Energy Is Not Conserved

I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog, which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom interferometry.

But I’m unable to get past this part of the blog post:

The notion of dark energy is peculiar, even by cosmological standards.

Cosmologists have foisted the idea upon us to explain the apparent accelerating expansion of the Universe. They say that this acceleration is caused by energy that fills space at a density of 10-10 joules per cubic metre.

What’s strange about this idea is that as space expands, so too does the amount of energy. If you’ve spotted the flaw in this argument, you’re not alone. Forgetting the law of conservation of energy is no small oversight.

I like to think that, if I were not a professional cosmologist, I would still find it hard to believe that hundreds of cosmologists around the world have latched on to an idea that violates a bedrock principle of physics, simply because they “forgot” it. If the idea of dark energy were in conflict with some other much more fundamental principle, I suspect the theory would be a lot less popular.

But many people have just this reaction. It’s clear that cosmologists have not done a very good job of spreading the word about something that’s been well-understood since at least the 1920’s: energy is not conserved in general relativity. (With caveats to be explained below.)

The point is pretty simple: back when you thought energy was conserved, there was a reason why you thought that, namely time-translation invariance. A fancy way of saying “the background on which particles and forces evolve, as well as the dynamical rules governing their motions, are fixed, not changing with time.” But in general relativity that’s simply no longer true. Einstein tells us that space and time are dynamical, and in particular that they can evolve with time. When the space through which particles move is changing, the total energy of those particles is not conserved.

It’s not that all hell has broken loose; it’s just that we’re considering a more general context than was necessary under Newtonian rules. There is still a single important equation, which is indeed often called “energy-momentum conservation.” It looks like this:

$\nabla_\mu T^{\mu\nu} = 0,.$

The details aren’t important, but the meaning of this equation is straightforward enough: energy and momentum evolve in a precisely specified way in response to the behavior of spacetime around them. If that spacetime is standing completely still, the total energy is constant; if it’s evolving, the energy changes in a completely unambiguous way.

In the case of dark energy, that evolution is pretty simple: the density of vacuum energy in empty space is absolute constant, even as the volume of a region of space (comoving along with galaxies and other particles) grows as the universe expands. So the total energy, density times volume, goes up.

This bothers some people, but it’s nothing newfangled that has been pushed in our face by the idea of dark energy. It’s just as true for “radiation” — particles like photons that move at or near the speed of light. The thing about photons is that they redshift, losing energy as space expands. If we keep track of a certain fixed number of photons, the number stays constant while the energy per photon decreases, so the total energy decreases. A decrease in energy is just as much a “violation of energy conservation” as an increase in energy, but it doesn’t seem to bother people as much. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how bothersome it is, of course — it’s a crystal-clear prediction of general relativity.

And one that has been experimentally verified! The success of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis depends on the fact that we understand how fast the universe was expanding in the first three minutes, which in turn depends on how fast the energy density is changing. And that energy density is almost all radiation, so the fact that energy is not conserved in an expanding universe is absolutely central to getting the predictions of primordial nucleosynthesis correct. (Some of us have even explored the very tight constraints on other possibilities.)

Having said all that, it would be irresponsible of me not to mention that plenty of experts in cosmology or GR would not put it in these terms. We all agree on the science; there are just divergent views on what words to attach to the science. In particular, a lot of folks would want to say “energy is conserved in general relativity, it’s just that you have to include the energy of the gravitational field along with the energy of matter and radiation and so on.” Which seems pretty sensible at face value.

There’s nothing incorrect about that way of thinking about it; it’s a choice that one can make or not, as long as you’re clear on what your definitions are. I personally think it’s better to forget about the so-called “energy of the gravitational field” and just admit that energy is not conserved, for two reasons.

First, unlike with ordinary matter fields, there is no such thing as the density of gravitational energy. The thing you would like to define as the energy associated with the curvature of spacetime is not uniquely defined at every point in space. So the best you can rigorously do is define the energy of the whole universe all at once, rather than talking about the energy of each separate piece. (You can sometimes talk approximately about the energy of different pieces, by imagining that they are isolated from the rest of the universe.) Even if you can define such a quantity, it’s much less useful than the notion of energy we have for matter fields.

