Comment by soon_to_be_sb
20 hours ago
>Any good scientific theory must create falsifiable hypotheses.
For any behavior inside the world, this is good.
But for the world itself and what harbor's it, asking for falsifiability is like measuring the expansion of space using a ruler that inhabits the same space.
Even science, that works in terms of cause and affect, which implies space and time, cannot be used to describe space and time itself.
Vanilla "scientists" have been trying to do that, but that is a dead end.
> But for the world itself and what harbor's it, asking for falsifiability is like measuring the expansion of space using a ruler that inhabits the same space.
Which exactly is what general relativity is centrally about and the reason why general relativity is defined in terms of intrinsic properties of the Einstein manifold describing the space of the universe. Intrinsic properties are, colloquially, indeed properties that can be measured "using a ruler that inhabits the same space".
Gauß' Theorema Egregium [1] is an early predecessor of intrinsic properties of general manifolds, and says that the curvature of a surface can indeed be "be determined entirely by measuring angles, distances and their rates of change on a surface, without reference to the particular manner in which the surface is embedded in the ambient 3-dimensional Euclidean space" ([1]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theorema_Egregium...
Also why LIGO works but Michelson-Morley failed: you can use the ruler distortion as a signal, with some caveats.
In LIGO, we detect the far away distortions propagating through our rulers and the differential effect of those waves.
But Michelson-Morley failed because the ruler distorted synchronously with the signal we tried to measure — since we mistakenly believed EM and matter were different fields.
How are general-relativistic effects relevant for the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment?
2 replies →
> measuring the expansion of space using a ruler that inhabits the same space
We do that, routinely: that’s how we do cosmology.
> We do that, routinely:
Yea, that is why we are not getting any where...
> Yea, that is why we are not getting any where...
Which alternative way of doing measurements do you propose? As far as I know, measuring intrinsic properties, i.e. "using a ruler that inhabits the same space" is with our current technology the only possible way of doing measurements.
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