GRAVITY PROBLEMS -- off topic from {Falsifying a young Universe}

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key phrase, key to the whole concept of science in all branches: if we can derive a simple answer then we do not need to look for more complcated answers. this is Occam's razor in action, and it is universal in science.... .....so I have to say again, "that we really just don't know enough to say at this point."

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Sounds like you sort of agree, but that your approach to challenge some things would be through regular channels of science and experiment?
I don't have that option, because --well, lets look at an example here. Ok I see the CBR uniformly all over the universe. Standard interpretation looks at it as temperature, hot and cool. Then look at how nicely it fits with a standard cosmological model. I look at creation, then a likely split of the spirit and physical universe, which left the CBR, with no real need for all the heat. Just a colorful pattern to explain in short age terms. How do you go back, and measure this spiritual light, or dimension? If they can't detect it here, how less so in the far past? So, there isn't yet the ability of science to really accept what they can't yet understand. I can look at the CBR, and our light speed now, and man's shortened lifespans, and say, hey that would fit nicely, as would a young creation date, but, unless we admit as evidence things like good accounts of spiritual phenomena, and the written records that we have, what can be done?

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To me the physicists that say that there must be dark matter and energy because their equations don't work out to match the observed motion of large scale extra-solar structures is just as absurd as someone who claims that the universe is wrong but a book is right.

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Interesting. Seems like dark matter on the sites I came across was pretty much 'gospel'. I may have it wrong, but I think it is one of the big things that is used to explain why the CBR should be interpreted as temperature fluctuations. Only makes me think even more how flimsy my opposition really is. Like shifting sand, how can they build a house that will stand?

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I always wonder about people who claim that they are sure that the earth and the universe are created, but they are unwilling to take the evidence of the earth

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But how uninteresting it would have been, if Jesus, or peter, took the evidence of the earth and simply drowned, rather than walking on water! There are powerful quantum fluctuations that can appear! Not just random ones, but on cue! (after all, don't they say one just happened to 'burp' up the universe so the big bang could grab it, and sail on out expanding with it?
Perhaps that is why bible believers don't admit they don't know, because they feel they have jumped to the head of the cue, sort of like cheating, and do know, because God, who did it, told them. So any unknown becomes temporary, and anyone not knowing with their own valiant efforts become, simply 'little' men stumped by their own limitations, because it is somewhat too big for them, alone to fully understand.

[quote]By weakening the link between cause and effect, quantum mechanics provides a subtle way for us to circumvent the origin-of-the-universe problem. If a way can be found to permit the universe to come into existence from nothing (emphasis mine) as the result of a quantum fluctuation, then no laws of physics would be violated. In other words, viewed through the eyes of a quantum physicist, the spontaneous appearance of a universe is not such a surprise, because physical objects are spontaneously appearing all the time--without well-defined causes--in the quantum microworld. The quantum physicist need no more appeal to a supernatural act to bring the universe into being than to explain why a radioactive nucleus decayed when it did." (Paul Davies, The Mind of God. N.Y.: Touchstone books, 1992)
and "Quantum fluctuation is the temporary appearance of energetic particles out of nothing, as allowed by the Uncertainty Principle"
Quantum Fluctuation
So how can we have the universe come into existance from nothing, as the guy says here?
Now is not this talking abot a stage of the BB where it is so very small? In other words I thought thay insinuated that the quantum fluctuation happened, then, with this wonderous material that was needed to form the universe suddenly there, presto, all we need is to start expanding now. This was what I referred to in 'trying to be cool' lingo, with, first, the magic fluctuation 'burping' up the material from nowhere, then the little hot speck sized soup, taking the ball, and expanding out with it.

Wow. I am actually surprised. I think it's great. I'll have to chew on some of this stuff for awhile. Seems like you are searching, and feel confident you will someday find what you are looking for. As far as the brane theory, I do usually think of curtains as more rippled than flat like sheets.

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And then feel that they know enough to criticize?

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I know it seems unfair for those who put so much work into trying to figure it all out by themselves. I figure it's like two very young brothers who want something from an attic, they can't reach, and have no ladder they are near or allowed to use. One of the twins has been at it for hours, standing on chairs, piling up books, on the chair, and falling, etc. Finally, the other brother asks his dad to lift him up to see, which the dad does. How does the other brother feel, who is still a little put off, and doesn't want to accept the help? I figure why not just get up there and have a look. Then, when I see the old books there, bat's nest, treasure chest, and neat things, and my brother tells me he thinks something different is up there, I have to try to tell him he's plumb wrong. Now, if I put too much relish in this, and am mean about it, well, that's not good. Nevertheless what he may consider critisism is valid.

