WHAT IS GRAVITY?
Let's talk about gravity from a philosophical point of view.
This isn't the place to have an introductory talk in philosophy, but see if you agree with me about one thing: I observe that philosophy seems hung up on assumption. For many philosophers, and throughout the history of philosophy, the point of it seems to have been to remove assumption; to somehow peel away the layers of reality to reveal some essential underlying truth, whether through language; through the difference between 'being' and
'knowing'; or through all sorts of other abstracts - none of which has been successful in taking us forward to a more complete philosophy.
And yet, as a would-be philosopher by avocation, the removal of assumption was never what concerned me: I didn’t think about it either way, as good or bad. The problems that did concern me: issues of my identity, the group identity, our destiny, the things that really mattered in my view, were completely addressable on the basis of assumption. The removal of assumption is itself a false assumption. What is needed is the replacement of assumption when it is wrong.
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Trying to remove assumption is, inevitably, a dead end. It's not desirable - it's not even important - to remove assumption; what's important is to check assumption, and to replace it with a better assumption when one arises, so that is a moving forward; that is a development.
It's a progression because it is a way to change your mind without being inconsistent with where you started from.
So don't remove assumption because it can’t be done, and it's debatable whether it's desirable, but replace assumption because you can do that at any time. We all of us constantly hold multiple contradictions in our own minds: it is a 'working understanding'. Replacing assumption however fondly one has held it, however deeply one is convicted to it, may not be easy, but it is almost certainly preferable to continuing to hold a false assumption. You can change your mind at any time. What I'm not saying is that it is easy. What I am saying is that it is evident now that it is worth it.
And if I've been successful as I believe I have, as a philosopher – for example, I am one of those saying Plato is wrong – the failure of philosophy is because it wasn't really philosophy.
What it was, was a branch of science.
~ • ~
I like John Hurt as we know, but I prefer Johnny Hart to Charles Schultz.
Charles Schultz of course is world-famous for writing the Peanuts comic strip. Johnny Hart may not be quite as generally known, but he is also famous for a cartoon strip, and the Wizard of Id has been serialised in Newspapers around the world.
It was B. C. by Hart which holds a special affection for me.
I recognise that Peanuts has a warmth that Hart lacks. When the 'Peanuts' strip becomes surreal, it is never silly, and Hart's 'B.C.' strip can be. But B.C. is more or less surreal all the time, with the same complexity as Peanuts. Peanuts was made into an equally sophisticated animated series which greatly impressed me but didn't quite win me over. Hart fascinated me with a world populated by characters wholly unreliant on sentiment. .
People are more likely to know Bill Watterson’s ‘Calvin & Hobbes’. Calvin & Hobbes mixes the reality of Peanuts with the surrealism of 'B.C.' to create something which some people find better than both, and it is a delicious mix. I didn’t get the personal connection with Bill Watterson I’d felt with Hart’s B.C. , but his is the example I need now.
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The Shape of the Universe
In 'Spiff the Spaceman', young Calvin finds that gravity has been reversed! 'Spiff' is the equivalent of 'talking clams' in B.C., or Snoopy as the Red Baron in Peanuts. In this particular adventure, Spiff explains matter-of-factly, 'gravity must have been reversed in my local vicinity', and then proceeds to fall toward the ceiling, walk around it, and then hang upward from the top of an outside door, in danger of falling onto a passing plane.
Anti-gravity is a mainstay of science-fiction, of course. Like jet-packs, anti-gravity seems a natural, logical step away from where we are. Like the clock that sets the time for others instead of itself, anti-gravity is sometimes easier to imagine than is the truth. It is useful to be reminded that anti-gravity might not just be imagined as the absence of gravity, it might be the reverse or inverse of gravity…
Perhaps that is how I would put into words the reason why we could not have a Dimension of speed. A thing is either moving or stopped, there is no negative of speed; no backwards. So can I apply similar reasoning to gravity as a Dimension? Even before I prove it so or reject it completely, I believe it helps to bear this question in mind as we try to investigate gravity in detail from very first principles. For gravity to be a Dimension, there would need to be a negative; a backwards. Gravity would need to not be a field.
Back to the Book.
The book I take as wrong about gravity is called 'What If?' by Randall Munroe, of the XKCD
website (www.xkcd.com). It says on the cover 'serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions' from the website xkcd which has presented the questions and answers which this book has collected. (It is great fun, by the way. I recommend it!) So what sort of thing do we have in here?
