There's a huge amount of stories of every sort in science, as in everything else, which are bullshit or probably bullshit. Like I said, lots of people say there was a consensus science was complete, but always ones who didn't think so themselves, I've never seen (though I'm sure there are some) any writings form respected scientists of that era saying "Yep, science is wrapped up or nearly so"

View original postThat was my point: Paradoxes tend to be hazy and troublesome, but their resolutions are often (and understandably) revolutionary. It seems save to say that resolving the contradictions between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics will be no less earthshattering than resolving the contradictions between the theory of light-as-wave and light-as-particle. Hopefuly we can come up with something a bit more precise and satisfying than "both."

I actually doubt it will be that earthshaking, it would be nice if it was but Olber's Paradox, as mentioned, was not very earthshattering in its resolution. I can name a couple dozen other big ones that were resolved as near footnotes. Duality itself, "It's both", doesn't really bug me anyway, it just is, same as opposite particles repelling, and anti-particle annihilating, we know how, why is probably not something we'll get to find out in the foreseeable future.

View original postYeah, I saw that; that is, um, a lot of Greek. I am enough of a layman that saying something is "is Rindler in terms of tau=t/4M and rho=2u" tells me very little. I can see how we end up with an equation where T is equal to a formula with M in the denominator, but that does not explain the mechanics in operation. It only relates to temperature (i.e. elctromagnetic radiation) though, so the same relationship would not necessarily follow for some kind of stimulated graviton emission, which one would expect to be proportional to mass to at least some degree. It was just a spur of the moment notion though, spitballing; I am certainly not married to it, but am curious about the nuts and bolts (even if I may not have the math to follow them.)

Unfortunately there are a lot of things in physics that require a lot of math to understand. I try to explain without it when I can, I'll even fudge reality a bit to fit a decent analogy, but there's not an obvious one to me for this that wouldn't be 'too wrong' to offer. From a practical standpoint just assume larger black holes are cooler because they have considerably more volume increase then mass increases, and emit less light because of that, same as a blackbody. Fill two objects, one twice the size of the other, with a cup of boiling water and dump them into the void and the bigger one will give off less background radiation. Same basic concept but the math is different, for instance you've got redshift of light as a huge factor for something outside a black hole's event horizon but still very under its gravitational influence.

View original postI was not thinking of them being blocked so much as the possibility dissolution of a (relatively) larger object (not necessarily by the black holes action) might generate gravitons the same way pair production yields electrons/positrons and the like: It is not that photons are COMPOSED of either or both, but the energy lost cannot truly be "lost" and is sufficient to produce the pair, so it goes there. Although, when I think about it that way (i.e. in quantum and thermodynamic terms) it amounts to indirectly positing antigravity, and since that seems literal science "fiction" I do not want to go there.

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View original postThe whole concept of gravitons perplexes me, since I always took it for granted all matter exerts gravity: Does that include gravitons themselves? If so, what is the medium? Obviously not a graviton, unless it is self propagating like I have suggested photons may be. Not to mention the fact gravitons are every bit as necessary and hypothetical as the Higgs boson is (or was,) but practically impossible to detect with the LHC or anything else. They seem far more deserving of the "God particle" title, especially since the Higgs was only the Standard Models last unverified particle because the Standard Model deliberately excludes gravity from consideration. It is a bit like a cartographer declaring, "I have mapped the entire universe," on the grounds of defining everything outside the Solar system as "not part of the universe."

View original postGravitons perplex everyone, I wouldn't worry over it much. We don't know if they exert gravity, photons do since electrical fields can, anything containing energy probably does but gravitons may be an exception.

Since the SM doesn't include Dark Matter particles at all I'm not exactly worrying about the gravitons absence making the model not 100% complete and proven.

I'm sorry I'm still not clear what you're trying to say here, as I said any system is almost bound to have a gradient (net direction of force that is non-zero after almost everything cancels out), it doesn't matter for our purposes, it's minimal, and in an infinite universe it just average out anyway but even if it didn't, remember that a particle flying away form us redshifts and gets dimmer, and toward us blue shifts and gets brighter, kinetic energy still contributes to an objects brightness.

If you're asking if a net outward motion would decrease the brightness then yeah, and if it were sufficient enough we'd have a dark sky... that's the point, everything has a major outward motion from us, expanding Universe, no paradox.

In a heat-dead universe all energy is kinetic, its just all random with no pockets of greater or lesser to work with. That's entropy.

Very Zen. Also kinda meaningless, which is typical of such I suppose. Like I said, I don't know if there are a finite number of questions or if they are all solvable, I've never seen any evidence indicating that was or wasn't so, I know the questions we currently have and I'd like them answered if they can be, some may spawn more questions, some may not, I worry about those if and when they appear because otherwise it amounts, IMO, to a sort of fatalism.