Who is going to stop the moron on his/her smart phone texting with eyes off the road.
This system could solve this too - just make the car-to-car communication operate on the same frequency as mobiles with enough power to block them and not only will you be able to tell the drive to brake (or just brake automatically) but the driver won't be able to receive or make calls/texts. However car drivers receiving/send texts is nothing - wait until you see an idiot cycling doing it! Although in this case I would imagine that, if given time, evolution will take care of it for us.
Your definition and examples are completely inconsistent. For example:
Charging $20 for a pack of batteries the day before the hurricane hits (aka "price gouging") is not exploitation.
However your definition says otherwise because nobody would normally decide to pay $20 for batteries hence the retailer is using the threat of the storm to coerce you into paying more. This would be the same as an ambulance that charges more to transport a seriously ill patient to hospital because it knows they cannot refuse the large fee without dying. They might not be holding the gun in these cases but they know that a gun is being held to your head and so they are using this to exploit you.
Similarly with the low wage example you discount the possibility that the reason the person cannot get more money is because all the local employers have agreed not to pay more than X per hour. Their labour might be worth more but there is no way for them to get it so they could be being exploited.
In the same vein: The BBC Micro came with a user guide that allowed what would now be regarded as "kernel level" hacking. This was great because it allowed some of us to increase our programming skills beyond writing simple BASIC programs. Will there be a similar level of hardware documentation to allow such programming with the Raspberry Pi?
What people don't understand is that under liberty, people are responsible for their own actions and decisions and that doesn't count as "exploitation".
I think what you don't understand is that there is no clear definition of "exploitation". For example what one person might regard as a reasonably obvious consequence of an action another might regard as completely unforeseeable so was the person exploited or just stupid?
If you illegally use a stolen device, knowingly or not, there will be consequences. Why should there be any expectation on a security company to screen and evaluate the data they obtain? They have permission to access data on the device from the legal owner and to give that to the police. Supposing they had written important data to the device and the real owner had recovered it and deleted that valuable data would they then be able to sue the owner for the missing data? It is insane to give an illegal user of the device any rights to privacy or safety of their data - if something embarrassing like this happens they should be regarded as another victim of the crime and should have no rights to sue the original owner otherwise it will hugely hamper the ability to use data to catch criminals which is very much against the public interest.
If you have any lego mindstorms build a shooter bot (one that can move and shoot balls) and then show them how you put a simple program together to control it and get them to help design a program to make the robot hit a target (like the teacher's foot if they don't mind!). The lego system uses graphical programming which is not great but nice and visual and is so simple that even my son - who just entered second grade today - has been able to write simple programs with it.
If nothing else it might encourage a few of them to go home and ask their parents for a Lego mindstorms set which is a good way to get them thinking of science and engineering in the future!
Think on a very big amount of easy to extract iridium, platinum....
While these will certainly help the bulk of the asteroid will still be metals which are relatively cheap on earth. I imagine that the biggest cost benefit will be from having those metals available in space. With launch costs to high orbits being around $20k/kg (based on a quick Google search) and the bulk cost of iron being around $0.20/kg (Google search) the major cost advantage will be having the metal already there in orbit and ready to build things. This assumes that it costs less than $20k/kg to mine it though!
Other information to help the police is fine, even pictures of her face, but instead they decided she was obviously a criminal and therefore sharing her nude pics was fine.
Given the circumstance this was a perfectly reasonable assumption for the police and company to make. Yes it possibly turned out to be wrong in this case but nevertheless it was the original criminal who caused both her and the police to jump to unwarranted assumptions so surely the correct thing to do is go after the criminal if she has been damaged by the resulting, perfectly reasonable, behaviour of those involved?
If she's innocent, the security company is on the hook for privacy invasion.
Why? If she is innocent all this means is that she was conned by the criminal who stole the laptop. The laptop is still not hers and, as well as losing the money she spent buying the laptop, it turns out she has also ended up being fooled into putting her priviate photos onto a device where there was (unbeknownst to her) no expectation of privacy.
If somehow believing that she really was the owner of the laptop means that she suddenly gains all the rights of the real owner then the next thing you know she will be suing the original owner for the $60 she paid for his laptop!
Of course the law does not operate on common sense so I've no idea whether she has a legal case or not but if we do follow common sense then surely she should be suing the criminal who caused her to expose these photos to the police and software company in the first place rather than go after the people who were trying to help!