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We have: the periodic wall of elements! That's one of my favourites: what if each element of the periodic table composed a brick in the same wall. What else? Machine-gun jetpack, Orbital Submarine, Facebook of the Dead. I'm interested in one particular question-and-answer.
“If a bullet with the density of a neutron star were fired from a handgun –
ignoring the ‘how’ – at the Earth's surface, would the Earth be destroyed?”
And that is a question from Charlotte Ainsworth.
In the book, the answer to Charlotte begins:
“a bullet with the density of a neutron star would weigh about as much as the Empire State Building and the surrounding blocks of midtown Manhattan.”
So this is an object the size of a bullet that weighs part of a city; a question and answer about gravity in theory, not an experiment that anybody would ever be able to perform.
The first point that's made by the author from the book:
“is our bullet made from a Neutron star?”
No. It's a bullet as dense as a neutron star not one made from actual neutron star material because of course at the centre of a neutron star the material is held together by tremendous pressure as well as tremendous heat and if that was suddenly transported out of the star then it would explode rather dramatically.
But we're imagining; we're hypothesizing - we're assuming (correctly so far) - that some imaginary material is both stable and ultra-dense.
Having got past his caveat the writer can start to answer the question: what would the bullet do to the Earth?
“You could imagine firing it from a gun but it might be more interesting to simply drop it. In either case, the bullet would accelerate downward, punch into the ground, and burrow toward the centre of the Earth. This wouldn't destroy the Earth but it would be pretty strange.”
The book goes on to say,
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“as the bullet got within a few feet of the ground the force of its gravity would yank up a huge clump of dirt which would ripple wildly around the bullet, as it fell, spraying in all directions. As it went in, you'd feel the ground shake, and it would leave a jumbled, fractured crater with no entry hole.”
Is that exactly so?
There is a further assumption here, but if I’m honest I must first acknowledge: that’s not something that would've occurred to me that the hole would close over, but I get it now.
That's great visualisation! Let's just see what the rest of the description says.
“The bullet would fall straight through the Earth's crust. On the surface, the vibration would quickly die down, but far below the bullet would be crushing and vaporising the mantle as it fell. It would blast the material out of the way with powerful shockwaves leaving a trail of superhot plasma behind it. This would be something never before seen in the history of the Universe: an underground shooting star!”
“Eventually the bullet would come to rest, lodged in the nickel-iron core at the centre of the world. The energy delivered to the Earth would be massive on a human scale but the planet would barely notice. The bullet's gravity would affect only the rock within a few dozen feet of it. While it is heavy enough to fall through the crust, it's gravity alone wouldn’t be enough to crush the rock very much. The hole would close up leaving the bullet forever out of anyone's reach.”
“Eventually, the Earth would be consumed by the ageing, swollen Sun and the bullet would reach its final resting place at the Sun's core.”
(The Sun itself will not become a neutron star.)
OK, so now I come back to it. What I have to query, is this:
“as the bullet got within a few feet of the ground the force of its gravity would yank up a huge clump of dirt which would ripple wildly around the bullet, as it fell, spraying in all directions.”
Imagine the island of Manhattan ripped out of the Earth and floating over your head, waiting to fall. Now, if that started to fall towards the Earth, clearly it's not going to rip up part of the Earth and have that float around it. So, what is being suggested to us is if that weight was Page 21
collapsed into something as small as a bullet and that fell towards the ground then it would rip up this earth.
As I might put it, what we're saying is a reasonable assumption is that gravity is a field, so that in the same way that I don’t have to be touching the Earth to be subject to it's gravity, I don't have to be touching the City's colossal mass to be subject to it, when it is condensed. When it is spread out and I'm not near enough to any heart of it, then the fact that it is colossal as a whole won’t affect me.
Without saying whether this is right or wrong; without submitting an argument one way or the other, I can pose a question: And the question is, in this chain of thought and reasoning, might there be an assumption that is wrong? Is there perhaps a way to highlight that assumption and make an alternative assumption that could replace it and therefore offer a way for people to not agree with me, and not disagree with me and agree with the Author, but make up their own mind in the privacy of their own opinion until there's the opportunity to decide further.
