Sunday, April 22, 2007

Gravity is . . . Part I: The Dynamic Source of Gravity

While Galileo apparently gets the credit for measuring how gravity accelerates matter, with the square of its distance, Tartaglia, earlier, had measured the angle at which a cannonball obtained optimal distance. This angle, 45ยบ, was the same arc described by Galileo’s balls as they rolled off an inclined plane.
When an object accelerates with the square of its distance from the assumed source of the force, the Earth, it demonstrates a field that diminishes inversely with the square. Thus, gravity quickly became viewed as a force that diminished inversely with the square of its distance from the Earth.
Tycho Brahe is credited with making the first observation of gravity’s analogy to light, that both diminished inversely with the square of their distances from their sources. Descartes, the theorizer of gravity as a product of vortices in space, flirted with the idea that gravity must have something to do with sunlight, that the planets orbited and rotated as a result of the sun's emissions.
To Hooke, Halley and Wren, sitting in a coffee shop in the cold London winter hashing back and forth the possible cause of the motion of the planets, discarding Descartes’ speculation was simple. While the sun’s emissions as the cause of the motion of the planets might seem plausible, it didn’t answer the question of why the moon orbited the Earth or why objects fell to the surface of the Earth. The sun might well produce light, but the Earth didn’t. Therefore, any speculation that analogized light to gravity was ruled out at the starting gate.
Let’s dwell for a moment on the concept, raised in prior entries, of dead men who knew nothing creating unquestionable rules prior to the acquisition of all relevant facts. These three were meeting over coffee in the closing decades of the 17th century. It would be 200 years before Maxwell would propose the existence of the electromagnetic emission field (although he referred to it, because of the general understanding of light as a wave, as a spectrum).
This is 2 centuries between rule making and fact-finding. In the interim, another dead man who knew nothing, Young, would memorialize light to be a wave as a result of an experiment that analogized light to water waves when the experiment showed an absence of light and water waves always had a presence of water. In addition, a number of people would experiment with, and determine the boundaries of, electricity.
While science didn’t have to create a particle for light because, being a product of a wave, it simply didn’t exist other than as an effect of something else (science made up the aether as that something), it did create a particle to explain electricity, starting off a distinguished practice of making up a particle to describe everything, a practice that continued until an international agreement created the standard model, which limited the number of particles that could be made up.
These determinations by dead men who knew nothing are vary important to our inability to understand gravity because, while Maxwell’s electromagnetic emission field was composed of electrons, it also included the nonexistent light, which might lead someone to conclude that light was composed of electrons. Not science, though. Note that Young determined what light was without ever bothering to determine how it was produced, and when Einstein, a century after Young, demonstrated that light was indeed a particle, science didn’t abandon light as a wave, it simply created a particle to describe light and then called light a wave particle and proceeded to come up with fantastical explanations for how matter could produce light, matter which, by the way, had only been hypothesized to be composed of structured atoms by other dead men who knew nothing several decades before.
While this two centuries of who struck john might seem off-subject, it serves not only to shed some light on what gravity might be, it demonstrates the appalling ignorance that the three gentlemen in the coffee shop were strapped with. However, Hooke was no Newton. He believed in Bacon’s assertion that concepts could never be more than concepts rather than Newton’s fantasy that concepts could be proven to be facts. What happened with his speculations is not the fault of honest men making speculations but of rigid science turning concepts into fact.
The abandonment of any attempt to analogize gravity to light carried forward even after Maxwell placed light in the electromagnetic emission field in spite of repeated measurements to the contrary. When Edison invented the light bulb, one of the first things experimenters noted was the mass of magnetic fields that swirled around the filament. As the century went on and the sun became more susceptible to measurement, magnetic fields were measured broiling on its surface.
Regardless, science settled firmly into the belief that planets didn’t emit anything, holding solidly to the unmeasurable fantasy (up there with measuring the amount of matter in a planet) that the Earth received the same amount of sunlight in the day it radiated at night (including the addition of starlight at night, which also radiated in like amount).
This went on until the maverick Velikovsky predicted that radio waves, a part of the electromagnetic field, would soon be measured from Jupiter. When radio waves were measured consistently from Jupiter, science shrugged its shoulders, said Velikovsky’s prediction was based on no coherent scientific theory and was therefore not a prediction, and then pretended to have considered the possibility of radio waves all along.
However, it never once, nor has it to this day, admitted that Jupiter was emitting anything, claiming that atmospheric aberrations were broadcasting the waves.
And all this claptrap in the face of geography books that display a molten core of the Earth sitting down there glowing with as much brightness as glossy paper can display!
Anybody, and this includes the eminent gatekeepers of scientific orthodoxy, who doesn’t realize the Earth is hot and its heat, the act of undergoing cooling, is a dynamic process that produces an emission field, is simply bonkers.
Not only is the Earth hot, but, with the exception of Venus, all other planets are relatively hot and producing emission fields according to their size and distance from the sun. Venus, the object of much controversy as to the length of time its been a part of the solar system, is hotter than it should be, but other than that, we can expect Mars, smaller and more distant from the Earth to be cooler than the Earth (and therefore the host of life earlier than the Earth), the moon, smaller than the Earth, to be cooler, Jupiter, larger than the Earth by a bunch, to be hot, perhaps still with surface cooling going on as evidenced by the giant red spot which science attributes to everything but the obvious, molten lava showing through the crust.
None of this could be envisioned by Hooke, Halley and Wren sitting in the 1600s London coffee shop, and none of it was ever even fantasized by Newton, who created our ironclad view of dynamic gravity as a static property of matter.
And yet, if we think about it, there isn’t anything else matter can do but, for want of better term, undergo combustion and begin to cool. When matter undergoes combustion, it is doing so in a lesser field of heat and as heat flows from hot to cold, the heat moves in the form of emissions from what is cooling to where it is cooler. Just as the fire in the hearth cools, producing emissions that flow into the room, warming everything in it, the Earth cools with its emission traveling into the colder regions that surround it.
And, just like light, the electromagnetic emission field, produced by a dynamic process in matter, expands inversely with the square of its distance from its source, does so uniformly, and therefore requires something to regulate its expansion.
These are the same characteristics of gravity!

2 comments:

SteveK said...

Can't your theory be tested some way? Heat up a ball of metal, cool it down and measure the change in gravity as it cools. What am I missing?

Peter Bros said...

It’s a matter of degree and interpretation, Steve. Science claims to measure the gravity of individual objects with the Cavendish Experiment. However, this experiment ignores electrostatic effects and is ambiguous as to the materials it measures. However, it really sells in a science classroom.
One place I considered your observation was in a steel making plant. I soon discovered, even if someone was willing to sneak in measuring instruments, those instruments wouldn’t operate in the ambient heat.
That’s why I use a consistent explanation to explain many different physical effects, for none of which the cause is measurable.
And it’s always encouraging to have one of my early questions, which no one could answer, why a light bulb actively attracts dust rather than just burning the dust that happens to settle on it, answered.
As next week’s post shows, the fun is in using a microscope to examine what must be happening, as opposed to accepting words and slogans for explanations. Once we see what must be happening, the material itself demands some sort of meaningful answer, and by meaningful, I mean mechanical.