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New Theories / Do we see the Sun where it was 8.3 minutes ago?

« on: 23/12/2015 17:58:02 »

For years, I've accepted Tom Van Flandern's proof, and others like it, that gravity is billions of times faster than light. That proof is based  on the claim that we see the sun where it was, not where it is. I am now having second thoughts.

Of course the Sun is where it was 8 minutes ago, in Solar coordinates. I'm referring to the direction relative to the stars, which goes thru 360° degrees in a year. In 8.3 minutes, the direction of the Sun from Earth changes by .0057°. So do we see the light coming from .0057° east of its current location? If we were moving in a straight line past the Sun, I believe that would be the case.

I have read that a term in general relativity almost exactly cancels the direction change of the light, as if the centers of successive light pulses follow the source.

The direction where we see an expanding spherical shell of light is perpendicular to the surface of the shell as it passes us. If we were in a circular orbit, I think the change in our direction, relative to the stars, would put the Sun's image back where the Sun is. I wonder if this analogy corresponds to the mysterious term in GR.

Our orbit is elliptical, and if I'm right, the angle between where we see the Sun and where it is ought to go thru an annual cycle. Concentric light spheres spreading from the Sun are always tangent to a circular orbit, but only tangent to an elliptical orbit at aphelion and perihelion.

If I now discard the idea that gravity is billions of times faster than light, there will need to be some changes in my model. I still think gravity is faster than light, but I'll have to look for a different proof and a different estimate of cg/cl.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Do transverse and longitudinal acoustic waves exchange momentum with one anotehr

« on: 01/10/2012 22:18:56 »

Exchange momentum between transverse and longitudinal acoustic waves is a cornerstone of my cosmology, but I know of no evidence that it is true. I've never even heard of anyone else's conjecture that it might be true.

I am interested in acoustic waves in foamy media, and in particular the foamy structure of the cosmos. I'm seeking a mainstream answer to a straightforward physics problem, which is why I'm posting in the mainstream forum. I can't go into much detail about why I need this information; that must be discussed in New Theories.

Imagine a longitudinal wave moving right to left across the page and a transverse wave moving from bottom to top. The plane of polarity of the transverse wave is parallel to the page.

The top of the transverse wave is a motion of the medium right to left, the middle of the transverse wave is moving left to right, and the bottom of the transverse wave is a motion of the medium right to left, back to its initial position.

The longitudinal wave moves the medium first left to right and then right to left, back to its original position.

When the two wave pass thru one another, the part of the longitudinal wave which passes thru the top part of the transverse wave encounters an extremely minute tailwind, and the part that passes thru the bottom of the transverse wave encounters an extremely minute headwind. Consequently, the longitudinal wave emerges from the collision very slightly twisted; its top part is now slightly ahead of its lower part.



I don't know if that twisting of the longitudinal wave changes the direction of its momentum vector, but I'm betting that is the case. As I said, the effect is extremely small, but for my purposes one part in 10^50 might be sufficient to power everything in the universe.

The postulated effect would be extremely difficult to simulate and measure in a laboratory using a chemical foam medium. Also, chemical foams with gas-filled bubbles are distinctly different from the foamy structure of the cosmos with its vacuum-filled bubbles (giant voids up to 100 million light years across). I think only a computer simulation can provide the answer. Furthermore, such a simulation would suffer from a lack of understanding of the dynamics of the cosmic foam. We don't really know what forces hold galaxies and dark matter together.

Please don't ask for details of my cosmology in the mainstream forum. This thread is only about exchange of momentum between longitudinal waves and transverse waves.

3

New Theories / Split: what is Mass?

« on: 06/07/2011 16:48:28 »

Split from here: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=7762.0

I'll answer this question from the perspective of my own non-standard model, so don't put any part of this answer on your homework, or you'll fail the course.

In Einstein's general relativity (GR), which is valid only in Minkowski space-time, it is said that light has no mass. That is a result of the definition of straight lines in space-time as being the path of light. Most people who are comfortable using the GR equations will tell you that there is no other kind of space, so the statement "light has no mass" is true in an absolute sense, not just in GR. I say, that's just plain scientific bigotry. Minkowski space-time is highly useful, but it is not the only mathematical analogy for representing the physical universe.

In old fashioned Euclidean space (where a straight line is the shortest distance, and where the internal angles of a triangle always add up to 180°) light does not follow straight lines in a gravity field. Instead, light changes direction as well as energy. That happens because light has mass, and like all masses, it is attracted to all other masses. What light doesn't have is rest mass, because light cannot be at rest in any reference frame; it must always move at c.

In my model, fundamental particles which can be at rest in their own reference frame consist of orbiting pairs or groups of photons, held in orbit at the speed of light around one another by the Higgs force. The rest mass of the particle is the sum of the masses of the orbiting photons in the reference frame whose origin is the center of the orbital paths. Larger particles form when fundamental particles orbit one another.

