. Now set the first electron wobbling back
and forth. If you do it fast enough some of the energy you put
into waving it around will 'peel off' in the form of self
-contained electric field loops, also known as photons.

I can imagine that.

If that didn't penetrate, read the stuff I gave you links to
above.

The word 'loop' still interferes with the image, but that's it.
Spin, I think (due to an earlier attempt from someone to explain
something), might be the sideways and up-down direction the photon
waves about in while going straight ahead.

Something like that. Photons have alternating electric and magnetic
fields; those can take the form of strainght lines or loops, depending
on how they were generated.

(Though the idea that gravity has waves doesn't ring any
better than it having stuff flying around. Basically, it goes
in the wrong direction; it leaves the source rather than
attracting something.)
Gravity waves aren't directly involved in ordinary
gravitational attraction

Then I have no idea what they are.
Traveling self-contained deformations of spacetime.

That produces a nice image.

Now, just to get this right; they're at best hypothetical, right?

Yes, they are considered 'very solidly' hypothetical, so much so
that most scientists assume they are real.

(Or the tiny-mini-things that one scientist you mentioned managed to
produce - have to keep track of what's tied to what in this
conversation.)

That's a real head-scratcher. Einsteinian gravitons, if real, will,
according to the math that describes them, be so feeble that we may
never detect them directly. Yet somehow Forward managed to get his
devices to work.

any more than light photons are involved in the electrostatic
attraction between electrons and photons

Protons, right? (I don't know what to do with the 'electrostatic'
in that sentence, though.)
Whoops, I seldom use a spellchecquer. Electrons have a
'negative' charge, protons a 'positive' charge.

Yep. That's why I asked. Afaik photons is the light thing wave
particles. :)

Yep.

That produces a particular kind of deformation in the spacetime
between them that manifests as an attractive force; they tend to
'fall' together.

A completely different image than I used to have, but it's
interesting.

Electrons 'want' to fall into the nuclei of atoms just like apples
'want' to fall to Earth. Apples are too large to form quantized
orbitals though.

A scientist named Millikan used a static electric field to suspend
drops of oil that contained extra electrons against the pull of
Earth's gravity; that experiment proved that electric charge was
quantized.

Without the 'gravity waves' not connecting to anything, I can't
place or imagine something that involves them, though.
But they do 'connect to anything',

I don't mean _them_ connecting to something physically, but the
_term_ connecting to an image I have or can make. Mentally.

they are generated when _any_matter is waved around just as
photons are created when electric charges are waved around.

Ok, I can follow that. I just don't like the 'waves' bit (as they're
just depicted as lines, again). I like coherent fields, of any form
(or de-form).

I'm not visualizing the depiction you're objecting to here.

Like, take a tank with water, and a container that can leak blue
liquid. In a perfect, theoretical environment (I guess a real water
tank would have side-effects and interferences just like real space
would have), you swing the container back and forth, and whenever
it's at either of the furthest points, it blobs out a bubble of blue
that travels on. It doesn't leak circular strings of blue.

Alternately they come out all the time, but at the furthest points
currently makes most sens to my ignorant self.

That's a bit like what I imagine happens by what you describe.
(Please confirm or correct.)

Hrm. And you were objecting to some of my analogies, and wanted to
know about 'the thing in itself'.

Familiar with the old 'lines of force' imagery? Those are nothing to
do with the previous 'mesh' imagery, lines of force merely indicate
the direction of the force a test charge (remember that concept?)
would feel at a particular place within the volume the lines occupy.
The lines are not intended to mean that the force only occurs where
the lines are drawn; you are supposed to understand that you can
interpolate between them to get the force where no line is drawn.

There are _always_ electric 'lines of force' connecting any positive
and any negative electrically charged object, like say an electron and
a proton. For that matter, if you take an electron out of its nice
comfy orbital and carry it far, far away from any atom, it is fair to
say that it will still be surrounded by lines of force all pointing
away from it with spherical symmetry like the head of a dandelion (the
force gets weaker with distance but extends literally to infinity, of
course it's undetectably weak by then). Those lines indicate the
direction it would 'fall' toward a proton placed anywhere near it; IOW
straight toward the proton.

Those lines of force are specifically lines of electrostatic force,
and they form a 'field' around the electron. Protons have the same
kind of field around them (except it points the opposite way). The
space between any electron and any proton therefore is the same kind
of 'electric field', and that's all an electric field is; a volume of
space labeled with a bunch of indicated directions of the force a
charge will feel when placed in that volume. Spin a charge and you add
a sort of 'twist' to the electric field, a twist that slews the force
sorta sideways. That's what we call a 'magnetic field'.

