GRAVITY EXPLAINED You probably think of gravity as curved spacetime. Surprisingly Einstein didn’t, not quite. And neither should you. To understand gravity you have to take the ontological view. You have to learn to see what’s there. And to do that, you have to put time to one side, because time isn’t the same kind of dimension as the Dimensions of space. Yes, an object passing a planet traces a curved path, but you don’t stare up at a plane and decide that it’s a silver streak in the sky. You take a mental snapshot, flash, a picture of it in a timeless instant. It’s the same with gravity. Take the time-derivative of that curved spacetime. What you get is a gradient. And it’s a gradient in space, not curved spacetime. But let’s tackle it an easier way, via an old favourite. Think about a cannonball sitting on a rubber sheet. The cannonball is heavy, and it makes a depression that will deflect a rolling marble, or even cause the marble to circle like an orbit. It’s a nice analogy, but it’s wrong. It’s wrong because it relies on gravity to pull the cannonball down in the first place. It uses gravity to give you a picture of gravity. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! To get a better handle on it, imagine you’re standing underneath the rubber sheet. Let’s make that a silicone rubber sheet. It’s transparent, like my snorkel and mask. Grab hold of the rubber around the cannonball and pull it down further to give yourself some leeway. Now transfer your grip to the transparent silicone rubber itself. Gather it, pull it down some more. Now tie a knot in it underneath the cannonball, like you’d tie a knot in the neck of a balloon. Now pull it all the way down and let go. Boinggg! The cannonball is gone. Forget it. Now, what have we got? We’ve got a flat rubber sheet with a knot in it. The knot will stand in for a region of stress, where the rubber is under pressure. Stress is the same as pressure. It’s force per unit area, and force times distance gives us the units for both work and energy. So energy is stress times volume. The knot represents energy. Or matter if you prefer. OK here’s the deal. Surrounding the small central region of stress is a much larger region of tension extending outwards in all directions. Whenever you have a stress you always have a tension to balance it. It isn’t always obvious, but it’s always there, like reaction balances action, and force balances force. The tension gradually reduces as you move away from the stress. If you could measure it, you would measure a radial gradient. But measuring it is trickier than you think. Because in this analogy we can’t use a marble rolling across a rubber sheet. This rubber sheet represents the world, there’s no stepping outside of it. Our “marble” has to be within the rubber sheet, and a part of it, made out of the same stuff as that knot. We need an extra dimension. So turn your top hat upside down and tap it with your magic wand. Abracadabra! A flash of light and a puff of smoke, and that rubber sheet is now a solid block of clear silicone rubber extending in all directions. And you’re standing inside of it. Let’s make you a ghost so you can glide around unimpeded, for the purposes of gedanken. Our knot is now three-dimensional, like a moebius doughnut, maybe a little silvery like a bubble underwater. It’s not really made out of anything, it hasn’t got a colour, and it hasn’t even got a surface. It’s a soliton, a topological defect, a travelling stress that’s basically a photon, but going nowhere fast because it’s twisted round on itself. So E = hc/λ = pc = mc² means the momentum is now inertia, and we call it an electron. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Our electron has replaced our cannonball, and now we need a photon to stand in for that rolling marble. Let’s conjure one up, and send it propagating across our rubberworld so that it passes by our electron. We could run after it and take some snapshots with our ontological camera, but let’s save that for another day. For now our photon is just a shear-wave ripple, travelling at a velocity determined by the stiffness and density of the medium. There’s an equation for it in mechanics that goes like this: v = √(G/ρ) The G here isn’t a gravitational constant, but is the shear modulus of elasticity, to do with rigidity. It’s different to the bulk modulus of elasticity, because it’s a lot easier to bend something rather than compress its volume. The ρ is the density. The equation says a shear wave travels faster if the material gets stiffer, and slower if the density increases. In electrodynamics the velocity equation is remarkably similar. You’ve probably seen it before: c = √(1/ε0μ0) Here ε0 is permittivity and μ0 is permeability. The two are related by impedance √(μ0/ε0). High permittivity means a material will take a larger charge for the same voltage, for example Barium Titanate has 1200 times the permittivity of air, so we don’t make capacitors out of air. High permeability means a material exhibits more magnetism when you change the charge. Iron has lots of it, wood doesn’t, so magnets are made of iron. There are some marvellous similarities between mechanics and electrodynamics, though confusions abound too. With the piezoelectric effect you subject a material to mechanical stress and you get an electrical stress, a voltage, but high voltage is called high tension, which is negative stress. And electric current goes from negative to positive, so things are backwards. But let’s come back to that another time, and just say higher impedance means lower velocity. Back in rubberworld, our photon-marble is passing our electron-cannonball. We notice it veers towards it a little. That’s because where the rubberworld tension is slightly greater, the real-world impedance is slightly higher, so the velocity is slightly lower. What we’re seeing is refraction. