How gravity works

WHAT EINSTEIN SAID

People say the speed of light is constant, and Einstein said it. But that’s… not… entirely… true, Mr President. Yes, Einstein started with this as a postulate in 1905, but in 1911 he wrote On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light, where we can see his ideas evolving. He gives the expression c = c[size=85]0[/size] (1 + Φ/c²), which is c varying with gravitational potential. Then in 1912 he said it again when he wrote “On the other hand I am of the view that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light can be maintained only insofar as one restricts oneself to spatio-temporal regions of constant gravitational potential”. He repeated this in 1913 when he said this: “I arrived at the result that the velocity of light is not to be regarded as independent of the gravitational potential. Thus the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is incompatible with the equivalence hypothesis”.


Wikipedia commons public domain image, Solvay 1911 crop uploaded by Fastfission

This wasn’t just some early thought that he later discarded, because there it is again in 1915 when he says " the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned." That’s on page 259 of Doc 21, sorry, I’m not sure what the original paper is called. He says it again in late 1915, on page 150 of Doc 30, within The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity. Einstein says “the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo must be modified.”. He spells it out in section 22 of the 1916 book Relativity: The Special and General Theory where he says this:

“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)”.

People tend to see the word velocity in the translations without seeing the context and without noticing that he’s repeatedly referring to “the principle”. They just don’t see the significance of “laid in the dust”, and they skip over his reference to “one of the two fundamental assumptions”. They just don’t and won’t see that he’s talking about the SR postulate, which is the constant speed of light. Some will even huff and puff and cry “out of context” and “cherry picking” to dismiss what Einstein actually said. They refuse to accept that Einstein didn’t speak English in 1916, and that what he actually said was die Ausbreitungsgeschwindigkeit des Lichtes mit dem Orte variiert. I’ve got the original German version, and I got a German friend and an Austrian friend to translate it for me. It translates into the speed of light varies with the locality. The word “velocity” in the 1920 Methuen translation was the common usage, as in “high velocity bullet”, not the vector quantity that combines speed and direction. He was saying the speed varies with position, hence the reference to the postulate, and hence it causes curvilinear motion. It causes the light to follow a curved path. like a car veers when the near-side wheels encounter mud at the side of the road.

THE OUTRAGE

People often react badly this, like creationists confronted with strata and fossils and carbon dating. Einstein talking about the variable speed of light does not fit with the relativity they’ve been taught. They cannot conceive that the “modern interpretation” is different to Einstein’s relativity, as described by Peter M Brown’s Einstein’s Gravitational Field. People swear that Einstein told us about curved spacetime, but when you read The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity it’s just not there. Yes, he talks about geometry and curvature and space-time, but he’s giving the equations of motion, through space. He doesn’t talk about “motion through spacetime” like people do these days. Surely everybody knows you can’t move through spacetime, it’s just the mathematical space where we plot our lines. With the time dimension included, you can’t move through it. Some will scoff, and say of course, we all know that but it isn’t true. See rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm where you can read this:

“Some of the most famous physicists in the world are not telling the truth about one of the most taken for granted concepts in scientific history. They are not telling us how they can come up with their fanciful time travel theories (wormholes, advanced and retarded waves travelling in spacetime, etc…) using a model of the universe that precludes the possibility of motion. Nothing can move in spacetime or in a time dimension-axis by definition. This is because motion in time is self-referential.”


Wikipedia commons GNUFDL image by Marc Goossens, see: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: … lspace.jpg

There’s other things that people don’t know. Such as how Einstein was still derided by many theoreticians even in 1923. You can see a reference to this on page 53 of Graham Farmelo’s Dirac biography The Strangest Man:

“At that time, Cunningham and Eddington were streets ahead of the majority of their Cambridge colleagues, who dismissed Einstein’s work, ignored it, or denied its significance”.

Many people don’t know that despite the media accolades and public adulation, Einstein drifted out of the mainstream from 1927 when he fell out with Bohr and others over the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. They don’t know that General Relativity was a “cottage industry” until the nineteen sixties, when the Golden Age changed it significantly:

“The Golden Age of General Relativity is the period roughly from 1960 to 1975 during which the study of general relativity, which had previously been regarded as something of a curiosity, entered the mainstream of theoretical physics. During this period, many of the concepts and terms which continue to inspire the imagination of gravitation researchers (and members of the general public) were introduced, including black holes and ‘gravitational singularity’. At the same time, in closely related development, the study of physical cosmology entered the mainstream and the Big Bang became well established… A number of simultaneous paradigm shifts characterize the Golden Age of general relativity. First and foremost, the Big Bang became the canonical cosmological model. Other paradigm shifts included a growing appreciation of the: Role of curvature in general relativity…”