The second reason is that the entire point of this exercise is to explain what’s going on in GR to people who aren’t familiar with the mathematical details of the theory. All of the experts agree on what’s happening; this is an issue of translation, not of physics. And in my experience, saying “there’s energy in the gravitational field, but it’s negative, so it exactly cancels the energy you think is being gained in the matter fields” does not actually increase anyone’s understanding — it just quiets them down. Whereas if you say “in general relativity spacetime can give energy to matter, or absorb it from matter, so that the total energy simply isn’t conserved,” they might be surprised but I think most people do actually gain some understanding thereby.

Energy isn’t conserved; it changes because spacetime does. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

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56 Responses to Energy Is Not Conserved

1. Jolyon Bloomfield says:

Hmm, interesting point. Is it the mark of a physicist that I’ve never actually worried about the energy conservation implications of a cosmological constant?

Like or Dislike: 2  1

2. Robert says:

A beautiful, clear explanation. One might add that every GPS receiver assumes this particular form of energy non-conservation by including relativistic corrections to the photon energy (=frequency) it receives when it tells us how far we are from the nearest Starbucks.

Like or Dislike: 0  1

3. Douglas says:

I applaud your description of a thorny problem. In my opinion, it is those physicists who attempt not to dilute their content with evasive language but instead illuminate its difficulties with wisely chosen analogies that are the best communicators. It is for this reason that I believe Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” has endured to inspire new physicists to this day: he openly admits the weirdness of physics, and does his best to give a glimpse into its nature. Apart from selecting which details he pursues, he pulls no punches.

However, I do feel like you stumble over your words quite a bit here. For instance, as a non-GR physicist, I have no idea what the distinction is between “there’s energy in the gravitational field, but it’s negative, so it exactly cancels the energy you think is being gained in the matter fields” and “spacetime can give energy to matter, or absorb it from matter, so that the total energy simply isn’t conserved”. What is the difference between a gravitational field and an “evolving” spacetime? Where does the energy go that it absorbs or releases?

These phrases are confusing because it sounds like we’re sweeping energy under a rug. Would it be better to say “There is a clear relationship that transmutes energy into momentum, just as space transmutes into time, under the laws of general relativity”? This is what I assume you were getting at with your “energy-momentum conservation equation”. But as someone who has never studied GR, I’m grasping at straws here.

Like or Dislike: 1  1

4. Bjoern says:

Nice explanation, Sean.

For those interested in the math behind that, you can find a good article by John Baez here:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/energy_gr.html

Like or Dislike: 3  0

5. TimG says:

Hi, Sean. Would it be accurate to say that energy is conserved locally, but not globally? That is, in a fixed volume the energy is conserved (in the sense that any energy gained or lost by the volume is equal to what we see passing through its walls), but because the total volume of the universe is increasing, the total energy is not conserved. Or does GR violate even this idea of local energy conservation?

Like or Dislike: 1  0

6. Ken says:

Is it just me or is the picture posted above broken?
The picture follows this paragraph:

“It’s not that all hell has broken loose; it’s just that we’re considering a more general context than was necessary under Newtonian rules. There is still a single important equation, which is indeed often called “energy-momentum conservation.” It looks like this:”

-ken

Like or Dislike: 0  0

7. Sean says:

Ken– Not sure what’s going on, the image looks fine to me.

TimG– No, even that kind of energy conservation is not true. The energy lost or gained is not equal to the flux through the walls.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

8. Arun says:

The thing you would like to define as the energy associated with the curvature of spacetime is not uniquely defined at every point in space. So the best you can rigorously do is define the energy of the whole universe all at once, rather than talking about the energy of each separate piece. (You can sometimes talk approximately about the energy of different pieces, by imagining that they are isolated from the rest of the universe.) Even if you can define such a quantity, it’s much less useful than the notion of energy we have for matter fields.

How does one talk about gravitational waves interacting with a gravitational wave detector and how the former imparts energy to the latter if one cannot talk rigorously about the “energy of the gravitational field”?

Like or Dislike: 1  0

9. Jason R says:

Hmm. this might have some interesting implications for the religious Kalam Cosmological argument. They like to throw around the word ‘conservation’ and that matter can’t be created or destroyed.

Nice article!!

Like or Dislike: 0  0

10. Meredith says:

Lovely explanation. Photons losing energy as they redshift bothered me during a recent graduate cosmology course, and the professor was kind enough to dig up a sentence stating simply that energy is not conserved on a cosmological scale. It still bothered me, but I have since taken a GR course, so your mention of “energy-momentum conservation” makes me much happier. Thanks!

