KPJ <kpj@sics.se> writes:
> 0. The theory predicts that the total zero point energy in the vacuum to be
> infinite when summed over all the possible photon modes.
>
> 1. The energy of the vacuum should act gravitationally [like an infinite mass].
>
> 2. Infinite mass create infinite gravitation [gravitational law].
>
> 3. Infinite gravitation would create a instant black hole of the universe
> since there exists no force which can withstand this infinite force.
>
> 4. Empirical data does not indicate that [3] has happened.
3 wouldn't occur, since the universe is topologically unable to collapse into a schwartzschild geometry. It is actually not clear that something nasty would occur in this case, even if the infinities show that the theory obviously need refining - quantum gravity, where art thou?
A quick "fix" would be to assume a corresponding negative cosmological constant cancelling the infinite mass. Ugly.
You get something similar when deriving entropies for continous probability distributions - they become infinite - but if you only care for relative measures, then the infinite terms cancel and you get a perfectly consistent theory (where you can do nice things and prove that gaussians are the distributions with the most extropy for a given variance, and so on). The trouble in GR is that the theory is nonlinear, and relative measures are not.
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