[Frank (OP)]

I have three questions and they are all simple, but I have to explain my thinking about them so you can address these latter and thereby help me get over my mental hump. Thanks for your effort; I am an elderly, semi-retired shift worker in a protracted (at this point post-) mid-life crisis/crisis of faith, and my confusion over these scientific questions is only making things worse.

Question: Why should we think there are such things as gravitons when there are other possibilities and no real empirical evidence of them?

Is it not correct that there is only being? “Nothing” does not exist as a dimension of anything. Something either exists or it doesn’t; there is no mix of being and not being; the part of the being that is nonbeing just isn’t there.
Don’t confuse this with probabilities or that silly cat who is both dead and alive; a dead cat exists as a dead cat. A probability implies a prediction. As a scientist, you can only discuss variables and outcomes, stuff in other words, that you can measure. If something cannot be measured, then you cannot scientifically say anything about it at all; including that it exists. If something doesn’t exist, then I surely cannot measure it.
So, the only entities, forces, particles, or whatever else that is part of the cosmos that exists, that you can talk about are measurable entities. All measurable entities are material. You cannot measure ghosts, telepathic messages, spiritual inspirations, or anything else that isn’t material. Particles are material. Energy is material in the sense that it can absolutely be measured. Mass can be measured. Forces can be measured. Photons can be measured.
Only finite entities can be measured. You cannot measure infinity any more than you can measure nothing. There is no measurable, finite amount of nothing nor can infinity be identified through measurement since you could never get all of it into the scale, so to speak. This implies, strongly, that the cosmos is finite, otherwise we couldn’t talk about it scientifically.
Space/time is reality (being) or the cosmos. It exists, which means that it, all of it, every part of it, can be measured. There is no “empty space” in the sense of a space in which there is no being; Every part of space exists and is material.
Finite space (which is all space) cannot infinitely expand. The cosmos may be able to expand and contract locally, but since matter cannot be created or destroyed, it cannot increase in overall size nor, since all space is real and full, can it get any smaller. The only way for the cosmos to get bigger would be for God to make more of it (like Hoyle said.)
So, when Einstein was talking about the space inside of a box, he meant the actual measurable existing material in that region of space time; he did not mean nothing was in the box since you cannot measure nothing and therefore you cannot say anything scientific about it. Saying “nothing is in the box,” is a nonscientific idiomatic expression, rather like saying a room full of furniture is empty if nobody is in it. And when we are talking about an expanding universe, we cannot mean our cosmos getting larger and displacing nothing all around it because if we can talk about a space all around the cosmos, it would not be nothing. If the ‘universe’ is expanding into space, then the space it is expanding into exists (and is part of the universe/cosmos, since the term is inclusive of all being.)

A fully existing anything (including a region of space) cannot be nothing and to say something is full of nothing is to make a statement that doesn’t provide any information.
Gravity, as Einstein said, is the cosmos (they are an identity, isomorphic.) The stuff in the cosmos must slither around in a constantly shifting ultra-dense tight pack in which each movement requires all material to move since there cannot be anywhere in the actual, existing, material universe that that holds nothing. All space is full of the being of the cosmos, which is real and material. Another way to say that would be that all space is full of itself.  Any other notion is a mystical simile treating being as sand in a sea of nothingness, which is impossible, or a simple misunderstanding.
This means that something in space is surrounded by space like a bar of soap is surrounded by water and that space, like water, is material.

Movement means real material shifting around in the dense grit of itself; there isn’t anywhere that nothing can be since nothing does not exist. That basically puts to rest the notion of ‘conservation’ of momentum since there can’t be a condition without friction since everywhere that exists is full of material that impedes movement and causes friction.

Now, I want a responsible scientist to explain to me why, based on those notions that are not real advanced (they come down to stuff exists and stuff cannot be nothing,) why the following conclusions are untenable:

•   Gravity is not a force. Gravity is the containing of matter within finite being. Gravity is the nature of movement in a packed universe of being, requiring nothing like a graviton to keep the stuff where it is.
•   Even if you deny the necessary finitude of space, the essential impossibility of ‘empty’ (of being) space is still dispositive. Even infinity would be infinity of something, not a half-way house of non-being.
•   It looks like the issue is something like permeability. In any case, the difficulty of movement in an ultra-full cosmos keeps mobility limited and tends to favor repetitive movement, as can be demonstrated in a situation in which a motorized mini locomotive is submerged in a box of sand and turned on; movement will be difficult and once a path is cleared, it will tend to follow it. This is not a perfect analogy for what I am getting at, but it is a distant approximation.
•   Time must be finite, but only in the sense of its being, not in the sense of duration, which is not a reality anyway but just epiphenomenal. Kant told us a long time ago that time was in the head, not in the world and we are basically coming to understand he was right. Time as space/time is different from the organizational Aristotelian time sense that we experience as time.
•   Kant said that space was just the same as time. If we think of space as emptiness surrounding entities, through which they move and in which they settle, that has no material being of its own, then clearly Kant was right because such a quid has no existence, cannot be measured, can only be understood as epiphenomenal, like Aristotelian time, part of human intuition. In the head, not in the exterior world.

