Planetary Orbits, an open discussion

It was my understanding that the effect of torsion is warping spacetime and pulling everything in our solar system together towards the sun, like a black hole. This is the accepted theory among quantum theorists.

Think of a beach towel stretched out with clamps on either side, then think of the distortion created by a basketball sitting in the middle of it. It droops down, this creates the torsion causing an inward spiral towards the sun. Dark matter is responsible for slowing the pace of this to a crawl, instead of a free fall (like the twin towers)

reply to post by mattdel


Me too. I though that too. That's why I assumed orbits would spiral down, not up. But the gentlemen's link from BBC states otherwise for the Moon/Earth relation.

Originally posted by mattdel
It was my understanding that the effect of torsion is warping spacetime and pulling everything in our solar system together towards the sun, like a black hole. This is the accepted theory among quantum theorists.

Look up the definition of the word "torsion". That's what you get when you tighten a bolt under the hood of your car, but I don't see how it applies to solar system orbital mechanics.

You can think of a gravity well, kind of like a stretched flat sheet of rubber with a steel ball in the middle. Try to roll another smaller ball around and it does tend to circle around and fall toward the big ball.

But this analogy, similar to your towel analogy, has limitations and only models the way the real world works to a certain extent. In the real world, if you insert the small ball's orbit fast enough, then its own speed will be enough to offset its tendency to fall in to the gravity well. In the real solar system, unless a planet slows down for some reason, it will never fall in to the sun, especially since the sun is losing mass.

Also, why do you say "This is the accepted theory among quantum theorists"? This would appear to be another misconception. Quantum theory is little more than a century old. Yet orbital mechanics is based largely on Newtonian mechanics, which preceded that by centuries. It turns out that Newton's mechanics only explains perhaps 99.9% of the orbital motions we see. To explain the other 0.1% such as the precession of Mercury required relativity, not quantum mechanics. In fact there is no theory of quantum gravity...this is a gaping hole in current theory which makes it especially odd you would claim that quantum physicists have an interpretation of gravity...they wish they had a theory of quantum gravity, but they don't. They are working on it, but they haven't figured it out yet.

Dark matter is responsible for slowing the pace of this to a crawl, instead of a free fall (like the twin towers)

This is another misconception. We have never had to use dark matter to explain simple orbital mechanics in our own solar system. The orbits are completely explainable without dark matter.

Furthermore, where dark matter is postulated, as a means of explaining observations in galaxies other than our own, what it is trying to explain is why they are rotating FASTER than expected, so dark matter appears to be speeding up the rotation, not slowing it down. This is because it's making the gravity well bigger, not smaller.

If you were thinking of dark energy, that probably has no measurable effect on a scale as small as our solar system, so you can erase that thought, or else research it to confirm what I said is true. We've only ever observed dark energy effects on much larger cosmic scales.

The Sun is propelling the planets through electrostatic action.
As long as there is no electrical imbalance things should go according to plan.

The wave reaction results in the mysterious forces of Newton.

Published on Sep 20, 2012 by ThunderboltsProject In the history of comet science, the most critical moment for the electric comet model was the evening of July 4, 2005. That was when a projectile from the Deep Impact probe struck the comet Tempel 1. The result was a stunning confirmation of key predictions by Wallace Thornhill and others. Since that event, comet discoveries have added numerous additional confirmations.

A Comet orbit but what about planets.
They don't count.
Are the guiding forces electrostatic in nature.