Understanding Gravity (and more)

Welcome. I need your help... but first I need to blow your mind. Get through all that follows, and if you grok it, it will blow... assuming nobody can blow holes through it. Fingers crossed.

Gravity is the thorn in the cosmologist's side, the bane of the physicist. It defies unification with the other forces, its source cannot be determined (it ain't "gravitons"), and everyone's been clutching at straws for decades, yea, centuries about it to no avail. Y'know what I think? Clearly one of our base assumptions is incorrect, or we'd have figured it out by now. And while we're at it, why not try to solve magnetism too? Then the Insane Clown Posse will be able to sleep nights. Well, I'll try. No promises.

So let's ponder; what base assumptions could we change without ruining any mathematically-proven gravitational axiom? Without invalidating the inverse-square law, the "gravitational constant of the universe" concept, Newton's laws of motion, Kepler's laws of celestial mechanics, Euclidian geometry, electromagnetism, the lot of it? I can only think of one thing. Tell ya in a minute; background first. Get some coffee.

When physics students in college start solving basic gravitational attraction equations, they're usually given a diagram like this:



And they're asked, "How much force is pulling those two masses together if m1 is blah grams and m2 is blurgh grams and r is snurrrr meters?" That would be fine if there were only two masses in the universe. But. NASA knows, having been doing it all these years, that any gravity calculation has to take into account every blob of mass in the solar system, from sun to Pluto and beyoooooond! (Sorry.) After the masses start getting a certain distance away from whatever probe they're calculating a course for (or, more accurately, once the distance "r" gets so large, or one of the masses so small, that the equation starts evaluating to infinitesimal numbers), they can ignore those masses' effects for short-term calculations, but they all have an effect, however slight... all the way to the edge of the universe.

Conventional gravitational theory has it that this force between any two objects is "attractive," as in "not repulsive." Scientists believe that gravity is matter pulling at other matter, no matter how far apart they are, in brief. With me so far good keep up please.

What those student physicists perceive as a straight line linking the centers of two masses is, they're later taught, in the context of reality in real-life outer space, actually the sum of all the gravitational force vectors acting on the masses. "There's less force from other bodies pulling them away from each other than there is pulling them together," they're taught to believe, because that's what their teachers were taught to believe, whose teachers taught them to believe it, ad infinitum. But what if they've got it exactly backwards?

What am I getting at? Okay, I'll stop dangling it just out of reach. Catch it if you can!

Picture yourself in a wind tunnel. On roller skates. (It could happen.) And fortunately, it's a bi-directional wind tunnel. Winds of equal intensity are blowing against you from before and behind. You stand still, balanced in the middle. We call that "equilibrium." But there's a catch. The fans are both tied to a harness you're wearing, linked by overhead rails; if you move, they move. (I'm not saying this is how the universe works, but it's necessary for the purposes of this thought experiment so just accept it and listen.) It also takes no force at all to move you or the fans. Superconducting... frictionless... bearings, or something, ANYWAY. If you push off and roll forward, with no friction, you'll just keep going. The wind velocity vectors pushing on you stay the same, so you stay at equilibrium even though you keep moving forward at the same speed from your initial acceleratory impulse, just as if there was no wind at all... and that's what we call "inertia." (In a wind context. It's an imperfect metaphor.)

Stop your rolling now. You're motionless relative to the floor again. And then a meddling scientist pushes a big brick wall in front of you, blocking the forward fan's wind a lot. What will happen? Well, you'd start accelerating towards that wall at, let's say, a rate determined by the wind speed alone, regardless of your physical size or mass. The difference in wind force from in front of and behind you unbalances your inertia; it will result in you speeding up towards the wall, faster and faster, until you splat into it. (See? This is why we wear helmets in wind tunnels.)

Now let's add one more base assumption to our experiment: you, the mass on roller skates, have never heard of wind. You couldn't see it or feel its effects on you when you were at equilibrium... and then the wall showed up. Wouldn't you think that you'd "fallen" towards the wall? That it had pulled you to it? Well, what else do you see around you that could've caused it? Nothing.