Now, where do I fall into error here?

Question: how can movement be possible? Zeno had a problem with infinity, but my problem is with finitude and spare-room. I don’t get how things have the degrees of freedom necessary to change position in time and space. This sounds idiot, which indeed it may be, but this is where I get stuck, so follow me here and tell me where I am getting lost.
The universe (or cosmos, or reality, or being, i.e. everything) includes everything that exists. Therefore, it doesn’t include anything that doesn’t exist. If we want to talk about this stuff scientifically, we must say that the universe includes everything that can be measured (actually or potentially) in a quantifiable way. To use the term ‘material universe’ is redundant since if something exists, from a scientific point of view, it is material (what else can you measure?)

If Einstein is right, then the universe is three dimensions of space and one of time in a kind of four-dimensional tube. It can be sliced in any number of ways (analytically) and all of it is always available to the observer. Time, in this model, appears as a kind of sequence within the other three dimensions. Our notion of time as a present following a past melting into a future is an epiphenomenon of human consciousness and not a physical datum related to the morphology of cosmic reality.  It is rather a result of our cerebral/neural configurations at each slice of space-time.

If this is the case, then each slice, so to speak, exists. The slice directly before or after per sequence, should be understood as co-real with the one arbitrarily designated as the present. All possible configurations of material exist in four-dimensions of sequence since reality and possibility mean the same thing. This is because a thing that is impossible is something that does not exist. ‘Cannot’ implies that there is a potential for variance in the system for which there is no evidence. All material configuration is over-determined.

Space is totally full of matter and is identical with it. If space is not identical with material, it does not exist. It cannot be measured as simply “empty” because that implies a ‘space’ in which there is nothing, which is a redundancy; a space would be nothing.

Space would be a ‘nothing’ in which material is embedded but in which it can move around. Were that the case, then the space would not be nothing but rather something in which the material could move around.
There cannot be any regions of nothing in the universe because the universe does not contain nothing. You cannot quantify nothing (how much?) so you cannot measure it so you cannot talk scientifically about it so it cannot be a variable in our cosmology.

Space is material and is therefore full, if only of itself. If it is full, then how can anything move around in it?
The answer we go with most often is that the inhabitant of the space is displaced into other space. This answer fails because all space is full. What is in space cannot be displaced from space because there is no ‘empty space’ (nothing/extra room) in addition to the material of the cosmos. Therefore, nothing (actually) moves. Movement means a thing goes from one unoccupied space to another. This cannot happen since all space is occupied. Actually there is no such thing as space separate from the material “in it.”

What we call observed movement is the difference in the configuration of our ambient universe from one slice to the next. The configuration of the universe at nanosecond 1 and at nanosecond 2 and nanosecond 10,000 are all coexistent and the difference in position of material things vis a vis each other in each of these slices is experienced by the conscious observer as movement, which like the experience of Aristotelian time, is epiphenomenal and a product of human consciousness/perception rather than an aspect of the physical universe. A thing was not at point a and then at point b except in conscious retelling; the configuration at points a and b are both right there.

That is essentially what Kant taught us years ago, isn’t it? Should this be the case, then Parmenides was right, just like Plato said, and the universe is a changeless, fully-determined, unity and all perceptions to the contrary are essentially error.

OK. Where did I go off track?

Question: How is entropy possible except as something observable in trains and gasses and stuff, since at the most basic level, we are always in the same state of organization?

If I understand Feynman’s statement, I am OK as long as I remember that everything is made of atoms. I am going to assume that since particles make up atoms, everything is made of particles (too, right?)
If quarks are not the smallest particles, then there are smaller ones that make them up, down to the most infinitesimal material bit possible. These ultimate material bits exist in close pack since they make up all of reality (unless we think of them as moving around in a gel of nothingness, which we cannot, as we have said.) That means that they are, because of their ultimate scale, uniform in size and organized in uniform adhesion to each other.

This means that there is total order in the cosmos as long as there exists material. If the cosmos doesn’t move (caveat) toward disorder because it is always in the state of ultimate uniformity at the most basic level, then there cannot be any such thing as entropy or time (since the former implies the latter and the latter cannot be measured without the former?)

