Maybe a bit of good news for a change.
From the 1950s and earlier physicists have struggled, so far almost entirely in vain, to incorporate gravity in their theories and to explain why it is so much weaker than the other four known forces. These have all long since been unified in a theory called the Standard Model.
Now a recently released paper, which can be found on the ArXiv here, is causing a big stir. I don't pretend to understand much of it, but the gist seems to be that gravity is the result of space, empty or otherwise, comprising a sea of "relic" neutrinos each of which is (in the manner of quantum theory) a bundle of spread out waves, and the overlaps between these wave bundles cause the neutrinos collectively to form a so-called superfluid.
Makes one wonder what will happen if the Universe keeps expanding and cooling, as it shows every sign of doing. Naively one would think these neutrinos will eventually decouple (becoming, in the author's words, "localized" particles) and consequently gravity will suddenly vanish, so that all matter literally falls apart.
Mind you, to put things in context, hardly a week goes by without some new physics theory being announced, and that's not including the kook theories (although this guy is clearly no kook, even if his idea turns out to contain a fatal flaw).
From the 1950s and earlier physicists have struggled, so far almost entirely in vain, to incorporate gravity in their theories and to explain why it is so much weaker than the other four known forces. These have all long since been unified in a theory called the Standard Model.
Now a recently released paper, which can be found on the ArXiv here, is causing a big stir. I don't pretend to understand much of it, but the gist seems to be that gravity is the result of space, empty or otherwise, comprising a sea of "relic" neutrinos each of which is (in the manner of quantum theory) a bundle of spread out waves, and the overlaps between these wave bundles cause the neutrinos collectively to form a so-called superfluid.
Makes one wonder what will happen if the Universe keeps expanding and cooling, as it shows every sign of doing. Naively one would think these neutrinos will eventually decouple (becoming, in the author's words, "localized" particles) and consequently gravity will suddenly vanish, so that all matter literally falls apart.
Mind you, to put things in context, hardly a week goes by without some new physics theory being announced, and that's not including the kook theories (although this guy is clearly no kook, even if his idea turns out to contain a fatal flaw).
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