Nor do most people know that in 1949 Einstein and Godel worked out that time is cofounded with motion through space, not with space. It’s there in A World without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein by Palle Yourgrau:


Basic books cover image reproduced with permission, see perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/ … 0465092942

But perhaps the signal most important thing most people don’t know, is that whilst aether is a taboo word which is sneered at by people who consider themselves to be mainstream, Einstein’s gave his Leyden address in 1920. And the title is Ether and the theory of relativity. There’s Einstein, talking about space and calling it an aether:

“Mach’s idea finds its full development in the ether of the general theory of relativity. According to this theory the metrical qualities of the continuum of space-time differ in the environment of different points of space-time, and are partly conditioned by the matter existing outside of the territory under consideration. This space-time variability of the reciprocal relations of the standards of space and time, or, perhaps, the recognition of the fact that ‘empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials g[size=85]μν[/size]), has, I think, finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty”.

All in all it adds up to some huge differences, and some total surprises. It means relativity has always been the Cinderella of modern physics, and despite his vast reputation, Einstein was hardly in the mainstream at all. His relativity wasn’t mainstream in his time, and it isn’t now. It’s been censored, so you don’t know about it, and pointing this out causes outrage and foam-flecked abuse. It’s really surprising, particularly it’s all rather similar to the way Newton described it in Opticks:

”Doth not this aethereal medium in passing out of water, glass, crystal, and other compact and dense bodies in empty spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve lines? …Is not this medium much rarer within the dense bodies of the Sun, stars, planets and comets, than in the empty celestial space between them? And in passing from them to great distances, doth it not grow denser and denser perpetually, and thereby cause the gravity of those great bodies towards one another, and of their parts towards the bodies; every body endeavouring to go from the denser parts of the medium towards the rarer?"
[size=50]queries 20 & 21[/size]

The language is different, but the underlying concept is the same. The energy tied up as the matter of a planet “conditions” the surrounding space to create a non-constant g[size=85]μν[/size] along with a gradient in c which causes curvilinear motion. To many people this is unacceptable, because it isn’t what they’ve been taught. It doesn’t matter that it comes from Einstein and Newton and is supported by experimental evidence, they refuse to believe it, and refuse to let anybody talk about it. I don’t mind people playing down the way Newton was big on Intelligent Design, because things were different then. But I will not have people dismissing Newton, the father of modern science, the man who said Are not gross bodies convertible into one another? and so anticipated E=mc², as an alchemist.


Wikipedia commons public domain image, Kneller portrait uploaded by Luestling reshaded by Thomas Gun

THE POWER OF GROUPTHINK

People suffer so much conviction about all this that they don’t just dismiss Einstein and Newton, and they even dismiss scientific evidence, just like YEC groupies. Show them two parallel-mirror light clocks at different gravitational locations, and they will refuse to believe what they see. You can employ high-powered telescopes and put the two light clocks up on a split screen, and people will still deny the evidence that’s there in plain view. They’ll talk about coordinate speed and time dilation and spacetime curvature, anything to deny the bleeding obvious: in a place where the gravitational potential is lower, the light goes slower.


Wikipedia commons CCASA 3.0 image by AllenMcC, see commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: … ential.jpg

It’s backed up by evidence and logic that is so crushingly obvious that it’s scarey how people just don’t get it. We define our time using the motion of electromagnetic waves, essentially light in the wider sense:

“Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom…”

Check out the NIST caesium fountain clock. It employs the hyperfine transition, which is an electromagnetic “spin flip” change to one of the atom’s electrons. As a result a microwave photon is emitted with a given “frequency”. But imagine you’re the detector. You sit there counting the arriving microwave peaks, and when you get to 9,192,631,770 you tick off a second. Since frequency is measured in Hertz which is cycles per second, you haven’t actually measured the frequency, the frequency is 9,192,631,770 by definition. So if electromagnetic phenomena proceed at a reduced rate, the second is bigger. In other words, if the light moves slower, the second is bigger, and you use it to measure the speed of light! The metre isn’t affected because provided you avoid the radial length contraction, the slower light and the bigger second cancel each other out.

