At long last, a unified theory combining gravity with the other fundamental forces—electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—is within reach. Bringing gravity into the fold has been the goal of generations of physicists, who have struggled to reconcile the incompatibility of two cornerstones of modern physics: quantum field theory and Einstein's theory of gravity.

Although the theory is promising, the duo point out that they have not yet completed its proof. The theory uses a technical procedure known as renormalization, a mathematical way of dealing with infinities that show up in the calculations.

So far Partanen and Tulkki have shown that this works up to a certain point—for so-called ‘first order’ terms—but they need to make sure the infinities can be eliminated throughout the entire calculation.

“If renormalization doesn’t work for higher order terms, you’ll get infinite results. So it’s vital to show that this renormalization continues to work,” explains Tulkki. “We still have to make a complete proof, but we believe it’s very likely we’ll succeed.”

  • Agosagror@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    6 hours ago

    I said they could be proved from assumptions. In the same fashion as mathematical proofs, they aren’t actually 100% true, they merely say that given these assumptions, the following is true. In maths the assumptions are so acutely obvious, or essentially definitions that we rarely rewrite our proof as the tautologies that they actually are

    I agree with you that the you can’t prove a physical theory, but you can TRY to axiomize it. Which is what Hilbert’s 6th problem was.

    In this way you can show that the equations you have are logically consistent - not that they are 100% true.

    The crux of this argument is defintional, not factual, you take proof in an experimental way, as such no theory can be proven. I take proof to mean proven logically consistent. As such any good theory should be 100% proven, otherwise 1 might as be 0.

    • corvus@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      47 minutes ago

      That’s not how physics works. If you are really interested in such issues read a book on foundations of physics or history of physics to see how physicists arrived at the most famous equations (Einstein,Dirac, Schroedinger or Newton), they are basically “bets” guided by physical and mathematical assumptions, but that is far from being “proved” or “derived”, there are no rigorous proofs or derivations involved. The uncertainty remains until an experiment or observation confirms it or rejects it. There’s no such a thing as “proving” a physical theory, for the simple reason that any physical theory works in a limited regime or range of validity. Newtonian gravitation and General Relativity are both valid and succesfull theories within their range of validity, but they contradict each other mathematically, in one theory gravity is a scalar field and in the other is a tensor field, so you could use the mathematics of one theory to refute the other, so it makes no sense the concept of proving a physical theory mathematically. You only try to axiomize a theory once is well established, but it’s irrelevant concerning its validity.