She is being punished, her private pictures are being distributed around without her permission.
She is not being punished, she is just another victim of the original criminal who stole the laptop (assuming that she genuinely thought there was nothing wrong with a $60 laptop!). Rather than sue the police and software company - who had the authorization of the legal owner to access the laptop - she ought to be suing the person who stole it in the first place because his criminal act caused her to wrongly believe the laptop was her property and therefore to give her a false expectation of privacy.
Effectively she stored naked photos of herself on some random stranger's laptop. In these circumstances there can be no expectation of privacy. The reason she did this was because she was deceived by a criminal: nobody else has done anything at all unreasonable.
Yes it does and if you read the paper you cite you'll notice that he mentions K-G and then goes on to say that this does not work for electrons before returning to basic principles to derive the Dirac equation i.e. he does NOT derive it from the K-G equation but simply points out the flaws in the K-G equation as an introduction to the state of where the field was at that time.
The GP was clearly talking about relativistic mass.
Which is a flawed concept with no real physical meaning. Fundamentally mass is a Lorentz invariant if this were not so then things like the Higgs mechanism would break special relativity because, at higher speeds, the coupling of an electron to the Higgs field would have to increase to account for the larger mass and we would then have a means to measure the electron speed relative to the vacuum which would provide a preferred inertial frame and break the postulate of SR that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames.
Your mass, as observed by you, does not change. That hypothetical "stationary observer" notices that time actually (not apparently) passes more slowly for you, and that your mass increases.
Umm, NO! This is a common misconception: mass is the same for all observers in all inertial frames: it is something called a Lorentz invariant. The error arises from the relativistic momenum relationship which is p=gamma*mv. People then mistakenly think that the 'gamma' is associated with the mass and so you have a "relativistic mass" of "gamma*m" vs. Newtonian mechanics. THIS IS WRONG - Einstein himself warned against this misconception. The gamma factor comes from the relativistic velocity which, being a rate of change of position with respect to time, is exactly what you would expect to change when perceptions of space and time change.
The error is easy to show the instant you start to look at acceleration instead of velocity. If mass changed as you claim then Newton's second law in special relativity would simply be: F = gamma*ma but instead it is a lot more complex because mass is constant and relativistic accelerations have a far more complex relationship to Newtonian accelerations than a simple factor of gamma. If you want to prove it to yourself look up 4-vectors, particularly 4-momentum, prove to yourself that the dot product of two 4-vectors is invariant under Lorentz transforms and then calculate the dot product of a particle's 4-momentum with itself - you'll end up with p^mu p_mu=m^2c^2 and since c is constant and the dot product is invariant m has to be invariant too.
No he did not what? You're just repeating what I said.
No, I am contradicting what you implied: that Dirac derived his equation from the Klein-Gordon equation. He did not - he started by trying to factorize the a QM equation based on the Einstein relationships. K-G has the Einstein relationship built in but is NOT just the Einstein energy-mass-momentum relationship: it includes a scalar wave function.
Well, according to relativity the world must contract to zero time
Not quite. Relativity is concerned with observers so here there are two: the person watching the photon and the photon itself. To the person watching the photon time is infinitely dilated for the photon so, as far as they are concerned no time passes for the photon between emission and absorption. However for the photon space is infinitely contracted in the direction of motion so it sees that there is no distance to travel to the object which absorbs it so it too thinks that no time will pass before it is absorbed.
To elaborate, he did it from the Klein Gordon equation
No he did not. The Klein-Gordon equation is for scalar particles - the wave function you get is a scalar one i.e. it has a single value at each point in space. With the Dirac equation the wavefunction gives a 4-component spinor at each point in space. These are fundamentally different. Dirac started with the Einstein energy-mass-momentum relationship and attempted to factorize it.
That's not really true. Dirac went looking to remove the square from E=mc^2
Actually he went looking for a way to factorize E^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2. Using E=mc^2 you have already taken the root which means you have assumed a stationary, matter particle.
Maths is the language of physics. You cannot get far without it but, as a language, it is a tool to describe the physics so you need to understand the physics too because it is easy to write down a maths expression which is non-physical and/or has non-physical solutions. Dirac's case is an excellent example. Dirac was NOT the first person to come up with negative energy solutions - the Klein-Gordon equation was already known and was considered a problem because of the negative energy solutions. Dirac's genius was that he came up with a valid, physical interpretation for negative energy solutions i.e. why a negative energy solution was a valid physical one.
