The idea of gravity as consisting of attractive forces emanating objects with ‘mass’ is easy enough to understand but leads to problems as explained in a paper by Tom Van Flandern. Anomalies can be resolved by thinking about gravity in a slightly different way and by analogy with the flow of water in a river.
Key anomaly
The Earth is said to orbit the sun but the position of the sun is not fixed – it is displaced by a distance of over a million kilometres by the gravitational fields of the Earth and other planets. Despite this, the gravitational pull on the Earth seems to be always towards the sun at the present and never where it was a few minutes ago,
Some scientists are expecting that the gravitational field of the sun will radiate out from the sun at the speed of light. It takes 8.3 minutes for the light to travel from the Sun to the Earth and so the light we see always comes from a position where the sun was 8.3 minutes ago. It is expected then that we should always experience on Earth a gravitational pull that was generated 8.3 minutes in the past.
This gravity vector travels towards us and will exert a pull towards the place from which it was created 8.3 minutes ago. This never happens and the pull is always towards the ‘present’ position of the sun thereby giving the impression that the gravitational field has travelled almost instantaneously from the sun to the Earth.
“Standard experimental techniques exist to determine the propagation speed of forces. When we apply these techniques to gravity, they all yield propagation speeds too great to measure, substantially faster than lightspeed.” – Van Flandern
Newton’s law: “Every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centres. Separated objects attract and are attracted as if all their mass were concentrated at their centres.” – Wikipedia
Newton did not like this: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.” – Newton 1692 – Wikipedia
Tom Van Flandern: “The most amazing thing I was taught as a graduate student of celestial mechanics at Yale in the 1960s was that all gravitational interactions between bodies in all dynamical systems had to be taken as instantaneous. This seemed unacceptable.. “
Confusing, certainly, but acceptable nevertheless if viewed from a slightly different viewpoint. Gravitational interactions are not actually between bodies at all but between a body and its local gravitational field even according to Newton. The interaction is in fact instantaneous but is local rather than distant; there is no need for it to ‘travel’ Moreover, cause can be said to flow from the force to the body and not the other way around.
There is no need to suppose that the bodies ‘know’ about each other, only that they are both subject to some sort of coordinated influence that will tend to move them closer together.
There is equally no need to assume that the force is caused by either object, only that it exists and has certain properties, will form certain patterns. Superfluous assumptions lead to confusion.
Such a cause is never observed directly and nor is a distant influence of one body upon another. Neither of these assumptions is necessary to make effective predictions about how the bodies will behave.
All we really observe is two objects coming together according to certain ‘laws’. The inverse square law is easily observed but the dependence upon mass is problematic.
Mass is never observed and is only ever measured by the degree to which attraction occurs and so strictly speaking we have no such thing as ‘mass’, only observed acceleration of objects towards each other.
Objects falling to the ground will accelerate towards the Earth at a rate that is independent of their mass.
Mass is merely a computational convenience. The idea of ‘force’ likewise is a fictitious construct to mediate between gravity, inertia, electromagnetism and mechanics.
A water vortex analogy. The substance of water is analogous to an all pervasive ‘field’ in space that influences the motion of the planets and stars, In the image, right, nobody imagines that it is the vortex that is causing its own little whirlpool, rather that it is the global vortex activity that gives rise to the sink at its own centre..
Similarly, the galactic centre is not creating and directing its own spiral arms via gravity, instead all the matter in the galaxy moves according to local field forces that organise the solar systems and have a tendency spiral inwards much as the water in the whirlpool.
Similar forces organise our solar system and will concentrate energy towards the sun where it is converted to photons and ejected at the speed of light to form sunshine. The Sun will therefore never run out as it is an energy transducer rather than a big bonfire.
In the image above the vortex is happy to conform with the general flow of the river and flow hither and thither with the rest of the stream. The centre of the vortex will not usually be out of step with the main vortex as it is caused by the vortex and part of it.
Similarly our sun will not be out of step with the gravitational fields of its own planets as its movements are determined by them, It has no motive force of its own.
If the water were to encounter an obstacle such as a rock, there would be an adaptive change to the vortex shape and its internal forces and this change would in due course lead to and altered trajectory of the vortex centre. The change would take some time to have an effect and this time would depend upon the precise evolution of the vortex geometry. Effects spiral inwards.
