[rdtsc]

Right but he was also hit on head by an apple according to the myth. So there place for analogies like that. Also I thought your comment seemed a bit too disparaging. GP had an idea they wanted to share. There is probably a nicer way of saying it won't work than "why don't you go to the library and learn the maths before speaking up..."

[pif]

> There is probably a nicer way of saying it won't work ...

The question is not why it doesn't work. The real issue is why someone who worked for years in order to become expert on a certain field should spend some of his time to consider a theory coming out of absolutely nothing. There may be a nicer way to say this; please help me find it ;-)

[SomeStupidPoint]

There isn't one because it doesn't need to be said.

It's also not true: the theory came out of questioning what would happen if you replaced one set of equations in the model with another, and whether that might make a more interesting (or accurate) model. It's simply expressed in informal language, but the formal (and completely sensible translation) is straightforward to anyone with the necessary background.

As for why experts would care, anywhere from dinner conversation (as is likely to be the case for myself; not a physics expert, but my company is, and Im curious of the answer) to it strikes a cord related to their work by giving them a new analogy, allowing them to bring more expertise to bear on the project.

For my professional work, some of the biggest influences have been questions by amateurs (and the subsequent trying to address them).

If it were actually such a useless idea, you'd have spent less time just refuting it than with your unnecessarily negative posts. Instead, you were negative for no clear reason (though, several uncharitable reasons might be inferred).

Please refrain from making such negative posts here. They make the community worse.

[mannykannot]

>...but the formal (and completely sensible translation) is straightforward to anyone with the necessary background.

Really?

[SomeStupidPoint]

The base question, as I understood it, was if regions of curvature caused by mass cause regions of opposite curvature between them (rather than no curvature).

Mass effectively creates positive curvature in a region, so the question is if that "tugs" and create regions of negative curvature to keep the "total" curvature 0, in some sense. (There's actually several models here, depending on how you want to distribute the negative curvature.)

This isn't totally absurd on the face of it, for any reason I can think of, and brings up an interesting curvature conservation law.

The next question is if this model (curvature conservation) explains things we see, is contradicted by facts, etc. In parallel (though usually after) mechanisms by which the tugging would happen are proposed.

[scotty79]

Because it's fun to pinpoint what exactly is wrong with some superficially plausible idea.

I can uderstand that it gets very old very fast for some people but there are physicists who like educating laymen by putting themselves in their shoes and pinpointing exact spot where they believe something that actually is not true.