The fact is that clocks clock up motion, not time. When atomic clocks or light clocks “run slow” in a region of low gravitational potential, they do this because the speed of light at that location is less than it is up in space. That’s why we have the GPS clock adjustment, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gps#Relativity. A GPS clock is an atomic clock that employs microwaves. The clock runs slower because the light moves slower. This is why the Shapiro delay is called what it is. It’s a delay, the light moves slower when it passes the limb of the sun. And this doesn’t just affect light. It affects everything. It affects electromagnetic things like electrons, because of what pair production is showing us: electrons are literally made from light:


Wikipedia commons CCASA 3.0 image originally by David Horman, see commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: … uction.svg

Electron spin isn’t “intrinsic”, nor is the magnetic dipole moment. There’s something going round and round in there, and “it’s not classical” is about as useful as “it surpasseth all human understanding”. Don’t buy it. The spin is in two dimensions, that’s all. And quarks notwithstanding, the same principle applies to protons, because you can conduct low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation and get two neutral pions which decay in a nanosecond into gamma photons. It applies to neutrons too, because of the evidence of beta decay. A free neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino in about fifteen minutes. So it isn’t just that light moves slower, all atomic processes run slower, and all other processes. You are made of electrons, and protons, and neutrons, and so are your rulers and clocks. When you see gravitational time dilation, it means your clock is moving slower. It’s like you’ve plunged a mechanical clock into an oil-bath. The viscosity makes the cogs and gears move slower. Only you’re like a clockwork man, and you’ve jumped in after it. So you don’t notice it locally.

All you have to do is think and you can see that this is how it is. Einstein said it, the evidence says it. That means the physics you’ve been spoon-fed that says the speed of light is constant is cargo-cult physics. For example, read Is The Speed of Light Constant? on the Baez website, and look at the section on General Relativity. You see the chapter 22 quote again along with the comment:

“Since Einstein talks of velocity (a vector quantity: speed with direction) rather than speed alone, it is not clear that he meant the speed will change, but the reference to special relativity suggests that he did mean so. This interpretation is perfectly valid and makes good physical sense, but a more modern interpretation is that the speed of light is constant in general relativity.” Lower down the article says “ Finally, we come to the conclusion that the speed of light is not only observed to be constant; in the light of well tested theories of physics, it does not even make any sense to say that it varies.”

The article says Einstein’s variable speed of light makes sense, and doesn’t make sense. It contradicts the evidence, and it even contradicts itself, but people swallow this junk, along with time travel and parallel worlds and tiny vibrating strings. Stuff like that predicts nothing, it explains nothing, and it’s all shielded by inscrutable mathematics that is far too complicated for you mere mortals to understand. What it is, is woo. And it crowds out the good stuff, stuff like New varying speed of light theories that you don’t get to hear about because there’s too many people selling snake oil.

HOW GRAVITY WORKS

You probably think of gravity as “curved spacetime”, but that’s the effect, not the cause. Curved spacetime is just curvilinear motion, and to see the cause you have to take a derivative of that curved spacetime. What you get is a gradient. It’s a g[size=85]μν[/size] gradient, essentially a gradient in the properties of space. And this gradient in space is caused in turn by the central energy locked up in the matter of the planet or star that “conditions” the surrounding space. It’s all to do with stress-energy and pressure, and the best way to conceptualize it is to start with an old favourite.

Think about the cannonball in the 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’s circular. It uses gravity to give you a picture of gravity.


Wikipedia commons public domain image by BenRG

To get a better analogy, imagine you’re standing underneath the rubber sheet. Grab hold of the rubber around the cannonball and pull it down to give yourself some leeway. Now tie a knot underneath the cannonball, get rid of the cannonball, and let go. Now we’ve got a flat rubber sheet with a knot in it. The knot is a stress configuration, and surrounding it is tension. The tension gradually reduces as you move away from the knot, so 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. This rubber sheet represents the world, there’s no stepping outside of it. Our “marble” has to be within the sheet, and a part of it. What we need is a ripple. A photon will do, because a photon is a transverse wave, also known as a shear wave. In mechanics a shear wave travels at a speed determined by the stiffness and density of the medium: v = √(G/ρ). The G here is the shear modulus of elasticity, to do with rigidity. The ρ is the density. The equation says a shear wave travels faster if the material gets stiffer, and slower if the density increases. You can’t directly apply material concepts to space, but in electrodynamics the equation is somewhat similar: c = √(1/ε[size=85]0[/size]μ[size=85]0[/size]). Here ε[size=85]0[/size] is electric permittivity and μ[size=85]0[/size] is magnetic permeability. People don’t quite understand these terms because they don’t understand the electromagnetic field. They forget about the dualism of Jefimenko’s equations, and about Minkowski’s wrench, which is two pages from the end of Space and Time:

“Then in the description of the field produced by the electron we see that the separation of the field into electric and magnetic force is a relative one with regard to the underlying time axis; the most perspicuous way of describing the two forces together is on a certain analogy with the wrench in mechanics, though the analogy is not complete”.