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You are the one that needs to reconcile walking on water with the physics involved

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Very easy. Just add in the Spirits involved. Like a controlled quantum fluctuation, where things pop out of nowhere, on command, contrary to mere laws of physics. Only reason it seems to pop out of nowhere, is that we don't yet see into the attic of the spirit world, and see how the Great Scientist can really, actually, literally do anything!!!

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Well, I think I am more likely to find it by looking than by just waiting around drinking lattes ...

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seek, and ye shall find.

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But it is not a matter of {scientists} doing it on their own, but of standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before: a solution that two kids in my experience figured out.

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The attic in question is way way too high for any men to reach it on their own, even if they stand on someones head and jump. No possibility. But it is simple if we ask for help.

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I have no problem with that as long as you clarify at this point spirits stepped in or some other form of god-done-it and ... don’t call it science. I also think it should be preceded by I don’t really know but I believe ...

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And since that is sort of the way I feel about secular science, I guess we can't progress on the philospphical, oh well, ...you're welcome.

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Think about as science asking what can I understand about the {life, the universe and everything} that doesn’t require a supernatural explanation?

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Yes it flashed by my head a time or two, but my answer comes up something like...not a whole hec of a lot, certainly it would be filled with dead ends, unknowable mysteries, and some wrong assumptions, as well as maybe even some right ones. It's like studying about what we think is in the attic, without actually taking a peek.

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Adding secular to science is oxymoronic

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I disagree. No need to add religion to science in the least, but there is a need to add God, as a creator, and the record He gave us. We are like little ants to Him, and when He gives us a clue we would be very wise to take it. because we can only do so much on our own. My normal concept of 'religion' is not pleasant. It brings up images of people killing Jesu, releasing terrorists instead of Him, and paying people to lie about the ressurection. It brings to mind some of the old time wasting scenes, where they would argue how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. It brings to mind Bush, and Ayatolah Khomenei, and the Inquisition. I don't need any religion, in science, thank you very much. I would like to actually get to the real truth of the matter in some of these things, however, and realize that calculating in the bible God can not lead you astray, and time and again, like gravity, or clockwork, we can see How He was right, and we were wrong about some things. Today's news has a duck found with some dinosaurs. I read some on this forum, saying something like, birds came later. Also, some said, no mammals, none, nyet, I think at dino time (?). A few days ago, another item in the news, where a mammal was found with a tasty little dino in it's belly. No, I say science without acknowleding God, is far inferior to science that does acknowledge Him. We need a new definition of science, and we will get one. The old kind, will eventually only be rememered as science falsely so called. And rightly so. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words shall not pass away, Jesus said, and science as it now is is less important, than the dust on an old scale would be. Yes it is measureable, but of no signifigant importance. Mostly we'll remember the things like science almost blowing up the world, biological weapons, and chemical, human chip implants, (I, at least believe myself, and I know this is a minority opinion among christians) that will bypass free will itself, women being jiggered to have a baby at 66, (this weeks news, in Russia), pollution, death dealing cars, cancer causing stuff all over the place, etc. Sometimes, even though we also may do a lot of good, if we do really bad, that's what is remembered. Newton, Pasteur, and most of those earlier men of science did not rule out God, I think.

Do we know exactly what gravity is, and what causes it?

Yes it leaves out a lot of things!

I asked, because things were waxing philosophical, and the Thread starter indicated he was tired of being off topic. I looked at the title of the thread, or a previous post or something, to see what the topic was supposed to be. Gravity stuck out. I had tried to bow out of the thread before, but, sure enough, ol Razd dun went and posted again on the philosophy line. So, I replied. So much for 'why', now on to the latter point of interogation. What means this 'exactly'? Well, I was trying to get a response that would tell me if some certainty was felt about our knowledge of gravity, or whether it was pretty 'grey' and maybe some room for a fresh opinion. Or not.

wow! One of those great posts we sometimes see around here. I'll have to go over it five ot ten times to digest some of it. Already I have the germ of a few new ideas looking at it. Thanks.

