New alternative to General Relativity ?
14 Apr 2018 15:21:54 UTC
Topic 214529
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A very elaborate and detailed article appeared on November 20, 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1088/1402-4896/aa93a8 and https://doi.org/10.1088/1402-4896/aa93a9 follow-up arXiv:1804.03520v1), which offers a new alternative to general relativity (GR), based on very different fundamental concepts, but explaining all experimental results and astronomical observations known in mid-2017 with the same impressive success as GR. A few days ago, a follow-up article appeared (arXiv:1804.03520v1 [physics.gen-ph] 6 Apr 2018), which discusses the gravitational wave observations of the binary neutron star event GW170817, with the conclusion that the observed polarization pattern seems well predicted by the new theory but NOT by GR !
I strongly encourage anyone interested in general physics to download these three articles, which are very well written, with clear introductions that can be understood without recourse to the higher mathematics background of either theory.
They are far beyond me,
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They are far beyond me, whatever they may be. But I do recall in one of the earlier cited publications that our type of experiments might be used to place bounds on the applicability of the general theory. It would be very interesting if our work could be used to help determine the correct theory, though that may be a bit much to hope for at this stage.
Thanks for the cite.
My understanding of the
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My understanding of the recent arXiv article is that IF a continuous pulsar source of gravitational waves (GW) is identified by Einstein@home from the data of the two LIGO interferometers, AND that signal can be also retrieved from the data of at least one other detector, THEN it will be possible to evaluate the polarization pattern of that GW and compare it with the different predictions of the two theories. No direct detection of continuous GW has been announced yet, but detectable GW signals from brutal events have been frequent and the number of operating interferometers will rapidly increase, so that we should soon have confirmation whether any of the proposed theories agrees with the new data.
Very interesting. The
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Very interesting. The sticking point is Postulate 4: Massive fermion-antifermion pairs are produced by the quantum of the vector field Ak (the graviton) is not an elementary particle, but it is a composite particle formed by massless antifermion pairs. With this point the whole theory stands and falls. Not only re gravitation and cosmology, but also particle physics. Unfortunately, there are no positive or negative opinions in the literature so far. If anyone knows more, please post here.