Like or Dislike: 0  0

11. Sean says:

Arun– You can talk about the energy lost by a binary system by treating it as isolated from the rest of the universe, but it’s necessarily an approximation. For detecting gravitational waves there is no problem, since you should be talking about observable things (like the displacement in light waves as measured by an interferometer) anyway.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

12. miller says:

I agree that this is an issue of translation, not of physics, but the conclusion you draw after that seems off.

“in general relativity spacetime can give energy to matter, or absorb it from matter, so that the total energy simply isn’t conserved,”

For instance, this strikes me as a non sequitur. If spacetime is giving and absorbing energy from matter, it sounds like energy is just moving from one place to another. And then you tell me that this means energy is not conserved. Sure, this will provoke surprised reactions, but that’s because what you said makes little logical sense.

If I were a lay person, my reaction would be, “Physics is hard and makes my brain hurt!” As a physics student, I just think the professor is BSing me because in his/her professional opinion, I do not have the required background to understand what’s really going on. I suspect that perpetual motion machines remain impossible.

Like or Dislike: 2  0

13. Cody says:

I have not yet taken a course on GR, but I am under the impression that coordinate transformations from one place to another in GR are path-dependent?

Assuming that is true, is that why, “…the energy associated with the curvature of spacetime is not uniquely defined at every point in space.”?

Like or Dislike: 0  1

14. KiwiDamien says:

@Miller:

It isn’t quite a non-sequitur. It is true that spacetime interacts with matter, and that the energy-momentum tensor changes non-trivially in a gravitational field. So you can certainly think of the spacetime as giving energy to or taking it from matter. The point is that it is not so easy to define the energy of the spacetime, and without doing so there is missing or excess energy in the matter sector.

It is logically consistent to think this way: energy conservation is not a property of any set of (mathematically consistent) dynamics. It arises often in physics because it is associated with a symmetry: that the background in which we are working is time-independent. I can give you a time varying potential in quantum mechanics and you will also see energy non-conservation. Of course, in that case, we resort to “physical reasoning” (i.e. our faith in the conservation of energy) to insist that we have ignored degrees of freedom associated with the lab / experiment / etc needed to set up the potential in the first place, and assure ourselves if we did include everything energy would still be conserved. But the fact that we can keep this assurance in the back of our minds without explicitly entering it into our calculations is sufficient to show that there is nothing *logically* inconsistent about defining an energy which is not conserved.

(A simpler example may be interactions with a heat bath in thermo, but there we often define our ensemble in terms of energy conservation so it is not as good as it first appears.)

In general relativity, in the absence of a timelike Killing field we simply have an evolving background. We can use our local time coordinate to define an energy, but just like the time evolving potential in a “series-of-evolving spatial slices” (or more generally a non-stationary spacetime) but we don’t have an assurance that the quantity we define will be conserved.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

15. Cusp says:

I concur. Energy is not conserved. Harrison had a nice paper on mining energy from expanding space-time

Like or Dislike: 0  0

16. Reginald Selkirk says:

Just two days ago, a preacher was telling me that scientists had proven something cannot come from nothing, and therefore God exists.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

17. Kmeson says:

What are the relative magnitudes of the energy gained due to a cosmological constant + expansion and the energy lost due to the red shift of non decaying particles propagating through space?

Like or Dislike: 0  0

18. Aaron Sheldon says:

That sentence does raise one interesting question: The Bianchi identities are true for any smooth manifold physically realizable or not it, so how does one determine what are the criteria that constrain the stress-energy?

No physicist would ever propose that we live on a 4-sphere, yet it has positive constant stress-energy, that is inversely proportional to the radius. So what gives?

Like or Dislike: 0  0

19. Gavin Polhemus says:

This may be just another translation, but I like it. The conservation of energy equation is the first law of thermodynamics:

dE = dW + dQ

dE is the change in energy, dW is the work done on the system, and dQ is the heat absorbed by the system. (This equation is good locally or globally.)

The Universe isn’t gaining or losing heat, but there is work being done by the expansion of space. Using for formula for work, dW = -P dV, where P is the pressure and dV is the change in volume, we can find the change in energy.

dE = -P dV

In our expanding universe dV is positive. Photons have positive pressure. A universe which is mostly photons (as ours was at early times) loses energy as it expands. Dark energy has a negative pressure, like a stretched spring. A universe which is mostly dark energy (as ours is today) actually gains energy as it expands. The energy doesn’t come from somewhere else, it is just an increase in energy.

It is believed that inflation was driven by a huge negative pressure which produced heaps of energy, and therefore matter, from this very process.