The assumption that I'm questioning is that gravity is a field. Why shouldn't gravity be what it appears to be?
When Einstein described gravity he said, imagine you're in a lift and the lift is accelerating. For you, in the elevator, the force of gravity is indistinguishable from an applied acceleration.
There's no doubt that the material in a neutron star exerts gravity, and even a small amount of the material of a neutron star, would exert gravity, however if Einstein's idea of standing in a lift is a description of gravity then we can say over the course of the time that it's been in the Universe that neutron star has been subject to 'being in a lift'.
If we move it to Earth, we move it to a different lift.
It retains density, but not necessarily gravity.
So let's imagine this:
We have Earth over here and a neutron star over here. Now the history throughout the Universe of these two objects is different. It's not just different because of the starting formation of the Universe, it is different because of the history of what has happened between now and all the time previously. All of the objects which collide with each other and lose momentum, and all of the objects which align with each other and gain momentum have a different history, and a different physical situation in Einsteinian terms. So this neutron star Page 22
has gravity because of something we visualise as being in a particular lift, and this Earth has gravity which could be in an entirely different lift!
If you take material out of here, the neutron star, and take it outside of the lift, are you bringing with it the constant acceleration, i.e. the implicit gravity that that mass has within the neutron star, or not? In other words, are you bringing over just density, or are you bringing over density plus gravity?
My understanding is that lead is dense but it doesn’t have more gravity than iron. Drop both from the Eiffel tower and they fall at the same speed.
If you bring over the thing that makes this part of a neutron star and not just an object drifting in space, i.e. you bring over its history then that is going to be a moving object when it gets here.
We may not be able to see these lifts - there's no background to the Universe to measure the absolute movement of anything but that doesn’t mean they're not there. That doesn’t mean it's not a real thing that we are describing. So, when you bring it over you’re going to bring it over to all intents and purposes from our point of view in trying to understand the underlying physics, you’re going to bring it over as movement.
Finally, note the impossibility of leaving the ‘gravity well’ of Earth to find out whether or not density has gravity per se. Earth is in a gravity pocket due to an acceleration which in the past caused it to reach a speed now of 60,000 mph around the Sun (relative to everything else in the same gravity domain). The Sun has a speed of one million miles per hour around the Milky Way. It is both a larger mass and in a larger gravity domain due to the acceleration that caused it to reach that higher speed in the past. You really would have to escape both domains to demonstrate that density = gravity, otherwise density is just subject to existing gravity using either my assumption or our book-authors assumption.
~ • ~
In fairness to Randall Munroe, the author doesn't pretend to be a scientist. He does aspire to be answering on the basis of the common sense associated with science, but it's quite possible that a physicist would say "oh no, this isn't correct; it's just not something that we physicists would shout about because it's fundamentally an entertainment, not a serious science project.” So, there is every justification for some poetic license in the description.
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It's another thing if it's philosophically incorrect: because at the heart of it there is an assumption and that assumption is demonstrably replaceable. Then, it ceases to become simply poetic license and it becomes something that physicists *should* correct because it is the job of science to stop us from believing what is essentially superstition.
I should comment also that against a live show, I must necessarily go more slowly and laboriously in an essay. For those that attend, my show is very much more fun, I can promise you! You don’t need more than O Level physics and you can even ask questions knowing that there is a money-back guarantee if I have got wrong.
VOICEOVER:
We also have a final part of the current work to complete so that I can set you the homework for you to do outside of the Show. Let’s just remind everyone what the homework is: There are three types of Galaxy. There is the globular cluster and the irregular cluster, and ours: the spiral cluster. Using only my visualisation approach, how can we explain the formation not just of the first two, but also of the third, just using 'O' Level physics as here?
How did the Milky Way get its spiral arms?
HOW GRAVITY DETERMINES SHAPE
We can see all around us that planets rotate around stars, stars rotate round Galaxies, and Galaxies interact.
Einstein offers us two ways to understand gravity. As already mentioned, the first is the analogy of a man in a lift.
The lift is accelerating, and so they experience the acceleration as if it was gravity. Because they are in a lift, they can't see anything outside so they have got nothing to relate their movement to, and they feel that they are stationary.
In the same way, the Universe has no background and we cannot measure our acceleration in terms of a background. From our point of view, gravity feels like acceleration, and vice-versa.