And what else was visible to Isaac Newton when he saw the earth pull an apple to it? Nothing. He'd never heard of wind. He couldn't see it. And from that moment on, every single equation that involves gravity was designed upside-down. Inside-out. Totally on its head. And that is why nobody can make sense of it anymore, and have to come up with things like "dark matter:" they're proceeding from the false assumption that gravity is an attractive force, when it is in fact repulsive.

Gravitational energy is the "wind of the universe," pushing against masses, and the gravitational constant determines how much of that energy affects the mass (that is, "gets absorbed by it") and how much passes right on through it to affect other masses beyond it. That is, "how porous to the wind it is." If the wall was made of chicken wire, it would block a tiny amount of the wind blowing you away from it, and you'd accelerate towards it very slowly. A black hole wouldn't let any of that wind through, would it? It would be a brick wall, totally without pores. Get too close and the wind from behind you will smash you into it, and you'll never have enough energy to leave again.

And consider: if you were in some sort of whimsical 3D wind tunnel, wind from every direction equally, no roller skates, you'd be "weightless" until someone threw a big ball in, wouldn't you? And then you'd fall towards the ball while the ball fell towards you, at velocities determined by your masses ("how easily the wind can push you"). But if you could aim to go around the ball, you'd just keep going around and around and around as the "gravity shadow" (the wind the ball keeps from hitting you) went around and around and around to point at wherever you are at any moment... and the ball would also wobble back and forth, always "leaning" towards you (that wobble is exactly the method they now use to find planets around other stars, "coincidentally").

Now, I don't generally like Occam's Razor, but let's apply it here. Which is more likely: that matter contains within it the ability to somehow reach across billions of lightyears to attract other matter, or that every point in the universe has an undetectable "wind" pouring out of it at a steady constant speed (the speed of light, no doubt), expanding spheres of energy that get weaker by an inverse 4πr^2 law (surface area of a sphere, look it up) as they get bigger and never stop going unless the wavefront (the entire sphere) is completely absorbed by whatever matter it hits?

"Hey! Does the percentage of that energy absorbed by the matter it hits bear any relation to the gravitational constant!?" I hear you scream with epiphany at this point? One gold star for you if so. Well, let's think about it... but first, what is matter?

An atom is, depending on its "atomic mass," more than 99.999999% empty space even when treating nucleons (protons & neutrons) as solid... but a proton is also 99.97% empty space, just three quarks orbiting each other at incredibly-fast speeds around a big maybe-empty spherical region. What holds those protons and neutrons together in the nucleus? Scientists call it the "strong nuclear force." It's the same thing as "valence" between electrons holding molecules together... which scientists call the "electromagnetic force." All they are, all of them, are things in orbit around mostly-empty space. And the "wind" streaming through the universe in every direction from far and near (it even streams outwards from inside every particle) is only absorbed when it touches, and pushes (thus doing work), actual matter.

Quarks orbit so fast that the protons and neutrons they comprise can look like solid balls, and what types those three quarks are (their different charges) determine whether it's a neutron or proton. Once those three quarks get together, it takes immense energy to separate them again (like the Large Hadron Collider knocking them apart), but they can stick to each other by sharing "valence quarks" with their neighbors. Picture one "up" quark leaving a proton as another one slides into it from another proton, or even from a neutron; a ceaseless wave of quarks flowing from particle to particle zillions of jillions of times per second, keeping three of them in each particle at all times. And when you split a nucleus apart, the "wind" that was trying to blow its protons and neutrons apart (the wind from in between them; it's coming from every point in the universe, remember), which was blocked by their matter, is released suddenly, like any conventional bomb detonation, because the particles get far enough apart and it comes bursting out, scattering subatomic shrapnel at high energies. Make that chain reaction happen in a few kilos of plutonium, and you have an atomic bomb.

So, yeah. The gravitational constant is a ratio, the amount by which we reduce the force calculated by m1*m2/r^2, but it isn't a "constant" at all. What we've measured it to be, using the earth, is 0.0000000000006675% - and it must be pretty close to the average amount of empty space in all the earth's matter if I'm right. If it's not close enough, other factors must enter into it (like, every particle has some degree of porousness to it, or really-small particles vibrate so fast that even to this energy, they appear partially solid because there's not enough time for it to get through any openings).

