Quote:
Originally Posted by byronm
I understand that the Genius that is Einstein theories is the concept of it being a thought process and not necessarily a visual or testable experiment in a lab, so its asking a lot to visualize GR itself. However when you use GR to explain the visible universe in theory you should be able to translate that to a visualization on a controlled environment such as a computer simulation.
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Theories are not hypotheses or thought processes that are going on. In order for something to graduate to theory it must have validity in the lab. When we speak of the theory of flying in physics we are describing how flight occurs and we can come up with predictions from our theory as to what will hinder flying and what will make it work better when we design a new jet. All the new jets fly. Whether or not they perform as predicted (better mileage, higher speeds, etc) can be a hypotheses but the theory and act of flying is not.
GR has been verified by gravitational lensing, the delays of pulses from binary neutron stars precisely matching Einstein's predictions and the accuracy of GPS systems along with the precession of the planets' orbits. You can visualize GR by just watching water droplets fall from the top of apartment buildings in your neighborhood and measuring the rate in which any two raindrops separate on the fall...the rate is 9.8 m/sec^2. By measuring the rate at which objects separate from one another in any free fall and measuring how much that rate changes gives an indication of the size of the mass the two objects are falling toward.
There are many computer simulations involving the collisions of galaxies and those simulations do take GR into account. As I recollect, the Grape 6 supercomputer makes 64 trillion calculations per second and takes the equations of GR into account.