On 5/30/2025 3:03 AM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Friday, May 30, 2025 at 3:13:02 AM UTC-6 Brent Meeker wrote:
On 5/29/2025 11:18 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Thursday, May 29, 2025 at 9:16:02 PM UTC-6 Brent Meeker wrote:
On 5/29/2025 5:12 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Thursday, May 29, 2025 at 3:34:34 PM UTC-6 Brent Meeker
wrote:
On 5/29/2025 6:22 AM, John Clark wrote:
I know that your next question will be why is nature
inherently lazy?My short answer is I don't know. My
slightly longer answer is I suspect that question
simply has no answer because it is a brute fact. After
all, an iterated sequence of "why" questions either
goes on forever or terminates with a brute fact. You
may not like either eventuality but one of them must be
true.
One thing that leads to confusion (and endless questions
from AG) in popular discourse is that Lagrangians and
least-action and differential equations and
Hamiltonians, etc, are /maps/ not the territory and,
depending on which map you're using, you find the
boundary "brute fact" to have different expression.
Brent
One brute fact worth mentioning, is that unless and until we
understand why gravity chooses the extremal path, we can't
say we understand it. Another point is about the clock. Test
particles have no clocks, so how do they "know", as they
traverse an extremal path, that it is in fact extremal? AG
You completely missed the point that the exact same problems
solved by finding the extremal path can also be solved by
half a dozen other methods and they are all mathematically
equivalent. So it make no sense to ask how Nature knows to
use this or that method.
Brent
Fine. Then accept the fact that you don't really understand
gravity, and with that attitude you never will. AG
Define "really understand" and give an example of something you
really understand.
Brent
For example, generally what operators are, and specifically that
Hermitian operators have real eigenvalues. AG
That's just mathematics. Mathematics can be understood because we
invent it. We understand the theory of general relativity but it's a
map of gravity, not gravity itself. To understand something in physics
generally means explaining it in terms of something more fundamental.
So string theory seemed to explain some things about gravity, e.g. why
the graviton was spin 2 and why gravity was so weak. But it has stalled
in other respects.
Brent
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