I have no intuition about the ultra-small – apart from a yet-unanswered question about how transparent objects slow light in a profound and perfect interaction (refraction), I will leave alone quanta and nuclear physics. My interest is gravity, and in developing a model understandable to our 3-dimensional conciousness.
To rehash a previous post, the balls of lead shot on the surface of a rubber balloon do well up to a point. Looking for a model that demonstrates the characteristics of gravity, using a trick of removing one of the four dimensions of space-time to enable us to envisage it (as a 2-D photograph or painting represents a 3-D scene). A rubber balloon is elastic. Although the balloon exists in three dimensions, it is the macro dimension inclding the whole balloon which represents the real-world 4th dimension, and of the local space dimensions, only north-south and east-west are present, up-down is missing hence the locally "flat" membrane.
In our gravity-free laboratory, lead balls rest at the outside surface. As the balloon is inflated, the balls resist, and cause indentations. Adjacent balls find themselves sharing an indentation, and roll down the slope towards each other. The model is a simplification through removal of the radial dimension (the direction of inflation), so we have to imagine that although elastic and having no thickness, the membrane is perfectly strong ie cannot be punctured. (Its “puncturability” is where the models for black holes will come in.) The main conundrum with this model is that work is needed to inflate the balloon, which gets thinner. Before assuming this, I am searching for a shape and motion of membrane which can cause the lead shot to move and therefore resist against and distort the membrane, without requiring the membrane itself to absorb energy or become increasingly stretched. In particular, the model needs the elastic medium to exert a continuous and constant force on the masses without doing work on them.
The answer is a continuous belt-shaped rubber membrane. If it is spinning like the tyre of a bicycle wheel, with the lead balls on the inside, the rotation and their inertia will force them to resist and cause them to indent the membrane, with pairs in the same “well” apparently attracting each other. The attractive force originates not with the pair of balls which are completely passive, but the fact that both are being pulled away from the straight line by the rotating rubber membrane, as they are forced into orbit around the centre of the ring’s rotation.
This is an elegant model because the size of the ring can remain constant, or it may expand or contract according to other influences. (Astronomers report that the universe is expanding, though it could reverse in the future.) And the driving force of the active or shining universe is in angular momentum. Once a bicycle wheel is turning, every part of the tyre experiences centripetal force away from the centre, determined by its mass and the speed of rotation, yet with no air and frictionless bearing will do so indefinitely and with no further input of energy.
Interesting though that rotation is around an axis (a line); the orbit exists in a plane which is two-dimensional. The dimension we have stripped off to simplify the model is the radial one (the dimension containing the spokes of the ‘wheel), not the dimension above and below the plane. Is the universe flat? I find it difficult to imagine the reinsertion of all dimensions to show how the model represents the real universe, especially when dimensions invent themselves. I think the rubber belt model is extremely elegant but it throws up a bunch of new conundrums. Of course we need two of them counter-rotating in the same plane to sum to zero angular momentum. Or could the belt be a Mobius shape? Wow! A two-sided belt with only one surface – relevance not clear, just a thought.
Thursday 30 April 2009
Friday 24 April 2009
Help from the Masters
So far these have been the random jottings of a complete amateur, deliberately untainted by any significant research. The initial contributions were thoughts I have collected over some decades of idleness; and more recently the development of ideas recently occurred as a result of writing this blog. Of most note, and of significance even after a month or two of cogitation, are 1) that the force of gravity experienced between masses is tiny compared to the force with which all masses are being dragged along by (or decelerated by?) dynamic and elastic space; and 2) the mystery of refraction - the fundamental speed of light is reduced by 20% or so when travelling through transparent material. I have not yet found adequate explanations of either pheonomenon on the web.
The ancients had little opportunity for experimentation and 'thought-out' the meaning of what they were seeing. But it was the work of Galileo, Newton and many others who used experimentation and mathemantics to demonstrate and prove, and thereby develop, their findings, and move from philosophy and occult into science.
My ideas are that there are elements of pure thinking that still have merit. There is something about our awareness and analytic capability that is missing - we can have vivid dreams but have barely no recollection of the details just seconds after awakening from them. We all took gravity for granted until just a few hundred years ago, just as we still take for granted the properties of our molecules - and of the fact of the existence of the Universe, which is impossible to exist and impossible not to exist (for what is non-existence?). In my naivity I am happy to call this the The Ultimate Paradox.
It is as if science claims a monopoly of truth, but if there areas it cannot deal with, like asking fundamental questions, it forces us to ignore them - true ignorance. My experience on a recent holiday, chatting about the origin of the universe with an ordinary guy met at random, suggest that lots of people secretly think and even worry about this, but realise it is too big a subject to deal with. We need a channel to ask and expound the problems without the constraints of formal science, but also without recourse to astrology, sacred science, demons or total anarchy.
An example of a free process is my "proof" that the universe is finite but unbounded - the intuitive statistical impossibility of another world exactly like ours. It is confused, but not dis"proved" by the other reason for the impossibility - quantum mechanics, which says that there cannot even be two billiard balls identical to each other.
