Gravity

I had an idea about gravity that turned out to be complete crap after struggling with the math for awhile. I'd written a couple pages about it, but they were lost in a fire when I tripped on the cord and the computer shut off. No sense repeating the theory or explaining how the math schooled my ass. But I'll try to retell the parts I want to keep.

[Well I'll mention the theory in a nutshell, for the sake of... I don't know what. The theory was that gravity wasn't due to some force acting from afar, but rather due to the difference of the apparent "force" of gravity across some fundamental constant distance. This idea basically describes gravitational gradients, which by the way is what causes tides. So rather than being pulled by something an astronomical unit away, we are pulled (or pushed) by some difference say between one side of a neutron and the other. My hope was that calculations based on existing measurements would produce an alternate formula for gravity, with a new constant analogous to G but which would have to be much much greater (to produce the same forces that the existing formula calculates for r², but for the much much smaller delta r²). If the resulting constant was similar in value to the other fundamental force constants, that might suggest some exciting new hidden relationship. Unfortunately, the math shows that while gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from a mass, the gradient is roughly inversely proportional to the cube. Fairly simple geometry can show why. In other words the calculations differ depending on which r you choose, so no such constant can be found. Or, the "fundamental constant distance" would need to grow proportionally to r. A good candidate for an idea that needs to be abandoned when shown to be wrong.]

The force of gravity exerted by a mass at a distance of r, is inversely proportional to r². The magnitude of the force is the same at all the points on a sphere with radius r centered on the mass. Interestingly, the area of a circle with a radius of r is also inversely proportional to r². This suggests that the force of gravity can be "spread evenly" across that sphere, making the "total force" on the sphere the same for any different value of r. As when blowing up a balloon, its radius increases and the latex is spread thinner, but the total amount of latex remains the same. If you imagine a gravity wave propagating like an expanding bubble ;) from the mass, it is similar to sound (pressure) waves, whose energy across some fixed area also is inversely proportional to r². This is because the total energy of a single pressure wavefront remains the same, but gets spread evenly over the total area of the wave's expanding sphere. As a side note, I think this requires the wave to move at a constant speed (c for gravity waves; the speed of sound for pressure waves)... otherwise, a slowing bubble expansion might allow energy to build up, or allow the wave to be compressed laterally and compensate with an increase in amplitude.

So, gravity gets weaker as you move farther from a gravitation body, as its force gets spread across a larger area. I'd drawn a bunch of triangles to show the ratios involving a slice of a sphere around a gravitational body, and another body (a spaceship, say) that is affected by it. I realized that the force would be the same for any r, if the spaceship grew in size relative to r... in 2 dimensions that is. Then, the spaceship at r would cover the same area relative to a sphere of radius r, as the different-sized spaceship at r₁ would cover relative to a sphere of radius r₁. And so it would experience the same gravitational force at the different distances. A conical "slice" of gravity shares the same total gravitational force across the (curved) base of the cone, for any cone height. This is a consequence of simple ratios.

The idea occurred to me to try to visualize a spaceship that expands as it moves away from a mass, in a way that keeps the apparent size of the spaceship the same, by warping space so that lines that radiate away from the mass become parallel. In such a view, a "normal" spaceship would appear to decrease in size as it moved away from the mass. At this point I felt that now-familiar feeling that things were getting too abstract to be conceivable. Another idea came to mind of modifying gravity by somehow warping its field this way possibly through some sort of gravity lens (a lens that warps gravity, not the more familiar lens that warps light using gravity).

An interesting idea that comes out of this is that a spaceship decreasing in size as it moves away from a gravitational mass, is exactly what appears to happen to the object when viewed from the gravitational mass. The apparent area that an object takes up relative to my entire field of view, is once again inversely proportional to r². This suggests a theory that the gravitational force on an object is related to how that object is "seen" by the mass. Interestingly, all of these ideas may be converging on some Theory of Everything that centers around the effects of observation as the core mechanism for describing physical interaction. Things affect me relative to how much I am aware of them.

Note that I'm not talking about simple visual observation. You can't hide from the sun's gravity by ducking behind a planet. The mass can "see" through matter, and can "see" the various layers or depth of matter (so a long rocket with the same visual area as a short rocket will not experience an equal force), and it can "see" the density of the matter.

As an example, consider the Sun and the Moon. From Earth, they appear to be roughly the same size. The Sun is about 400 times as far away as the Moon is, and also has a radius about 400 times the Moon's (anything that appears the same size should have the same proportion). However, it is about 0.42 times as dense. So, compensating for density, the Sun has approximately 400*0.42 = 167 times the gravitational "depth" as the Moon. Since they occupy roughly the same area in the sky on Earth, we would expect the Sun's gravitational pull to be roughly 167 times the Moon's, which it is (The actual factor is about 178).

