- cross-posted to:
- science@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- science@beehaw.org
Edit: The paper is total nonsense. Sorry for wasting people’s time.
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The math here is beyond me, but this statement from the paper seems contradictory:
The obtained equation is covariant in space–time and invariant with respect to any Planck scale. Therefore, the constants of the universe can be reduced to only two quantities: Planck length and Planck time.
Planck time is derived from the speed of light and the gravitational constant. So wouldn’t there be at least four universal constants?
What they are doing is just nonsense. You can use the four normal constants: gravitational, speed of light, plancks constant, boltzman constant, or the Planck ones, also four (time, mass, length, temperature). What they do is just rewrite the G, c and h-bar, the only ones that appear here, in their equations and it turns out just only two appear in the equations. Which two? Planck length and “energy”, where planck energy is a combination of time and mass… so it is still three! All this nonsense to try to say something of no particular interest: if you look at a very small subset of expressions you can probably redefine some constants conviniently to get rid of others.
If a constant is defined by another constant, without a variable between, wouldn’t it be fair to simplify that into a single constant? Additionally, based solely on the article, it almost sounds like they’re inverting that, saying that Planck time and Planck length determine the speed of light and gravitational constant(?).
This (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927650524001130?via%3Dihub#sec0027) appears to be the actual paper the article is talking about.
Running the title though Google and looking at the discussions around it in various corners of the Internet seems to indicate it’s utter bunk.
Yeah , on top of how ad-infested and vague the article is and on top of the discussion I’ve seen about this paper elsewhere, it looks like at least one of the authors, Adrian David Cheok, doesn’t have any physics training according to his ORCID bio or his his wikipedia page, but has dabbled in AI according to the latter.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just some AI schlock.
the lead author, srichan, appears to have co-authored a number of papers on ai for telemedicine and some medical materials over the last 12 years, so it’d be a little weird if he took a break to solve quantum physics
What’s the end game for these people? Is it hubris? Stupidity? Do they not think anyone’s gonna notice - and even so, how do you expect to fly under the radar with “solution to the unified field theory.”
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)
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.
The masses of electrons, muons, and tau can be explained by the different curvatures of universe, galaxy, and solar system, respectively.
What the actual fuck? I mean I get that it’s a bullshit paper but at least try for god’s sake.
like what, the LLM should try harder!
Nah, you’re doing the right thing: getting input when not sure. That’s the way of learning!
Only one request: add the thoughts from this answer to the OP the next time please! Would make reading it a bit easier and better framed, at least for me.
(I.e. “I’m an authority in this field, look at this exciting news!” VS “my bullshit sensors tingle but I don’t know enough. What are your thoughts?”
That’s a good suggestion, thanks.
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 metric is zero (even in flat spacetime the metric is not zero, it is the identity matrix). They nonchalantly do that replacement without even a hint of explanation.
Elsevier and ScienceDirect should feel ashamed. They can go f**k themselves.
I do agree the whole paper is bull. Equations (1) and (2) are strictly speaking wrong, but you’d see these kinds of expressions if you are talking informally about these things. (1) should be a Riemann tensor, so its mostly wrong. For (2) it is a bit more general than R=0, since you could have Einsteinian manifolds and can make that redefinition. But yeah, without explaining anything, it’s just nonsense.
Sabine Hossenfelder now has a video about this paper:
Of course! The answer all along was to just use magic!
