• Pop sci

    The direct article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927650524001130 (Jan 2025)

    Reddit chatter about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1fbl3aw/on_the_same_origin_of_quantum_physics_and_general/

    Might be LLM bunk. If you’re consuming science news, then first: I recommend PBS Spacetime and second: if a quantum gravity was actually formulated, you’d hear about it there first. It might actually be exciting enough to make CNN.

    More to the point though: this sorta thing is too good to be true. Plenty of things are, and are still real. But even still they bear a second glance. This one doesn’t pass the sniff test.

    • No shade to OP. Something like this isn’t likey to trip BS alarms unless youre already aware of how big this should be. and it’s the kinda thing that isn’t sexy enough to grab public attention, which lends some credence.

      like, I read a headline like, “FUSION MAKES POWER NOW, FUSION POWER PLANTS EXPECTED NEXT YEAR” and I know it’s BS. But part of that is the way it promises to affect your life, and it does do in terms of Fusion, which enough people would recognize so as to make their eyeballs valuable.

      This article has neither of those really. So yeah. No shade.

      (Edit: guess the words “magical equation” is a pretty quick tip off too lol)

      •  floofloof   ( @floofloof@lemmy.ca ) OP
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        11 days ago

        I had my suspicions but I wanted to see what others made of it. The headline was obviously dodgy, but that might just have been the reporting rather than the paper. And I glanced at the paper but didn’t dig through. Since then I had a slightly more careful poke through it, and sentences like this ring some pretty loud alarms:

        The masses of electrons, muons, and tau can be explained by the different curvatures of universe, galaxy, and solar system, respectively.

        Anyway, I appreciate your comments and the comments of the person you replied to. I should have recognized this for what it was.

  •  stravanasu   ( @pglpm@lemmy.ca ) 
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    11 days ago

    It’s utter bullshit from the very start. First, it isn’t true that the Ricci curvature can be written as they do in eqn (1). Second, in eqn (2) the Einstein tensor (middle term) cannot be replaced by the Ricci tensor (right-hand term), unless the Ricci scalar (“R”) is zero, which only happens when there’s no energy. They nonchalantly do that replacement without even a hint of explanation.

    Elsevier and ScienceDirect should feel ashamed. They can go f**k themselves.