Why Einstein must be wrong: In search of the theory of gravity
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Monday, September 25, 2023
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Einstein’s theory of gravity — general relativity — has been very successful for more than a century.
Key Points:
- Einstein’s theory of gravity — general relativity — has been very successful for more than a century.
- This is not surprising: the theory predicts its own failure at spacetime singularities inside black holes — and the Big Bang itself.
Deviations and quantum mechanics
- These signal that Einstein’s theory is failing there and must be replaced with a more fundamental one.
- Naively, spacetime singularities should be resolved by quantum mechanics, which apply at very small scales.
- This is enough to understand that a theory that embraces both general relativity and quantum physics should be free of such pathologies.
- However, all attempts to blend general relativity and quantum physics necessarily introduce deviations from Einstein’s theory.
Cosmology matters
- A century of research has given us the standard model of cosmology known as the Λ-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model.
- Here, Λ stands for either Einstein’s famous cosmological constant or a mysterious dark energy with similar properties.
- Dark energy was introduced ad hoc by astronomers to explain the acceleration of the cosmic expansion.
- Despite fitting cosmological data extremely well until recently, the ΛCDM model is spectacularly incomplete and unsatisfactory from the theoretical point of view.
Alternatives to Einstein’s theory
- That we are observing the first deviations from general relativity while the mysterious dark energy simply does not exist?
- This idea, first proposed by researchers at the University of Naples, has gained tremendous popularity while the contending dark energy camp remains vigorous.
- A very popular class of alternatives is the so-called scalar-tensor gravity.
The current situation
- Theorists have spent the last decade extracting physical consequences from these theories.
- The recent detections of gravitational waves have provided a way to constrain the physical class of modifications of Einstein gravity allowed.