When Gravity Breaks Down E-Book

Balungi Francis

• Herausgeber: Balungi Francis
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This book takes you through the history of gravity, its success and failures along the way. From Newton's law of gravity, to Einstein's general relativity, to MOND, through Gravitons to Quantum gravity and string theory nearer to Emergent gravity untill when the Fifth force is presented and finally gravity is fixed

Leseprobe

When GRAVITY breaks down

BALUNGI FRANCIS

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Copyright © Balungi Francis 2020

Copyright © Barungi Francis 2020

Copyright © Bill Stone Services2020

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Balungi Francis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study or critism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Newton’s Gravity Breaks Down

Theoretical Failures of Newton’s Laws

Observational Conflicts

Einstein’s General Relativity Breaks Down

Predictions of General Relativity

Failures of General Relativity

MOND Tries

MOND Success

MOND Failures

Gravitons are Promising

Difficulties and outstanding issues

Quantum Gravity Waits

String Theory Fails

Emergent Gravity Welcomed

I Proposed the Fifth Force

Gravity Fixed

Glossary

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PREFACE

In Newton’s view, all objects exert a force that attracts other objects. That universal law of gravitation worked pretty well for predicting the motion of planets as well as objects on Earth and it's still used, for example, when making the calculations for a rocket launch. But Newton's view of gravity didn't work for some things, like Mercury’s peculiar orbit around the sun. The orbits of planets shift over time, and Mercury’s orbit shifted faster than Newton predicted.

Einstein’s idea was that gravity is not a force, but it is really an effect caused by the curvature of space and time. Matter curves space-time in its vicinity, and this curvature in return affects how matter moves. This means that, according to Einstein, space and time are responsive. Although all its predictions have almost been confirmed by experiment, General relativity fails to explain details near space time singularities at the centre of Black holes and the mysterious dark matter. Which means Einstein equations cannot explain the motion of stars in galaxies and galaxy clusters.

MOND was proposed by Mordehai Milgrom in 1983. MOND explains the motion of stars in galaxies correctly without assuming Dark matter. Therefore MOND is an alternative to Newton’s law of Universal gravitation. However the most serious problem facing Milgrom's law is that it cannot completely eliminate the need for dark matter in all astrophysical systems: galaxy clusters show a residual mass discrepancy even when analysed using MOND.

Most theorists believe that gravitons must exist, and that they could be candidates for Dark matter, because quantum theory has successfully explained every other force of nature. But not everyone agrees. No theory claiming to unify quantum theory with GR has been successfully verified, and this has raised suspicions that perhaps gravity isn’t like any other force – in which case gravitons may not exist. Even if they do, finding them is another matter. Quantum theory predicts that as gravity has an effectively infinite range, the graviton must have an incredibly low mass. Studies of gravitational waves from colliding black holes suggest that the graviton must be at least a billion, billion, billion times lighter even than the electron.

The theory of quantum gravity is expected to be able to provide a satisfactory description of the microstructure of space time at the so called Planck scales, at which all fundamental constants of the ingredient theories, c (speed of light), h ( Planck constant) and G ( Newton’s constant), come together to form units of mass, length and time. The search for the full theory of quantum gravity has been stymied by the fact that gravity’s quantum properties never seem to manifest in actual experience. One of the issues with theories of quantum gravity is that their predictions are usually nearly impossible to experimentally test. This is the main reason why there exist so many competing theories and why we haven’t been successful in understanding how it actually works.

One option for a solution to this conundrum is string theory, or the idea that everything we perceive as a particle or force is simply an excitation of a closed or open string, vibrating at specific but unique frequencies. One of the major criticisms of string theory has to do not with the theory so much as with theorists. The argument is that they are forming something of a “cult” of string theorists, who have bonded together to promote string theory above all alternatives. Not only that, the strings of string theory are stupendously small, thought to be somewhere around the Planck scale, a bare 10-34 meters across. That's far, far smaller than anything we can possibly hope to probe even with our most precise instruments. The strings are so small, in fact, that they appear to us to be point-like particles, such as electrons and photons and neutrons. We simply can't ever stare at a string directly.

Therefore emergent gravity or entropic gravity is a theory in modern physics that describes gravity as an entropic force, a force with macro-scale homogeneity but which is subject to quantum level disorder and not a fundamental interaction. The theory, based on string theory, black hole physics, and quantum information theory, describes gravity as an emergent phenomenon that springs from the quantum entanglement of small bits of spacetime information. As such, entropic gravity is said to abide by the second law of thermodynamics under which the entropy of a physical system tends to increase over time. The theory claims to be consistent with both the macro-level observations of Newtonian gravity as well as Einstein's theory of general relativity and its gravitational distortion of spacetime. Importantly, the theory also explains why galactic rotation curves differ from the profile expected with visible matter whithout invoking dark matter. The theory has been controversial within the physics community but has sparked research and experiments to test its validity. The problem is, if emergent gravity just reproduces General Relativity, there’s no way to test the idea. What we need instead is a prediction from emergent gravity that deviates from General Relativity.