And, if I'm right, there's another force even stronger than the "strong force" that nobody's ever named holding three quarks to each other, and another even stronger force compressing other stuff into each quark... but why give them names, since All The Forces Have The Same Cause? That cause is known to scientists as "vacuum energy." And our entire reality is its effect. Lemme explain.

Since that energy diminishes with the inverse 4πr^2 law, it also increases the same way as that distance, "r", gets smaller and smaller, until, at zero distance, the force becomes asymptotic ("infinite"), since the equation becomes divide-by-zero... so therefore, there must be a non-zero minimum distance beyond which things cannot get any closer together. They call that the "planck distance," and at that distance, the amount of force reaches its maximum possible and compression stops. But how much force is that? It depends on how much energy is available.

There is an estimate of the amount of energy inherent in every point of space-time. It's... very, very large. Look at this article from NASA (emphasis and clarification mine)...

Zero Point Energy (ZPE), or vacuum fluctuation energy are terms used to describe the random electromagnetic oscillations that are left in a vacuum after all other energy has been removed. If you remove all the energy from a space, take out all the matter, all the heat, all the light... everything -- you will find that there is still some energy left. One way to explain this is from the uncertainty principle from quantum physics that implies that it is impossible to have an absolutely zero energy condition.

For light waves in space, the same condition holds. For every possible color of light, that includes the ones we can’t see, there is a non-zero amount of that light. Add up the energy for all those different frequencies of light and the amount of energy in a given space is enormous, even mind boggling, ranging from 10^36 to 10^70 Joules per cubic meter.

In simplistic terms it has been said that there is enough energy in the volume the size of a coffee cup to boil away Earth’s oceans - that’s one strong cup of coffee! For a while a lot of physics thought that concept was too hard to swallow. This vacuum energy is more widely accepted today.

I hope you can accept it too. That energy is pushing the wind that's blowing you down to the earth. It's the cause of all chemistry, all physical laws, all quantum mechanics, all electricity, all "messenger particles" even. It has to be causing garden-variety "magnetic flux" attraction too, something weird about the atomic structure of certain metals (iron, most notably, but several others too) that I can't explain. Some sort of resonance perhaps; everything does vibrate, after all.

My basic point is, the only difference between each of the "fundamental forces" is the scale over which they perform work. Above a certain scale, the "electromagnetic" distances, it all looks like gravity. And it goes all the way down to the planck distance, at which point the energy can't compress and condenses into strings, little bundles with no space inside them. Every string is a near-singularity writhing around violently as other strings orbit all around it and change its equilibrium by blocking parts of its source energy. Every bit of matter in existence arises from the energy of the entire universe "freezing" into the illusion of a solid, whether it's quarks or light or electrons or hydrogen or gold or DNA or you. "We are starstuff?" Rubbish. We are energy.

So there you have it. One Grand Unification Theory. The only question is...

...can anyone out there better than me at math "do the math" to prove that it's wrong or right? That's the only thing holding me back. I'll share the Nobel Prize with you. Promise.

Wow I wish I could understand everything you have put in this great thread but I would be lying.
Thanks for the read S&F and thanks for teaching me a little today

reply to post by Thought Provoker


I have two questions on this.

*) If you are out is space, and not close to any planetary body, or star for that matter, in which direction will this "gravitational wind" push you?

*) Why, if you are close to a star or planet, will the "gravitational wind" push you in the direction of the star or planet?

How would you describe the differences between the above two scenarios?

Your OP was an interesting read though, because the best minds on earth still don't fully understand gravity.
That's why they are busy doing all that crazy experiments at the LHC ("Large Hadron Collider"), in an attempt to identify the Higgs boson, etc.

Fantastic posts.

Very interesting , trying to digest it all.

So to a layman like myself your saying "gravity" is in fact a repellant force pushing planets through the universe.  only when this force is partially blocked by another planet / object do we see planets orbiting suns and moons orbiting planets because the opposing force is being weekend by the mass of the obstructing planet .

reply to post by QMask

See the post just after yours; it explains it perfectly.

ETA... well... okay, it's probably only obvious to me...

To address question 1: no matter where you are in the universe, there are far-away objects "casting a shadow" on you, gravitationally. Therefore, you have to do vector addition to add up all of those forces and figure out what direction their net effect will push you in.