I want to use this "obviology" to tackle fundamental questions too hard for science. How can a world exist with laws and physical constants so exact not have been designed, yet if it was, who designed and built the designer? How arrogant for atheists to say it happened by accident from nothing, and for theologists to say it is God's creation, and he was always here. It's turtles all the way down!
Traditional paradoxes pale in comparison, yet serve to illustrate. The 17th century battles between Newton and Hooke about whether light was a wave or a particle - and turned out to be both. In fact, it depends on how you look at it. We realise that the ultra small (and the ultra large) are outside our intuitive experience or understanding, and accept the experiments and wave equations (ie of wave-particle duality) to build the model we cannot really see.
So a brief review - we should ask the difficult questions and think about them, and structure a free-form scaffolding for the solution model around possibilities like: - creation joins the three elements of 1) the physical universe, 2) God, and 3) our awareness of those two; - just as our earth's surface is finite but unbounded, so is the volume of the universe; - our understanding of time is key, and we need to manage somehow that the beginning and end of time are (like the East and West edges of the Earth and the "Up" and "Down" edges of the universe), the same thing.
The main point of this post is to say that I need to do some research, and am reading first the biography of Sir Isaac Newton - thinker, recluse, philosopher, mathematician, alchemist, physicist, theologeon, practical scientist - in my view the father of science. He questioned everything, took nothing for granted, shied away from no problem, he worked out for himself what he was seeing from first principles and with his own practical and mathematical tools. But it is as if by opening the door to analytical proof, he helped close the door to free uncluttered thinking. Even in my naivity I know this is trivial, so just for fun I'll call this the Paradox of Newton. The serious point is that Newton thought outside his box; his successors like Stephen Hawking also have to show us outside theirs.
The ancients had little opportunity for experimentation and 'thought-out' the meaning of what they were seeing. But it was the work of Galileo, Newton and many others who used experimentation and mathemantics to demonstrate and prove, and thereby develop, their findings, and move from philosophy and occult into science.
My ideas are that there are elements of pure thinking that still have merit. There is something about our awareness and analytic capability that is missing - we can have vivid dreams but have barely no recollection of the details just seconds after awakening from them. We all took gravity for granted until just a few hundred years ago, just as we still take for granted the properties of our molecules - and of the fact of the existence of the Universe, which is impossible to exist and impossible not to exist (for what is non-existence?). In my naivity I am happy to call this the The Ultimate Paradox.
It is as if science claims a monopoly of truth, but if there areas it cannot deal with, like asking fundamental questions, it forces us to ignore them - true ignorance. My experience on a recent holiday, chatting about the origin of the universe with an ordinary guy met at random, suggest that lots of people secretly think and even worry about this, but realise it is too big a subject to deal with. We need a channel to ask and expound the problems without the constraints of formal science, but also without recourse to astrology, sacred science, demons or total anarchy.
An example of a free process is my "proof" that the universe is finite but unbounded - the intuitive statistical impossibility of another world exactly like ours. It is confused, but not dis"proved" by the other reason for the impossibility - quantum mechanics, which says that there cannot even be two billiard balls identical to each other.
I want to use this "obviology" to tackle fundamental questions too hard for science. How can a world exist with laws and physical constants so exact not have been designed, yet if it was, who designed and built the designer? How arrogant for atheists to say it happened by accident from nothing, and for theologists to say it is God's creation, and he was always here. It's turtles all the way down!
Traditional paradoxes pale in comparison, yet serve to illustrate. The 17th century battles between Newton and Hooke about whether light was a wave or a particle - and turned out to be both. In fact, it depends on how you look at it. We realise that the ultra small (and the ultra large) are outside our intuitive experience or understanding, and accept the experiments and wave equations (ie of wave-particle duality) to build the model we cannot really see.
So a brief review - we should ask the difficult questions and think about them, and structure a free-form scaffolding for the solution model around possibilities like: - creation joins the three elements of 1) the physical universe, 2) God, and 3) our awareness of those two; - just as our earth's surface is finite but unbounded, so is the volume of the universe; - our understanding of time is key, and we need to manage somehow that the beginning and end of time are (like the East and West edges of the Earth and the "Up" and "Down" edges of the universe), the same thing.
The main point of this post is to say that I need to do some research, and am reading first the biography of Sir Isaac Newton - thinker, recluse, philosopher, mathematician, alchemist, physicist, theologeon, practical scientist - in my view the father of science. He questioned everything, took nothing for granted, shied away from no problem, he worked out for himself what he was seeing from first principles and with his own practical and mathematical tools. But it is as if by opening the door to analytical proof, he helped close the door to free uncluttered thinking. Even in my naivity I know this is trivial, so just for fun I'll call this the Paradox of Newton. The serious point is that Newton thought outside his box; his successors like Stephen Hawking also have to show us outside theirs.
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