A moving electric field doesn’t generate a magnetic field, it is a magnetic field, because Minkowski’s wrench is referring to a screw mechanism. This goes back to Maxwell’s On Physical Lines of Force see en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit … df&page=53 . Find a drill bit or reamer, grip it in your right hand, and put your left thumb on the bottom of it, and push upwards. It turns, just like the right-hand rule. That’s because the electric field is in essence a “twist field”, and the magnetic field is a “turn field” view of the self-same thing. Permittivity is telling you the twistability of space, and permeability is telling you how good it is at making things turn. Hence they are similar to stiffness and density, and the photon is similar to a ripple in a rubber sheet. But this analogy isn’t perfect, because in a rubber sheet the speed increases as we approach the knot. For space, speed doesn’t increase as we approach our central stress. Instead it reduces. It reduces because the pressure is outward rather than inward. It’s like pushing your fingers into a taut rubber sheet and then spreading them. The energy conditions the surrounding space to create a negative tension gradient, a pressure gradient. And even then the analogy still isn’t perfect, because you can’t tie a knot in two dimensions. You need three. So we need to extend our rubber sheet into a rubber block. Then instead of it being under tension like a sheet stretched over a frame, we need it to be under pressure, like a clear transparent jelly squeezed into a glass box. And to round it off, pair production tells us that an electron is quite literally “made of light”. It has spin and angular momentum, there’s something going round and round in there. What is it? Annihilation tells us the answer. It’s a 511keV photon, somehow trapped by itself. It’s like a knot, but a knot of stress-energy, a knot of “ripple”, not a knot in the rubber itself.

As to how it works in the real world, it’s to do with vacuum impedance, which is Z[size=85]0[/size] = √(μ[size=85]0[/size]/ε[size=85]0[/size]). Impedance is like resistance, but for alternating current rather than direct current:


Wikipedia commons GNU FDL image by Jacobsk, see commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wisselstroom.png

You might wonder why alternating current is important here, but it’s very simple. That’s what a light wave is:


Wikipedia commons GNU FDL image by Heron, see commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Light-wave.svg

There’s an electromagnetic field variation, first one way, then the other, and you just can’t have this field variation without some form of current. There’s no charge in there, but it really is current, like displacement current. But because a photon conveys energy in a three-dimensional space, and the dimensionality of energy is pressure x volume, it’s better to think of a photon in terms of a pressure pulse, shaped something like a lemon. Think of it as a “pulse of spacewarp”, where the sinusoidal waveform is telling you the twist and tracing a slope. It grows to a maximum a quarter of the way along the lemon, goes to zero half way along, increases to a negative maximum three-quarters of the way along, and then goes back to zero. But it’s still a wave, and its rate of propagation is determined by impedance, because impedance is describing “the strength of space”. If space is stronger, and you’re a photon, it’s harder to twist and it turns you more easily. Impedance increases as we approach the central matter/energy stress, the photon is a quantum of alternating current, a higher vacuum impedance equates to more resistance, and that results in a lower velocity, hence a lower c because c = √(1/ε[size=85]0[/size]μ[size=85]0[/size]).

Hence when a photon passes a massive body, it’s travelling through inhomogeneous vacuum where there’s a gradient in c across the photon wave-front. Hence it veers towards the body a little. What we’re seeing is refraction. It’s not quite the same as refraction through a glass block, but it’s similar. It’s so very similar that when we see it through our telescopes, we call it gravitational lensing:


Wikipedia commons public domain image, NASA/ESA, uploaded by Ladsgroup

Here’s the crucial point: our real world is like ghostly transparent block of rubber containing ripples of stress, some of which are tied into knots called matter. And we are a part of it, we are ripples and knots too. We are painted into the bulk of the “rubber” that is space. Like Flatlanders, we stretch with it. We are made out of this insubstantial fabric. We are so totally immersed in it and so much a part of it that we cannot directly measure any change in vacuum impedance. And nor can we directly measure any change in the velocity of light, because we calibrate our rods and clocks using the motion of light:

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom…

The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second…

So when we measure the motion of light, we’re taking that measurement using units derived from… the motion of light. And as pair production is telling us, we are made of this stuff. Anything that affects the speed of light affects electrons, and we can say the same for protons and neutrons. It affects all processes. That’s why we can’t measure the change in c locally. It’s like trying to measure the length of your shadow using the shadow of your ruler. It always measures the same, be it morning, noon, or dusk. But we can infer the change in c. We can measure it from afar, by comparison. It’s there in the gravitational time dilation, programmed into our GPS, in the Shapiro delay. The evidence is hiding in plain view, we can see it but we don’t know what we’re seeing. For many of us c is set in stone, and to challenge the constancy of the speed of light would be to challenge relativity. But Einstein told us about the variable speed of light, and it’s the forgotten legacy. That’s what time dilation is. Gravity doesn’t make “time to go slower”. The second is defined using the motion of light. The light goes slower because the space is not homogeneous, there’s a gradient in vacuum impedance and hence a gradient in c, and that’s why things fall down.

