Hi,

Hopefully this is the right topic for this... I read all the guidelines.

I've studied quantum physics and cosmology as a hobby for 20+ years reading books like 'A Brief History of Time', 'The God Particle', 'The Road to Reality', etc. --in other words... I don't 'really' know snot.

Never the less (and of course!) an idea has come to me that solves a lot of problems. It kind of turns things on their head but still... it seems nice, neat and logical. Its not completely original and of course... it has to be completely wrong, still I believe it is worth posting.

It's summarized in 4 pages of bulleted items and pictures in a zipped Word document. I think I can guarantee that its interesting... maybe a bit radical. If anyone's interested... and please 'think twice' before you reject.

(It's been scanned for viruses)
http://www.virtualmediastudios.com/WilliamsonGravityModel.zip

Thanks,
Rusty

Can you summarize things here?

I can try but such a summary I fear would be quickly rejected... here goes...

Vacuum energy and the Higgs field pervade space and together form the fabric of timespace. GR's warped timespace is actually a thickness in the Higgs field and a thinning of virtual particle pair generation (i.e. vacuum energy).

The Higgs field is responsible for mass as well as 'acceleration gravity'.

The interaction of vacuum energy and the Higgs field is responsible for gravity from mass. It is also the reason that a pendulum swings slower when aligned with a Lunar eclipse.

Vacuum energy creates gentle force in all directions, from all directions and is responsible for the expansion of the universe.

A ring of stars accelerating at a specific rate around galaxies causes a change in the energy level of the Higgs field. This ring of stars depart from Newtonian physics as well as the documented effects of so called 'Dark Matter'. This ring has been detected in over 80 galaxies. The disruption this causes to Vacuum energy beyond this ring outside the galaxy is responsible for the effects of Dark Matter.

I believe those are the main points in my humble, pretty uninformed shot at solving most of physics' and cosmology's problems... LOL!

Di-da-di-da-di-da that's all folks!
Rusty

Despite you having having few posts and my general attitude to threads like this I'll attempt to be somewhat more polite than usual because I get the impression you're a little more open minded than the usual "OMG, I've got a theory of everything!" nuts here. That does not mean I'm going to lie in order to be kind....


I've studied quantum physics and cosmology as a hobby for 20+ years reading books like 'A Brief History of Time', 'The God Particle', 'The Road to Reality', etc. --in other words... I don't 'really' know snot. While its great you have read such books (and well done if you managed to slog through the entirety of Road to Reality, few people, even PhDs and professors, manage it due to its length) its a long long long way from 'studying'. Undoubtedly reading such books puts you in a position of being more informed than the average person (depending on how much you actually understood this might vary....) even reading 'Road To Reality' doesn't provide you with any working grasp of physics. A Brief History, The God Particle etc are specifically for the purposes of informing lay persons about the concepts and ideas in physics, not to provide them with working understanding. Road to Reality is a little different, getting knee deep in postgrad material before even the 200th page (out of about 1000, for those who don't own the book) the depth is pretty shallow, even with 1000 pages of material its impossible to go from basic kknowledge of numbers through to quantum gravity in any more than a superficial way. I'll admit I've used the book a number of times as a source for nice explanations of quite abstract mathematics (like fibre bundles) but it is only a supplement when a traditional textbook's algebra is a little too obscure for me to understand easily.

So while it might be splitting hairs in some people's eyes I think its pragmatic and ultimately much better for you to realise you haven't studied quantum gravity or whatnot, you have simply taken a keen but ultimately layperson interest in what the physics community is doing or has done.


Never the less (and of course!) an idea has come to me that solves a lot of problems. Before commenting I feel I should point out that I have been in a similar frame of mind in my past (ie high school age), believing that I might have come up with some great physics result because I can provide a superficial explanation of something using buzzwords.

It is a common mistake of those outside the physics community who wish to contribute to physics via a new idea about gravity, electromagnetism etc that they can do this by addressing one and only one problem in the area in question. They fail to realise that even if they provide a fully accurate new model of a given phenomenon they must also be able to apply it to all other relevant phenomena. To provide an example consider Newtonian gravity (NG) and general relativity (GR), both models of gravity. When you use GR to model the rotation of galaxies they appear to be spinning too fast and this lead to the prediction of dark matter. Some people disliked this so they modify NG to explain these rotation curves but GR is a model of so much more. It explains GPS time dilation, pulsar orbital decays, light deflection by mass, 'invisible' partners in binary systems (ie black holes), the CMB, the Bullet cluster and everything in between gravity related. The reason GR is considered a marvel is that it works for so many systems, implying its more than just a 'curve fitting' model, a result which standard NG fails as its been contradicted by experiments. Hence if you wish to use modified NG to explain galaxy rotations you also need it to explain everything else which GR can without invoking the existence of invisible matter (ie dark matter, the thing modified NG is meant to avoid!). It can't.

