Of course I always liked the older 50's theory of..."Grab-a-dees!"...Why bodies attract...it's just a law of nature
Posted on 07/13/2010 3:35:33 PM PDT by Mr. Mojo
By It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.
But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?
So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.
“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.
Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Get Down with Gravity!!!
Well... If the Klein-bottle is the 2-dimensional version of the Mobius-Strip, then maybe the Universe is the 3-dimensional version of the Klein-bottle.
That would account for weird dimensionalities, wouldn’t it?
Don’t fall for gravity.
You miss the point.
You're saying the gas pedal is what makes the car go. He says there's something else going on under the hood that happens when you push down on the pedal.
I agree. One can't counteract magnetism or electricity by any amount of motion, but gravity can be counteracted.
There's something else at work.
Gravity. Remove it, and the rest is gravy.
So you admit it, he DOES have more papers published than you oh Mr. cut and paste............
Are you on the correct thread? Low blood sugar? Tough day at the job? Traffic jam?
Of course I always liked the older 50's theory of..."Grab-a-dees!"...Why bodies attract...it's just a law of nature
Perhaps a better way to put it is to say that gravity is “virtual”, a side effect of space and time and mass.
To start with, it can be said that space and time are the same thing. So much so that it can be called space-time. This is a well accepted theory in physics, and the two are combined into the “space-time continuum”, for the purposes of modeling.
But within the space-time continuum, there is the other pair, of mass and gravity. And mass-gravity is *interactive* with space-time. With enough mass-gravity, space-time actually distorts, is bent. Think about the “gravity well” created by a black hole in the “grid” space model.
But this comes with the usual problem: gravitons, the hypothetical gravity quantum particle, have not been found.
So what they are proposing is: what if gravity isn’t really “needed” in the equation? That is, what if mass, distorting space-time, may be all that is needed to create the illusion of gravity.
Think of the “grid” model again. Most of the lines are straight, except around massive objects. If you were on one such line, as your path, as it curved, your route would curve with it. Importantly, the massive object wouldn’t have to affect you directly, as long as it curved the space you were traveling, your path would curve as well.
Yet by all appearances, it would appear that the massive object was acting on you. Virtual gravity.
Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy,
Please don’t antagonize the NAACP complaint department any further, they have their hands full of other imaginary issues
Duly stolen ;)
So I guess you believe that Dirac's Nobel prize should be rescinded:
Can be measured. I don’t believe they’ve had direct confirmation though.
On a slow news day and a blank spot in the paper to fill...what better than something about gravity! Makes the mind brace right up, it does.
I think the problem is that you’ve got to be a crack head in order to make it in academia these days.
Man has a finite mind and will never understand or explain the infinite. This is why Physicists and Cosmologists are all doubled up with such outlandish theories like string theory, dark matter, and dark energy. They will never get an answer (at least in this lifetime).
for the string theory ping list
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