From: "ajiko" Subject: What makes something compelling? Date: Thursday, September 07, 2006 5:31 AM Two years ago, my son gave me a book on string theory. It was a layman's style book and I read it and I found that string theory claimed to be a go-between between QFT and GR. That it actually required both. The book had nothing technical in it, but at the end of reading it, I found myself asking the silly question of whether string theory would require that ALL the dimensions were curved (ten of them now). My background grounded me enough to not consider curled up dimensions as curved. I considered them more like dimensions on a cylinder where parallel lines circle around the cylinder but always remain the same distance apart. Again the book had nothing at all technical in it. What makes something compelling? Well...(not yet) I searched the internet for gravity things and starting reading this newsgroup. Early on, I found the einsteinhoax gravity paper here and read it. It's a slow read, and, not knowing enough about GR, I didn't know that just about everything in it that referred to GR was wrong. Years ago, during my senior year in high school, I had read Einstein's original GR book. I had actually read it several times and actually recall understanding it one of the first times (I was young). I remember being confused on subsequent readings. I remember not understanding why it was more confusing the second time. I remember something about getting lost when the cosmological term was added. Since then, I have tried many times to learn GR. What makes something compelling? Well...(not yet) My apologies for the rambling. I'm not known as a writer. My school background is in Math and Physics (double major at Cal). On this news group, over the past two years, I've asked several questions. I've gotten sharp answers to just about everything. So, thank you to those that answered. The questions were formulated on a combination of my being stuck on a concept, and on trying to keep the issues raised interesting and possibly a little thought provoking. Hopefully, I haven't been like much of the posters... Anyway, I found myself reading and rereading that gravity paper. The paper was quite intriguing. I found myself needing to either verify its accuracy or disprove it. I found a webpage that calculated precession results starting with the Schwartzschild metric. I converted his space and time conversions into a metric and calculated Christoffel symbols and solved the basic orbit formulas in the same way. There was an exact solution that was very comparable to GR. I spent ages trying to research the radar ranging measurements of GR. I had major difficulty finding good papers on it. For example, I ordered the "Final Report" from NASA on two years of such studies. In was a one page report - (reminds me of my own traditional difficulties writing). The radar ranging and, now, laser ranging are the best measures of gravity. Anyway, perhaps the greatest stride in experimental gravity research has occurred recently. A combination of measurements from the Casini spacecraft and from Lunar laser ranging has added a second term to the PPN version of gravity. We now have gamma=1 and beta=1 (four decimal places) - nicely matching GR. What makes something compelling? Well..(not yet - at least for me) That gravity paper I had been studying turns out not to be compatible with beta=1. Well, that was that. Until.... Part of my approach this time to learn GR was to do it as a comparison. One theory that I understood (but was wrong) compared to GR. My new question was: What exactly "required" curved space? Perhaps a technical measure of the difference between these two theories could give me some clue. Actually, I wound up comparing just the simpler case of the PPN in a Schwartzschild context versus the heretical theory. GR is quite daunting, and the simplest cases often provide the most insight. After many false starts, I finally discovered an idea for where I could legitimately (in my eyes) put a function between the two and calculate some of the properties of that function. I found that I could calculate exactly, the first three terms of a Taylor's series expansion of it. I recognized, immediately, that it matched the first three terms of that function from the Lorentz transforms : F = sqrt(1-u^2). And I know that there can be many natural sources for such a term. What makes something compelling (at least for me)? Well... Here goes. Perhaps it's not much, but... I had just found a function that could be called a correction term. I had found it based on measurements from low gravity. What effect did it have on high gravity? Well... The heretical theory has, as part of it basics, being able to assign an energy potential to different elevations. It used the simple Newtonian m/r function. That function, when r goes to zero, goes to infinity. The correction term made the function go to 1 instead. It basically clamped the gravitational energy in a somewhat similar fashion that the speed of objects is clamped to less than 1 (light=1). So, here I am, looking at this metric where now, gamma=1 and beta=1 for low gravity and for high gravity, the metric is as mathematically clean as I can imagine. The metric has the terms (1-U)^2 and (1-U)^-2. Looking at the result, it appears that the traditional event horizon has shrunken to a single point. There are actually additional niceties related to the metric not being based on curvature, but rather, as in the PPN, it is based on local distortions. The interpretation is that objects actually shrink and move slower, whereas in GR extra space is created. In GR, the space also "falls" through the event horizon (is that a correct interpretation?). The two give very similar relative results in low gravity, but GR cannot be embedded in a flat space. Compeling reason number 1 (for me): Over the years, I have often used the technique of looking at the extreme cases. It is almost always successful. There are a number of other supporting reasons to continue the research. Recent CBR analysis looking at the size of the variations in the CBR indicate that, back then, the space was flat. Apparently, a single coordinate system can cover the entire evolution of the universe. Over the years, GR's cosmological constant has never had a "reason". It has only recently been determined (if GR is correct), that the constant is -1. After so many years, why was this a surprise? A collapsing neutron star has a new cosmology to it. - Intriguing to the exteme -. This intrigue is fully another compelling reason (for me). So... What does one do? I have no goal of disproving GR. My goal is to learn how gravity works, whereever that takes me. I have gotten to my current point because of a number of factors, much of which I have just described. The new theory is clearly incomplete. It is clearly in the "plausible" realm. Some first impressions (on this site these don't necessarily mean much) have turned it down on its face without any technical support. If second impressions are better... then that's a start for another compelling reason. Thanks for taking the time to read this, Ned Phipps Oh, Here's my paper (All the equation numbering is currently getting lost in the conversion to html format; sorry about that. Also the titlebar somehow is keeping an old title.) http://www.sonic.net/~ajiko/Gravity/GravityPaper_ShortVersion_11.htm