Talk:General relativity

The intended structure of the following sentence is unclear to me: “Reconciliation of general relativity with the laws of quantum physics remains a problem however, as there is a lack of a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity; and how gravity can be unified with the three non-gravitational forces—strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces.”

A minor issue is that a comma seems necessary before “however.” A more important issue is how the part after the semicolon is related to what comes before. Would the following rewrite be correct? Or would something else be better?

“Reconciliation of general relativity with the laws of quantum physics remains a problem, however, as there is a lack of a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity, and how gravity can be unified with the three non-gravitational forces—strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces—is not yet known.”

Tom Gally (talk) 13:27, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

Your suggested change would be an improvement. However, I personally would not want to suggest that gravity theory must change to accommodate those other theories. Perhaps they need to change instead. Or perhaps our four-dimensional space-time continuum should be embedded in a higher dimensional space with a more uniform structure, like Minkowski space? JRSpriggs (talk) 15:09, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. I am afraid I don’t understand the issues well enough to feel confident about making any changes to the article (other than adding a comma before "however"). Can you, or someone else, use my suggestion above as a basis for fixing the structure of that sentence? As it is, it doesn’t make sense grammatically. Tom Gally (talk) 06:38, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

To me, the major issue is the forced mashing together of multiple sentences into a single sentence via the semicolon. How about this? “Reconciliation of general relativity with the laws of quantum physics remains a problem, however, as there is a lack of a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity. It not yet known how gravity can be unified with the three non-gravitational forces—strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces.” Prokaryotic Caspase Homolog (talk) 06:39, 19 June 2022 (UTC)

I like this, so I'll 'be bold' and put it in. David Spector (talk) 00:01, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

Many thanks to all of you for your replies and for fixing that sentence! I’ll try to be bolder next time. Tom Gally (talk) 12:19, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

I think the solutions I have obtained will be of interest to the readers of this wikipedia article. Since I am the author, I cannot make any related edits. The article has been published open access CC BY 4.0. Cotton, F.W. A generalization of the Einstein–Maxwell equations. Eur. Phys. J. Plus 136, 162 (2021).

     https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-01115-6 71.183.235.5 (talk) 19:32, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing. So far Google Scholar only produces this. When this is noticed, picked up and sufficiently cited in the relevant literature, it could be ready for being mentioned in Wikipedia. - DVdm (talk) 20:32, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia is written for narrow experts? What is the point of placing the forms of writing incomprehensible not to a narrow specialist? For example

${\displaystyle R_{\mu \nu }-{\textstyle 1 \over 2}R\,g_{\mu \nu }+\Lambda \ g_{\mu \nu }={\frac {8\pi G}{c^{4}}}\,T_{\mu \nu }}$

is non-understandable form of writing. Why is the non-understandable form of writing is used unless an understandable form of writing for tensors? But the understandable form of writing is something like this:

${\displaystyle \mathop {\mu ,\nu } \limits _{\geq 0}^{n\leq }\left\{{R_{\mu \nu }-{\textstyle 1 \over 2}R\,g_{\mu \nu }+\Lambda \ g_{\mu \nu }={\frac {8\pi G}{c^{4}}}\,T_{\mu \nu }}\right.}$

or

${\displaystyle \mathop {\mu } \limits _{\geq 0}^{n\leq }\left\{{\mathop {\nu } \limits _{\geq 0}^{n\leq }\left\{R_{\mu \nu }-{\textstyle 1 \over 2}R\,g_{\mu \nu }+\Lambda \ g_{\mu \nu }={\frac {8\pi G}{c^{4}}}\,T_{\mu \nu }\right.}\right.}$

or

${\displaystyle \mathop {\left\{{}\right.} \limits _{\mu =0}^{n}\mathop {\left\{{}\right.} \limits _{\nu =0}^{n}R_{\mu \nu }-{\textstyle 1 \over 2}R\,g_{\mu \nu }+\Lambda \ g_{\mu \nu }={\frac {8\pi G}{c^{4}}}\,T_{\mu \nu }}$

These forms of writing clearly indicate the system of equations and quantity of this equations. At the same time, this form is the same short. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find literature that would prove the importance of using such forms for better understanding by readers. At the same time, I do not understand why this problem is not obvious for writers. Voproshatel (talk) 08:18, 28 February 2023 (UTC)