Final Thought

I've been working on some things that make you go hmmm involving defining time in terms of distance (of which the apparent speed of light propagation is a side-effect) and may one day relate it back to this gravity stuff. One idea to explore is this: perhaps the increase in mass experienced in objects traveling at relativistic speeds, is some consequence of length stretching, which makes the object appear "larger", as far as gravity is concerned. It may even involve removing mass from one time (where it appears smaller) and moving it to a time where it appears larger, or being relative to the "rate of time", but either way obeying some "conservation of mass over time" law.

Metapost

Dear diary,

I've wondered about my willful choosing of ignorance over research, the choice to contemplate ridiculous ideas about junk rather than trying to understand what science has already determined about said junk. Part of this is a fear that any idea I have will have already been thought of and disproved, thus robbing me of any feeling of creativity unless I ignore what's out there. Part is a fear that I won't understand what I read about, and I'd rather feel smart than struggle to actually be so. I've also recently heard of the belief that creativity requires that you don't know too much about a topic, basically because you will be lead far down the path of existing knowledge, and miss some possible new and hidden branch somewhere way back on the path.

At best thinking and figuring stuff out yourself might be good practice. Also, you can think of something until you get stuck, and then look it up for enlightenment, and your brain should be more willing to accept new knowledge than it would be if you just tried to force-feed it all in without the puzzling curiosity. However, this approach can be futile; Imagine trying to figure out the cosmos by watching the night sky and ignoring all of humanity's existing astronomical knowledge. You might not get past something like,"the stars appear to be fixed on a sphere that rotates around the earth".

But this is a blog, not a textbook. So it will be stupid at times (hopefully about average as far as blogs go), and incorrect too. It is about my exploration of the realms of metaphysics, and as much about the struggle to understand, or about bad ideas, or good, as my experiences with each warrant.

One of the basic tenets of science goes something like this: an idea, no matter how good it is, must be abandoned if it is proven to be wrong. Trying to fit all ideas to one central idea or belief = timecube.com. And so stupid ideas will come and go, and be revisited now and then, and conflicting ideas will get mixed up and others resolved, until I either get that nobel prize on my shelf, or give up, or go mad.

The theory of Instantaneous Information Transfer

Note: This theory as-is is disproven, but leads to the basis of other compelling theories

Long ago, everything was about matter. Everything was about stuff interacting with stuff. Even light was thought of as a bunch of tiny particles moving at extreme velocities.

Then everything was about energy. Einstein showed that matter and energy are equivalent, that E=mc². In effect, matter is made up of energy.

Now, the new big thing is information. The transfer of energy is a transfer of information. Stuff interacting with stuff is a transfer of information.

c, the speed of light in a vacuum, is the nominal speed of information travel in the universe. There is nothing inherently special that I know of about light that would make light the defining thing of the universe. c is more than just the speed of light; it is the speed of the universe itself. Electricity flows as a wave carried by adjacent electrons at c. Gravity waves travel at c. No matter or energy or information can travel faster than c. Calling it "the speed of light" severely undervalues its importance, and makes it seem confusing that it should have such a pivotal role in the workings of the universe. After all, what's so special about light?

For matter to travel at c, it would need to have an infinite amount of energy. What if we were to consider c to be an infinite speed, and redefine space and time as we need to, around that assumption? Then, light would be transmitted at infinite speed. Instead of light being some piece of energy that moves like matter does, it is energy or information that is conveyed instantly. It is emitted and absorbed in the same instant. Since we know from experience that light in fact takes a certain amount of time to cross a certain distance (at speed c), we must redefine "time" to allow these 2 events in different locations to be "simultaneous" even though they appear not to be.

This would mean that if you observed a star exploding 100 light years away, that is happening "now" where you are. But "now" would not be the same in all locations, as an observer 50 light years away would seem to see it 50 years earlier, according to our notion of light taking one year rather than an instant to cross a light-year. But it would mean that despite this apparent difference in time, according to me and my observations, the 3 events of the star exploding, the closer observer seeing it, and myself seeing it, all occur at the same time. (Note: Since my observations are based on the propagation of light, it is clear that all 3 events would be observed simultaneous from where I am -- but does simultaneous observation imply simultaneous occurrence?)

This is shown to be confusing, if not just plain wrong, when you consider something like reflecting a laser off the moon. According to this theory, an observer on the moon would see the laser on Earth turned on at the same time that the light hits the moon, which is then instantly reflected back. An observer on the Earth would see the light reflecting off the moon and instantly being seen on Earth. However, the observer on Earth would not see the laser being turned on and then being instantly reflected by the moon. There would be a delay, equal to the time it would take if the light was traveling the return distance at c. This means that time and simultaneity are not the same between different locations. 2 events that occur between the Earth and the moon may seem to occur with different timing, when seen by each.

