User:Paine Ellsworth/Gravity

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 * Disclaimer: Following are my own ideas about gravitation intermingled with the ideas of great men. This is not to be considered part of present-day mainstream thought.

Gravity is caused by the flow of spatial energy into condensed forms of energy known as "matter". As space flows into and through us, it presses down on us, keeps our feet on the ground, or our behinds in our seats, and prevents our floating out and away from the mass of our planet Earth.

Isaac Newton
Newton gave us most of what we know about gravity. He showed us how gravity behaves like a force and discovered equations to explain this energetic behavior of gravity. His contributions were awesome and brought us a long way toward an understanding of this perplexing physics puzzle that was labeled "gravitational force". But when asked what caused gravity, all Newton would say was tantamount to "God causes gravity." In other words, with all his great acumen, his awesome mental faculties, when it came to the cause of gravity Newton was stumped by what he called "spooky action at a distance". (Yes, it was Uncle Isaac, not Uncle Albert (Einstein) who coined that phrase.)

Albert Einstein
Along came Einstein to build on Newton's work with what he called a "theory of general relativity". He deduced that matter curved space, which resulted in what appeared as the force of gravity. So, matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move. This is evidence that space is not "nothing" (a persistent paradigm that still pervades some scientific thought). If space can be "curved" by matter, then space must be "something", not nothing. Einstein actually talked about "spacetime" adding time as a fourth dimension to the three spatial dimensions, length, width and height.

So Einstein thought and taught that gravitation was not a force, it was an effect of the four dimensional curvature of spacetime that surrounds all matter. The larger the mass of matter, the larger the effect of gravity. And the hardest part of his theory to accept is that if spacetime is curved, then spacetime has to be, well, something, and not the emptiness or nothing that people thought space was before Uncle Albert happened along. For clarity, I'll include a part of what he wrote as a preface "Note to the Fifteenth Edition" of his book, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. "Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept of "empty space" loses its meaning."

- A. EINSTEIN

Material objects, such as moons, planets, stars and galaxies, are not in space. Instead they are "spatially extended", a very interesting thought. What did Einstein mean by "spatially extended"? His use of that phrase was as opposed to physical objects such as stars, planets and moons being "in space". Rather than being in space as if space were "empty" and in need of objects being in it, material objects are extended spatially or extensions of spacetime. Einstein showed with his math depiction, E=mc², that matter, composed of atomic particles, is equivalent to relatively great amounts of energy, and so material objects are extensions of the energy of spacetime.

Extending those thoughts
The connection between spacetime and matter that results from their mutual spatial (and temporal) extending is a constant movement or flow of space into matter. Spatial energy constantly moves through us, each of us. Some of that flow, an exceedingly small amount of it, presses downward on all of our atoms, molecules, cells and organs. The rest, the vast majority of spatial energy, continues on downward into the ground and toward the center of Earth, and it presses down on all the matter it encounters.

Spatial energy
This seems so obvious to me when you think about it. Take a good look at the image on the right. It's a pie chart, one of the latest devices that astronomers have put together based upon their observations. Now take a knife and slice out the small amount of familiar matter, including the intergalactic gas, and what do you have left? Come on – if you could remove all of the physical objects, right on down to every star, every planet, atom, even every quark from space, then what could possibly remain?

Spacetime.

It follows then that space is dark matter/energy, and dark matter/energy is space. We cannot sense dark matter nearby, we only sense dark matter far away around for example the center of our galaxy. Space takes on the attributes of familiar matter, especially the attribute of gravitation, near condensed areas of familiar matter, such as the area of our galaxy's center. Closer to us, for example, just above our heads, space is a type of energy, a "spatial energy" that moves, flows into galaxies, stars and planets. Space flows into everything on those planets, into everything inside those planets. It flows into and through us and keeps our feet on the ground and our buns in our seats.

Flow of spacetime
When we accept that gravity behaves forcefully (that's an easy acceptance) and that it appears to warp or curve the something of spacetime (perhaps that's a little more difficult to accept), then we become able to deduce that the matter called "dark matter" and the energy called "dark energy" are actually the material properties and the energy of spacetime itself. It was c. 1980–90 when scientist and deep thinker Gordon Wolter began to disclose this to his distributor, editor and friend, Bill Sheppard, who got the rest of us on Usenet's alt.astronomy newsgroup involved and thinking about what causes gravity.

Sheppard described in detail the process that actually causes gravity, that portrays precisely what keeps our feet on the ground. Turns out that Newton and Einstein were both correct – and wrong – about gravity. Newton was correct about it being a force, and he was wrong about its cause. Einstein was correct about its bending of starlight twice as much as Newton's equations predicted and about its effect on planet Mercury's orbit around the Sun, and he was wrong about its apparently benign "effect" of matter curving space. While these apparencies seem evident, neither God nor the curving of spacetime are the cause of gravity. It's cause is the "something" (energy) of spacetime itself moving, flowing from the less energy-dense areas outside of matter into the more energy-dense areas of matter. It is similar to the way water drains in a sink or bathtub. We must always keep in mind: "[planets, etc.] are not in space, but these [celestial] objects are spatially extended ". And it is an energetic interaction between matter and spacetime that causes gravity.

Matter is like a radio or TV receiver. The energy that "holds" the voice, music and, in the case of TVs, the picture, flows through the air, and into our radios and TVs. Similarly, the energy of spacetime flows into the matter of stars, planets, buildings and people, and manifests itself as what we call "gravity".

Casimir effect
Now, just as when we study, say, a tree and must delve into the microscopic communities in the soil or swamp water to fully understand the tree's complete system, so must we delve into the quantum mechanics of gravitation. And we begin with a subject that has been well-known for a long time, about 75–80 years, the "Casimir effect". "Since the value of this [quantized] energy depends on the shapes and positions of the materials, the Casimir effect manifests itself as a force between such objects."

Further study of the Casimir effect will show how the forceful flow of spacetime (dark energy) is the direct cause of gravity.

Spacetime expansion
Scientists cannot sense this, let alone measure it, in our present day as the Sun and solar system revolve around the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only at great distances, distances farther even than the Andromeda galaxy, which is blue-shifted and heading in our general direction, can spatial expansion be observed. That says to me that since the farther we peer out into space, the longer into the past we see, it is very likely that spacetime expansion is a matter of the past, and that here in the present there is no expansion. In fact, here in present times there is either no expansion, or spacetime is actually beginning to contract. It contracts as our galaxy and many other galaxies travel headlong, head over heels in fact, toward an anomaly that has been deemed the "Great Attractor". Our galaxy appears to be a part of a "dark flow" of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, which move at great velocities toward a thus far unseen place, a place that may very well be similar to the "Big Crunch" of some theorists. Still billions of years ahead in our future, a violent end of our part of the Universe looms over us. But I digress ...