Jason R: Yes. Have fun trying to explain it to someone who believes the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Like or Dislike: 1  0

20. miller says:

@Kiwidamien
Well, of course it’s not actually a non sequitur. But look how long it took you to explain it! If we are trying to choose the explanation which is most effective at reaching popular audiences, I’m not convinced that this is the best one.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

21. marc says:

@Gavin–I like that explanation. When I try to explain negative pressure, I tell students to imagine dark energy in a piston (with nothing on the outside). For a regular gas, the pressure inside is positive, outside is zero, so the piston will expand. For dark energy, the energy DENSITY is constant, so if the piston expanded, the volume would go up and so the total energy would increase. Thus, work has to be done to pull the piston out–this is suction, or negative pressure. Of course dE = -p dV makes it clear that if the energy density, i.e. dE/dV, is a constant, the pressure is negative…

Like or Dislike: 0  0

22. Iolaum says:

@Gavin Polhemus – good thinking, really liked reading that post.

Regarding the topic of the post a question discussed on my university forums comes to mind.

[i]What is energy?[/i]

We didn’t reach any conclusion discussing it (internet forums have a way of getting derailed …) though some interesting arguments were made. Without wanting to astray this discussion I ll say that as I understand it, conservation is a defining characteristic of energy. (For example) You write down a Lagrangian that describes all the interactions+particles of a system and when you examine what remains conserved from time translation you find what you can call energy in the said system.

From the little I know, this cannot be easily done in GR (if it can be done at all?).

It was enlightening to read the blog-post but I wasn’t really shocked to read that energy is not conserved. I think that it’s only that we haven’t been able to identify correctly what to call energy yet. For example consider the example of a particle moving through empty spacetime. The time component of it’s conjugate momentum we identify as its energy (a well known result from special relativity). If we assign a charge to this particle and a electromagnetic field present then (from it’s corresponding Lagrangian) the conjugate momentum changes and therefore what one now calls energy of the particle is different.

I think this is the case, regarding the expanding/accelerating universe as well, we have not identified yet what it is that we should call energy.

P.S. If I said something really dump in there, be kind with me. As we say in Greece:
Sciolism is worse than ignorance.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

23. Excellent post! ” When the space through which particles move is changing, the total energy of those particles is not conserved.”

Exactly.

What a pity then that you had to equivocate:

“We all agree on the science; there are just divergent views on what words to attach to the science. In particular, a lot of folks would want to say “energy is conserved in general relativity, it’s just that you have to include the energy of the gravitational field along with the energy of matter and radiation and so on.””

Sorry, but it’s very obvious from your post that these folks are just wrong. We may agree on the numbers but numbers are not understanding; and these folks are getting correct numbers by means of wrong physics. Better to say so than to throw them such sops, which will only encourage them to continue in their error.

Arun asks: “How does one talk about gravitational waves interacting with a gravitational wave detector and how the former imparts energy to the latter if one cannot talk rigorously about the “energy of the gravitational field”?”

Good question. To answer it, you have to remember that the word “energy” has two different meanings: [1] a name for a convenient mathematical abstraction, eg “kinetic energy” and [2] the stuff out of which the universe is made. In GR one can continue to use “energy” in sense 1 to do the calculations leading to predictions as to what gravitational wave detectors should see, while at the same time completely abandoning the idea that spacetime has “energy” in sense 2. One has also to renounce all attempts to give a detailed local account of how energy2 gets transferred from the binary pulsar to the detector. This kind of renunciation is familiar to you from quantum mechanics.

By the way, when talking about this question in connection with cosmology it is useful to bear in mind that most cosmological models are perfectly homogeneous and isotropic, ie everything is exactly the same everywhere and in all directions at a given time. Hence there can be no question of any “work” being done by the “gravitational field”: it is “pulling” equally hard in all directions.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

24. Aaron Sheldon says:

Actually you can define work in an isotropic space because you can define the differential volume element through the Jacobian of the metric, the difficulty is in correctly defining the energy differential in terms of the stress-energy.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

25. KiwiDamien says:

@Gavin (19):
I like this explanation for calculational purposes (i.e. I use it as a mnemonic to myself to write down the evolution of a type of matter given the equation of state). The problem with it as a conceptual device is that in
dE = dQ + dW = 0 – P dV
the “P” in this equation is really the pressure of the environment. Normally in stat mech we don’t distinguish because we are doing quasi-static processes in which the pressures are almost the same inside and out to ensure that the expansion is slow. In the opposite extreme we have a free expansion of a gas into vacuum — which involves no transfer of energy at all (how could it?). We can have a gas at a high pressure P and energy E in a small volume V, and have it expand into a vacuum by opening a door into a larger volume V’ at a smaller pressure P’ but at the same energy. This is because in the vacuum P = 0 and we don’t (can’t!) do any work on the vacuum.