So the second analogy, the second visualisation of gravity, is as a dent in space; a cup, or pocket. This visualisation imagines space as a flat, two-dimensional plane and the gravity as creating a cup, or a well; an indentation, in that plane. These are the two ways that we have got through Einstein without having to understand the maths.
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The Shape of the Universe
(See below)
The visualisation of gravity is an important conception.
The visualisations above are not consistent with gravity as an acceleration.
They are consistent with gravity as a product of density, but that is missing the point if it is the other way round; if density is a by-product of gravity, rather than the gravity arising from the density, then we would re-draw these diagrams to make them accurate.
So where could gravity come from if not from density?
I have already mentioned the saying that the Universe is a sphere whose centre is everywhere. It turns out to be vitally useful to us. Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, is credited with the words, according to the Internet:
“Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
I came across this saying many years ago and acknowledged the truth of it. They are my italics, but Blaise Pascal would have appreciated the following use of his idea. We have seen the Universe is fractal on the largest scale, which explains how the edge can be nowhere, but what about on the smallest scale?
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On the smallest possible scale things like gluons and quarks seem not to even be wholes.
Physics made the discovery through the famous two-slit experiment. This, and other experiments gave not an indeterminate answer, nor even a non-answer, to the question “is light a wave or a particle?”. When experimentally passed as a wave or particle through two slits, light did not fail to give an answer – the indeterminate answer, “We don’t know” – nor did it give a third unanticipated answer (the different answer, or non-answer, it is X); rather, it gave something else: an unanswer – i.e. “this is the wrong question to ask”. Light responded to an Aristotelian Yes/No experiment with a Chinese Tao, or “third way”; an unanswer, forcing physicists to “unask the question”.
As a result, physicists were forced to think in a different way about the Universe. The old certainty about cause and effect gave way under a dawning realization that the observer affects the outcome. It is not that the outcome is decided by the observer, it is that the outcome is decided when the thing is observed. Schrödinger’s cat stretched ‘now’ into an indefinite future. The moment ‘now’, which we thought a mechanical product of the past, became an artificial construct like the set of ‘The Truman Show’. For all our billion minds, we still could not answer the question about whether a tree falls in the forest if there is no-one to hear it. If there is no one to hear it then is it falling still? Indeed does it fall at all?
The result was the brand new field of Quantum Physics, which made Uncertainty the basis of its determinacy, brilliantly negotiating the schizophrenia of paradox throughout the Twentieth Century.
And thinking in this new 'quantum' way had a definite and wonderful outcome, in entanglement. It seemed like magic, spooky “action at a distance”; the most unexpected manifestation when you thought 'physically', it turned out that two very very tiny particles could become joined - entangled – so that no matter how far apart in space they were or are, action on one instantly affects the other.
The mystics had said that the Universe was like “a sphere whose centre was everywhere”.
Here was, if you like, a proof of that. It was a way to understand entanglement, that the subatomic particles had become so small, they were, effectively in the same place. W hether edge or centre, who could tell?
We can think of it like this. Picture a subatomic something so small that it is not entirely in the Universe. It is, perhaps, not yet fully realised; not quite real. You can move this something.
You can even move it, and leave it where it is. Then, when you make it real by say observing it, at that moment the single something is drawn into the real Universe - as two somethings.
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At this point I have my exact visualization, a set which contains infinity: a Trans-finite Set.
The Universal Set which has an infinitesimal edge now has an infinite centre – a singularity.
Diagram Redacted
Universal Set
Universal Transfinite Set
So at the opposite end of scale from ‘large’ we find a particle can inhabit any two positions in space because they are 'entangled' at the centre/edge of the Universe. To put another light on it, if the Universe has a centre then that would be the place for God, and God would be in the Universe. If it is a centre that is everywhere then God can be right next to you or next to me; He can be a personal God.
But notice one other thing at this point: things are not stationary in relation to the centre.
That is, everything is falling towards the centre that we imagine is everywhere - or, the centre is falling away from everything. To be exact, we do not and cannot say whether all falls towards (in an implosion) or away from (like an explosion).
The Universe is a place with no centre and no outside so it is very difficult to think about. In fact, I am going to cheat, a bit. I’m going to start with a centre/outside and then take them away.
Let’s imagine a starting Universe where large and small objects are arranged randomly. So let's take a random arrangement of stationery points, and let's add a centre.