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Here’s the crucial point: our real world is like that rubberworld with the knot in it plus an extra dimension, and we’re made out of this stuff, along with our rulers and clocks. So we don’t see the tension. We don’t measure the change in c. But we can infer it. Like in the Pound-Rebka experiment, where a photon is blue-shifted at the bottom of the tower because c there is lower. Or in the Shapiro experiment, where the light takes longer to skim the sun because the c there is lower too. There’s an equivalence going on here between General Relativity and Special Relativity, but it’s tricky to spot. Imagine that I stay here on earth while you travel to Alpha Centauri in a very fast rocket travelling at .99c. We can use 1/√(1-v²/c²) to work out that you experience a sevenfold time dilation. (Multiply .99 by itself to get .98 and subtract this from one to get a fiftieth, which is roughly a seventh multiplied by a seventh). We normally think of time dilation as being matched by length contraction, but that’s only in the direction of travel. Hold up a metre ruler transverse to the direction of travel and it’s the same old metre. Your metre is the same as my metre, and your time is dilated by a factor of seven, which means it takes a beam of your light seven times longer to traverse your transverse metre. Looking at it another way c = s/t and your t changed, your s didn’t, so your c did. Your c is a seventh of mine. Don’t get confused about this. Don’t tell yourself that your lightbeam is following a diagonal path and has to cover a greater distance. That’s introducing an absolute reference frame, mine. Stay in your own frame. Then when you come back after your year-long round trip, I aged seven years, but you only aged one. You aged less because your c was slower than mine, but you never noticed it at the time. The equivalence comes in because I could have slid you into a black box and subjected you to high gravity instead of sending you to Alpha Centauri. We know that “clocks run slow” in a high gravity situation, just as they do when you’re travelling fast. And it’s for the same simple reason. The c is reduced. But you won’t measure it as reduced, because it’s just a distance/time conversion factor. Just like you when you go to the moon you don’t get three ounces to the pound. I know it’s difficult to stop thinking c is a constant. Yes it’s always measured to be the same in all frames. But when you step back to see the big picture that is the whole gallery, when you look at all the frames side by side, you see what distinguishes them is the way c changes. It’s a constant, but it isn’t constant. Once you realise that c changes in a “gravitational field” you can allow yourself the epiphany of understanding gravitational potential energy. We know that E=mc², so a cannonball sitting quietly in space represents maybe 1011 Joules of energy. If the earth now trundles on to the scene, the cannonball will fall towards it, and just before impact will also have kinetic energy of say 109 Joules. Now hold it right there. Freeze frame. Where did that kinetic energy actually come from? Has it been sucked out of the earth? Has it been magically extracted from some zero-point bottomless bucket? Has it come from the “gravitational field”? No. There’s no free lunch from Mister Gravity. The energy came from the cannonball. And it hasn’t come from its mass because mass is “invariant”. Only it isn’t invariant because the rest mass has actually increased, check the Pound-Rebka experiment. So E=mc² and we’ve got a pile of kinetic energy that hasn’t come out of the m. There’s only one place left it can have come from. The c. The c up there is greater than the c down here, and there’s a gradient in between. There’s always a gradient in c when there’s gravity. Even across the width of an electron. Yes, the gradient might be very small. But it isn’t negligible. If you think it is, as per the General Relativity Equivalence Principle, you’ve just thrown the baby out with the bathwater. An accelerating frame with no tidal gradient isn’t the same as a proper gravity situation. There’s always a tidal force. The gradient has to be there. There can be no Uniform Gravitational Field. Because without that gradient, things don’t fall down. Let’s go back to rubberworld. But it’s time we did a Reverse Image and made the rubber the ghost. Now you’re back to normal again take a look at that electron once more. It’s a travelling stress localised because it’s going round in a circle. Stick this ring of light in a real gravity gradient, caused by a zillion other electrons some distance downaways. What’s going to happen? Flash, take a picture. At a given instant we have a quantum of light travelling down like this ↓. There’s a gradient top to bottom, but all it does is gives the photon a fractional blueshift. A little later take another picture. Flash. Now the photon is moving this ← way, and the upper portion of the photon wavefront is subject to a slightly higher c than the lower portion. So it bends, refracts, curves down a little. Later it’s going this ↑ way and gets fractionally redshifted, and later still it’s going this → way and curves down again. These bends translate into a different position for our electron. The bent photon path becomes electron motion. Only half the cycle got bent, so only half the reduced c goes into kinetic energy, relativistic mass. The other half goes into rest mass, but it’s only a scale-change falling out of the clear blue sky, and there ain't no free lunch. Now you can understand why gravity is not some magical, mysterious, action-at-a-distance force. There is no curvature of spacetime, no hidden dimensions, no gravitons sleeting between masses. There’s no energy being delivered, so gravity isn’t even a force. It’s just the tension gradient that balances the stress that is mass/energy. And we’re just rubberworld Fatlanders getting to grips with our wrinkles and bumps. No energy delivered, extra mass to use as collateral... that means there’s no energy cost. So if we could somehow contrive a gradient that goes the other way... whoo, it’ll be The Stars My Destination. But first of all we must also understand the thing we call Space. We must learn how light is a ripple of nothing, and how all the somethings are made from it. It’s a tale of something and nothing, and since nothing comes for free, there will be a Charge... Acknowledgements: thanks to J.G. Williamson and M.B. van der Mark for Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? http://members.chello.nl/~n.benschop/electron.pdf, to Peter M Brown for his many papers on his excellent website http://www.geocities.com/physics_world/, to Robert A Close for for Is the Universe a Solid? http://home.att.net/~SolidUniverse/]home , to Reg Norgan for http://www.aethertheory.co.uk/pdfRFN/Aether_Why.pdf, to G S Sandhu for The Elastic Continuum http://www.geocities.com/gssandhu_1943/index.html to all the forum guys with their relevant posts and links, Wikipedia contributors, and to anybody who I’ve forgotten or whose pictures I’ve used. Thanks guys.
