Our collective understandings fundamentally change every now and then. Before Christopher Columbus sailed, most would adhere to the notion of a flat world and found the idea of a globe to be unthinkable and ludicrous. Today, we find it quaint to contemplate a flat earth belief. This article will be a mind bender for those of my generation and I believe will probably appear as obvious to future generations. I want to take a moment to address both audiences.
For those of my generation: This is part two of a series. I wrote part one over twenty years ago and have been thinking off an on about it every since. Last summer I had some insights that make these thoughts even more urgent than before. I don't have the answers yet but know what I'm looking for. I ask that you just give this a fair reading. You do not need to agree with all of the thoughts contained and no doubt some are not correct. The point that I am trying to make is that we have a wonderful phenomenon in gravity. Even if I am 100% wrong in everything I propose, it does not alter the fact that if harnessed and utilized properly, gravity may well be able to solve many problems that we encounter today. I can imagine few topics more worthy of exploration, thought, and scientific study.
To the future: I fancy myself an average person that has stumbled upon some useful thoughts. Twenty years ago when I had the original idea, I wrote to five astro-physicists and received a reply from three of them. One told me to stop wasting time and get on with something else, one thought the notion was plausible but that scientist basically happy with their current understanding of gravity and weren't looking for new theories, and the third came back with his pet notion of the universe as a vacuum fluctuation (it was interesting to read but I could never see how it related to my notion of gravity at all).
People on the streets today are interested in making a living, sports, current events and such. They could care less about how gravity works. The moral is this. Don't think for a moment that the thoughts in your head are necessarily wrong. They probably are wrong, but that doesn't mean that some thoughts aren't correct. When Columbus sailed for the East, he didn't set out in a canoe. Many may have tried and died before him and he just had the good fortune to see it through. I'll likely try and die with this crazy notion in my mind but sooner or later, some fairly ordinary person will get lucky and see it through. Keep at it with your thoughts and ideas and maybe you will be one of the lucky ones. If necessary, think of yourself as a modern day daVinci.
That is the big question. Current thoughts are that gravity somehow pulls objects together. I merely believe that objects are pushed together by gravity. Powdered coloring thrown into a swimming pool will not congeal into a globe… ever. It would not matter how much powder you threw into the pool. I find it preposterous to think of massive amounts of hydrogen floating about in a vacuum somehow congealing into a globe and turning into a star. My mind does permit that same massive amount of hydrogen to be pushed from all angles into a globe. Gravity that pushes, rather than pulls also explains an expanding universe quite easily in my mind. A mentally simple approach it to just say that you have another form of electromagnetic waves that travel faster than the speed of light with a slight chance of collision or push to matter. Place the source of these waves at all points in the universe and you begin to see that everything is pushing against everything else (expanding). I know this is in conflict with Einstein but don't care. Only a couple of hundred years back, radio waves, x-rays, gamma rays and so on would have met with equal disbelief. Today they are widely understood and have been harnessed and utilized for a variety of purposes. Just because we are unable to detect anything faster than light and Einstein says no, doesn't mean that they don't exist. We may have just not made the discovery yet.
Math and physics are not my strong suits and so I do not know how to calculate whether or not my notion has a chance of being correct. Some who read this will have such ability and encourage you to do the math and see if it doesn't work. If it works, start looking for those waves. Here is a hint if you think that you don't have instruments to detect them. Watch an apple fall from a tree. It is a crude instrument, but something is going on and it is measurable and repeatable.
OK. Once we discover how it all works, then we need to harness it and make use of it. Just making an 80,000 pound truck weigh less could save tremendous amounts of energy. Look for all of the hard solutions first of course but then come back and read this analogy closely.
Light has the ability to be reflected.
It can go clean through a swimming pool full of water (lots of mass) and light up the bottom of the pool clearly. Ditto glass, quartz, and even diamonds. It can go straight through, no problem, no slowing down. However, a simple sheet of paper can stop light. It can also be nearly totally reflected by any mirrored surface. A sheet of aluminum foil is an effective and inexpensive reflector. Suppose for a moment that we could as easily reflect or stop the effect of gravity. Aha! Simple, beautiful, but completely out of mind for everyone I'm living with today (as unimaginable as that may seem to future generations). I'll keep working on it and hope to have concrete answers before my days here are done. I should have another 20 years to work on it. Stay tuned.
© 2002
Dave Weeks