• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Scientists capture first image of a black hole!!

Thanks for the help. It looks like my question was hinting at whether gravity has a quantum effect such as light. This science above my head.
The quantum boson (a particle with integral spin 2 that obeys Bose-Einstein statistics) of the gravitational field has been posited to be the graviton. However, gravity is such a weak field that detecting a graviton as a particle is believed to be well nigh impossible. As I mentioned, attempts to derive a quantum field theory for gravitation have been unsuccessful so far.

Not sure if the following audio recording discussing the graviton is available outside the UK (if not, my apologies):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003k9ks

The recording predates the discovery of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves but it's still relevant as the Large Hadron Collider has yet to discover supersymmetric particles or to infer that gravitons probably exist by indirect deduction. (The existence of the graviton might be inferred by mass-energy seemingly going missing from collisions or by the detection of the gravitino - the supersymmetric partner of the graviton. The gravitino would be a fermion - a particle with half-integral spin 3/2 that obeys Fermi-Dirac statistics.)

People have been mislead into believing forces such as electromagnetism work by bosons (photons in the case of EM; gluons for the strong nuclear force; W and Z bosons for the weak nuclear force) simply being tossed back and forth between charged particles. It's a poor description and, if one thinks about it, makes little sense in the case of attractive forces. Here's a link to a much better explanation by John Baez:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/virtual_particles.html

As with all things quantum, it's quite mind bending.

Some physicists actually doubt that gravitons exist at all but it would seem odd for a field with a simple harmonic oscillator (gravitational waves) not to have an associated boson.
 
Last edited:
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top