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Do people think we will be able to devise experiments to enable us to 'see' gravitons and gravitinos, or will their proof have to be purely a mathematical one?

Regards,

Blacknad.

There is no reason to believe that gravitation propagates via quantized carriers. Physics' fundamental forces other than gravitation are uniformly mediated by vector bosons. Gravitons as tensor bosons satisfy the math but cause incredible trouble for creating a testable physical model, e.g.,

http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0409089
Spin-2 gravitons have problems
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/sci.physics.strings/msg/ba31a00f5f26277a
(so does the preceding proposal)

Promoting virtual particles to reality is the simple proof of their force mediation. Shouldn't that be quite facile for a massless graviton (e.g., making photons)?

www.google.com ... "Gravity Probe B"

Uncle Al - There is no reason to believe that gravitation propagates via quantized carriers.

I know that is probably the case, but assuming it did, would we be able to detect gravitons? I understand that it is equivalent to spotting the movement of a hair within the distance of a few billion miles. It is the practicality of it that I was wondering about.

DA - thanks, the GP-B experiment seems to be pretty significant.

Regards,

Blacknad.

Gravity Probe B is.

But there is every reason to believe that gravity propagates via quantized carriers: Everything else does. Likely time and space too are quantized.