Question 2, the planet you're near is blocking some of the "gravity wind" coming towards you from the drection of that planet, like a shield with holes in it. Since there's less of it from there than there is from behind you, the gravity from behind pushes you in the planet's direction. "Path of least resistance." Nature always obeys it.

reply to post by Thought Provoker


This theory could also explain why the universe is expanding, what scientists and cosmologists calls "inflation".

Basically, the matter on the outer edges of the universe experience a net "outward" push from this "gravitational wind". And therefore, the universe is expanding. So, no need for the whole "dark energy" thing.

I like this idea/theory. (S and F).

The next challenge will be to get a serious and respected scientist/cosmologist to do the actual mathematics of it all. But I think the mathematics will all just work out nicely.

Maybe, you should write an e-mail to the LHC ("Large Hadron Collider") people.
Those people may even be able to experimentally prove/disprove the whole idea.

Would it be more accurate in your scenario to say the fan tracks you than to say you are attached to it with a harness? Because in that case, wall or no, you aren't going anywhere. The fan will go one way, you'll go the other, the harness will tighten up, and you'll begin to be dragged by the fan's reaction.

Originally posted by QMask

 

This theory could also explain why the universe is expanding, what scientists and cosmologists calls "inflation".

Basically, the matter on the outer edges of the universe experience a net "outward" push from this "gravitational wind". And therefore, the universe is expanding. So, no need for the whole "dark energy" thing.

Prexactly. The farther from the center something is, the faster it's pushed outwards. If my theory's right, the universe cannot be infinite. In four dimensions, at least. I think it might also speed things up on the edges of galaxies, the other reason they expect to find dark matter/energy.

But then... what did they find at CERN that they thought was the Higgs boson?

The next challenge will be to get a serious and respected scientist/cosmologist to do the actual mathematics of it all. But I think the mathematics will all just work out nicely.

Boy, I sure hope so. One of "the greats" once said that when the GUT was finally discovered, it would be so simple a child could understand it. But it takes Hawking-level analysis to prove it.

reply to post by Bedlam

Well... sure, guess so. It's not perfect. Ideally it'd be a wind tunnel where every point has wind blowing in every direction, but that's not as easy to visualize...

reply to post by boymonkey74


You had me at hello

Joking aside that is one hell of a easily understood and well put theory.

I wish I were so eloquent and educated as to why this seems invalid to me, but there is something
"not quite right" with the idea that matter is "pushed" instead of "pulled".

I just feel in my gut that matter is attractive to other matter. It seems to work in nature and from I can see
all nature's basic principles seem to function in the same general and simple way.

How's that for an unqualified opinion? I daydream about gravity alot, waiting for a laymen's epiphany
it is yet to come. But what I do see is relative to your theory---in that if we ever reach the stars
we will do so because we have solved the mystery of gravity and have learned to "pull" AND "push"
ourselves thru space at velocities many times the SOL by grabbing ahold of the gravitational fabric
of the universe to do so...

Well...that was probably a bunch of mumbo-jumbo compared to your excellent post and sorry to be
critical at all (I don't want to take the wind out of your fans) as yours was one of the easiest to
understand theories on such a grand subject that a person could hope for. S@F

reply to post by Thought Provoker


This "gravitational wind push" theory could also explain a lot about the "Big Bang".

To answer the question: why did all the matter expand so quickly outwards, from the initial small point, just shortly after the Big Bang event?

Answer: Well, because of the outward pushing net "gravitational push" of course.

I really like this theory. It is simple, and can explain a lot of things in science and cosmology.

That was deffinately clear enough for this monkey, excellent explanation! (and sense of humour),

GUT/TUG

sorry couldn't help myself, I see how everything has been opposite of what it was supposed to be everywhere else, to find this is the case for a range topics ( the biggest one possibly ) would not surprise me in the slightest.
I always do things back the front too.

There's plenty of maths freaks here, where are they?
ATS best, please help this dude out with his theory.

reply to post by Thought Provoker


It's interesting, but a long read and I have a head full of Benadryl. I can't do it justice. Will try again later when I'm not talking to the benevolent monkey gods.