If you restrict your attention to only one physical system then its easy to come up with an ad-hoc curve fitting theory which is of practical use but whose origin you have no knowledge of. Modifying NG means you don't need to assume dark matter for galaxy rotation curves but you then can't explain anything else. So you don't gain anything really, you lose a lot though. Assuming dark matter then allows you to use GR to describe all gravitational processes. Yes its an additional assumption but one which you can test via experiments.

I've somewhat rambled but I hope you get my point, if you're going to come up with a replacement for GR then you need to be able to explain more phenomena more accurately than GR.


it seems nice, neat and logical.I don't mean you by this but its my experience that usually when someone on an internet forum pitches their own pet theory and claims its logically derived and complete they usually have no idea what 'logical' means.


It's summarized in 4 pages of bulleted items and pictures in a zipped Word document. I think I can guarantee that its interesting... maybe a bit radical. If anyone's interested... and please 'think twice' before you reject.I shall have a look later today.

Dear Alpha Numeric,
First, thank you for... I guess a very respectful and considered response. I didn't expect anything like that. As I stated, I know I don't know anything and that this is pretty much just a joke. It was actually a response to a challenge--I had 48 hours to put it together though I had ideas that I wondered about.

As for Penrose it is my current endeavor and my second go... I made it into chapter 2 about 3 weeks ago but felt I was not completely getting everything--actually although I know what squaring a number is (I was once good at algebra) I think there's something about it that I'm missing. So I took a break and read 'The Trouble with Physics' (losing even more enthusiasm for strings). Penrose sits on my end table waiting for me to start over again. I can't say I wasn't warned.

Ah, if I only had it to do over again... but, I did well with computer science--it got me Independence (retirement) at 51 and it was fun but it isn't the passion I think exploring the universes secrets would have been (but then reality never quite lives up to the illusion).

I need to discover why those 'ideas' are not good ones.

Rusty

Hi Rusty, one problem I can see (at least with my understanding of your model) is that it relies more on, say density, than mass as such, to block the "push" and give the "illusion of gravity pulling".

Picture (for example) an eleventy-gazillion tonne point source: in that case "gravity" will "pull" towards the centre uniformly, if it's a push (because it's blocking the push from "the other way").
What happens if you have the same mass spread out over, say, a light-year square (and however thick it needs to be to give that mass)?
If gravity is actually a push then wouldn't it be a push uniformly to each point on the surface of that square - normal to the surface rather than to the centre of mass as would (does) happen with gravity as a pull?
In fact wouldn't gravity be higher on the edges since the blocking takes place through a full light-year rather simply through the thickness (assuming that the material used gives a square noticeably thinner than the light-year width/ length)?

Hi Rusty, one problem I can see (at least with my understanding of your model) is that it relies more on, say density, than mass as such, to block the "push" and give the "illusion of gravity pulling".

Picture (for example) an eleventy-gazillion tonne point source: in that case "gravity" will "pull" towards the centre uniformly, if it's a push (because it's blocking the push from "the other way").
What happens if you have the same mass spread out over, say, a light-year square (and however thick it needs to be to give that mass)?
If gravity is actually a push then wouldn't it be a push uniformly to each point on the surface of that square - normal to the surface rather than to the centre of mass as would (does) happen with gravity as a pull?
In fact wouldn't gravity be higher on the edges since the blocking takes place through a full light-year rather simply through the thickness (assuming that the material used gives a square noticeably thinner than the light-year width/ length)?

Hi Dywyddyr,

First, thank you for reviewing my document and replying!

I have read your post several times and, for some reason, some of it is hard to understand.

For instance the first sentence:
"Picture (for example) an eleventy-gazillion tonne point source: in that case "gravity" will "pull" towards the centre uniformly, if it's a push (because it's blocking the push from "the other way")."

You say:
"... gravity will <do this>, if its a push <what? where's the rest of the sentence?>

I think I get the jest of your message and later this evening, when I have more time, I'll review it again and respond.

If 'you' have time, play devils advocate for a moment; pretend this theory fits like a glove in every other way except for the problem you see... do 'you' see a way to resolve this?!

Regards,
Rusty

If 'you' have time, play devils advocate for a moment; pretend this theory fits like a glove in every other way except for the problem you see... do 'you' see a way to resolve this?!
Ha, good question.
When I get more time (I'm currently running back and forth looking after my nephew's cats while he's sojourning in a foreign country - United States of Something-or-other, I hear it's doing quite well since we decided we didn't want it as a colony any more - and I'm getting huge chunks of my day taken up with travelling back and forth) I'll take another look at your document (to see if I understood it correctly), but that (my objection) appears to be a big stumbling block - I AM trying to find a "way round it" and will let you know if anything occurs to me.