The bald truth is that a gradient in c is what a gravitational field is, and when you can appreciate this, 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 10^11 Joules of energy. If a planet now comes onto the scene, the cannonball will fall towards it, and just before impact will also have kinetic energy of say 10^8 Joules. Now, we ask, where did this kinetic energy actually come from? Has it been sucked out of the planet via some magical mysterious action at a distance? Let’s ask an expert, somebody who was right on the money:

“That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it”.

That’s a no from Sir Isaac Newton, and he should know. So, has it been magically extracted from the surrounding space? No, the energy density in the surrounding space is not reduced when a cannonball falls through it. The force of gravity doesn’t work like that in relativity. A free-falling body is not accelerating, the body on the ground is the one accelerating. No acceleration means no force and no energy is being delivered. So the only source of that kinetic energy is the cannonball itself. It hasn’t come from its mass because mass is “invariant”. So E=mc² and we’ve got a cannonball 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. The Pound-Rebka experiment backs this up. There’s a gravitational blue-shift because the c is reduced so it looks like there’s more energy in the photon at the bottom of the tower. But the photon hasn’t changed, the environment has changed, and the measuring devices, because of the gradient in c. There’s always a gradient in c wherever there’s gravity. Yes, the gradient might be very small. But don’t neglect it like the tidal gradient, which is a gradient in the gradient in c. Because without that local gradient in c, things don’t fall down.

Let’s take a look at an electron to see why things fall down. It has angular momentum aka spin and a magnetic dipole moment, and this evidence along with electron-positron annihilation tells us its something like a self-trapped 511keV photon going round and round in circles. Stick a circle of light that looks like this: O, into a gravitational gradient, caused by a very large number of other electrons and protons some distance off. What’s going to happen? Let’s divide the circle into four flat quadrants and make it very simple:

…←
↓…↑
…→

Starting from the left and going anticlockwise, at a given instant we have a photon travelling down like this ↓. There’s a gradient in c from top to bottom, but all it does is make the photon look blueshifted. A little while later the photon is moving like this → and the lower portion of the photon wave-front is subject to a slightly lower c than the upper portion. So it bends, refracts, curves down a little. Later it’s going this way ↑ and looks redshifted, and later still it’s going this way ← and bends down again. These bends translate into a different position for our electron. The bent photon path becomes electron motion. The electron falls down:


The reducing speed of light effectively bleeds motion out of the component photon and into the electron. But only half the cycle got bent, so only half the reduced c goes into kinetic energy aka relativistic mass. That’s why light is deflected twice as much as matter. That’s why gravity is not some magical mysterious action-at-a-distance force. There are no hidden dimensions, there’s no blizzard of gravitons sleeting between the masses. There’s no energy being delivered, so gravity isn’t a force in the usual sense, and it isn’t negative energy. There is no location in a gravitational field where the matter/energy of a planet, or the vacuum energy of space, is negative. It’s just the gradient in the properties of space caused by the central stress-energy. And it makes things fall down like this:

Imagine a swimming pool. Every morning you swim from one end to the other in a straight line. In the dead of night I truck in a load of gelatine powder and tip it all down the left hand side. This starts diffusing across the breadth of the pool, imparting a viscosity gradient from left to right. The next morning when you go for your swim, something’s not right, and you find that you’re veering to the left. If you could see your wake, you’d notice it was curved. That’s your curved spacetime, because the pool is the space round a planet, the viscosity gradient is Einstein’s non-constant gμν, and you’re a photon. As to how the gradient attracts matter, consider a single electron. We can make an electron along with a positron from light, via pair production. Since the electron also has spin, think of it as light trapped in a circular path. So if you’re swimming round and round in circles, whenever you’re swimming up or down the pool you’re veering left. Hence you find yourself working over to the left. That’s why things fall down.