So you need an understanding BOTH of the physics AND the maths to describe it if you really want to get to grips with a particular topic.
Umm, no!
At 0.5% of c, your mass will have increased by 0%, and your time will have dilated by ~1.0000125 as viewed by a stationary observer.
At 50% of c, your mass will have increased by 0%, and your time will have dilated by ~1.155 as viewed by a stationary observer.
At 95% of c, your mass will have increased by 0%, and your time will have dilated by ~3.2 as viewed by a stationary observer.
Key points: mass is invariant and does not change, and you do not notice any change to the passage of time only a "stationary" observer notices that time apparently passes more slowly for you.
I don't understand how moving in a vacuum increases your mass.
It does not. It is a popular misconception about relativity that you mass increases. In fact using relativity you can show that mass is something called a Lorentz Invariant and so is required to be constant in all inertial frames. The gamma factor which people associate with the mass actually comes from velocity and only applies when using a velocity - it is a lot easier to see this with accelerations where the factor is very different (and far more complex) which would not be the case if the mass were changing.
Time dilation works largely because as we approach C our mass also increases.
You mass is something called a "Lorentz invariant" - IT DOES NOT INCREASE and in fact is constrained by relatively to be constant in ALL inertial frames. The gamma factor in relativistic momentum comes from the velocity NOT the mass. Try using a gamma factor for a mass increase with Newton's second law and you will get it spectacularly wrong!
I know what you mean - I'm half worried that I'll be reading about Linus' retirement tomorrow!
Thanks Rob - It has been a real pleasure to read your site just about every day, good luck for the future...with the number of people who know about you and Slashdot I imagine you'll definitely be able to find something fun and interesting!
The difference may looks subtle, but consider that herbal supplements like Enzyte aren't likely to kill you, although they won't work.
Ohreally? (google it for many more articles) Many drugs come from plants - if the drugs work so do the herbal versions but with far more risk to the idiot taking them! When using a plant extract the concentration of active ingredient is not well controlled and there are other, potentially harmful, chemicals in the plant. Compare that to drugs which are carefully synthesised under laboratory conditions so that you have a precise dose and there are no other harmful substances included.
The only good thing that can be said for allowing these herbal remedies without controls is that it is one of the few mechanisms for natural selection we have left.
Cut subsidies to USA/EU farmers, so they no longer can do "dumping" to farmers from other countries. That will be a a great help to those farmers.
It might be a help to those farmers but it will NOT be a help to the rest of the population in those countries who cannot afford to compete with the price that developed countries will pay for the crops which they produce. Hence the result will be farmers here going bust and people over there starving. I don't like farm subsidies but I like the probable result of getting rid of them even less.
adjective/in'vizbl/
Unable to be seen; not visible to the eye
- this invisible gas is present to some extent in every home
Concealed from sight; hidden
- he lounged in a doorway, invisible in the dark
Invisible does NOT mean undetectable. In addition you make several mistakes in your examples. Iron filings, having no net charge and being conductors, will not line up for an electric field like they do for a magnetic field. You might be able to get them to do ths if you had a strong enough field by inducing a electric dipole in each but this would work for any conductor, not just iron and the picture you link shows a magnetic field from a bar magnet not an electric field at all. However electric fields are easy to detect e.g. they deflect the path of charged particles...but they are still invisible. You see the effects of the field NOT the field itself.
Also spectroscopy in stars you are generally looking at the plasma state, not the gaseous state which is why stars are not transparent: plasma is opaque! However you can detect invisible gases in nebulae from their absorption of non-visible parts of the EM spectrum.
It is indeed possible that there is some underlying property of gravity/space-time which might possibly account for DM. However this would also have to account for observations like the Bullet Cluster (google it) where two galaxies have collided apparently separating the matter made of atoms from the DM. This is extremely hard to account for in a gravity/space-time model since you now need the properties of one area of space to be rather different from another region. In fact I would be concerned that this breaks relativity since is space-time can have properties which vary in a detectable way then I can now use one such region as a reference point and so it risks breaking relativistic invariance (I'm not a GR guy though so I don't know how big an issue this is).
Slashdot Mirror
Who is going to stop the moron on his/her smart phone texting with eyes off the road.