Originally posted by rival

 

I just feel in my gut that matter is attractive to other matter. It seems to work in nature and from I can see all nature's basic principles seem to function in the same general and simple way.

Glad you enjoyed reading the theory. Maybe I can change your mind...

But I know what you mean. I'm a firm believer in "As above, so below" too. But when two people fall in love, did they fall, or were they pushed, together? Could be either. To me, a neutron is just a really, really tiny galaxy, with three stars in it, spinning really, really fast because it's so small. And the wind is what's blowing it around. Like a windmill. If they were attracting each other together, why would there be any distance between them? Why would a neutron have a size? Why do electrons orbit a nucleus instead of being sucked into the opposite charge at the center? Why is a photon emitted when an electron falls down one valence level, what form was that energy in before the quantum leap released it? Conventional science can't really explain it... my theory does. I really really believe in it.

if we ever reach the stars we will do so because we have solved the mystery of gravity and have learned to "pull" AND "push" ourselves thru space...

UFO flight is also explained by it. If they block the "wind" hitting their ship from any direction, the ship will "fall" in that direction, even if it's straight-up. The acceleration is determined by how much of the wind they block. It can easily allow instantaneous right-angle turns at 15,000 MPH... but inertial dampeners are another matter. Pun intended. You'd have to have those, too... never really thought about how to apply this theory towards dampening inertia... I'm open to suggestions.

Very interesting, so there is a.force pushing all matter together. And through specific particles found in matter such as iron,(or other conductive/ unique elements).. the force uses said unique chemical structure to create a "flux"of cascading reactions we.now see as gravity,magnetism etc.. from a musican point of view I see it like the same energy used to strum a guitar, can produce a result or equally.similar note.regardless of the instrument used..

As if.the universe itself was using particles to play a.symphony, but if this the cause of what creates the vaccum and influences the particles in the vaccum of time/space... Where does the infinite force recieve its energy? Do you think their might be some sort of perpetual motion effect that allows the.unused expendable.energy to somehow be recyled back to the force keeping gravity Infinite as long as a single particle.exists??

reply to post by subtleperspective

I think it possible that... well, black holes "evaporate." It's like the matter falls through the singularity and "goes away." This caused Hawking's "Information Paradox" that confused everyone for years. He explained it one way; this could explain it another: if the matter is converted to energy as it passes through the singularity, that energy could be dispersed into some kind of sub-dimensional "power grid" that distributes the energy evenly over all of space-time. Add up all the matter being converted by the evaporation of every black hole in the universe. Probably pretty big.

But I'm also a Christian (non-denominational). I don't pretend to know what God is, but he too could be feeding us all that energy, like underground irrigation.

Whatever the source of the vacuum energy, it's there. It's real. Perhaps we'll find out one day... but it shouldn't get in the way of understanding and controlling it as Tesla predicted we would someday.

One point to consider if gravity is like the strong and weak nuclear force just on a different scale, then there would be +ve and -ve charges to how gravity operates or gravity attraction and repulsion going on.

reply to post by kwakakev

As in, how like charges repel and opposites attract? Hmm. Lightning... the electron charges go from the ground up... pulled along a conductor towards the lack of electrons up above... by golly, that might be a different force, unless it's "in disguise," like magnetism. What imbalance is it that causes electrons to always move towards the more-positive side in a conductor? The force of the electrons in the power source, pushing them, repelling them rather. Least resistance means, if there's a hole for them in the opposite direction from whence they're being pushed, they'll go into that hole. And on and on, until it can't move any more. Lightning isn't pulled into the sky by the clouds; lightning is pushed into the air through whatever water drops and air gaps can conduct electricity. Wow; I guess everything is the opposite of what we think.

And it must be like magnetism, operating over small (single-atom) distances, via valence shells. Electrons must have some special shape, or property, that "shields the wind" in a slightly different way, to cause an effect that only pushes electrons. It's like... a wind within the wind, a wind that ignores everything but charged particles. Maybe a "positive" particle is just "less negative." Less energized. And there's not really any such thing as a "positive charge," like how shadows are the absence of a substance rather than a distinct substance of their own. Magnetism, gravity, and electricity; the same mechanism, but acting differently on different things as well as at different scales...

Thank you very much. That never would've occurred to me.