NB: note that it’s energy that causes gravity, not matter per se. Matter only causes gravity because of the energy content. See The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity and look at page 185 where Einstein says “the energy of the gravitational field shall act gravitatively in the same way as any other kind of energy”. A gravitational field is a region of space that contains extra energy and in itself causes gravity, hence an integration approach is required, as per page 201. But we don’t consider a gravitational field to be dark matter. We don’t go looking for WIMPs. Yes, space is “dark”, and the mass of a system is a measure of its energy content, so if you defined the space around a planet as a system, it has a mass of sorts. But it isn’t matter. It’s just space. What did Einstein say about space? Neither homogeneous nor isotropic. What does the FLRW metric say? ”The FLRW metric starts with the assumption of homogeneity and isotropy of space.” Spot the difference? Gravitational anomalies aren’t evidence for dark matter. Dark matter is just a hypothesis that attempts to explain them. And those who promote it sweep the raisins-in-the-cake analogy under the carpet. The universe expands, but the space within the galaxies doesn’t, because galaxies are gravitationally bound. So each and every galaxy is surrounded by a halo of inhomogeneous space. That’s a g[size=85]μν[/size] gradient. It’s a gravitational field without any matter on the end of it. So when you hear people talking about the hunt for dark matter, bear this in mind.

Can you show us the equations that keep a photon trapped in a curve?

Can you show us how these equations create charge?

Yes, see arxiv.org/find/grp_physics/1/au: … /0/all/0/1, and many more. Keep an ear out for “the trefoil photon”.

What equation in that paper controls the movement of the photon in that curve?

Qui-Hong Hu does not claim that electrons are photons, at least not in the paper you site. Thus it seems that your citation is in error. The second citation is also in error, as the authors in question are working with the interference patterns of many photons, not knots in a single photon, as a quick scan of the actual paper makes plain. Often, when individuals cite popular sources rather than a scientific journal article, it is because that individual is attempting to dishonestly claim that the cited work supports his or her own work when in fact the individual has done no actual research on the citation.

So, again, what is the actual equation that governs the photon and its motion? How does this lead to the production of charge?

Oh my god. Repost, anyone?

First of all, wrong:

Second, give me an equation that shows that all motion slows down at a rate that maintains, just for example, the perceived frequency (i.e. color) of light. Oh wait, it’s time dilation…which means the most plausible answer is that one thing is slowing down, not all things, which is what you maintain.

Third, no one is denying that the speed of light ‘changes’…if you’re observing it in another reference frame.

Agreement with general relativity, it says. Doh.

It is because the speed of light is constant and time varies that this happens, not because time is constant and the speed of light varies, like you profess.

Yes, saying there is no such thing as time is the exact same thing as saying it’s constant.

That won’t do. I give you a whole heap of observable evidence and you say “wrong” then give an expression? Come on Anthem, try harder.

You’re dismissing observable evidence in favour of “one thing slowing down” that has no supporting evidence. You can’t see time slowing down. Nor can you see time flowing. All you can see, is things moving.

Good. Now take it to the next level. Understand that the Shapiro delay is there because the light goes slower. And look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_delay and ask yourself what that Einstein quote is doing there.

I can show you light. I can show you light moving. Can you show me time? No. Now how do we define time? Using the motion of light.

Huh? Read Time Explained. Time exists like heat exists, being an emergent property of motion. Come on Anthem, put some brain power into this instead of going along with an unthinking conviction that is not supported by scientific evidence.

Actually, no, what he did was exactly right. So far you have given no observable evidence. Observable evidence requires measurements and you have given no measurements. Anthem suggests that what you have said is contrary to an accepted physical law that is supported by a host of evidence. So you either have to undermine that law or you have to demonstrate that your proposal matches the law. This requires showing the measurement predictions of your proposal and showing that they meet the equation in questions.

Again, you have no evidence here. Not only that, but the evidence for time dilation is not seeing things, it is measuring things. And that the relevant difference is one of time rather than differences in the operation of all possible forces is one of reason. I.e.: if all physical processes slow down, then there must be some underlying cause as to why they slow down. So far, you have given no measurement evidence saying that all nuclear processes are electromagnetic processes, so we have no reason to suspect that something that slows down electromagnetic processes will also slow down nuclear processes. Indeed, if you claim that electromagnetic processes slow down, then we should see measurements of nuclear processes that demonstrate an increase in their speed. This suggests that your theory is prima facie incorrect. However, actual measurement evidence could possibly show otherwise.

Cheers, PhysBang :obscene-drinkingcheers:

You know, it’s stuff like this that makes me retire from threads. So I will, after this:

Can you see air? Any fourth grader can ask that question. For christ’s sake. If you only trust your eyes you’re not going to accomplish much. Weren’t you the one showing us the optical illusion? Jebus.