This system could solve this too - just make the car-to-car communication operate on the same frequency as mobiles with enough power to block them and not only will you be able to tell the drive to brake (or just brake automatically) but the driver won't be able to receive or make calls/texts. However car drivers receiving/send texts is nothing - wait until you see an idiot cycling doing it! Although in this case I would imagine that, if given time, evolution will take care of it for us.
Charging $20 for a pack of batteries the day before the hurricane hits (aka "price gouging") is not exploitation.
However your definition says otherwise because nobody would normally decide to pay $20 for batteries hence the retailer is using the threat of the storm to coerce you into paying more. This would be the same as an ambulance that charges more to transport a seriously ill patient to hospital because it knows they cannot refuse the large fee without dying. They might not be holding the gun in these cases but they know that a gun is being held to your head and so they are using this to exploit you.
Similarly with the low wage example you discount the possibility that the reason the person cannot get more money is because all the local employers have agreed not to pay more than X per hour. Their labour might be worth more but there is no way for them to get it so they could be being exploited.
In the same vein: The BBC Micro came with a user guide that allowed what would now be regarded as "kernel level" hacking. This was great because it allowed some of us to increase our programming skills beyond writing simple BASIC programs. Will there be a similar level of hardware documentation to allow such programming with the Raspberry Pi?
What people don't understand is that under liberty, people are responsible for their own actions and decisions and that doesn't count as "exploitation".
I think what you don't understand is that there is no clear definition of "exploitation". For example what one person might regard as a reasonably obvious consequence of an action another might regard as completely unforeseeable so was the person exploited or just stupid?
If you illegally use a stolen device, knowingly or not, there will be consequences. Why should there be any expectation on a security company to screen and evaluate the data they obtain? They have permission to access data on the device from the legal owner and to give that to the police. Supposing they had written important data to the device and the real owner had recovered it and deleted that valuable data would they then be able to sue the owner for the missing data? It is insane to give an illegal user of the device any rights to privacy or safety of their data - if something embarrassing like this happens they should be regarded as another victim of the crime and should have no rights to sue the original owner otherwise it will hugely hamper the ability to use data to catch criminals which is very much against the public interest.
If you have any lego mindstorms build a shooter bot (one that can move and shoot balls) and then show them how you put a simple program together to control it and get them to help design a program to make the robot hit a target (like the teacher's foot if they don't mind!). The lego system uses graphical programming which is not great but nice and visual and is so simple that even my son - who just entered second grade today - has been able to write simple programs with it.
If nothing else it might encourage a few of them to go home and ask their parents for a Lego mindstorms set which is a good way to get them thinking of science and engineering in the future!
Think on a very big amount of easy to extract iridium, platinum....
While these will certainly help the bulk of the asteroid will still be metals which are relatively cheap on earth. I imagine that the biggest cost benefit will be from having those metals available in space. With launch costs to high orbits being around $20k/kg (based on a quick Google search) and the bulk cost of iron being around $0.20/kg (Google search) the major cost advantage will be having the metal already there in orbit and ready to build things. This assumes that it costs less than $20k/kg to mine it though!
Other information to help the police is fine, even pictures of her face, but instead they decided she was obviously a criminal and therefore sharing her nude pics was fine.
Given the circumstance this was a perfectly reasonable assumption for the police and company to make. Yes it possibly turned out to be wrong in this case but nevertheless it was the original criminal who caused both her and the police to jump to unwarranted assumptions so surely the correct thing to do is go after the criminal if she has been damaged by the resulting, perfectly reasonable, behaviour of those involved?
If she's innocent, the security company is on the hook for privacy invasion.
Why? If she is innocent all this means is that she was conned by the criminal who stole the laptop. The laptop is still not hers and, as well as losing the money she spent buying the laptop, it turns out she has also ended up being fooled into putting her priviate photos onto a device where there was (unbeknownst to her) no expectation of privacy.
If somehow believing that she really was the owner of the laptop means that she suddenly gains all the rights of the real owner then the next thing you know she will be suing the original owner for the $60 she paid for his laptop!
Of course the law does not operate on common sense so I've no idea whether she has a legal case or not but if we do follow common sense then surely she should be suing the criminal who caused her to expose these photos to the police and software company in the first place rather than go after the people who were trying to help!
She is being punished, her private pictures are being distributed around without her permission.