So why bother considering this confusing idea, when everything makes sense if we just return to the idea of light being something that travels at a given speed? What do we gain with this concept? I started by arguing that light is nothing special, so why then treat it so specially? Compare it to sound... if for example we hear the crack of a bat hitting a baseball after we see it, we wouldn't consider that the events we see and hear occurred at different times. Wouldn't light propagation being instant make it special?

Well, the answer is no. It would simply mean that light is an instantaneous transfer of information, while sound (like all information transmitted through the movement of matter) is not. What we gain is this notion of instantaneous information transfer, which we can apply to a myriad of interactions that appear to occur at a speed of c.

General Relativity already allows for such a redefinition of time and the loss of universal simultaneity, between 2 observers who are traveling at different speeds relative to one another. That is a necessary weirdness, however, to allow for things that would otherwise be impossible with a notion of universal time. The theory discussed here, on the other hand, adds unintuitive weirdness to common everyday events that otherwise appear not weird at all, and can be intuitively explained with existing simple classical physics.

The theory of instantaneous information transfer (IIT) implies that all events observed through information that arrived at an apparent speed of c, occurred at the time they were observed, according to the observer. That means that light from the moon arrives instantly. It means that to an observer on the moon, light from Earth arrives instantly, but it does NOT mean that according to an observer on Earth, light sent to the moon arrives instantly. Although light propagates instantly, there is no valid concept of universal time that says that what happens in one place happens at the same time in another place. Remember that this theory implies that the appearance of propagation of light at a fixed speed is a side-effect of a re-definition of time as something that is not fixed, as it seems to be. To an observer on Earth, light is sent to the moon, and though I am seeing the moon as it is "now", it receives the light in a different time. When that happens, it immediately reflects the light back, which I instantly see.

That would imply that information transmitted across a distance is sent into the future.

Okay so much for Occam's razor. The theory of IIT will likely be tossed out well before the next trash day. Well it was a valiant attempt at any rate.

Note that IIT doesn't break the law of causality or even imply faster-than-light travel, because time and distance are redefined based on c in a way that maintains causality.

So we have events happening in various locations, and light instantly conveying information about those events. Then we have time defined as a factor of distance such that it appears that events 1 light-second away occurred 1 second ago. (Or, we could have distance defined as a factor of time, such that it appears that events that happened 1 second ago appear to be 1 light-second away -- however I think this is actually TOO complicated to bother contemplating at the moment).

It could then be that all of our perception of the passage of time is nothing but an effect of the distances between everything.

Now then, what were those interesting consequences of this theory?...

Consistency

I've touched on the idea that separate observers each experience "their own reality", but when they come together and compare notes, they will always find their experiences are mutually consistent. This is the Law of Consistency.

Basically, if all that you can be certain of is only what you know and what you observe, then everything else is defined only by probabilities. Some quantum mechanics junk says that it can't be known any more than that, I think. But a separate observer may make observations of what you can't observe, meaning that they have a different definition of what is real and what is only probability.

When you and the other observer share information, you gain knowledge. What was previously just probable is now actual. Probability waveforms collapse, and this propagates "backward through time", in that observations of the present depend on observations of the past, and what you know to be real now makes what it is based on in the past, real in the past.

So you have your reality, and the other has their reality, and where those overlap is a shared reality. This reality will always be consistent. Your shared reality will have a common shared history. The events you shared will appear the same under any observation. At least, they will within the bounds of causality. For example, the chronology of causally unrelated events may not be agreed upon by separate observers. This may be a major clue about the Law of Consistency, but I'll put it aside for a moment.

Consistency appears on the surface to be a source of weirdness, in that there is an appearance that some mechanism "corrects" or "sorts out" observers when they come together, or somehow simultaneously restricts separate observers while they are apart. On the other hand, consistency may be what saves us from the otherwise weird aspects of quantum mechanics.

Take the example of entangled particles. When both particles are considered by a common observer, there are some "weird" aspects apparent, like "spooky action at a distance". Consistency requires that the observation of other laws, such as conservation of spin, is observed for both particles. However, the observer of only a single particle sees no weirdness. They see only a single particle behaving as a single particle. The expectation that a message can be passed from an observer of one particle to the observer of the other is false, because only an observer of both particles can observe an effect that depends on both particles (such as any effect of entanglement). This again may appear weird, because the common observer can include an observer who gains information from one or both separate particles at a later time. That is, I may gather the results from 2 separate observations, and notice that they display weird aspects of entanglement, but neither I nor anyone else will observe any effects of entanglement until we've made observations of (that is, gained information about) both particles.

And so Consistency simultaneously displays weirdness, and makes it not weird (because it is by definition consistent). That is to say, it is only because things must be consistent that they appear to be weird, in cases like this. The weirdness cannot be exploited in ways that break laws (FTL message passing breaks the law of Causality, notably).

Trying to exploit entanglement involves trying to make things inconsistent, but the only way to attempt that is to separate the observers, and in doing so, consistency between the observers no longer applies, and the effects of consistency (such as entanglement) can no longer be observed.