“Giving up Einstein's theory of gravity is simply unacceptable to many in the community. It may take a new generation of physicists to view the evidence with unclouded eyes.”

— John Moffat , book Reinventing Gravity

Epilogue, p. 221
Reinventing Gravity (2008)

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John Moffat 22

British-Canadian physicist 1932

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“Why is Einstein's theory better than Lorentz's theory? It would be a mistake to argue that Einstein's theory gives an explanation of Michelson's experiment, since it does not do so. Michelson's experiment is simply taken over as an axiom.”

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“The miracle of physics that I'm talking about here is something that was actually known since the time of Einstein's general relativity; that gravity is not always attractive. Gravity can act repulsively. Einstein introduced this in 1916… in the form of the cosmological constant, and the original motivation of modifying the equations of general relativity to allow this was because Einstein thought that the universe was static, and he realized that ordinary gravity would cause the universe to collapse if it was static. …The fact that general relativity can support this gravitational repulsion, still being consistent with all the principles that general relativity incorporates, is the important thing which Einstein himself did discover..”

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“The incompatibility between gravity and quantum coherence represented by black holes should be solved by a consistent quantum theory that contains gravity as superstring theory. Despite many encouraging results in that sense, I question here the general feeling of a naive resolution of the paradox. And indicate non trivial physical possibilities towards its solution that are suggested by string theory and may be further investigated in its context.”

Daniele Amati (1931) Italian physicist

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“Greene takes it for granted, and here the great majority of physicists agree with him, that the division of physics into separate theories for large and small objects is unacceptable. … Greene believes that there is an urgent need to find a theory of quantum gravity that applies to large and small objects alike. … As a conservative, I do not agree that a division of physics into separate theories for large and small is unacceptable. … The essence of any theory of quantum gravity is that there exists a particle called the graviton … I looked at various possible ways of detecting gravitons and did not find a single one that worked. Because of the extreme weakness of the gravitational interaction, any putative detector of gravitons has to be extremely massive. If the detector has normal density, most of it is too far from the source of gravitons to be effective, and if it is compressed to a high density around the source it collapses into a black hole. There seems to be a conspiracy of nature to prevent the detector from working.”

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“My own conclusion is that today there is no interpretation of quantum mechanics that does not have serious flaws. This view is not universally shared. Indeed, many physicists are satisfied with their own interpretation of quantum mechanics. But different physicists are satisfied with different interpretations. In my view, we ought to take seriously the possibility of finding some more satisfactory other theory, to which quantum mechanics is only a good approximation.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

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“Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of quantum gravity.”

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“The last thirty years of Einstein's life were largely devoted to a search for a so-called unified field theory that would unify James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism with the general theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of gravitation. Einstein's attempt was not successful, and with hindsight we can now see that it was misconceived. Not only did Einstein reject quantum mechanics; the scope of his effort was too narrow. … Nevertheless Einstein's struggle is our struggle today. It is the search for a final theory.”

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page 18, 2nd edition https://books.google.com/books?id=Qd0MEtsBr7oC&pg=PA18
Dreams of a Final Theory (1992; 2nd edition 1994)

“Giving up Einstein's theory of gravity is simply unacceptable to many in the community. It may take a new generation of physicists to view the evidence with unclouded eyes.”

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John Moffat 22

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