anti-gravity?

Apr 20, 2024 Last reply: 2 years ago 41 Replies

Of course little things like the equality of inertial and gravitational mass (so that objects of different density fall at the same speed) don’t fit easily into such a picture.

Also, the rate at which the hypothetical particles collide with matter has to be extremely large in order to work with very dense matter, such as free neutrons.

Neutrons have been observed to follow Newtonian gravity to very high accuracy in the lab.

And then there’s the complete absence of Brownian motion in free particles. With some huge flux of particles carrying the sort of momentum that would be required to account for the gravitational motion of free neutrons, the resulting fluctuations would be very visible.

Besides, if the particles bounce off the gravitating objects, their velocity distribution will change as a consequence. (Some of them will rattle around between them, going faster and faster as the objects get closer.) Thus there will be a wake effect, like a small plane taking off right after an A380. No such effects are observed.

Not to pile on, or at least not as much as the notion deserves, but if relativity is completely wrong, then there is only one velocity in a given reference frame for which the drag force of such a particle ensemble is zero.

And, of course, there’s the question of the origin, distribution, and regulation of the momentum-carrying particles.

To have any chance of avoiding even these purely classical effects, the particles would have to have infinite speed, zero mass, perfectly uniform and isotropic distribution in both position and direction, perfectly timed arrival at each object to make the fluctuations cancel out, and on an on.

This is the luminiferous ether, on stilts.

And then there are matter-wave interferometers, which work not only on electrons, but on neutrons and even buckyballs. They set far tighter limits on most of these classical effects.

So no, these sorts of theories are not good candidates to explain gravity or other relativistic effects.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

But it isn't backed up by any experimental observations that point to anything we haven't known about for centuries now, as is pointed out by Jan Panteltje's wikipedia link, which he doesn't seem to understand.

The basic idea came from "Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in 1690" He was a friend of Newton, but rather less clever.

Is there any deeper explanation for conservation of energy, and for Newton's laws, other than that's just the way things are?

(That gets philosophical, namely why does mathematics define the world?)

If you postulate that the forces interact with mass rather than area or volume, that is easily explained.

Why do we assume that gravity is a pull based on mass, when it could equally well be a push based on mass?

Whenever you feel like reading the rest of my post, let me know. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Oh no, think of the methane emissions! Well if it gets hot enough, it will be bacon from the sky, not manna...

What is manna? Our Safeway doesn't seem to have it.

Your post appeared to concentrate on particles,which, I agree, are not a good explanation for gravity. I am taking a more general view that gravitatioal 'attraction' could equally likely be something-or-other 'non-repulsion' . The something-or-other isn't particles and isn't electromagnetic waves but we don't know what it is and have ignored the possibility that it might exist.

We invented the term "gravity" to account for an observed phenomenon but we don't really know what it is or whether it exists -- why can't we invent an equally plausible mass-intercepted force and see if we can find out if that exists and what causes it?

If you're interested in outlandish theories for gravity -and much else- read the two papers published by Wolfgang Schnell in 'Il Nuovo Cimento' in 1998. Starting from a model of the universe as a dense spherical chunk of very rigid particles that can sustain shear and compression waves and dislocations, he derives the existence of mass and electric charge, relativity and gravity, and works out the masses of a whole list of elementary particles.

There were two papers. I have them here: W. Schnell, A non-local wave model for particles and fields, Il Nuovo Cimento, VOL. 113 B, N. 2, Febbraio 1998 <https://cern/ch/jeroen/tmp/Wolfgang-Schnell-1.pdf>and <https://cern/ch/jeroen/tmp/Wolfgang-Schnell-2.pdf>. Nobody paid much attention. They are altogether too weird, but intriguing nevertheless.

Jeroen Belleman

I don't think we know for sure that conservation of energy holds on a cosmological scale, since we don't know for sure the global topology of the Universe.

In a hypothetical Universe that's topologically flat and unbounded there's still the boundary condition at infinity to be considered, which I think could in principle be a singularity sort of like a "white hole", anything could come flying in and conservation of energy can't hold exactly.

[snip]

The above URLs won't work until "cern/ch" is replaced by "cern.ch".

Joe

20 years?! I think there's a "k" missing. According to
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's_location_and_neighborhood>, the sun is 26 - 27 kly from the centre of the galaxy.

Or are you proposing FTL speeds?

Gravitational repulsion is easy. The hard bit is reversing time.

Exactly. (*)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) “manna” translates as “what is it?”

Oops, indeed. Sorry.

Thanks, Jeroen Belleman

I did find New Orleans CDM Coffee and Chicory in the Asian foods section at our Safeway. Mo loves it.

20 years in the rest frame of the individual travelling there with continuous acceleration of 1g.

Obviously the stay at home twin will be long dead by then.

No. That's what science is about.

The world was there first, so it defines mathematics.

Mathematics is a way of describing a simpler world that is close enough to the real world to be useful. It evolved in the same way as language, and for exactly the same reason - it makes organising stuff easier.

Probably mealy bug or scale insect excreta. Desert equivalent of honeydew from aphids.

+1

The trouble is that simple *wrong* answers appeal to a lot of people. The "Einstein was wrong" brigade have been going ever since he first published the special theory of relativity.

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His repost to "A hundred authors against Einstein" was that it would only take one iff they were actually correct. That is true of all science. It doesn't matter how elegant the theory is it can still be refuted by an experimental test where it predicts the wrong answer.

Invariants of motion are a higher level version of the classical conservation laws that can be formulated in general relativity.

Mathematical notation is just our best way so far of ensuring accuracy, logical consistency and precision in our description of things.

Hand waving with "just so" stories can only get you so far. Natural language is far too ambiguous and flexible to be effective for science.

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