Look at the isolated electron again with its dandelion-field.
Imagine it moving a bit to the left. The extended field has to change
to reflect the different directions it's going to be pointing in
afterward and that change can't be instantaneous; it propagates
outward away from the charge as a sort of ripple at the speed of
light. That expanding spherical ripple is composed of photons even
though overall they don't look like the typical sinewave illustration-
if you zoom in real close to the ripple while it's moving you get the
familiar sinewave image.

So there you are; moving a charge simply produces expanding ripples
in its inherent, infinite electric field.. Two charges have a mutual
field, and moving them in concert also produces expanding ripples, but
because they don't have the spherical dandelion symmetry an isolated
charge does, the ripples will have a different symmetry to them.

Gravitational fields similarly surround masses; move a mass and its
field ripples, and the ripples (gravitons) expand away also at the
speed of light. Not dots at all, more like complicated self-contained
directional induced motion fields that travel at the speed of light.

They're very feeble though, because as I said the gravitational
coupling constant is so much smaller than the electromagnetic
equivalent.

'Coupling constant' doesn't really mean anything to me. At best I
can guess that it's a number that's slapped onto the field I
mentioned further above, where gravity is most happy at (attracting
and overlapping), keeping stuff where it is (and why things don't
speed up further, when falling to the ground). But that's a wild
guess.

Think of charges as digging their fingers into the warp and weft of
spacetime and _pulling_, deforming it to produce that electric field
of force. Their mass also digs different fingers into other threads in
the weave of spacetime and _pulls_ to produce the gravitational field,
but much, much less strongly. To be exact, 10^45 times weaker.

It's like gravity can't get anywhere near the 'traction' that
electrical charge can. Nobody knows why. Yet.

Also, they affect the motion of _any_ matter they strike during
their flight, somewhat like what happens to charges that intercept
photons.

Makes sense.

Mind you this works because the waves are bending spacetime
itself.

I guess it wouldn't be a good idea to ask 'how'. (But I don't
have an image of that, because I don't know why they should.)
Asking 'how' isn't relevant,

It's what matters. The finer the details, the better the image, the
more I can do with it (and extrapolate).

it's just what they are, like traveling self-sustaining
deformations of the arrangement of water molecules are called
'water waves'. It's pointless to ask how water waves rearrange
water molecules, it's what they are.

Quite the opposite.

I might be able to use plain water waves, but as soon as I need them
to hit something, I need to know how that works. And with physics, I
have no way to just try and observe. Imagine I had never heard of
cliffs, and never taken a bath, and never seen a duck on the
river,... _all_ I know is just 'water waves', unconnected to
anything else. There's really nothing at all I could do with that.
But if someone told me how they work, I can then use that do do all
sorts of interesting things.

Then you're out of luck because at this time nobody knows 'how'
gravitational waves work. All we can do is describe their effects as
accurately as we can measure. There are theories, but since it's so
damn weak, it's really hard to separate on theory from another via
observations.

Usually you aren't allowed to get close enough to examine them,
but they're really sculpted in reverse relief;
My point was that your travelers may perceive exactly what the
Others are doing, but since their inborn and
life-experience-generated idea of 'real' and 'normal' don't apply,
how they interpret what they see will not necessarily be what's
there. That can be more than merely creepy, even fatal.

I understand what you mean.

and the bit about tossing them out of this spacetime into a
'sister' universe that is nothing like this one is not
completely implausible according to current scientific
speculation /hypotheses, if not actual theory- you can toss in
murky references to 'quantum loop gravity' and 'topological
geometrodynamics'

I'd have to understand the terms to use them.
I gave you a link to a (fairly technical, I'm afraid)
explanation of loop quantum gravity. Geometrodynamics is the
underlying idea that empty space is not a passive thing that just
sets the background for physics but is an active participant. The
geometry of space has a dynamic effect on what happens within it.

To my ignorant self, that seems kind of 'of course'. Probably
because I have no idea what you really mean. :)

The power levels involved will be humongous but the array _is_
a storage structure, so maybe a private (military) nuclear
power plant can feed it for a week before each incident.

Or some nut cult (with lots of funds from the gullible it drew)
can afford it. Or it's a science experiment like the
supercollider (that cost a ton, too, though I forgot the actual
amount which I think was mentioned on the news).
Yep, whatever it takes. I suggest you don't quote specific
numbers other than to mention that the technique is all about a
way to exceed previous maximum power _density_, not just power
levels. The power density is what ovrwhelms the local spacetime
texture so to speak.

Makes sense.

Thanks again!

You're welcome; I hope some of this sticks so that you can use it.


Mark L. Fergerson
.

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