Monday, March 26, 2007

What is Gravity?

Think you know?
The official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science Magazine, the gatekeeping guide to what is and is not science, recently celebrated its 125th anniversary. As a tribute to the passing years, it published a lengthy article titled "125 Questions: What Don’t We Know.” It broke out the top 25 questions, listing them as the 25 big questions facing science over the next quarter-century.
What is gravity is a no show in the top 25.
The remaining 100 questions were listed under the heading “So Much More to Know.” Number 9 on the list is "What is the Nature of Gravity?” Of course, adding “nature of” to the question, rather than just asking what is gravity, tends to hide the fact that the explanation for gravity, that it’s a property of matter, is no explanation at all. Looking up the definition of “nature” reveals:
1.
a. To state the precise meaning of (a word or sense of a word, for example).
b. To describe the nature or basic qualities of; explain: define the properties of a new drug; a study that defines people according to their median incomes.
2.
a. To delineate the outline or form of: gentle hills that were defined against the sky.
b. To specify distinctly: define the weapons to be used in limited warfare.
3. To give form or meaning to: “For him, a life is defined by action” (Jay Parini).

Thus, using “nature” in the question means science is really serious about looking into gravity. Not so, as the explanation for the question turns into a meaningless joke: Science magazine notes about its question that gravity “clashes with quantum theory. It doesn't fit in the Standard Model. Nobody has spotted the particle that is responsible for it. Newton's apple contained a whole can of worms.”
So quantum theory, the Standard Model, and the practice of assigning properties to a particle (the way science explains all unknowns) are products of the mind, yet, it is not they that clash with gravity, it is gravity, the reality, that clashes with science's absurd creations.
Gravity is the core principle of empirical science. Gravity is proportional to and therefore a property of mass rests at the core of both astronomy and physics, and as a result of resting at the core of these two sciences, rests at the core of all disciplines that follow.
Science magazine says that the subject is a can of worms. How would you like to have a defense attorney call you in and tell you your life rests on a can of worms? You say, well, aren’t you going to do something about it, and the attorney shrugs his shoulders and says, well, we’ve got more important concerns here. First, we need to find out what the universe is made of (Science magazine’s number 1 question)."
How can anyone worry about what the universe is made of when the basic question, what is the nature of the most important force in our existence, goes unanswered, and indeed, unexamined.
Everything we do in the technological sector, from engineering the huge machines that create our prosperity to designing the aircraft that allow us to use that prosperity to widen our horizons, depends on acknowledging the existence of gravity.
How can that technology be efficient if it first doesn’t examine the nature of gravity?
And what are we paying billions of dollars in professorial salaries, stipends, honorariums, awards, even scholarships, for, not to mention the tens of billions of dollars we spend for projects dreamed up by scientists to support their extravagant lifestyles, useless projects such as the Superconducting Super Collider, 11 billion dollars and 45,00 contracts in 48 states, dead as a doorknob, the many Tokamak initiatives, plans to produce controlled fusion, with no results and slow abandonment, and the latest boondoggle, the Space Elevator, the difficult not-to-laugh-at effort to turn a science fiction fantasy into an elevator rising 62,000 miles above the Earth’s surface, which should top all others in costs and eventual abandonment. Read more on these rip offs here.
What do we say when science’s gatekeeping publication states flatly that it doesn’t know the nature of gravity, doesn't even put it near the top of the list of problems that need solving, and then goes about its merry way making a can of worm joke about it.
What are we paying for?
We sure aren’t getting anything concrete in return (although the scientific community would like us to believe that our entire prosperity, our technological society, the lights that brighten our darkness, are the result of scientific theories like light is a wave/particle, and not engineering trail and error).
The next series of entries will deal with Newton’s failed proof that gravity is proportional to and therefore a property of matter, followed by an analysis of what we know about gravity, followed by the construction of a mechanism that would produce what we know about gravity.

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