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Ellen asked the Naked Scientists: Is gravity stronger or weaker at the bottom of a mine shaft?What do you think?
Quote from: thedoc on 22/08/2012 21:30:01Ellen asked the Naked Scientists: Is gravity stronger or weaker at the bottom of a mine shaft?What do you think? You weigh less on a mountain top, then at sea level. There is a certain amount of truth that anywhere but at the poles, you are going to weigh slightly less, because of the fact that you are moving at perhaps on average near 1000 feet per second.
...Consider that at just a little higher altitude, a satellite moving with the surface of the earth, no longer falls to earth. The difference from Sea level to a high self sustaining orbit really is not that great a distance. If you look at the ratio, of a 100 pound weight, at sea level weighing 100 pounds, and then at that same weight, weighing nothing or not falling from high orbit. You can get an idea of the harsh, difference a couple of miles makes. The old no longer taught theory of gravity stated that it was a pushing force, and as an object that creates gravity, like the earth, is bombarded, the gravity increases all the way to the core. Because the particles that are creating gravity are being focused to the core of the earth. Kind of like refraction or light through a lens.
...So I would expect to weigh a few more pounds in a deep well. Sincerely, William McCormick
Quote from: William McCormick on 23/08/2012 03:53:52Quote from: thedoc on 22/08/2012 21:30:01Ellen asked the Naked Scientists: Is gravity stronger or weaker at the bottom of a mine shaft?What do you think? You weigh less on a mountain top, then at sea level. There is a certain amount of truth that anywhere but at the poles, you are going to weigh slightly less, because of the fact that you are moving at perhaps on average near 1000 feet per second. This much of the post is quite correct.More from Will:Quote...Consider that at just a little higher altitude, a satellite moving with the surface of the earth, no longer falls to earth. The difference from Sea level to a high self sustaining orbit really is not that great a distance. If you look at the ratio, of a 100 pound weight, at sea level weighing 100 pounds, and then at that same weight, weighing nothing or not falling from high orbit. You can get an idea of the harsh, difference a couple of miles makes. The old no longer taught theory of gravity stated that it was a pushing force, and as an object that creates gravity, like the earth, is bombarded, the gravity increases all the way to the core. Because the particles that are creating gravity are being focused to the core of the earth. Kind of like refraction or light through a lens. I am afraid that this bit is, once more, nonsense.A satellite that is "... moving with the surface of the Earth ..." is in a geostationary orbit, 35786 km above the equator, or about 5.5 times the Earth's radius -- hardly qualifies as "... not that great a distance ..." on the scale we are considering. "... self sustaining orbits ..." are certainly attainable at lower altitudes than this, but only because the satellites are orbiting the earth at speeds much faster than the earth's rotation -- typically they have orbital periods of the order of an hour or two rather than a day."... a couple of miles ..." makes a difference of the order of 1 part in 10,000 to the weight of a 100 lb mass (or any other mass for that matter).There is no "... old, no longer taught theory of gravity ...". The picture of gravity as a push rather than a pull was never taught in any respectable school or university, and Sir Isaac himself described gravity as "a force of attraction".The idea of gravity arising because of particles that are bombarding masses and focussed on the centre of the earth "... Kind of like refraction of light through a lens ..." is in desperate need of an external link or reference. If it ever existed it has disappeared without trace from the annals of science.The last bit of Will's post:Quote...So I would expect to weigh a few more pounds in a deep well. Sincerely, William McCormick This last bit of the post is most probably correct. We have a lot of evidence for Will's sincerity, and no real reason to doubt it.
mod note - William, please stop, or at least make it clear that you are guessing or wildly speculating. your answers to questions on the main forum have an appearance of certainty which may be very misleading to members who have little training or education in these areas. I really do not want to have to start shrinking posts which have had a great deal of effort put into them - but if you continue to post nonsense to answers on the main forum I will do so. please be warned.
I made it clear that the information I was providing is no longer taught. I was taught this information. By a fellow, a college professor, and Universal Scientist, who was still getting $1,700.00 an hour to lecture in the early seventies. Am I not allowed to exist or communicate about my life?
