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First off no statement in science can be proven true. It's just the nature of what science is, even Einstein knew this. In science and therefore reality as we k

First off no statement in science can be proven true. It's just the nature of what science is, even Einstein knew this. In science and therefore reality as we know it, things can only be falsified. I talked about this in this thread through other posts. Second, was general relativity falsified or are you referring to generally accepted speculation? If it was falsified, do you have a source?

jerf 3y ago
The incompleteness of both relativity and quantum mechanics as a theory of everything is actually so obvious it can be hard to see: Relativity only has mass and gravity, and no electromagnetism, etc., and QM has no gravity. Therefore, it's quite obvious neither of them are the actual Theory of Everything. They also don't agree about the nature of the universe; relativity runs on classical space time on real numbers and QM says you can't just treat space as homogeneous on all scales. They can't both be right. I'm not making some whacky fringe claim here; this is actually completely mainstream physics. It just isn't as well understood by the laymen as it ought to be. The previous paragraph is a summary and you can get into lots of nuances and details and such, but in the end the underlying fact remains that at the moment nobody knows how to put relativity and QM together. We have several theories, none proved and all with problems, and there was even a new entrant this very week. Relativity and QM are two of the best theories we've ever had in the world, in terms of the number of digits of precision they are accurate to... and in some sense that is one of the biggest problems with them. We know they don't go together as written, but to know how to weave them into something that covers both domains correctly, we either need real-world phenomena that they do not correctly predict, or the ability to do experiments in the regime where they disagree (which is why black holes are so interesting to physicists), and we're basically empty handed for both those things.

jerf 3y ago

The incompleteness of both relativity and quantum mechanics as a theory of everything is actually so obvious it can be hard to see: Relativity only has mass and gravity, and no electromagnetism, etc., and QM has no gravity. Therefore, it's quite obvious neither of them are the actual Theory of Everything. They also don't agree about the nature of the universe; relativity runs on classical space time on real numbers and QM says you can't just treat space as homogeneous on all scales. They can't both be right. I'm not making some whacky fringe claim here; this is actually completely mainstream physics. It just isn't as well understood by the laymen as it ought to be. The previous paragraph is a summary and you can get into lots of nuances and details and such, but in the end the underlying fact remains that at the moment nobody knows how to put relativity and QM together. We have several theories, none proved and all with problems, and there was even a new entrant this very week. Relativity and QM are two of the best theories we've ever had in the world, in terms of the number of digits of precision they are accurate to... and in some sense that is one of the biggest problems with them. We know they don't go together as written, but to know how to weave them into something that covers both domains correctly, we either need real-world phenomena that they do not correctly predict, or the ability to do experiments in the regime where they disagree (which is why black holes are so interesting to physicists), and we're basically empty handed for both those things.