When photons are grabbed by the Higgs force, they fall into a deap potential well, which increases their energy and mass many fold. (This converts zero-point energy to rest mass.) All other forces are derived from the Higgs force, which results from exchange of momentum between regular energy and dark energy. Free photons are surrounded by a Higgs field; the Higgs field of orbiting photons is spun into a spiral pattern; the spiraling Higgs fields of particles interact resulting in the other forces.

In Euclidean space, accelerating a photon in a given reference frame is a matter of changing its direction and energy in that reference frame. (In Minkowski space-time, you can change a photon's energy, but not its direction; so you can't accelerate a photon.) Accelerating a fundamental particle with rest mass is a matter of accelerating the center of the orbital paths of the constituent photons, and thus translating those photons into a different reference frame. The complicate way to calculate the change of the particle's momentum would be to calculate the change of momentum for each orbiting photon, averaged over time. The result would be the same as the much simpler Newton's formula, f = ma.

As has already been mentioned in this discussion, f = ma only works for non-relativistic speeds. That is because the mass is not constant. Approaching the speed of light, additional force is needed to change the mass, and f = dp/dt is the formula to use (where dp is the incremental change of momentum, and dt is the increment of time). In Euclidean space, F = dp/dt works for both particles and photons. At relativistic speeds, dp = m•dv + v•dm. At non-relativistic speeds dm is practically zero, so dp = m•dv, and f = ma.

I could explain where the Higgs force comes from, but that would mean going more deaply into the nature of regular energy and dark energy and how they exchange momentum with one another. In other words, I'd have to explain my whole model. I have already done that in the New Theories section.

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New Theories / Fractal Foam Model of Universes

« on: 23/02/2011 00:35:39 »

PLURAL UNIVERSES

If the "universe" is everything that "is", then like Bill Clinton, we should ask, "what the definition of IS is." My imagination IS, so in a sense everything I can imagine IS. We need more restrictive meanings of "universe", and to keep them straight, we should attach descriptive labels. When we hear the word "universe", most of us think of the physical universe, and we think we have an inkling what that is. I have a cosmological model in which "our universe" is a scale-wise subset of a greater fractal physical universe. My fractal universe, though infinite in time, distance and scale, shrinks in comparison to the multiverses envisioned by some other cosmologists. So when I describe my Fractal Foam Model of Universes, I don't mean to disparage, belittle, scorn or deny the possibility that my universes are contained in a unichapter of a unibook in a unilibrary. With that in mind, I shall try to condense my model to a few paragraphs, as follows:

FIZZ

The cosmic foam of our universe is the ether foam of a super-universe, and the ether foam of our universe is the cosmic foam of a sub-universe. These are but 3 infinite universes in an infinite scale-wise sequence. (Each verse in this chapter may, itself, have infinite tangents existing in the same time, scale and location; but I shall not attempt to develop that idea any further.) The expansion of our space enlarges the cosmic voids (bubbles), thus increasing the distance (stress) between neighboring galaxies. On the assumptions that gravity is perfectly described by Newton's law of universal gravity, and that gravity is the only force acting between neighboring galaxies, we might suppose that increasing stress means decreasing strain. For an isolated pair of galaxies, we might expect strain to be inversely proportional to the square of stress. The stress-strain relationship in a foam whose bubble walls consist of thousands of galaxies is well beyond my meager math skills to analyze, but I imagine the galaxies can only be stretched so far apart before the integrity of the foamy structure breaks down, and a bubble wall "pops".

Eventually, a gap opens near the middle of a wall, and the galaxy clusters around the perimeter of the wall exert greater attraction than the galaxies across the gap. The galaxies near the gap accelerate toward the surrounding clusters, and after a billion or so years, collisions occur. Zooming out to view a larger portion of the foam, we should expect to see momentum and energy conserved by radiating pressure waves. (These waves are analogous to the sound we hear when we pour a glass of beer.) In the plane of the ruptured wall, surrounding galaxies move first away from the rupture, then back to a new equilibrium position. Perpendicular to the ruptured wall, galaxies move first toward the rupture, then away to a new equilibrium position. The kinetic energy gained by galaxies in the ruptured wall is transferred to the radiating pressure waves. I cannot say what the speed of those waves might be. Perhaps they move away at the speed of gravity (which I believe to be at least 20 billion times the speed of light), or perhaps the move at the speed of light. This is one of the major gaps in my understanding of my own model.

DARK ENERGY

The pressure waves radiated from popping cosmic-foam bubbles in one universe are the dark energy of the next scale-wise universe. The concept of dark energy was invented to explain where the energy comes from to create new space in our universe. In this model, space can be quantified as median-size ether-foam bubbles. More bubbles means more space, so expansion of space means the number of ether-foam bubbles must be increasing. When a bubble wall pops, two bubbles are united into one, which represents a decrease in the number of bubbles. (Of course, the number is infinite, so we must talk about the number of bubble in a given region of space.) For the number of bubbles to increase, ether-foam bubbles must un-pop, but that violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Bubbles don't un-pop in forward time. The paradox is resolved by reversing the arrow of time from one universe to the next. As our universe gets older, the super-universe and sub-universe get younger. From a sub-universe perspective, a cosmic-foam bubble pops, and pressure waves radiate. From our perspective, the dark energy pressure waves converge to a point where an ether-foam bubble un-pops, converting dark energy to new space.

