Pen Truth Contributor
Gravity is considered a basic or fundamental forces of this universe. Like fire to a cave man, gravity is not fully understood. Just as cavemen understood how to create fire,that it produces heat and how to utilize fire for their benefit and survival, too, we know only this much about gravity. There are models that can predict the apparent gravity of massive objects, but ultimately gravity does not always act as the models predict.
The popular explanation is that the gravity, as we experience it is actually a well created in space by mass. Like a marble spinning in a funnel, objects keep from falling in due to the velocity of their orbits. This never satisfied me no mater how I tried to rationalize the explanation. I believe that a new description for gravity is needed. As I envision it, mass never warps space but rather attracts space. Until recently I didn’t have a way of explaining this and it’s ramifications to my satisfaction. That is until last night.
Time may not be analogous to a river, but space is, or at least it is analogous to a lake. Like water, space is spilling out in all directions. The gravity of the universe has not slowed down the expansion of space because gravity does not exist, or at least not as a force. I have APOD as the start page on my internet browser at work. Every now and then a vivid photo of some well defined and wondrous Galaxy shows up when I go online. I don’t just look at these photos, but get absorbed into them. One day I casually noticed that the galaxy I was looking at appeared to be flowing down a drain. As more and more of these photos came across my computer, I would study them and I found that every galaxy looked as if it were flowing down a drain. They did not look that way to me because of their rotation or spiral forms, it was something else about these structures.
For my vision of how we experience gravity one would have to imagine a boat on a lake. You are sitting in that boat with your hand in the water. As long as the boat is not moving, your hand feels no force on it. Once the boat begins to move you begin to feel a force against your hand in the direction of the flowing water. This force that your hand is experiencing is called drag. What we observe as gravity is the flow of space creating drag as space is being sucked into mater. Therefore, standing on a planet is like standing in a river near a waterfall. Just as water passes by you dragging you toward the waterfall, so too space drags mater toward the waterfall of space spilling into mater. The closer you get to the source of the water fall, the stronger the drag. If you were able to get down to the quantum scale, that drag would exert considerable force on anything in the stream.
Light passing a massive object does not bend, but is more like a bullet being pushed off target by the wind as it passes through a stream of space spilling into the massive object. Space in a so called gravity well is not static, space is constantly being sucked into the mass like water flowing down a drain. As for the gravity well, there is none, only the effect of space flowing into matter and the effect of the frame dragging created by the spinning planet. As such, gravity should be considered as drag and not a force in itself.
This model of gravity can be used to explain why traveling through space at great velocity is analogous to standing on the surface of a supper massive object. The faster an object travels through the medium of space, the more drag space exerts on that object, i.e. the more mass the object appears to have. From data gathered by the voyager space crafts as they leave the solar system, it is known that the current calculations for gravity are imprecise. The discovery that the space craft have traveled farther than the current model for gravity implies that they should have caused quite a stir in the scientific community. After much examination, many potential causes for this extra “Push” have been ruled out. The data is still hotly debated to this day. The well theory of gravity was close to an explanation, but it lacked a vital component, the movement of space.
There are interesting implications to this thought exercise. Also, there are some unanswered questions as a result of my proposition.
1) What happens to space once it falls into the mass? My thought is that the structure of mass requires space like a flame requires oxygen.
2) Why do stars at the outer edge of a galaxy move faster than predicted by Sr. Issac Newton’s Laws of Motion? Plasma Cosmology has a good model to explain this without having the need for dark matter.
3) Can fluid dynamics be adapted to a new gravity model and would it yield better results that exist today?
4) Why does mass, or movement through space effect time?
This is probably falling on deaf ears,( er, blind eyes?) but as space expands it moves galaxies. Today I was told that space would not cause drag because it was empty. Well, even empty space is not empty, just as a “pure” vacuum is not empty, it contains space. Space is all around us and in us. As space expands, it “Drags” galaxies along with it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space
So tell me, why is my theory not probable?
But space is NOT empty. It has light, gamma rays, microwaves, neutrinos etc.
And, the further things get from concentrated space, the faster they can go. Galaxies travel faster than the speed of light because there is less ‘stuff’ in space the further out you go.
When I say empty space, I refer to areas free of large enough mass to cause significant gravity. Of course space is not empty, nor is it a pure vacuum. There is something like one atom per square centimeter of “empty” space. That is significant.
If you are referring to my statement of the outer stars orbiting galaxies faster than predicted, physicists invented dark mater to explain that observation. As for galaxies traveling faster than the speed of light because there is less “stuff”, galaxies would not be effected by such stuff as would a spacecraft. Besides, the current theory is that the galaxies only appear to be traveling faster than the speed of light because space is expanding. If the big bang theory is the correct model, then this would make sense since space would have been the first thing to exit the singularity at the moment of the event. Therefore, space must be capable of traveling faster than the speed of light. Nothing can exist without space and time, not even light.