Gravity

Just some musings nothing to take seriously.

Okay we all know what gravity is, it's the force that keeps us on this planet and the planets revolving around the sun etc. Except of course that doesn't actually tell us what gravity is just what it does.

Historically it was simple gravity didn't exist as a concept. From the Ancient Greek perspective things fell to the Earth because things have a natural place in the cosmos; this got amended slightly when it was considered that things fell downwards. This meant that the Earth had to be the centre of the universe, which was a nice-ego boost for the sentient inhabitants who pretty much thought that they were anyway.

Trouble occurred with the heliocentric approach to the solar system (sun-centred), for those thinking of Galileo, wrong; for those thinking smugly of Copernicus also wrong, the first hints of a heliocentric theory were back in Ancient Greece again. However it was dismissed as obviously wrong, it would mean that the Earth was moving, and we couldn't feel that; and that the Earth wasn't the centre of things so contradicted why things fell.

When the theory was presented and proven to be true the force of gravity became that which kept everything in order and a neat order it was too as Newton (or Hooke) discovered with the inverse square law. Still didn't tell us what gravity was though.

The standard conclusion still listed in Wikipedia is that gravity is a force between masses. In the standard model a particle called a graviton was created to act as the mediator between masses. Everyone was happy. Well not quite see when compared to other forces gravity is the odd sibling, it acts over a long distance which none of the others do and it's comparatively weak; very weak; very, very weak; weak to the fifteenth type of weak.

To demonstrate consider that you are probably reading this while seated in a chair. The atomic interactions between your body and the chair are competing against the gravitational pull of the entire mass of the Earth and winning. Heck if you're at least fairly spry your own muscles can beat the entire planet just by jumping in the air.

But hey it works and if it's a bit odd well that's reality for you, you can puzzle over it and try to justify it, but you just have to live with it.

Then a bloke called Einstein turned up and demonstrated that light would be bent around the sun by its gravitational field. So what you might ask, this makes perfect sense everything else gets affected by gravity why should light be special. Well light is special because it's massless.

Remember gravity is the interchange of gravitons that are produced by masses. A massless object shouldn't be affected by gravitons, but it is. Oh dear.

Einstein got around this by saying that gravity is in fact an illusion caused by mass warping space (yes okay space-time but that's getting complicated). Well the equations worked and explained some oddities in Newton's formulas, but it leaves things a little stuck because once again we can happily apply what gravity will do to the umpteenth decimal place but we still can't say what it is.

Trouble also rears its head when you consider that the theory that postulated the graviton works for everything we can test it against, while at the same time Einstein's rules also work for everything we can test them against - and yet the two viewpoints are incompatible.

Okay even more way-out rambling now.

Let's imagine that masses do in fact produce gravitons, but it's not an interaction between masses but between mass and space to be precise the energy field of space. See despite what you might think space isn't empty, at a quantum level it's teeming with energy it's frothy and is known as quantum foam. This is a point where the two gravity theories also fall apart - one has space as being frothy the other has it being flat.

So imagine that the graviton stretches the quantum foam itself. This has multiple consequences.

Firstly stretching the energy matrix makes it 'flatter', evens out the foam.
Secondly it allows for massless objects to be affected as they move through space as it becomes distorted.
Thirdly it means gravity no longer has to appear weak and long-reaching - it isn't it simply pulls on something that disperses the energy over long-distances.

So it reconciles the foam/flat conflict by making the existing foam flatter near masses.
It allows massless objects to be affected and keeps the graviton.
It puts gravity back in the same stable as all the other forces.

In fact if you grant the universe a coefficient of elasticity in that quantum foam resists being 'pulled' you could explain why there appears not to be enough mass in the universe to account for the rate of expansion without needing to create dark matter/energy; or at least giving the same results the same name. Oh and once again doing so would also help answer those who create a negative counterpart to gravity to explain other results.

Just one more aside. As space is being stretched from an objective point of view, light travelling through it at a constant speed has to travel further and thus takes longer. However from our subjective point of view space hasn't changed therefore the 'delay' in light travelling over that point has to be attributed to a change in time itself.

Okay that's it just seriously wild speculation without any equations or proof to back it up. Tear it apart and shred it as much as you can.