REGULAR ENERGY

Regular energy consists of ethereal shear waves, which propagate at the speed of light in the manner of acoustic shear waves in ordinary solids. The speed of sound in a bulk solid is given by the formula, c = sqrt(G/rho), where G is the shear modulus and rho is the density. So the ether must be ultra-dense and ultra-stiff. E/m waves are regular energy shear waves caused by acceleration of electric charges. Electric charges have an architecture composed of a finer grain of shear wave. I cannot yet describe in detail what distinguishes that structure from the structure of other particles. That difficulty will be evident when I discuss the formation of fundamental particles from shear waves.

The origin of shear waves (other than e/m waves) is an interplay between pressure waves and minute variations in the foamy texture of the ether. The median size ether-foam bubbles is presumed to be roughly a Planck length (1.6e-35 m) across with a volume roughly 4e-105 m^3. At the scale of electrons, variations of individual bubbles average out very precisely, so the median size is the same everywhere (probably even beyond the visible universe). At the scale of a few Planck lengths, though, there must be blobs (for lack of a better word) where the median bubble size is significantly different. Such variations must surely affect the speed of pressure waves. A pressure wave imparts momentum to the blob going in and recovers it coming out; this leaves the blob ever so slightly out of its equilibrium position. Shear stress surrounding the blob pulls the blob back to equilibrium, and shear waves radiate like ripples on a pond perpendicular to the path of the pressure wave. That is my best guess as to the origin of regular energy in our universe. I can't say whether that process is happening in the present epoch; perhaps it ended when our universe became transparent, or even sooner.


FORCES

All forces in our universe result from exchange of momentum between regular energy shear waves and dark energy pressure waves. I have no proof that momentum is exchanged between the two types of waves. I have no research budget and no laboratory in which to test this concept with chemical foams. I suspect it may take a huge block of foam and ultra-sensitive sensors to detect the effect, and I cannot be sure that chemical foams behave like the ether foam or the cosmic foam. A virtual experiment in cyberspace should come first.

When a pressure wave passes thru a shear wave in the shear wave's plane of polarity, one side of the pressure wave (moving against the sideways motion of the medium) is delayed and the other side (moving with the sideways motion of the medium) is advanced. The effect is extremely small compared to the wavelengths of the two waves, but in an infinite universe, any effect is significant. The magnitude and direction of the exchanged momentum is a function of phase and polarity.

With a white noise flux of dark energy coming equally from all directions, the flux is altered in a particular pattern around the shear wave. Consequently, one shear wave will "see" a disturbance of the dark energy flux in the direction of another shear wave. Depending on the phase and polarity relationship between the two shear waves, they may "feel" a force of attraction or repulsion toward each other. This is the ultimate source of all forces.

PARTICLES

One such force of attraction can cause a pair of shear waves (with the right amplitude and wavelength) to orbit one another. Orbiting converts the radiant energy of the shear waves to the rest mass of a particle. Accelerating the particle, from one inertial reference frame to another, changes the energy of the orbiting shear waves in accordance with relativity. The change in energy of the orbiting shear waves is the change in mass of the particle. The shear waves continue to move at the speed of light in all reference frames, which accounts for the length contraction and time dilation of the particle.

The dark-energy flux disturbance around each shear wave is spun into a spiral pattern. Those spiral patterns may mesh with other spiral patterns to form larger particles. Some spiral patterns may be complementary or opposite to others, accounting for both electric and color charge. Unfortunately, I cannot yet explain how the patterns are complementary or opposite.

At greater distances, the spiral patterns become blurred, and inverse square forces take over. Again, I cannot yet explain in detail how this makes gravity different from electrostatic forces. There's a great deal of mathematical development to be done before the model can be used to derive the electrostatic and gravity constants from fundamental principles (or vice versa).

Make no mistake about it; this is NOT the wave theory of matter, WTM. Not even close!

ANTIMATTER

Since antimatter behaves like regular matter in reverse time, and since alternate universes run in alternating time directions, it seems likely that the super-universe and sub-universe are anti-matter universes. If we can turn the clock back on expansion to an epoch when our cosmic foam and our ether foam existed at the same scale, we might discover that each universe shrank from the other universe's perspective because they were made of opposite types of matter. Of course, this raises the question of what medium both universes existed in at that time. Today, the sub-universe's cosmic foam is our ether foam; we exist as waves in that medium. At the beginning of time as we know it, both universes must have existed as waves in the cosmic foam of another universe.

PERSONAL LIMITATIONS

No doubt, Asperger syndrome was an asset in developing my model up to its present form. The other side of that coin is that I am severely handicapped in interpersonal relationships and communication skills. It is difficult for me to reach out for help from others, and I am not qualified to lead any kind of project. I am living on so shallow security, and I don't anticipate becoming famous in this lifetime. So I don't mind sharing credit with anyone who can get the ball rolling, either as an administrator, researcher or technician. They don't give Nobel prizes to theorists; that honor will go to those who discover whether the theory is true or not.

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