Baloney. You’re dismissing the evidence of the Shapiro delay and the GPS clock adjustment along with NIST fountain clock and the astronauts. And you’re dismissing what Einstein said. You haven’t even read any of it it have you?

Yes, the impedance of space changes. I guess you missed that.

And I guess you didn’t read what I said about proton-antiproton annihilation into pions thence photons. Not very good Physbang. What do I have to do, drip feed it to you piecemeal? Will you ever read it anyway?

Yes, you can see it shimmering on a hot day, and you can feel it blowing through your hair. The air is there, no doubt. Now, can you see time? No. Can you see time moving? Or slowing down? No. All you can see is things moving, and that motion slowing down. That’s the scientific evidence, and if you’d rather ignore it, that’s up to you.

Farsight,

I think I understand what you are saying concerning why, in a variant impedance field, a particle would gravitate toward the mass. Due to higher metaphysics, I can substantiate and agree with your surmise that a particle is an enveloped EM wave which would, of course, be affected by a variant impedance field. Careful logic can derive what cannot be measured by Science (very careful logic).

What is your reasoning as to exactly, physically, why the impedance field varies around mass objects. The fact of it is a given. Please keep in mind that every point in space can only effect an adjacent point. What is, in effect and in your view, gradually extending from a mass such as to cause the impedance of the space around it to be different?

I’d like to describe this in terms of energy rather than mass, using the most ubiquitous “particle” we see, namely the photon. If we consider one wavelength of the archetypal sinusoidal electromagnetic waveform, the electric field amplitude denotes the degree of spatial twist or deformation. If we could freeze-frame a photon in a cubic lattice representing space, the positive peak denotes a maximum twist where a horizontal lattice line has rotated to this disposition: \ . Tracing the waveform with your finger, the midway zero point indicates a rotation back to horizontal: _ , whilst the negative peak denotes a reverse rotation like this: /.

The magnetic field amplitude indicates the rate of the rotation, or “rate of turn”. There is however only one true field involved, which is the electromagnetic field. I have a separate essay/chapter on this, which describes it as a geometrical spatial disposition, essentially a “twist/turn” field.

The sinusoidal electromagnetic waveform is giving us the upper slope of pulse of stress-energy, essentially a pressure pulse. There’s an electromagnetic field variation, but no charge is present. Instead there is a form of current, namely an alternating “displacement” current. The result is rather like a gravitational wave in that there’s a change in distance as it passes through. The displacement rises to 3.86 x 10[SUP]-13[/SUP]m then falls back to zero. This is a distance or extension, and relates to Planck’s constant h in E=hf because action has the dimensionality of momentum x distance. And since this is a pressure pulse in a volume rather than at a surface, we have to consider the pressure to be isotropic, and the slope to be symmetrical in the photon polarization plane. It thus takes the lemon-like outline of a wavepacket. See arxiv.org/abs/0803.2596 figure 2.

This pressure imparts a pressure gradient into the surrounding space. When a significant amount of energy is tied up as the matter of a planet, this pressure gradient measurably alters vacuum impedance or the “strength” of space via a form of compression. Hence permittivity (twistability) and permeability (reciprocal of turnability) are altered, hence c varies. The end product is inhomogeneous space, or a gravitational field.

Not to distract, but for later thought; I think you have made a presumption in the “How Long is a Photon” that invalidates the otherwise logical conclusion. You seemed to have presumed that the energy associated with the wavelength of a photon is equatable to the energy of a sinusoidal EM wave such as to derive the length of the photon from a calculated length of a stand of EM wave of equal wavelength. But back to the subject;

As I feared, I think that I need to reword my question. You are talking about space twisting and turning. Two questions;

  1. exactly what is it that is getting twisted; of what is the space made such that it could be twisted?
  2. exactly what is twisting it; why/how is the twisting accomplished? (the words “energy” or “charge” are insufficient).

Again, remember that each point in the universe can only affect the next adjacent points to it. So my question is, “of what are those points made such that they have the properties you describe and yet maintain that each point only affects the next point over?”

Perhaps if you began with the thought of absolutely nothing at all then added in whatever components were necessary to establish a “twistable space substance” and whatever would be doing the twisting. What essential components would you have added?

This restriction of only being able to post 1 or 2 posts per day is not very tolerable. I wouldn’t think that a forum such as this would have a need to slow traffic down so much. So please contact me email, which I’m certain will be much faster: jamessaint42@yahoo.com and I would also like to discuss your next book.