She is not being punished, she is just another victim of the original criminal who stole the laptop (assuming that she genuinely thought there was nothing wrong with a $60 laptop!). Rather than sue the police and software company - who had the authorization of the legal owner to access the laptop - she ought to be suing the person who stole it in the first place because his criminal act caused her to wrongly believe the laptop was her property and therefore to give her a false expectation of privacy.
Effectively she stored naked photos of herself on some random stranger's laptop. In these circumstances there can be no expectation of privacy. The reason she did this was because she was deceived by a criminal: nobody else has done anything at all unreasonable.
Yes it does and if you read the paper you cite you'll notice that he mentions K-G and then goes on to say that this does not work for electrons before returning to basic principles to derive the Dirac equation i.e. he does NOT derive it from the K-G equation but simply points out the flaws in the K-G equation as an introduction to the state of where the field was at that time.
The GP was clearly talking about relativistic mass.
Which is a flawed concept with no real physical meaning. Fundamentally mass is a Lorentz invariant if this were not so then things like the Higgs mechanism would break special relativity because, at higher speeds, the coupling of an electron to the Higgs field would have to increase to account for the larger mass and we would then have a means to measure the electron speed relative to the vacuum which would provide a preferred inertial frame and break the postulate of SR that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames.
Your mass, as observed by you, does not change. That hypothetical "stationary observer" notices that time actually (not apparently) passes more slowly for you, and that your mass increases.
Umm, NO! This is a common misconception: mass is the same for all observers in all inertial frames: it is something called a Lorentz invariant. The error arises from the relativistic momenum relationship which is p=gamma*mv. People then mistakenly think that the 'gamma' is associated with the mass and so you have a "relativistic mass" of "gamma*m" vs. Newtonian mechanics. THIS IS WRONG - Einstein himself warned against this misconception. The gamma factor comes from the relativistic velocity which, being a rate of change of position with respect to time, is exactly what you would expect to change when perceptions of space and time change.
The error is easy to show the instant you start to look at acceleration instead of velocity. If mass changed as you claim then Newton's second law in special relativity would simply be: F = gamma*ma but instead it is a lot more complex because mass is constant and relativistic accelerations have a far more complex relationship to Newtonian accelerations than a simple factor of gamma. If you want to prove it to yourself look up 4-vectors, particularly 4-momentum, prove to yourself that the dot product of two 4-vectors is invariant under Lorentz transforms and then calculate the dot product of a particle's 4-momentum with itself - you'll end up with p^mu p_mu=m^2c^2 and since c is constant and the dot product is invariant m has to be invariant too.
No he did not what? You're just repeating what I said.
No, I am contradicting what you implied: that Dirac derived his equation from the Klein-Gordon equation. He did not - he started by trying to factorize the a QM equation based on the Einstein relationships. K-G has the Einstein relationship built in but is NOT just the Einstein energy-mass-momentum relationship: it includes a scalar wave function.
Well, according to relativity the world must contract to zero time
Not quite. Relativity is concerned with observers so here there are two: the person watching the photon and the photon itself. To the person watching the photon time is infinitely dilated for the photon so, as far as they are concerned no time passes for the photon between emission and absorption. However for the photon space is infinitely contracted in the direction of motion so it sees that there is no distance to travel to the object which absorbs it so it too thinks that no time will pass before it is absorbed.
To elaborate, he did it from the Klein Gordon equation
No he did not. The Klein-Gordon equation is for scalar particles - the wave function you get is a scalar one i.e. it has a single value at each point in space. With the Dirac equation the wavefunction gives a 4-component spinor at each point in space. These are fundamentally different. Dirac started with the Einstein energy-mass-momentum relationship and attempted to factorize it.
That's not really true. Dirac went looking to remove the square from E=mc^2
Actually he went looking for a way to factorize E^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2. Using E=mc^2 you have already taken the root which means you have assumed a stationary, matter particle.
Maths is the language of physics. You cannot get far without it but, as a language, it is a tool to describe the physics so you need to understand the physics too because it is easy to write down a maths expression which is non-physical and/or has non-physical solutions. Dirac's case is an excellent example. Dirac was NOT the first person to come up with negative energy solutions - the Klein-Gordon equation was already known and was considered a problem because of the negative energy solutions. Dirac's genius was that he came up with a valid, physical interpretation for negative energy solutions i.e. why a negative energy solution was a valid physical one.
