The reasons for these phenomena are obvious to any junior high school student. This is the gravitational effect that a great scientist named isaac newton told the world more than 300 years ago. However, Newton admitted that he didn't know why two objects attracted each other and how this attraction was transmitted.
So modern science has spent more than a century studying gravity, but the final result is that gravity doesn't exist at all, and everything attracts each other only because the curvature of time and space has changed. Moreover, not only does gravity not exist, but also the time and space we are familiar with every day do not exist.
Space-time does not exist? This is crazy, right?
Wait patiently, please continue reading, and let's start the cognitive journey of cutting-edge science together.
A long time ago, the ancients intuitively thought that the sky was round and the earth was square. Immortals live in the sky and mortals live on the ground. Because God is omnipotent, they can live in the sky and will not fall. The sun, the moon and the stars are just palaces where God lives. Many of us grew up in such myths and legends.
/kloc-At the beginning of the 5th century, Portuguese Magellan led a fleet from Spain and sailed all the way to the west. Three years later, it returned to the starting point of Spain. This is the first time that mankind has sailed around the world, and it is also the first time that practice has proved that the earth we live in is not flat, but a sphere.
However, there is a problem. According to the principle of symmetry, people on one side of the sphere stand on their heads and feet, and people on the other side must stand upside down.
How can people live upside down for a long time? This problem puzzled the scientific community for more than a century, until Newton proposed gravity.
Born Newton put forward the three laws of motion, gravitation and optical principle in one breath, which explained almost everything people see every day, especially gravitation, not only explained the phenomenon that objects always fall on the surface of the earth, but also explained the movement of celestial bodies in the universe. Later generations commented on Newton like this: God said that there should be light, so there was Newton!
Newtonian mechanics ruled the world for more than 200 years, until another talented scientist Einstein appeared.
At that time, Einstein was still a small clerk in the patent office, but he didn't do anything seriously, and every day his mind was full of big problems in scientific research.
Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 192 1 for putting forward the photon hypothesis and successfully explaining the photoelectric effect, but his greatest contribution to science was the theory of relativity.
First of all, the special theory of relativity denies Newton's absolute view of time and space, and the principle of constant speed of light subverts Newtonian mechanics. However, the special theory of relativity leaves a problem, that is, the contradiction between the insurmountable speed of light and the over-distance propagation of gravity.
Einstein thought that the speed of any object could not exceed the speed of light, but gravity worked instantly. Of course he won't doubt that there is something wrong with his theory, so the problem must be Newton's gravity.
So it took Einstein ten years to put forward a more powerful general theory of relativity. In general relativity, gravity doesn't exist at all. Objects fall on the earth because the mass or energy of the earth bends the space around them. Objects tend to move according to the shortest distance in space, and curved space is the shortest distance.
It is difficult for us to imagine what a three-dimensional space curve looks like, but we can use a two-dimensional plane for analogy.
For example, if you put a shot on a spring bed, the weight of the shot itself can bend the spring bed and make it droop. At this time, if you put a glass ball on the spring bed, the glass ball will roll down the depression. If you give the glass ball a lateral velocity, it will move in a circle around the depression. Isn't this the phenomenon of falling objects and shifting stars that we usually observe?
Simply put, gravity is not transmitted in space, and the gravitational field itself is space.
The general theory of relativity explains the phenomenon of gravity concisely and elegantly, and it is proved to be correct in various subsequent experiments, the most famous of which is the precession of mercury.
Mercury is the closest planet to the sun in the solar system. According to Newton's gravity, its orbit should be a closed ellipse.
However, what is actually observed is that Mercury's perihelion is close to the sun every turn. Although the precession amplitude is small, it has reached an observable level after a century of accumulation. This phenomenon does not conform to the calculation result of Newton's gravitational formula, but it completely conforms to Einstein's gravitational field equation.
The general theory of relativity was gradually accepted by people, but its founder Einstein began to be unhappy because he tried to unify the gravitational field and electromagnetic field, but failed countless times.
We know that there is a real electromagnetic field in the invisible space. Electromagnetic fields transmit energy in the form of electromagnetic waves. The smallest energy packet is what we often call a photon. This phenomenon was first discovered by Einstein.
In this case, is the gravitational field similar to electromagnetic field, with gravitational waves and minimum quantum field?
Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, but he could not imagine the smallest gravitational quantum field. Space should be continuous. How can there be quantum space? And it can't be deduced from the formula of gravitational field.
After Einstein, with the development of quantum mechanics, a young scientist named Marwit solved this problem.
We use a thinking experiment to explain Marwit's discovery. Suppose we are going to observe a very small space now, that is, the gravitational field, because the gravitational field is invisible. For convenience, we put a microscopic particle in it as a marker.
However, according to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, microscopic particles can't stay at a certain point in space for a long time, but will escape at any time, and the smaller the space, the greater the momentum change of particles and the greater the energy they carry.
Infinitely small space, infinite energy, is it familiar?
Yes, particles in an infinitely small area will make space collapse into a black hole. Since the emergence of black holes, particles and that space will disappear, and space will not exist.
This means that infinitesimal space does not exist, and space, like electromagnetic field, has its own quantum scale. Substituting into the formula, the length of quantum space is 10 (-33) cm, also called Planck length.
Nothing can enter the space below Planck's length because it doesn't exist.
Since there is no infinitesimal space, it means that the space is not continuous. A large area we usually see is composed of countless Planck-length quantum spaces at the microscopic level.
You can simply think of it as a net made of beads with a diameter of 10 (-33) cm. These nets crisscross like magnetic lines, forming our space, in which each of us lives.
Gravitational effect is the result of the interaction between matter and bead net, similar to the movement of electrons in electromagnetic field, and the propagation of gravity is transmitted through beads.
Note here that the space mentioned in the article is essentially time and space, and it is the combination of space and time and space. This general theory of relativity has been proved.
Therefore, the individual time and space we perceive daily does not exist in the micro-world, which is only the result of our rough perception of the world. This is similar to what you see with the naked eye is a smooth marble plane, but when you look at it with a microscope, the smooth surface immediately becomes a gully uplift.
Gravity doesn't exist either. There are only countless quantum fields in which we live. That is what we usually call time and space, but it is quite different from what we thought before. The essence of the world is the fluctuation and interaction of various quantum fields, nothing else.
Ok, that's all for today's sharing. See you next time!