So for the dE = -P dV thing to make sense you would have to imagine the universe doing work embedded in an external environment at pressure P = P_inside universe!

Like or Dislike: 0  0

26. Shantanu says:

Sean any comments about 1002.3966? Would be interested to hear what you and others think
Thanks

Like or Dislike: 0  0

27. Gavin Polhemus says:

KiwiDamien (25): P is the pressure at the boundary, which is always the same due to Newton’s Second Law. (In this case, the force per tiny area that the system exerts on its surroundings is equal and opposite to the force per tiny area that the surroundings exert on the the system.) In the case or a gas expanding into a vacuum, the pressure at the boundary is zero, so no work.

Although it works nicely for the expanding-into-a-vacuum example, it doesn’t make sense to say that P is the pressure of the environment in general, because the distinction between the system and the environment is a matter of choice.

Take, for example, a box of volume 2V divided into two equal parts by a removable partition. If one half is filled with gas at pressure P and the other half is vacuum, we can use your method. However, what if there is gas on both sides, which different pressures P1 > P2. Now we remove the partition. Gas 1 expands against an environmental pressure P2, so you would calculate that it is initially doing work, dW1 = -P2 dV. Meanwhile, gas 2 is being compressed by an environmental pressure P1, and therefore receiving work dW2 = -P1 dV. So work being done on gas 2 is greater than the work being done by gas 1! That is not right.

The correct way to deal with this situation is to look at the box as a whole The whole box doesn’t change volume at all. So no matter what sort of horrible, non-quasi-static event happens inside the box, the total work must be zero. In the case of a single gas that means its energy stays constant. In the case of the two different pressures, the gas will find a new pressure with the same total energy as the two gasses had before the partition was removed.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

28. kiwidamien says:

Hi Gavin (27)

Thanks for the two box example — you are right and I had not carefully considered that before. I suppose the real moral of the story should be that I can only equate (nonparitial)W = -P dV for quasi-static processes.

I disagree that the pressure P at the boundary must be the same in both cases. If we stipulate everything is quasistatic then forces must indeed (quasi-)balance to maintain (quasi-)staticity, but in both the free expansion and mixed expansion cases horribly far from equilibruim there is a pressure differential at the boundary that drives the change. In the free expansion case there is a gas of pressure P released onto a P=0 vacuum, in the two gas case there is an interface with P1 meeting P2 at least initially.

So I think the objection that I have to using this explanation still stands — namely that I should not be considering my universe as embedded in a medium of pressure P that is equal to the current FRW pressure.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

29. Gavin Polhemus says:

Kiwidamien: Probably we should only use E = -P dV on finite regions, not the whole universe. Then we are talking about the change in energy of that region, and the change in its volume. That removes any need to worry about something beyond the universe. The pressure inside the region is the FRW pressure, and outside is just more of the universe at the FRW pressure. Everybody’s happy.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

30. “A decrease in energy is just as much a “violation of energy conservation” as an increase in energy, but it doesn’t seem to bother people as much.”

I think this is because most people don’t think about this, whereas dark energy (we really should get back to Sean’s “smooth tension” as a much better term) is something which is in the news now. Also, when photons lose energy in the expanding universe, many assume (incorrectly) that this is because they do work in the expansion. (The universe is not a steam engine!)

As always, my suggestion to anyone who is unclear on the basis ideas behind cosmology should consult Edward Harrison’s wonderful textbook. He spends a chapter on this, a chapter on why the cosmological redshift is not a Doppler shift, a chapter on horizons etc. One of my favourite books of all time, not just one of my favourite cosmology books.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

31. lun says:

I thought that a Hamiltonian formulation of General relativity has been formulated, where energy integrated over a boundary surface is conserved. How does the cosmological constant look in that picture?

Like or Dislike: 0  0

32. Iolaum says:

A Hamiltonian formulation of GR has been made but it involves constrained dynamics.

As long as you are upon the equations of motion the Hamiltonian equals zero because of the existence of constraints. (The Hamiltonian is weakly zero.)