With no external influences, the flow would move in stereotypical patterns that would, after some investigation, be amenable to scientific description, with stories of forces and inertia being sufficient to make quantitative predictions. Big vortices have a large ‘mass’ and hence ‘momentum’ and this allows them to push smaller vortices out of the way but in reality this is due to the large field forces surrounding the vortex as opposed to any innate property of the vortex centre itself.
The motion of a speck of dust on the surface of the water can be described with a radial and a tangential component and this can be interpreted as free movement (inertia) around the orbital with some sort of ‘force’ pulling the speck (mass) towards the centre of the spiral. What is observed however is motion, not forces.
Similar considerations then apply to our solar system. Space is permeated by a ‘living’ field which influences all the celestial bodies and is ultimately responsible for their movement and indeed creation. It is not the case that the stars are sending out radiative fields to pull other bodies towards them; the Universal Field instead oversees all cosmological organisation.
Is space really permeated by an infinite unseen force field?
Well this is what Newtonian theory says and most people seem content to think so.
Is it really the case that a weak disembodied force can influence the movement of the sun or entire galaxy?
See answer above.
If the force is not radiative then what is the inverse square law?
See the image of the whirlpool. Energy spirals inwards here and forces become stronger towards the centre. The inverse square law is solely a consequence of geometry whatever the nature of the actual force
What would happen if there were an explosion on the Sun?
This is similar to what would happen if a firework were tossed into a water vortex. The vortex field would be disturbed and the effect would propagate outwards from the centre at a speed we call the speed of sound in water. This is analogous to speed-of-light effects propagating out from the sun. This is not, however, the same as the sun radiating out gravity waves on a daily basis to keep the Earth in orbit.
Just because some gravitational effects propagate out from the Sun it doesn’t mean all of them do. The formulation of a gravitational field supposedly emanating from mass together with the inverse square law has caused scientists to attribute all of the effects they see as being caused by the same radiative force called gravity all coming from a centralised source.
Laws are formulated under this assumption and because they seem to make good predictions they are then accepted as some fundamental truth.
Does a Gravitational Field Continuously Regenerate, or is it “Frozen?”
The field does not need to regenerate as it is not produced by anything let alone the sun. It is self-generating and operates according to its own laws with the inverse square law being a simplified observation of something that happens near planets. The field is in a constant state of ‘movement’, it contains its own ‘energy’.
What is this ‘Law’ you speak of?
The field equation of Konstantin Meyl.
What is fundamental?
The field equation is fundamental. This is analogous to the field equations that describe the flow in water: the Navier-Stokes equations.
What is not fundamental?
Everything else; everything that happens that we actually observe. Ripples travel through a whirlpool with some consistency but this doesn’t mean that they form a separate fundamental entity called ‘photons’ or whatever; they are an emergent phenomenon dependent upon the underlying properties of water.
Two small sticks move closer together on a pond via a resonant ripple effect. They are both emitting gravity waves which attract each other? No! This is just an illusion; it is the water, the substrate, that is causal here, not an inert bit of wood. Planets do not attract each other it is just that space moves them together.
What is the field ‘like’?
The field is dynamic version of Maxwell’s equations where electricity and magnetism are merely different aspects of the same thing. Constant movement of the field makes it ‘alive’ and enables propagation of emergent effects such as light. Other effects contribute to the concept of ‘energy’ which again is not fundamental but a way of expressing observations of specific patterns in field movements.
How does light propagate?
As ripples moving across a pond may traverse a water vortex so is light merely a modulation of the ambient field and so will its trajectory be determined by that field. The field itself is the substrate for field modulations.
“There is only the Field” – Meyl
Ripples will follow a vortex and move at the speed of light (sound) within that vortex and as a consequence its speed is added to that of the vortex moving through space. Two vortices moving towards each other may therefore view light in the opposite vortex as moving faster than Einstein’s ‘c’.
Where does the energy come from to move massive objects?
All objects are just manifestations of the Field themselves and will operate according to local field conditions. There is no matter or even mass as distinct from field configurations and so no need for any transfer of ‘energy’ between different type of fundamental stuff.
An object in a gravitation field is moving under its own ‘steam’ . The local field is propagating according to local conditions. Propagation is on a point by point basis and each point has no concept of the total ‘mass’ of the object. This makes it obvious that the acceleration under gravity is independent of the mass of the object.