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One of the thoughts that I have had recently, is that what we are seeing as quantum level fluctuations are more like oscillations back and forth in time of the probability field matrix, and this ties us to close proximity with those other "time slices" thus acting much like multiple dimensions with the added benefit of the mass distribution closely matching the viewed time instant distribution.
the ghost of universe past and the ghost of universe future acting on the ghost of universe present.

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If time really is a dimension then what does it look like? Long branching strings of everything from beginning to end? Would not that affect the gravity behavior of systems if there was {mass\energy} distributed along the time axis?

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I would think that would provide a means to correlate minutes to miles ...

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the only problem I see is that it makes the universe pretty deterministic, already written into the future yet to be revealed.

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or the time link is only into the past, and the present is expanding like a supernova ... chaotically ...

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Or that the spiritual is also at work here. As things get smaller, perhaps it gets into the door between the physical and spiritual? Gravity, in heaven is , if there is any at all, not a limiting factor. Sorry, I lost my cosmo password, and don't much care.This message has been edited by simple, 10-09-2005 04:16 AM

Well, I just looked up this old thread, because I ran into someone who thought gravity was quite cut and dry, and I remembered you seemed to question it here somewhat.
My angle now with it is looking at how and if there was gravity in a universe (like heaven) where there is both the spiritual and physical. Obviously, it would not be a limiting factor, if there was any, because people there can fly. Horses, even can fly. The idea came up about if there was this merged world in our past, could gravity have been different? All kind of far fetched I know. I did look up something about gravity, as well, to give the guy, that seems to show it is less than a totally exact, known thing.
""Perhaps no one has so elegantly expressed the objection to such a concept better than Sir Isaac Newton: "That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to the other, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it." (See Hoffman, 1983.) But mediation requires propagation, and finite bodies should be incapable of propagate at infinite speeds since that would require infinite energy. So instantaneous gravity seemed to have an element of magic to it."
"We conclude that the speed of gravity may provide the new insight physics has been awaiting to lead the way to unification of the fundamental forces. As shown in (Van Flandern, 1993, pp.80-85 and Van Flandern, 1996), it may also be connected with the explanation of the dark matter problem in cosmology. Moreover, the modest switch from SR to LR may correct the "wrong turn" physics must have made to get into the dilemma presented by quantum mechanics, that there appears to be no "deep reality" to the world around us. Quantum phenomena that violate the locality criterion may now be welcomed into conventional physics."
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While relativists have always been partial to the curved space-time explanation of gravity, it is not an essential feature of GR. Eddington (1920, p.109) was already aware of the mostly equivalent "refracting medium" explanation for GR features, which retains Euclidean space and time in the same mathematical formalism. In essence, the bending of light, gravitational redshift, Mercury perihelion advance, and radar time delay can all be consequences of electromagnetic wave motion through an underlying refracting medium that is made denser in proportion to the nearness of a source of gravity. (Van Flandern, 1993, pp. 62-67 and Van Flandern, 1994) And it is now known that even ordinary matter has certain electromagnetic-wave-like characteristics. The principal objection to this conceptually simpler refraction interpretation of GR is that a faster-than-light propagation speed for gravity itself is required. In the context of this paper, that cannot be considered as a fatal objection.Lastly, we note experimental evidence from neutron interferometers that purports to demonstrate a failure of the geometric weak equivalence principle, that gravity is due to a curvature of space-time. (Greenberger & Overhauser, 1980) This experiment confirmed the strong equivalence principle (local equivalence of a uniform acceleration and a gravitational field), but its results are incompatible with the geometrical weak equivalence principle because interference effects in quantum mechanics depend on the mass. This is because the wave nature of the neutron depends on the momentum of the neutron, which is mass times velocity. So all phase-dependent phenomena depend on the mass through the wavelength, a feature intrinsic to quantum mechanics.""It seemed incongruous to allow for the finite speed of light from the body to the Earth, but to take the effect of Earth's gravity on that same body as propagating from here to there instantaneously. Yet that was the required procedure to get the correct answers."
"Indeed, it is widely accepted, even if less widely known, that the speed of gravity in Newton's Universal Law is unconditionally infinite. (e.g., Misner et al., 1973, p.177) This is usually not mentioned in proximity to the statement that GR reduces to Newtonian gravity in the low-velocity, weak-field limit because of the obvious question it begs about how that can be true if the propagation speed in one model is the speed of light, and in the other model it is infinite.The same dilemma comes up in many guises: Why do photons from the Sun travel in directions that are not parallel to the direction of Earth's gravitational acceleration toward the Sun?Why do total eclipses of the Sun by the Moon reach maximum eclipse about 40 seconds before the Sun and Moon's gravitational forces align? How do binary pulsars anticipate each other's future position, velocity, and acceleration faster than the light time between them would allow? How can black holes have gravity when nothing can get out because escape speed is greater than the speed of light?"
Meta Research Bulletin of 6/15/94The more I hear of gravity, the more it seems that it just doesn't work the same way in a merged universe, but that doesn't make it not real here, like your monks seem to think.

