Gravity-Don’t Let it Get You Down

If a inkblot appears on your desk, would you think it appeared in the shape it did to convince you, that what you are “seeing is real?” To you, it may look like someone trying in their attempts to convince you of what a blackhole is?

These questions greatly disturbed Richard Feynman. His famous paper on quantizing general relativity, in which he first described his discovery of the “ghost particles” that eventually played a crucial role in understanding modern gauge field theories, begins with a discussion of the smallness of gravitational effects on subatomic scales, after which he concludes,

There’s a certain irrationality to any work on [quantum] gravitation, so it’s hard to explain why you do any of it. . . . It is therefore clear that the problem we [are] working on is not the correct problem; the correct problem is: What determines the size of gravitation?

So the fantasy of implying such things as “ghosts” go to the points of what Feynman wants to say? He then shows you this inkblot. Psychologically are you prepared?

Piglet describes the Heffalump,. in Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne.

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