Replies

I like your idea, n&v, about putting a Michelson-Morley experiment on a deep space probe. It ought to settle the issue once and for all, if physicists believe there is anything to be settled, which I don't think they do believe. I'm not sure exactly why they feel that way. I'm not a physicist and didn't get a degree in the subject. I don't think it was ever adequately explained us. Did I doze off that day? In retrospect I can now at least see, even if I did doze off, that we skirted over it pretty darned quickly in class. But I'd like to see it done. It'd be interesting.

Swordy... Interesting article for people at my level (and it sounds like you're waay past that) is here => https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/are-the-laws-of-physics-really-universal/. Though I've heard some of it before, it's an interesting recap about how physical law and physical constants might or might not be changing over time and distance.

One point about G and g... The latter is an acceleration and obviously changes from place to place, while the former has units meters cubed per kilogram per second squared, or the equivalents, and is not an acceleration that changes from place to place, but is believed to be one of those "universal constants."

As to accretion disk models... I believe computer simulations work pretty well modeling them, but formal mathematical models are going to run into difficulty, in part because the three-body problem is still unsolved, never mind the n-body problem, though I thought electrostatic forces have been shown to be sufficient to bring particles the size of smoke (which almost all particles in a nascent disk are - supernovae are a b***h!). After that, electrostatic forces rule until gravity can take over. Well... That's just my understanding. Could be wrong. As always.

The problem with G being assumed to be a "universal" constant is that very assumption. Remember that assumptions tend to make an ass out of you and me. . . Because they come back to bite us both in the ass. They are always made absent any evidence of their veracity.

As to accretion disk models... I believe computer simulations work pretty well modeling them, but formal mathematical models are going to run into difficulty, in part because the three-body problem is still unsolved, never mind the n-body problem, though I thought electrostatic forces have been shown to be sufficient to bring particles the size of smoke (which almost all particles in a nascent disk are - supernovae are a b***h!). After that, electrostatic forces rule until gravity can take over. Well... That's just my understanding. Could be wrong. As always.

The problem is that accretion disk models are already not just n-body problems but almost infinite n-body problems, which for all purpose are indistinguishable from chaos. The electrostatic issue is one that di=oes play a major role, but opposite what gravity cosmologists "assumed" (there’s that word again) because in every model when the laws of physics were applied as related to charge acquisition, objects in the same vicinity, I.e. orbital areas, gained identical charges and like charges repel, keeping particles separated. We don’t see moons forming in the disks around Saturn or even nodules of accretion within the rings. Instead we see what astronomers call "herding" where small charged moons seem to move debris via electrical charges opening gaps in the rings, and a fairly homogenous density of spacing between particles in the rings that can be disturbed by the charged solar wind. Lp>

Some of the more evanescent rings, such as the F Ring we can actually see are braided rings showing the tell-tale double layer Birkeland currents flowing.

The "mysterious" intertwined braided rings of Saturn