• atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    Right - that’s what I’m saying. But this article seems to think that if you make a bicycle out of cars then you have a motorcycle… Unless I’m not understanding it.

    AFAIK gravity waves are ripples in actual space (mechanical waves) - not a property of “gravitons”.

    • Eufalconimorph@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 months ago

      Gravitons are the name for the quanta of the (hypothetical) quantum gravitational field. They’d be the force carriers of the gravitational force in a theory of quantum gravity, if we had one.

      Gravitational waves would still be physical waves like water waves, and they’d be composed of moving gravitons. Spacetime would likely be quantized instead of continuous; this becomes very hard to resolve since quantum mechanics needs to be reformulated to use discrete math instead of calculus, and we don’t really know how to do that (non-uniform spacetime breaks QM).

    • CadeJohnson@slrpnk.net
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      10 months ago

      maybe space is the graviton field itself(!), but maybe there is a graviton field (or is it the Higgs field?) and gravitons (and Higgs particles?) are excitations of that field; like other particles are excitations of their various postulated quantum fields