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Comment by audunw | Hacker News Reader

My pet theory for gravity / general relativity (which is probably completely wrong, but fun to think about), is that space itself is created through particle interaction. Space will thus be denser and create a gravitational effect in places with lots of matter.

That means space also has to decay. And unless you want space to become non-existent far away from matter, the rate of decay must also fall off somehow as you get further away from matter.

I wonder if you could get such a space creation/decay process to match a curve that's 1/r2 at short distances and 1/r at long distances...

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My pet theory is that let's say particles are the excitation of the field, imagine you come to a lake in a quest to understand water. The surface is field. You throw in a rock and the splashback is particle, you analyze the particle, you throw other things and analyze the other particles. Then you form a water theory based on these particles and you find out that boats shouldn't float at all.

It's because particles are exceptional things, not the normal, calm field they come from. If you base your theory on those exceptional thing it will be non representative or outright wrong.

That's why quantum physics is giving us weird results, because particles are exceptions, not the common state of the field.

I'm intrigued by this thought exercise!

If it doesn't depart too much from the analogy, what is the lake (water below the surface, under the field) and what is above the field?

Are we supposed to assume that the water below the surface is inside the field, and above the surface is outside of the field?

What is the non-exceptional form of the particle, or thing that makes up the particle? I guess this is the essence of your analogy, and your point is that we've spent so much time trying to identify this thing as a particle, we can't yet answer this question?

Or have I now dissolved the analogy by taking it too literally?

If it doesn't depart too much from the analogy, what is the lake (water below the surface, under the field) and what is above the field?

More than what it is, the question is what properties does it have. Anyway the object of interest is the surface.

What is the non-exceptional form of the particle, or thing that makes up the particle?

The surface.

The field is the "deeper truth", the particles are the second hand tidbits of information, it's like trying to understand marriage only from the jokes instead of marriage itself.

Yeah, totally get that.

Was trying to understand what was inside (water) and outside (air) the field to help me start thinking about what the field (surface) might be.

Interesting idea. Although, if particle interaction creates space, shouldnt it counteract gravity? If the Earth, full of interacting particles, is hurling space outwards, stuff around Earth should fling into infinity, not fall towards it, or what am I missing?

But aren't particles emergent property of space wave function collapse?

wave function does not have to collapse for particles to exist. Particles and wavefunctions are just different lenses for which to make sense of excitations in quantum fields

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