Ok my un- respectable school, filled with un respectable teachers and students, because what other kind of students could be created at such an evil place, taught me these things in this fashion. These unholy scum at my school, explicitly told us that the material we would be learning as honor students was, from the past, and not necessarily main stream. I thought it might be interesting to some of you, to hear how it was, before World War Two. I do not understand, the amazing hatred for what I say, about my life. It is my life, I lived it, and now just mentioning "no longer taught information" is some kind of crime. Wow. C.W Post awarded my school many first place prizes at the Long Island Science Congress. Maybe they are un respectable too? Sincerely, William McCormick
Quote from: imatfaal on 23/08/2012 17:02:23I made it clear that the information I was providing is no longer taught. I was taught this information. By a fellow, a college professor, and Universal Scientist, who was still getting $1,700.00 an hour to lecture in the early seventies. Am I not allowed to exist or communicate about my life? Sincerely, William McCormickWould that have been Walter Wright? If not, it looks like Walter is looking for credit.
I made it clear that the information I was providing is no longer taught. I was taught this information. By a fellow, a college professor, and Universal Scientist, who was still getting $1,700.00 an hour to lecture in the early seventies. Am I not allowed to exist or communicate about my life? Sincerely, William McCormick
Well, William, we are still waiting for that reference, because it would be most interesting to many of us. Are you sure you are not mis-remembering? Gravity cannot be a push, because there simply is not enough material -- particles -- to create such a push on an astronaut walking on the surface of the moon, let alone to hold the planets in their elliptic orbits as they move around the sun. (This is quite apart from at least a dozen other inconsistencies and contradictions such a theory would introduce).If, indeed, you are remembering correctly, then your school and teacher -- (was it a physics or general science teacher by the way, or a trade teacher?) -- would deserve the adjectives I have used. It is interesting that none of the leading scientists in the world in this area in the seventies, were lured by the huge fees being offered, to take up similar positions to your "Universal Scientist" and expound their well-researched insights into gravity.
The concept of pushing gravity was introduced by Fatio and Lesage around the time of Newton. They postulated that space is permeated with ultra-small, ultra-numerous, ultra-fast gravitons, which bounce off of masses like perfectly resilient spheres; and masses accelerate toward one another because they shield each other from the background of gravitons. They mistakenly believed that two perfect spherical mirrors in a uniformly white room would look slightly darker to each other than the rest of the room. That was the main flaw in their model. A later attempt to fix the model presumed that a fraction of the gravitons are absorbed, while the rest are scattered. The problem with that is that the amount of energy absorbed would be equivalent to the mass of the particle every picosecond. No reasonable mechanism was offered to explain what becomes of that energy. Pushing gravity is discussed extensively at the late Tom VanFlandern's metaresearch.org. Today, the question of the cause of gravity is simply not asked in "respectable" circles. Minkowski space-time defines the path of light as a straght line, and since gravity affects light, space-time is warped. Most scientists now claim that gravity is caused by the warp of space-time, which is like saying that mountains are caused by the elevation lines on a topographic map. A mathematical description of an effect is not the cause of the effect. The modern standard gravity formula is based on Newton's shell theorem. For points outside an empty uniform hollow spherical shell, gravity is equal to the gravity of an equivalent point mass at the center of the sphere. As you go farther outside the sphere, the gravity decreases according to the inverse square of distance from the center. For points inside the hollow shell, gravity is zero. Since a solid sphere consists of concentric shells, the gravity inside the solid sphere at radius a is equal to the gravity of a point mass at the center, having as much mass as all of the shells inside radius a. If the density of Earth were constant, the gravity inside would follow a straight line graph with zero gravity at the center and 1 g at the surface. Beyond that, it decreases as the inverse square of radius. Since the Earth is denser in the center, however, the graph is not a straight line; instead, it is steeper near the center. Mathematical derivation of this graph.
With Einstein's General Relativity gravity isn't a pulling force or a pushing one - it's simply a warping of space which allows everything to travel in what to it is a straight line, the result being that things appear to be attracted together by a force even though there is no force involved. I am puzzled though as to why some physicists say gravity isn't a force while others go on about the difficulty of uniting gravity with the other forces which are much stronger - why are they still treating it as a force?