Precession of the equinox. The Earth is said to undergo ‘precession’, to rotate in the sky in synchrony with the Pleiades star cluster, Sirius and the whole of our Solar System. The whole cycle takes about 26,000 years. Nobody believes that all these bodies are somehow dragging each other around by means of a radiative force. [video]
What is happening is that all these ‘masses’ are caught up in the same galactic helical field vortex which spans several light years and is responsible for the rotation of all bodies within its sphere of influence.
To try to imagine this as a collection of radiative forces is just too difficult but to picture it as a giant eddy current in a flowing galactic ‘river’ gives a nice idea of what is going on.
Newton’s concerns: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.”
Newton’s basic view of the Universe, which is reinforced by his mathematical theories, is therefore one where a collection of solid objects called ‘matter’ float about in an all pervading ‘vacuum’ that by definition has no properties or useful qualities of its own.
This world view pretty much rules out the development of any theory of gravity acceptable to Newton himself!
Matter is regarded as basic and fundamental but again has no ‘qualities’ as such and needs additional properties such as ‘mass’ and ‘charge’ to somehow allow it to interact with the rest of the universe. The rest of the universe meaning other chunks of matter separated by a lifeless vacuum.
The idea of gravity is an embryonic field theory but Newton was trying to graft it on to a system already overloaded with unnecessary concepts. He was trying at the same time to regard matter and space as being at the heart of reality whilst denying them the possibility of distant communication.
He needed to discard these ideas and start from scratch with Field Theory as fundamental and to then add matter and space back in as being subservient to the field, as emerging from it rather than somehow creating it.
General Relativity. Einstein was on the right track with the idea of an all pervasive universal field but in the rubber sheet concept (right), space and matter are still fundamentally different concepts and the idea of a force arises from the interaction between two such different ‘stuffs’.
“Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move” – J.A, Wheeler
This is circular and mind-bending with causality being shifted from pillar to post and back. Moreover, it doesn’t say how these things communicate with each other. In our example, the Sun would be the cause of a large dimple in space-time, with movement of the Sun registering as further deformations of the field which propagate at light speed.
This doesn’t help our case as no light speed propagation is observed and the data suggests ‘synchrony’ of Sun and Earth rather than distant ‘influence’.
Einstein was still bewitched by the illusion of ‘matter’ as being solid, real, fundamental and indeed causal in somehow orchestrating cosmic events.
Imagine the diagram above but without the mass. We do not need the mass itself as we can easily detect its ‘presence’ by the distortion of space with which it is now synonymous. No mass ‘moves’ as now the rubber sheet itself is endowed with the properties which will cause movement of the dimple i.e. movement within the field itself. Movement which is consistent with the observed laws of physics.
David Bohm, like everybody else, saw separate objects moving around independently of each other and yet at the same time seemingly in step to produce what he called the Explicate Order. Since inanimate objects are not normally capable of organising themselves there must be an unseen Implicate Order responsible for these patterns. [page]
The Implicate Order then is the field equation of Meyl (above) and the Explicate Order is everything else that we see and measure, from the movement of galaxies to the double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics.
The equation specifies the evolution of the field at every point in space and time with field propagation at light-speeds giving the impression of conventional causality.
This evolution, it is to be stressed, is local and confined to an infinitesimally small point, meaning there is no influence from one point to another over any distance at all, even a trillionth of an an angstrom; there is no granularity to reality.
Global order is maintained by a finite propagation speed with the solutions to the equation leading to the large scale patterns we observe, as with the water vortex.
This is the seeming paradox of field equations, that the rules are strictly local but the solutions global. The Implicate order is not a global plan but a local description of field properties, whilst the Explicate Order is the emergent patterns that we actually observe and measure and have mistaken for the Fundamental Laws of Nature.
Related pages:
References:
The Speed of Gravity – What the Experiments Say
Author: Tom Van Flandern
https://www.intalek.com/Index/Projects/Research/TheSpeedofGravity-WhattheExperimentsSay.htm
The speed of gravity: A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmbaqmX016M
Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation
Precession is one of the biggest failures in the mainstream gravity only model! What is it hiding? – See the Pattern
https://youtu.be/-oPE3l5E8uk
The website of Konstantin Meyl: http://meyl.eu