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Isn't it a bit like getting to correct answer by incorrect reasoning? I was thinking that knowledge of how space curves in presence of high energies/masses and
by jagrsw 5y ago
Isn't it a bit like getting to correct answer by incorrect reasoning? I was thinking that knowledge of how space curves in presence of high energies/masses and time/length dilation concepts are necessary to come to the conclusion that light will be slowed down beyond its speed in certain circumstances?
Maybe a bit similar to e.g. Gordiano Bruno's claim that stars are similar to our sun, and there are planets around them, not on the basis of observations and data analysis but b/c of some relatively unrelated to astronomy philosophical reasoning.
Also, alchemy :) (some concepts were right)
- vanderZwan 5y ago> (some concepts were right) I would expect a lot of incorrect past models of science and its precursors to still be based on (mostly) correct data, so bad guesses were still informed bad guesses at least.
- roywiggins 5y agoThe corpuscular theory of light was one of those theories that was wrong but useful. The successor wave theory was also wrong. It may turn out that general relativity is founded on incorrect reasoning ("God does not play dice" for one), but that matters much less than it being fantastically useful. The basic idea- if light interacts with gravity, if you pack enough mass into a region you will get a dark star- is correct. It just turns out that the interaction can't be described by treating light as little particles and calculating by Newton's equations. There's been lots of wrong-but-useful theories, like phlogiston or arguably luminiferous aether: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/the-phlogiston-theory-wonderfully-wrong-but-fantastically-fruitful/ https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/the-phlogiston-theor...
- whatshisface 5y agoIt's not founded on incorrect reasoning, which would imply a logical inconsistency or error in the deductions, but it could be founded on false postulates. (A postulate is like an axiom except that it is held to be true in the real world, as opposed to being abstractly true.)
- sillysaurusx 5y agoThat's true of all science since the beginning of science.
- jetrink 5y agoI don't think the reasoning is incorrect. It went like this: 1. What if the motion of light is influenced by gravity, as suggested by Newton's theory of corpuscles? (It is, just not in the way he thought.) 2. And what if there are supermassive, super-dense objects? (Turns out there are.) 3. Then light would be unable to escape such objects. That's pretty remarkable in my opinion, and no more "wrong" in its way than Newton's theory of gravity which was also correct for the wrong reasons.
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- Moodles 5y agoI suppose it's impossible to ever really know what the true nature of reality is. We only have models which have an accuracy of x%. It's quite possible, dare I say likely, that e.g. quantum mechanics as we understand it today is just an approximate model of how things really are. I suspect that the fundamental nature of reality is probably at a scale too small to be testable anyway.
- AltoidsTin 5y ago> incorrect reasoning If you haven't already, check out the Demarcation Problem and work by Feyeraband. Physics is such a philosophically tenuous science that its theories are perpetually incorrect reasoning.
- pdabbadabba 5y agoWe should bear in mind that, if the history of science is any guide, in 250 years' time relativity will probably seem pretty badly flawed as well leading some future person to criticize our science for "getting to a correct answer by incorrect reasoning." (If we're lucky. It might just seem wrong.) So we'd do well to be charitable in crediting our predecessors' achievements.
- lapetitejort 5y agoRelativity will probably suffer the same fate as classical mechanics: true for small values of v. In relativity's case, the small value will probably be about 0.99999999c.
- pdonis 5y agoI don't know where you're getting this from. We have a relativistic quantum field theory of light itself.
- tsimionescu 5y agoGiven what we know today, it seems that it's much more likely that special relativity will remain more or less as we know it today (a good approximation for relatively flat regions of space-time and non-accelerating bodies), and that GR will be a good approximation for something like large regions of space-time and huge masses (where "large regions" may mean anything larger than a few Planck lengths, and "huge masses" may mean anything greater than a few micrograms).
- raattgift 5y ago> non-accelerating bodies Accelerated bodies in flat spacetime (Minkowski space) are well-described by special relativity. One can even calculate usefully in accelerated reference frames. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceleration_(special_relativity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceleration_(special_relativi... The Unruh effect can happen in flat spacetime, for example, and is a useful check on Hawking radiation (in a black hole curved spacetime). It's also interesting in understanding the weak equivalence principle in detail; very loosely, a small-mass object can rest quietly on the surface of a non-compact, non-spinning, spherical mass eternally, while it is at least very difficult to keep the same small-mass object accelerating uniformly in flat spacetime for even fairly short (compared to say the age of the universe, which is hardly eternal) finite times.
- zinclozenge 5y agoNot really. You can predict gravitational light bending with newtonian physics and a corpuscular approach to light. It gives you half the value of the relativistic value because the assumption is that light as a wave is unaffected by gravity due to no gravity-EM coupling.
- IncRnd 5y agoWhat was the incorrect reasoning?
- Enginerrrd 5y agoI can't say for sure on this particular case, but the usual reasoning is this: Using Newtonian Mechanics (I'll skip the derivation.) you can calculate escape velocity as follows: v = sqrt(2GM / r) r is the distance to the center of mass, G is the usual gravitational constant and M is the mass of the body. So, now we can reason about an object whose escape velocity is c. c^2 = 2GM / r and rearranging a bit: r* = 2GM / c^2. Thus, IF we packed a mass M into the radius r*, we would have a Newtonian blackhole. It turns out, quite incredibly, that this r* is in perfect agreement with the swarzchild radius from a non-rotating blackhole calculated using general relativity. Exactly why these two are in such agreement has never been explained to me other than as a coincidence. But it's quite incredible since usually r^3 terms pop up prior to the event horizon (at the same radius) which make GR make different predictions about orbits. (Such as the precession of mercury)
- mr_toad 5y agoDoesn’t GR always agree with Newtonian gravity when objects aren’t accelerating?
- Enginerrrd 5y agoFamously, not quite. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe...
- Beldin 5y agoWhat's "not accelerating" about going in an ellipse? Doesn't that imply constant (and varying) acceleration?
- soheil 5y agoQuantum Mechanics most likely is not the true explanation of what is going on either, but it sure as hell accounts for a lot of it and is why we have modern computers.