Where am I going wrong?

[puppypower]

The way I resolved all your questions and others has to do with observational reference, and the assumption used for the ground state of the universe. The current theory does not have a single ground state, since it assumes reference is relative, therefore there are infinite ground states instead of just one. This can start to create conceptual problems if the ground state is not chosen wisely, or evolved as it should be, with new discoveries.

As an analogy, say you lived on top of a large plateau. Since the plateau is your world and you are not allowed outside the boundaries, it is convenient to assume that the plateaus  is the center of your world. In the middle of the plateau is a lake. where all the rain water flows and collects. This lowest point is called the ground state.

One day you notice the lake is getting lower and lower, faster than expected by evaporation. From the POV of an outsider looking from the desert floor below, the lake level dropping is due to the height of the plateau above the desert creating a gravity head for the water to flow further downward.

But to those on the plateau who have assumed the lake is the ground state, the water leaving downward would need to be caused by some new form of negative energy. A new theory needs to be created, which you can't see in the lab, but which is needed to explain the observation in the light of all the other accepted theory based on the lake ground state. Dark energy is the type of theory the plateau dwellers would need to help explain the lake's negative energy so nothing else has to change.

[PmbPhy]

Question: Why should we think there are such things as gravitons when there are other possibilities and no real empirical evidence of them?

Its basically something expected from symmetry. We find that there is a great deal of symmetry and even what we consider to be beauty in nature, i.e. in the laws of physics. We have found that the fields of force we call the electromagnetic, strong and weak force all have particles associated with those fields. So we expect the same with the gravitational field. Please note that no physicist has ever claimed that gravitons exist. Its merely an hypothesis at this point.

Is it not correct that there is only being? “Nothing” does not exist as a dimension of anything. Something either exists or it doesn’t; there is no mix of being and not being; the part of the being that is nonbeing just isn’t there.

That's strictly a question of what it really means to exist, physically that is. That's a question addressed by the philosophers of physics. A good book on this subject is

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics by Marc Lange, Blackwell Publishing, (2002)

You might be able to find it online. If not then there are many alternatives. Just go to http://b-ok.org/ and search for "An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics". Its definitely worth the effort for what you want to learn. I cannot emphasize that enough!

You cannot measure ghosts, telepathic messages, spiritual inspirations, or anything else that isn’t material.

Who says those things aren't material? If ghosts actually do exist then how we've detected them, i.e. we "see" them or experience their existence otherwise, is physically detectable.

Energy is material in the sense that it can absolutely be measured.

That is incorrect. Energy is not a physical quantity and therefore its existence cannot be measured. Its merely a bookkeeping device which is useful as a constant of motion or other kind of constant. See:
http://www.newenglandphysics.org/physics_world/cm/what_is_energy.htm

Mass can be measured. Forces can be measured. Photons can be measured.

Mass is a property of something and as such doesn't physically exist. It's like color. Nobody can say that color exists other than being a property of light (as in wavelength). Same thing with force (time rate of change of momentum).

Only finite entities can be measured. You cannot measure infinity any more than you can measure nothing.

That in no way means that infinite things don't exist. Its quite possible that the universe is spatially and/or temporally infinite.

etc.

[Frank (OP)]

Thanks, guys. Both of those were helpful replies.
If energy is matter in motion, how is it not a measurable material thing?
I am still dealing with the nothing bit, I will continue to read up on that, thanks for the reference.
Yours,

[Janus]

First of all, you have to ask, "What is a graviton?"
The graviton is a quantum of gravitational radiation (or gravitational waves)
Meaning is would be the smallest discrete unit of energy you can have for a gravitational wave of a given frequency.
In the same way, a photon is a quantum of electromagnetic radiation(light waves, for example).

We also have to distinguish between gravitational waves and the gravitational attraction between masses. They are not the same thing any more than light is the same thing as the attraction between two charges of opposite signs.

 And while you will heard it said that photons are the mediating particle for the electromagnetic forces, they actually mean "virtual" photons.   And if we ever develop a quantum theory for gravity, virtual gravitons will surely be involved.

Now we have just recently confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, and if gravity is subject to the rules of quantum mechanics( as everything else appears to be), then there should be a graviton as a quantum of those waves.

[PmbPhy]

Thanks, guys. Both of those were helpful replies.
If energy is matter in motion, how is it not a measurable material thing?
I am still dealing with the nothing bit, I will continue to read up on that, thanks for the reference.
Yours,

Energy is not matter in motion. May I ask where did you get this notion from?