Thx.
JSS

Noted. There’s a " pulse" issue here wherein one photon is considered to be one wavelength.

Some of what I say next might sound trite, but bear with me:

Space.

Space.

Space.

Consider an analogy where a region of space is a cube of transparent elastic jelly marked through with lattice lines. Insert a hypodermic needle, and inject more jelly into the centre. The centre now exhibits a pressure bulge, where the lattice lines are distorted and are no longer straight. This pressure and distortion diminishes with distance from the centre. The bulge represents a photon, the closest thing to “raw energy” we can envisage. But all you’ve added is jelly, and this jelly is space. This suggests that space and energy are, at the fundamental level, the same thing.

And that next adjacent point affects the next adjacent point, which affects the next adjacent point, and so on.

Space. I can’t describe it in terms of anything else, it’s the most fundamental thing there is. It seems to behave like an elastic “substance”, but it isn’t a tangible substance in the usual sense of the word. Light isn’t tangible either. You can’t “touch” long-wave radio waves. But electromagnetic radiation is a wave in space, IMHO a wave of space in space. And you can make electrons out of photons, and electrons are matter, and you can touch matter. So space isn’t made of anything tangible, but tangible things are made of it.

Distance. Imagine that you are in the vacuum of space. Press your hands together. What’s between them? Nothing. Now separate your hands. What’s between them? A gap. Space. This space has its vacuum energy, and this has a mass equivalence. It isn’t nothing.

I haven’t noticed this myself, but noted.

Thx Farsight,

I think the use of the word “space” when describing of what objects and space are made might run into semantics problems. :wink:

For deeply logical metaphysics reasons, I use the word “affectance” for that “jelly space stuff” from which all other stuff is made.

But now for the challenge;

Why does it move at all (become more dense)?
Why doesn’t the “jelly space stuff”, affectance, just sit still, quiescent?
Why did it ever begin to move?
Why doesn’t it eventually entropy into stillness? - true nothingness.

Even if an affectance knot were maintained without collapsing, why would the space around it be statically altered and not evenly redistribute the density? You seem to be saying that distant bits of jelly must remain at distances and thus any contraction occurring between them causes static density variations. Why wouldn’t the distant bits of jelly/affectance merely move closer toward the knot and relieve all pressures and hence remove all gravity?

If you form a pocket of compressed air or evacuated air space, the air around that space does not form a gradient field aimed toward your pocket, so why would space jelly/affectance do that? The implication is that bits of space jelly are being held in place and thus get stretched. What would be holding them in place?

Noted, James.

I don’t know.

Because the knot maintains itself, just as a knot in a rubber sheet stays tied up.

For the same reason that a wave in water remains a wave. It’s a travelling pressure pulse that appears as a hump, and the hump travels but the water does not. This hump does not collapse because of the nature of water. A wave in space does not collapse because of the nature of space.

Because space isn’t made of particles. Instead, particles are made of it.

More of the same. But it’s all one whole, it isn’t made of bits.

I think I confused you. I am not challenging the persistence of the knot. Note that the “rubber sheet” analogy requires that the edges of the sheet be fastened in place, else there would be no stretching even with a firm knot. The entire sheet would merely wrinkle. A gravity field persists through indefinite time. The “rubber sheet” stays stretched. For the jelly/rubber-space concept to hold true, there must be an reason as to why the “edges of the sheet” are held in place.

Or another way to ask is, “Vibrations in water and air reflect what happens within liquids. Why isn’t the jelly-space liquid rather than jelled?”

It is important to know because we are talking about a “knot” forming which directly implies that the jelly stuff not only moved, but actually got wrapped around itself where jelly point B got into the position of jelly point D while D is still attached to E and B is still attached to A. How could you conceivably tie jelly into a knot resulting in altered densities?

It seems that it would have to be the waves themselves that form the “knot”. But if that is the case (and I’m certain that it is) then why would the surrounding space be affected at all other than the vibrations of the waves within the knot? In effect, you are proposing a scenario of a compression wave of jelly being twisted in such a way that it not only persists in a consistent shape and location that compresses the jelly, but causes the surrounding jelly to be less dense (decompressed) throughout time.

But then why not a knot that decompresses rather than compresses? Wouldn’t such an occurrence cause anti-gravity; a compression of the surrounding jelly-space that pushes other such “objects” away? Wouldn’t the anti-gravity objects adhere and perhaps annihilate the gravity objects? Has there ever been any witness to any actual anti-gravity particle for even the shortest time?

Of course, the bigger question would very soon become, “How did this jelly-space ever come to be?”