Jacob Shymanski

speaker

317 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 11 Jul

Jacob Shymanski’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #999 - Aug 31 2024 podcast

I think we've mentioned it on the show but not in any detail.

Gravitons are theoretical.

First off, theoretical.

No evidence, solid evidence for them at all, really.

Gravitons are theoretical particles that would transmit or mediate the force of gravity, right?

This would be like photons, which transmit the electromagnetic force, which we call light.

They'd also be similar to gluons, which mediate the strong force, etc.

So theory says that gravitons would probably be like photons in that they would be massless and travel at the speed of light.

So they would, in a sense, be building blocks of gravity, right?

Gravitational waves, which we've covered many times, are often described as these space-time ripples, right, that are formed from colliding black holes or neutron stars and which are detectable with LIGO.

Remember those?

So those gravitational waves, which we've talked about many times on the show, would be made up of many gravitons.

Okay, you got that?

So now you may be thinking, hey, isn't gravity really the curvature of space itself?

with no real need for a particle or a force that's transmitted, and you would be right.

Bravo and brava to you.

But you'd be right from a specific context only, really.

Einstein's general relativity describes a universe where mass and energy curve spacetime, and that curve tells matter how to move.

And we say that movement is caused by gravity.

That's gravity.

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