Like or Dislike: 0  0

33. Jason R says:

Sorry, but i’m not a physicist. Is this article on wikipedia regarding “Conservation of Energy” correct or incorrect, or partially correct?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy

Like or Dislike: 0  0

34. Gavin Polhemus says:

Jason R (33), The short answer: Wikipedia is wrong. However, as Sean said, some people assign negative gravitational energy to the space, which balances the positive energy of everything else. In that case energy is conserved, we just don’t have a good local definition of energy any more, which makes me wonder what the point is.

However, the first law of thermodynamics, dE = dW + dQ, is still true and doesn’t require messing with gravitational energy.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

35. Sean says:

Shantanu– I don’t have any especially deep thoughts about this paper. I agree that the idea of a cosmological constant is perfectly respectable, and is very likely to be the right explanation for why the universe is accelerating. I disagree that the coincidence problem and the small value of the vacuum energy aren’t important problems.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

36. Aaron Sheldon says:

You need to be more careful with the partitioned box example (27), you must account for the change in entropy when removing the partition. The entropy is higher in the box without the partition, which allows for the extraction of heat from the reservoir, this is the principle that heat pumps work on. In the idealized binary partition case the entropy changes on the order of (N ln2).

Like or Dislike: 0  0

37. P says:

Physics can only make solid statements about aspects of physical reality which are directly accessible to experiments. Cosmology deals with concepts and distances far removed from anything we can experimentally test which puts it on a very shaky ground.

The assumption that our simple theories which hold on our tiny little planet at this moment in time also hold in the whole expanse of the Universe at all times is well… a bit naive.

Yes, it was worth a try, but now that we know it forces us to accept dark matter, dark energy, naked singularities, accelerating expansion of space, inflation and other such exotic concepts completely inaccessible to experimental verification an intellectually honest person is forced to conclude that the assumption mentioned above is no longer justified and that despite many grandiose claims we still know very little about the Universe.

Like or Dislike: 1  0

38. Aaron Sheldon says:

(37) To the extent that those distances have been tested, such as in the angular power spectrum of the microwave background, redshifts of supernovas and galaxies, the FLWR metric is in excellent agreement with observation. Which is remarkable given that the family of FLWR metrics are essentially parameterized by only a scalar pressure and scalar density, and the order of data collected is in the trillions of bytes. Other branches of science could only hope to be so lucky!

By comparison the Standard Model has 19 parameters that need to be fit, but many orders of magnitude more data collected.

Perhaps another way to popularize the problem is that stress-energy is a generalization of 4-momentum, which is a generalization of kinetic energy. Because the stress-energy is divergence-less, it has a type of conservation through orthogonally intersecting geodesics.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

39. Joe says:

I’m now at the point of wondering why Noether’s theorem is so often associated with time-translation invariance, if GR proved that we don’t have time-translation invariance before Noether’s theorem was published.

Did it just take a long time to tease out this implication of GR? Or is time-translation invariance a good enough approximation that its treated as a no-harm, no-foul issue?

Like or Dislike: 0  0

40. Doug Watts says:

Thanks Sean. I was totally lost in this post until you said this about Hubble red-shifting:

If we keep track of a certain fixed number of photons, the number stays constant while the energy per photon decreases, so the total energy decreases. A decrease in energy is just as much a “violation of energy conservation” as an increase in energy, but it doesn’t seem to bother people as much.

We’ve “known” about photons’ loss of energy due to the expansion of space-time since Edwin Hubble, but it’s funny how when the concept is expressed in a different format we can miss the connection.

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41. Doug Watts says:

For anyone:

when photons go through a gravitational lens, do they lose energy in addition to what they lose from a Hubble red-shift?

thx.

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42. Cusp says:

> Cosmology deals with concepts and distances far removed from anything we can experimentally test which puts it on a very shaky ground.

Is this suggesting that cosmology is not an experimental science?

So the prediction, and then detection of the wobbles in the CMB was not experimental?

So the prediction that the time scale of distant supernovae would be time dilated was not a prediction?

So the prediction that the temperature of the CMB was hotter in the past was not experimentally verified?

Clearly many of those who criticize cosmology have no real clue about what happens on a day to day basis. We don’t just sit in the pub and make this stuff up! (well, except for the guys who publish in Phys Rev D).

Like or Dislike: 0  0

43. Cusp says:

>when photons go through a gravitational lens, do they lose energy in addition to what they lose from a Hubble red-shift?