So you need an understanding BOTH of the physics AND the maths to describe it if you really want to get to grips with a particular topic.
Umm, no.
Umm, no!
At 0.5% of c, your mass will have increased by 0%, and your time will have dilated by ~1.0000125 as viewed by a stationary observer.
At 50% of c, your mass will have increased by 0%, and your time will have dilated by ~1.155 as viewed by a stationary observer.
At 95% of c, your mass will have increased by 0%, and your time will have dilated by ~3.2 as viewed by a stationary observer.
Key points: mass is invariant and does not change, and you do not notice any change to the passage of time only a "stationary" observer notices that time apparently passes more slowly for you.
I don't understand how moving in a vacuum increases your mass.
It does not. It is a popular misconception about relativity that you mass increases. In fact using relativity you can show that mass is something called a Lorentz Invariant and so is required to be constant in all inertial frames. The gamma factor which people associate with the mass actually comes from velocity and only applies when using a velocity - it is a lot easier to see this with accelerations where the factor is very different (and far more complex) which would not be the case if the mass were changing.
Time dilation works largely because as we approach C our mass also increases.
You mass is something called a "Lorentz invariant" - IT DOES NOT INCREASE and in fact is constrained by relatively to be constant in ALL inertial frames. The gamma factor in relativistic momentum comes from the velocity NOT the mass. Try using a gamma factor for a mass increase with Newton's second law and you will get it spectacularly wrong!
I know what you mean - I'm half worried that I'll be reading about Linus' retirement tomorrow!
Thanks Rob - It has been a real pleasure to read your site just about every day, good luck for the future...with the number of people who know about you and Slashdot I imagine you'll definitely be able to find something fun and interesting!
The difference may looks subtle, but consider that herbal supplements like Enzyte aren't likely to kill you, although they won't work.
Oh really? (google it for many more articles) Many drugs come from plants - if the drugs work so do the herbal versions but with far more risk to the idiot taking them! When using a plant extract the concentration of active ingredient is not well controlled and there are other, potentially harmful, chemicals in the plant. Compare that to drugs which are carefully synthesised under laboratory conditions so that you have a precise dose and there are no other harmful substances included.
The only good thing that can be said for allowing these herbal remedies without controls is that it is one of the few mechanisms for natural selection we have left.
Sorry, an unlimited speed limit is not possible. You can't exceed the speed of light.
However you can make the journey time as arbitrarily as short as you want which, in the end, is really what you care about.
Cut subsidies to USA/EU farmers, so they no longer can do "dumping" to farmers from other countries. That will be a a great help to those farmers.
It might be a help to those farmers but it will NOT be a help to the rest of the population in those countries who cannot afford to compete with the price that developed countries will pay for the crops which they produce. Hence the result will be farmers here going bust and people over there starving. I don't like farm subsidies but I like the probable result of getting rid of them even less.
adjective/in'vizbl/
Unable to be seen; not visible to the eye
- this invisible gas is present to some extent in every home
Concealed from sight; hidden
- he lounged in a doorway, invisible in the dark
Invisible does NOT mean undetectable. In addition you make several mistakes in your examples. Iron filings, having no net charge and being conductors, will not line up for an electric field like they do for a magnetic field. You might be able to get them to do ths if you had a strong enough field by inducing a electric dipole in each but this would work for any conductor, not just iron and the picture you link shows a magnetic field from a bar magnet not an electric field at all. However electric fields are easy to detect e.g. they deflect the path of charged particles...but they are still invisible. You see the effects of the field NOT the field itself.
Also spectroscopy in stars you are generally looking at the plasma state, not the gaseous state which is why stars are not transparent: plasma is opaque! However you can detect invisible gases in nebulae from their absorption of non-visible parts of the EM spectrum.
It is indeed possible that there is some underlying property of gravity/space-time which might possibly account for DM. However this would also have to account for observations like the Bullet Cluster (google it) where two galaxies have collided apparently separating the matter made of atoms from the DM. This is extremely hard to account for in a gravity/space-time model since you now need the properties of one area of space to be rather different from another region. In fact I would be concerned that this breaks relativity since is space-time can have properties which vary in a detectable way then I can now use one such region as a reference point and so it risks breaking relativistic invariance (I'm not a GR guy though so I don't know how big an issue this is).