Finally when all is said and done, the fifth force is proposed and its first result is that it reproduces the MOND and Emergent gravity results from one single force equation and solves all gravitational problems leaving none untouched. Although it is accurate there is one problem; it can’t explain the origin of gravity.

Gravity is then fixed by postulating that it is as a result of the Casimir effect due to vacuum polarizations with sounding experimental proof. This book will help you fix Gravity.

Newton’s Gravity Breaks Down

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Discovering a new law of nature is the acme of scientific achievement, and one granted to few. Those who succeed are assured of a place in the pantheon of science, first published in 1687, his book, “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” put forward his three laws of motion and his law of universal gravity. Sir Isaac Newton portrayed gravity as some kind of mysterious influence that allows masses to affect each other even through the vacuum of space. While declining to say exactly how this influence worked, Newton came up with a precise mathematical description of its effects, in the form of his celebrated "inverse-square law" of universal gravitation. Supposedly inspired by watching an apple fall in his mother's garden almost 350 years ago, Newton's law remained the best description of gravity until 1915, when Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity, which gave the first detailed account of what gravity actually is.

In Newton’s view, all objects exert a force that attracts other objects. That universal law of gravitation worked pretty well for predicting the motion of planets as well as objects on Earth and it's still used, for example, when making the calculations for a rocket launch.

But Newton's view of gravity didn't work for some things, like Mercury’s peculiar orbit around the sun. The orbits of planets shift over time, and Mercury’s orbit shifted faster than Newton predicted.

While Newton was able to formulate his law of gravity in his monumental work, he was deeply uncomfortable with the notion of "action at a distance" that his equations implied. In 1692, in his third letter to Bentley, he wrote:

"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."

He never, in his words, "assigned the cause of this power". In all other cases, he used the phenomenon of motion to explain the origin of various forces acting on bodies, but in the case of gravity, he was unable to experimentally identify the motion that produces the force of gravity. Moreover, he refused to even offer a hypothesis as to the cause of this force on grounds that to do so was contrary to sound science. He lamented that "philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain" for the source of the gravitational force, as he was convinced "by many reasons" that there were "causes hitherto unknown" that were fundamental to all the "phenomena of nature". These fundamental phenomena are still under investigation and, though hypotheses abound, the definitive answer has yet to be found.

"I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena and I feign no hypotheses.... It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies."

When Isaac Newton put forth his universal theory of gravitation in the 1680s, it was immediately recognized for what it was: the first incredibly successful, predicatively powerful scientific theory that described the one force ruling the largest scales of all. From objects freely falling here on Earth to the planets and celestial bodies orbiting in space, Newton's theory of gravity captured their trajectories spectacularly. When the new planet Uranus was discovered, the deviations in its orbit from Newton's predictions allowed a spectacular leap: the prediction of the existence, mass and position of another new world beyond it: Neptune. The very night the Berlin Observatory received the theoretical prediction of Urbain Le Verrier working 169 years after Newton's Principia they found our Solar System's 8th planet within one degree of its predicted position. And yet, Newton's laws were about to prove insufficient for what was to come.

The problem all started not at the outer reaches of the Solar System, but in the innermost regions: with the planet Mercury, orbiting closest to the Sun. Every planet orbits the Sun not in a perfect circle, but rather in an ellipse, as Kepler noticed nearly a full century before Newton. The orbits of Venus and Earth are very close to circular, but both Mercury and Mars are noticeably more elliptical, with their closest approach to the Sun differing significantly from their greatest distance.

Mercury, in particular, reaches a distance that’s 46% greater at aphelion (its farthest point from the Sun) than at perihelion (its closest approach), as compared to just a difference of 3.4% from Earth. This doesn't have anything to do with the theory of gravity; this is merely the conditions which these planets formed under that led to these orbital properties. But the fact that these orbits aren’t perfectly circular means we can study something interesting about them. If Kepler’s laws were absolutely perfect, then a planet orbiting the Sun would return to the exact same spot with each and every orbit. When we reached perihelion one year, then if we counted out exactly one year, we’d expect to be at perihelion once again, and we’d expect the Earth to be in the same exact position in space relative to all the other stars and the Sun as it was the year before.

Pretty well, but not perfectly: Einstein showed that Newton's formula starts to break down when gravitational fields become very strong - for example, close to stars or black holes.

Einstein offered a different view of gravity, one that made sense of Mercury. Instead of exerting an attractive force, he reasoned that each object curves the fabric of space and time around them, forming a sort of well that other objects  and even beams of light fall into. Think of the sun as a bowling ball on a mattress. It creates a depression that draws the planets close.

This new model solved the Mercury problem. It showed that the sun so curves space that it distorts the orbits of nearby bodies, including Mercury. In Einstein’s view, Mercury might look like a marble forever circling the bottom of a drain.