Nope – as generally the potential they fall into is as deep as the one they climb out of.

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44. Sean says:

There is no net redshift if the lens they fall into is static (unevolving). If the lens itself is changing in time, the potential they fall into might not be the potential they climb out of, and there can be a redshift — that’s known as the “integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect.”

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45. P says:

> To the extent that those distances have been tested, such as in the angular power spectrum of the microwave background, redshifts of supernovas and galaxies, the FLWR metric is in excellent agreement with observation.

Galaxy rotation curves are in stark disagreement with GR. In fact we cannot explain a whooping 95% of mass-energy content of the Universe and yet you claim there is “excellent agreement with observation” and that “other branches of science could only hope to be so lucky”?

>> Cosmology deals with concepts and distances far removed from anything we can experimentally test which puts it on a very shaky ground.

>Is this suggesting that cosmology is not an experimental science?

No, it’s saying that cosmology is on a very shaky ground – it’s based on limited experiments and breathtaking generalizations.

For example we cannot conclude that redshift of distant galaxies is due to expansion of space until we rule out the possibility that it’s an intrinsic property of all electromagnetic radiation. Unfortunately distances involved make such experiments technically impossible so the issue cannot be decided using scientific method.

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46. Cusp says:

> For example we cannot conclude that redshift of distant galaxies is due to expansion of space until we rule out the possibility that it’s an intrinsic property of all electromagnetic radiation.

Every contender has been ruled out.

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47. Aaron Sheldon says:

(45) Actually…the mathematics of GR itself is a proven truth, every smooth manifold has a well-defined stress energy as it is the only non-trivial contraction of the Bianchi identities, or conversely the Noether current on the local symmetries of the smooth manifold. As such it can never be proven or disproved, it is simply a mathematical truth. What is tested by observation is our understanding of the mechanisms that generate the stress-energy, or conversely the mechanisms that generate a metric.

So for dark matter in rotating galaxies, what we are told by experiment is that we do not know all the mechanisms that determine the stress-energy, but we can infer components of the stress-energy from the geodesics (rotations) within the galaxies.

As for the FLWR, it is quite literally the simplest possible stress-energy that conforms to the broad observations we have of the universe, such as angular isotropy. So the fact that it agrees with the data with so few free parameters is stunning.

A final example of a well confirmed metric is the Kerr metric which, as anyone who as used centimeter scale GPS can confirm, is in excellent agreement with observation of the curvature around a rotating body.

One can think of GR more as a really powerful tool, where the specific metrics or stress-energies are the theories being tested. The only way to dispense with GR is to dispense with the assumption that space-time can be represented by a smooth manifold, but testing such a hypothesis would require experiments that are beyond the scale of what can be accomplished in this century. So at the scale of energies and distances we have measured to, space-time is accurately described by a smooth manifold.

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48. Brett says:

@Aaron Sheldon- Terrestrial gravitation measurements with e.g. GPS are not nearly sensitive enough to measure properties of spacetime that depend on the Earth’s rotation. They key such property is the dragging of inertial frames or the Lense-Thirring effect. Even a dedicated, space-based experiment to measure this phenomenon was not really successful; gravitomagnetic effects have not been unambiguously observed. (There are arguments that the same effect responsible for the Lense-Thirring precession has been observed already, in more mundane GR tests such as lunar laser ranging. However, whether or not this is actually the same turns out to be gauge dependent.)

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49. Charon says:

Part of the problem is that even many physicists don’t know about this aspect of GR. Conservation of energy is hammered into people’s heads from first-year undergrad through grad school, and while probably almost every grad school requires quantum mechanics, many of them don’t even offer GR (and many of those that do make it optional).

Observational astronomers are intimately familiar with redshift, of course, but even they don’t think much about violation of conservation of energy, because when they’re doing flux calculations, they’re either doing them locally (where a static background is a very good approximation) or they’re using the luminosity distance, which by construction hides the non-conservation of energy.

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50. P says:

> Every contender has been ruled out.

I am well aware of that but that is not a scientific argument and it’s not convincing in any case.
History provides countless examples of experiments discovering completely novel and unexpected phenomena which were not predicted by currently popular theories.

The possibility that all electromagnetic radiation experiences intrinsic redshift on cosmic scales cannot be excluded simply because we have no idea why it should be so or how to explain it. For all we know it may simply be a fact with no explanation at all, just like existence of electromagnetic radiation has no explanation at all.

