Understanding gravity per ToGR requires understanding something in the pure abstract without the aid of conventional intuition. Unlike the cube intuition of a 3-dimensional reality, our four dimensional reality (3 space dimensions + 1 time dimension) has no simple intuition. The 'shape' of our reality is varied and complex resulting from the the distortion of space-time by all matter.
Imagine that we are on an enclosed roller-coaster car with no windows (our inertial frame) but the car is on an incomprehensibly complex track which bends our path in ways that are beyond our comprehension by 'pushing'/redirecting the bottom of the car. We are moving in a straight line as we perceive things but are being constantly accelerated from the bottom by the curved path. Curved spacetime is the track that provides this acceleration and thus the illusion of gravity.
Given the intuitive challenge required to simply understand this concept in general terms, one might stand in awe of a mind who could correctly see past human intuition into the bizarre world that is Relativity. Same holds true in the extremely counter-intuitive world of quantum dynamics. Reality is very much an illusion. What we perceive in our normal scale is not reality ... it is a special case of a far more complex reality. We are indeed living an illusion.
I agree, but why do you say so? The grand unification (the theory of everything) is looking for an explanation of the illusion of gravity at the cosmological level (GToR) and also the illusion of the imagined 'graviton' at the quantum level. The theory will likely discover some substance (some particle of energy ... likely a boson) that explains how mass distorts spacetime.
That said, given the search for the theory of everything has been ongoing for a century, I do not expect to see this emerge in our lifetimes.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The CGP Grey video sent me down the rabbit hole...
Understanding gravity per ToGR requires understanding something in the pure abstract without the aid of conventional intuition. Unlike the cube intuition of a 3-dimensional reality, our four dimensional reality (3 space dimensions + 1 time dimension) has no simple intuition. The 'shape' of our reality is varied and complex resulting from the the distortion of space-time by all matter.
Imagine that we are on an enclosed roller-coaster car with no windows (our inertial frame) but the car is on an incomprehensibly complex track which bends our path in ways that are beyond our comprehension by 'pushing'/redirecting the bottom of the car. We are moving in a straight line as we perceive things but are being constantly accelerated from the bottom by the curved path. Curved spacetime is the track that provides this acceleration and thus the illusion of gravity.
Given the intuitive challenge required to simply understand this concept in general terms, one might stand in awe of a mind who could correctly see past human intuition into the bizarre world that is Relativity. Same holds true in the extremely counter-intuitive world of quantum dynamics. Reality is very much an illusion. What we perceive in our normal scale is not reality ... it is a special case of a far more complex reality. We are indeed living an illusion.
I guess this means that "Grand Unification" ain't gonna happen any time soon...
I agree, but why do you say so? The grand unification (the theory of everything) is looking for an explanation of the illusion of gravity at the cosmological level (GToR) and also the illusion of the imagined 'graviton' at the quantum level. The theory will likely discover some substance (some particle of energy ... likely a boson) that explains how mass distorts spacetime.
That said, given the search for the theory of everything has been ongoing for a century, I do not expect to see this emerge in our lifetimes.