All: I'll be grateful for any feedback you can give me. Even if somebody delivers a showstopper. Fingers crossed I'll buff it up with the input I get, and do a version 2. Otherwise: enjoy. Sorry there's only 3 pictures, that's the max.
URI: The moot point about this and previous essays is that I'm explaining axiomatic mathematical terms. I can't explain things like c, E, m, or g using maths. So please cut me some slack here.
Come on guys, this is for real. Can I have some feedback please. "In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position. Now we might think that as a consequence of this, the special theory of relativity and with it the whole theory of relativity would be laid in the dust. But in reality this is not the case. We can only conclude that the special theory of relativity cannot claim an unlimited domain of validity ; its results hold only so long as we are able to disregard the influences of gravitational fields on the phenomena (e.g. of light)." Albert Einstein (The General Theory of Relativity: Chapter 22 - A Few Inferences from the General Principle of Relativity)
I only had time to quickly start reading through but I sorta lost you right here: What is s? Are you saying that as we travel faster the relative speed of light isn't constant but slows down? I have a hard time with this. There is an assload of evidence that the speed of light is c and always c. Light may be affected by gravity/warping of space, but it doesn't slow it down. This has me thinking though so thats always good.
Are you proposing a new theory here ? If you are, perhaps you could give a summary of your proposal/conclusions. It looks to me like a thought experiement that is still at a crossroads.
I wouldn't call it a new theory, paulfr. Maybe a model. Perhaps even a toy model. It's a work in progress. See below. Captain: s is distance. Yes, what I'm saying is that if we travel fast c is in a way reduced. However we can never hope to measure this because the speed of light defines our time. You perhaps need to read the earlier essays: TIME EXPLAINED http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=60883 ENERGY EXPLAINED - sorry can't find thread MASS EXPLAINED http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=61557
I would say that a model is a theory. Bohr's planetary model of the atom was/is a theory. And I would say a 'work in progress' is a thought experiment; a possible component of some conclusion/theory. Like AE's elevator in space. If people can explain the fundamentals of SR, GR and QM in a few minutes of video or a paragraph, surely you can explain and summarize your 'new' ideas. You should include time, mass, energy and gravitation in that expplanation if you want others to take the time to consider it seriously.
Paulfr: OK here's a brief summary: Time is a dimension in that it's a measure of change, but there's no freedom of movement so it's not a Dimension like the Dimensions of space, and is a derived effect like Heat. They say Time is Money, only it isn't, because money exists when people agree on value. It makes the world go round but when you spend it it doesn't get destroyed because it's like energy. Energy is stress, but you have to multiply by volume to get the units right, because stress is force per unit area. A photon is a travelling stress and has energy and momentum, but if it was you moving instead of the photon, that momentum would look like intertia. So wrap a 511kev photon into a moebius loop via pair production and you've got an electron, mass. Time isn't fundamental it's space instead of spacetime and it's not curved so take a derivative and get a gradient. Stress is always balanced by tension so a concentration of mass/energy will create a tension gradient like a knot in a rubber sheet, and if mass is made out of light we can explain gravity as a refraction effect via variable c but we always measure c as 300,000km/s because light defines our distance and time and it's like trying measure the length of your shadow using the shadow of your ruler. That's as far as I've got. I need to talk about charge and permittivity next. It's a toy model, but actually it flies. I'm not sure where it's going, but nobody can actually shoot it down. Note the Q-type feedback which basically says "Farsight you're wrong because of naive axiomatic statement and abusive statement". There's some important psychology going on here, something to do with unfounded conviction. Try this to test yourself. Squares A and B really are the same colour. Look up echalk illusions and use the swatch for proof. If you insist they're different colours you're not as rational as you think. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
You're wrong because of experimental results. You really are a jackass. See, now THAT was an 'abusive statement.'
I read the essay on time. I agree that time is motion. That essay made complete sense. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one and I just don't get how you come to this epiphany: Are you saying mass causes a change in C, the gradient of which is the cause of gravity. What have I missed?
Energy is basically stress, Captain. Mass is localised energy. (ENERGY EXPLAINED needs a little work, but do read it and MASS EXPLAINED to get the gist of this). Both matter and energy cause gravity because stress is always opposed by tension. I need to explain how in a further essay or essays talking about charge, permittivity, and space. Edit: yes, I am saying that mass and energy cause a gradient in c which we call gravity.