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51. Aaron Sheldon says:

(48) I was actually referring to the use of GR corrections in the time coordination algorithms both in the ground devices and on the satellites, without which GPS wouldn’t be nearly as accurate.

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52. Cusp says:

> The possibility that all electromagnetic radiation experiences intrinsic redshift on cosmic scales cannot be excluded simply because we have no idea why it should be so or how to explain it.

There is more to expansion than just the redshift – bit only would photons have to magically lose energy, they would have to space themselves out so the surface brightness drops as (1+z)^4 – the Tolman surface brightness test.

Yes, there *may* some magic that can do this, but currently there is no mechanism for it and not even remotely workable theory (other than random handwaving) for it. Hence, cosmology in terms of GR is it.

I am not suggesting that we not look for it, but damning cosmology because of some unknown physics is silly – you may as well damn all of science.

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53. P says:

>There is more to expansion than just the redshift – bit only would photons have to magically lose energy, they would have to space themselves out so the surface brightness drops as (1+z)^4 – the Tolman surface brightness test.

Tolman test is a fiction. Check out the linked article for example, the measured value of the exponent is between 2.6 and 3.4 but the authors conclude that the difference from 4 is due to galactic evolution and locate some model which gives such an evolution. Seriously, if we have to assume how a particular galaxy evolved billions of years ago then the test is worthless. Tolman original idea was that the measurement should be 4 to begin with so the above value can be seen as a refutation of simple expansion model.

But there are other problems with the test, to do it we have to know gravitational potential difference and relative speed to account for gravitational redshift and Doppler effect and there is no way to know them meaning no way to do the test.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1538-3881/122/3/1084/201175.web.pdf?request-id=f2949343-d90f-46fc-9e42-714622f0f18f

> I am not suggesting that we not look for it, but damning cosmology because of some unknown physics is silly – you may as well damn all of science.

Certainly not all of science, only those disciplines where many experiments needed to verify theories cannot be performed for technical reasons. Most of natural sciences don’t have such problems.

And I am not trying to “damn” cosmology, I am trying to point out that many of it’s predictions are nowhere near the level of reliability that many people expect from natural sciences. For example it is far to early to conclude with certainty that our Universe started this way or that way – for that we have to first understand more then just 5% of its mass-energy content! We also need a proper theory of matter, meaning successfully marrying QM and GR, we need to be able to correctly predict vacuum energy, we need to know where the parameters of SM come from and so on.

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54. A universe with a fixed finite mass at its origins, (necessary for the universe to develop roughly according to the predictions of the standard model) strongly implies a strict energy conservation principle. This is especially true in a self-contained, everywhere universe with a marginally closed geometry.

The fact that open geometry GR does not have a conservation of energy principle casts doubt, I would think as to the veracity of the concept. Einstein’s grand proportion itself implies a cosmological relationship between all (or any part) of what we identify as “matter” and “energy”.

“Space” is created by the way energy densities are observed…their relationships relative to the observer within the manifold.

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55. Reptile says:

The concept of the graviton, and relationship to GR, has always bothered me. I always took it that gravitational waves are distortions of space time, nothing to do with the wave/particle duality of, say, a photon. Thus the exquisite use of interferometry to detect them over long baselines.

If the graviton has any relevance/existence, how would it play out with gravitational effects (much less energy conservation) arising from an expanding universe.

Too much to hold in my mind. But then the idea that there is may be no exchange particle creating gravitational effects has always boggled my mind also.

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56. Just a quick stab at it…there may be something amorphous and simultaneous about the entire universe and all the information/complexity it contains. This probable fact makes the study of the nature of the singular condition a key to our understanding the nature of existence.

As Einstein and Hawking point out, all the above means that time (space-time)is an illusion.

The very existence of time (and space) comes about by the process of observation…electromagnetic observation. The electromagnetic wave/particle duality implies we are on a Holo-Deck. We ARE real, but cosmologically, all this stuff about the expansion of the universe- all motion and change- is frame of reference “bull shit”. We observe “expansion”, spin (implying motion) and particles, but essentially (cosmologically), the universe is none of these things.

conumdroms like “wave-particle duality” and the fact that we measure gravity as propagating at the speed of light when we know full well such a thing is impossible are natures warnings to us….they are the door to the outside of the Holo-Deck…except that in the case of the universe, existence, motion and change are what we observe and measure in a very certain way- there is really NO “outside” or “beyond”. We and everything else we observe exist -permanently- ONLY inside.

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