🚀 go-pugleaf

"you can't deny that the metric affects where they end up going..."
I realise that I may have been a little unfair to SOME modern
physicists. I am aware, too, that not everybody takes the "exchange of
virtual particles" bit very seriously. But I do claim that many people
think of gravitation as an "interaction". Which it is NOT; this being
the main point of GR. Now without getting too philosophical about it, I
suppose that when people say that two things "interact", they mean that
these things end up doing something that they otherwise would not. I am
pretty sure that, though they may protest otherwise, a lot of people
privately think of gravitation as just another "interaction", albeit one
with an unusually complicated classical version. But this is simply
wrong: as Aristotle said, the Earth goes around the Sun on an
approxiamtely elliptical orbit NOT because it is being "forced" to do
so, NOT because it is"interacting" with the Sun, but rather because it
is NOT interacting with the Sun. To ask, "why does the Earth go around
the Sun?" is precisely analogous to asking Newton or Galileo why a free
particle moves in a straight line at constant speed. What would you have
it do? I fear...correct me if I am mistaken... that when you say that
the "metric affects where they are going" you are thinking of the metric
tensor as a thing that lives on Minkowski space: the particle would
really like to follow the Minkowski geodesics, but the metric compels it
to go elsewhere. Would you say that the Minkowski metric "interacts"
with free particles in Minkowski space and "forces" them to move along
straight lines ["inertons"!]? No? Well, if you do not wish to say it of
Minkowski space, then don't say it of any other spacetime. "Gravity" was
all a mistake, resulting from our ignorance of spacetime curvature. How
does one quantize a mistake?