Well, says you. From your paragraph, I detect a dislike for the guy. But where does the 'being critical of GR' stuff come from? Did I say I didn't like general relativity, or gravity? No.
All I said was it seems that it is less than perfectly understood, and offered a possibility it may be because of limitations one faces not realizing there is more than a physical universe.
Now, I guess the guy who was quoted in the paper I clipped is so 'stupid' that his points are not worth refuting, or clearing up, where the poor deluded soul went so drastically wrong. Fine.
By the way, do you know what causes gravity exactly? Why do objects pull towards each other?

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GR does have a real problem, in that it doesn't quantise consistently. The bulk of the papers in theoretical physics are related to trying to sort out this problem...

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So you too admit, really, you don't really understand it!

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I was referring to vanFlandern, not you. I was urging you not to listen to his rubbish, which is totally contrary to GR, despite whatever he says on the matter.

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Oh. Ha. Hate to admit it was just the first thing I searched on the topic. What I liked about it was it seemed to admit we don't know everything about gravity. But you say as much, as did the thread originator, so I guess it's pretty unnamimous. What I feel has been missed is the GCR. With this, no quantum mysteries remain. (General combined relativity-combined with the spiritual!) But thats a long story.

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". If you are interested in this area of science, search out a good book such as Brian Greene's, or of course there is always A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell. Perahps others here can suggest some more titles. I tend not to be too aquainted with the popular texts.

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OK, thanks. Of course, I have some reservations about someone trying to tell me where time came from and what it is, when really, they haven't much of a clue! About all they could manage is how it works in this physical only universe. or how they think it theoreically works only in the physical universe. I think time is a temporary force that is set in place in a temporary physical only universe, that will be forever replaced by a merged (Physical and spiritual together), eternal universe, where time shall be no more. Just part of our present, 'prison'.

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Objects curve their surrounding space-time. An object follows the straightest path it can find through space-time. ..

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Isn't this saying, basically that we know things attract each other, or move toward each other, etc? But why exactly does it do this? Why does it, and how does it follow the straightest path? How and why does it curve time and space? What is the heart of the force?

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..or around the larger object in what we call an orbit; which one depends upon the initial conditions of the objects.

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This describes how it works, not what it really is.

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Your straight path through space-time is towards the centre of the Earth. However, the solid ground is preventing you from following your path by exerting an upwards force upon you. That force is what you call gravity. There is no pulling

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My path through space time? I know what you mean, in other words, where I would go, if there were no material stopping gravity from pulling us into the center of the earth.
I realize my path through time and space is temporary, and while I will continue to exist, time itself will not. Therefore, in one sense, time's path through me may be a more apt phrase.

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To the second question, General Relativity doesn't do why and how in the human sense.
It is background independant, which means that spacetime is an active participant in the physics.
Matter doesn't create gravity, any more than gravity creates matter.
In a human manner of thinking it is easier to look at it that way, but it isn't the case.

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It is simply "This is the Matter distribution" and "This is the geometry that goes with it".
One doesn't create the other.

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So, what, in other words, this is the way it is, thats it we can't know more than this? Now, regardless of how much matter there is in this physical universe, or how it is distributed, how does that tell us how gravity works. All that says is there is matter, it reacts this or this way, but not the why. If I throw a ball at you, you know why the ball got it's power or energy, or momentum, etc. If there is a toy car with a battery, we know it moves, because of so and so. But if a sun moves, or planet, we say it is gravity, but this doesn't explain what is really doing the moving. It's all well and good to say, well, it's going to go straight, unless something makes it go crooked, but why is it going in the first place? Where does that force come from, that makes it move?This message has been edited by simple, 10-10-2005 07:48 PM