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> Why didn’t God just make the universe classical and be done with it? He did. Physicists just never managed to properly grapple with the concept that classica

> Why didn’t God just make the universe classical and be done with it? He did. Physicists just never managed to properly grapple with the concept that classical mechanics involves action-at-a-distance.

simiones 5y ago
Nothing in classical mechanics can explain the double-slit experiment; nor the relativity of simultaneity. Furthermore, action-at-a-distance (non-locality) makes classical mechanics inconsistent even with itself, so it's a non-starter (it implies grandfather paradoxes).
- Eratosthenes 5y ago
  Fundamentally, orbital mechanics still relies on the same old action-at-a-distance that plagued Newton. You can look under the hood of any software that simulates orbits and see that this is the case. No time delay is assumed for gravitational interaction. Celestial bodies effect each other's orbits instantaneously (the Poynting-Robertson effect also makes this obvious). IF you assume that photons have mass and interact gravitationally (there are good reasons for making this assumption), then you can explain the double slit experiment classically via gravitational interaction.
  - simiones 5y ago
    > IF you assume that photons have mass and interact gravitationally (there are good reasons for making this assumption), then you can explain the double slit experiment classically via gravitational interaction. No, you can't. The double slit experiment has nothing to do with mass or gravity. It is well known that it happens with electrons, protons, and has even been demonstrated with some large molecules (thousands of atoms). Gravity can't explain anything about it though. And even if I can imagine some gravitation-based interactions in the case of a stream of huge numbers of particles (though not the actual quantitative explanation), the double slit experiment has been reproduced with things like 1 photon emitted every hour - over the course of a few days, the same interference pattern emerges IF the photon's path is NOT observed; but NO interference pattern emerges if the photon's path IS observed. > You can look under the hood of any software that simulates orbits and see that this is the case. No time delay is assumed for gravitational interaction. The fact that simulation software takes shortcuts to make its computations feasible is not proof that this is how the world works. Einstein's GR equations are famously intractable to solve in their base form, and approximations are strictly necessary. But given the distances and observational precision for the positions of planetary objects, I would bet the effect of gravitational waves having a finite speed is negligible for most predictions. Not to mention, we have actually measured the speed of gravity: we have detected gravity waves and they are moving at the "speed of light", or as near to that as we have been able to determine. Definitely not instantaneously. > the Poynting-Robertson effect also makes this obvious That is a General Relativity effect, which assumes that gravity is a local interaction (i.e. no action at a distance). That is precisely Robertson's contribution to the Poynting-Robertson effect, per the WIkipedia article (Poynting first understood the effect, but described it in terms of the luminiferous aether).

simiones 5y ago

Nothing in classical mechanics can explain the double-slit experiment; nor the relativity of simultaneity. Furthermore, action-at-a-distance (non-locality) makes classical mechanics inconsistent even with itself, so it's a non-starter (it implies grandfather paradoxes).

Eratosthenes 5y ago
Fundamentally, orbital mechanics still relies on the same old action-at-a-distance that plagued Newton. You can look under the hood of any software that simulates orbits and see that this is the case. No time delay is assumed for gravitational interaction. Celestial bodies effect each other's orbits instantaneously (the Poynting-Robertson effect also makes this obvious). IF you assume that photons have mass and interact gravitationally (there are good reasons for making this assumption), then you can explain the double slit experiment classically via gravitational interaction.
- simiones 5y ago
  > IF you assume that photons have mass and interact gravitationally (there are good reasons for making this assumption), then you can explain the double slit experiment classically via gravitational interaction. No, you can't. The double slit experiment has nothing to do with mass or gravity. It is well known that it happens with electrons, protons, and has even been demonstrated with some large molecules (thousands of atoms). Gravity can't explain anything about it though. And even if I can imagine some gravitation-based interactions in the case of a stream of huge numbers of particles (though not the actual quantitative explanation), the double slit experiment has been reproduced with things like 1 photon emitted every hour - over the course of a few days, the same interference pattern emerges IF the photon's path is NOT observed; but NO interference pattern emerges if the photon's path IS observed. > You can look under the hood of any software that simulates orbits and see that this is the case. No time delay is assumed for gravitational interaction. The fact that simulation software takes shortcuts to make its computations feasible is not proof that this is how the world works. Einstein's GR equations are famously intractable to solve in their base form, and approximations are strictly necessary. But given the distances and observational precision for the positions of planetary objects, I would bet the effect of gravitational waves having a finite speed is negligible for most predictions. Not to mention, we have actually measured the speed of gravity: we have detected gravity waves and they are moving at the "speed of light", or as near to that as we have been able to determine. Definitely not instantaneously. > the Poynting-Robertson effect also makes this obvious That is a General Relativity effect, which assumes that gravity is a local interaction (i.e. no action at a distance). That is precisely Robertson's contribution to the Poynting-Robertson effect, per the WIkipedia article (Poynting first understood the effect, but described it in terms of the luminiferous aether).