. o . . O . o C . o . O O . O
The objects around it are all falling towards the centre. (They could equally all be falling away).
We cannot see the movement because, at our starting point, this is like a still photo from the movie footage.
Now let’s imagine the Centre moves and we are looking at another still in the movie:
. o . . O . o C . o . O O . O
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C
As the centre moves, we also see from the shifted positions the movement of the objects toward/away from the centre.
If our Universe were like this it would be obvious. It is obvious our Universe is * not* like this, but we can take a step closer to our Universe by hiding the Centre.
The Centre would be not taken away, but hidden, if we made the speed at which the objects move towards (away) from the centre random. Perhaps some are still, some are moving, and some are accelerating, and so all we can see is their movement relative to each other, or to an earlier position, if we know that.
Now, you're going to say well, that's not a random arrangement: look, they're all in a straight line. To which my reply could be:
“ That's as may be, but a random arrangement of elements includes an arrangement in a straight line. So I don’t have to choose my randomness to suit you (and other people), I can choose it to suit me, if that's what I need to do, without breaking any rules.
We can assume the centre is anywhere; we can arrange our starting conditions to allow the centre to be anywhere. What I want to do then is to take an arbitrary time, t1, (sometime between now and the start of the Universe) and then I want to take the next point in time, t2 (whenever that may be), and move the centre - and that's how I want us to start thinking about no centre: by moving the centre, rather than by taking it away. “
I could say that to you now, but then it would be no help to you in explaining it to someone else later. I can imagine you or another saying to me “look, unless I can explain it to them without arranging things in a straight line, why would they be interested?”
Fair enough, let’s compromise. So this time my starting situation is going to be a “random”
arrangement of points around a centre. The Universe doesn’t have a centre but for our convenience we are giving it a centre. I am also arranging the dots around in a circular rather than random manner, but that is for our mutual convenience, ready for when I come on to move the centre, next.
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The Shape of the Universe
What I want to do is to move the centre by effectively taking it away. What I'm going to do first is to pretend the centre is bigger than the elements it is the centre of:
So we've still got a centre, it's just that it's so big as it drops away that everything effectively is pulled to the outside instead of to the middle. So suddenly all these flows of accelerations are reversed. (I say suddenly but I only mean, of course, suddenly in our thinking. I don’t mean the Universe has somehow reversed its starting condition: whatever our starting condition is, it goes back all the way to that.)
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The Shape of the Universe
Now, we don’t know whether the Universe has a big centre or a small centre, we only know it has no centre.
Finally then, if I now take the centre away completely, we are left with an acceleration which is not in any one particular direction. Given that the Centre is hidden for us, the accelerations actually look completely random, but crucially that randomness still makes sense. The conclusion I hope is clear: it is that no centre is also a centre that is both outside and inside.
Outside of what, and inside of what is irrelevant. (Notice that it is also irrelevant where in the page the centre was. I could have put a Centre in the street outside my flat and it wouldn’t make any difference!)
We now have acceleration which is completely unrelated to itself in direction. And because acceleration is effectively a ‘pocket’ in space - Einsteins idea of a ‘gravity well’ as being like a dent in 3D where spacetime is effectively 2D - when something passes something, or something approaches something, it is these pockets which interact. These bodies I’ve drawn don’t always hit each other, they don’t always smash into each other, so what matters is what happens to the pockets. They are effectively soft, so we can ask obvious questions about whether the pockets flatten or deepen, as a result of the interaction.
It has been a long chain of reasoning to arrive here. I could have simply said that if the starting condition for the Universe is movement, rather than expansion, then one really has a simpler precondition, philosophically, not a more complicated one but that would hardly Page 30
The Shape of the Universe
convey the impact of the change on existing thought. As the Stephen Hawking film, ‘The Theory of Everything’ relates, the idea of the ‘Big Bang’ came about as an alternative to the
‘Steady State’ Theory. I can now say that neither of them corresponds to this premise, which argues for a Big Bang that is ongoing yet maintains an overall steady state.
I now have the basis for a complete alternative visualisation of gravity which I build up in 3
stages, ready to apply below, in ‘how gravity determines Shape’.
•
Movement around an Accelerating Body
•
Acceleration around an Accelerating Body I
•
Acceleration around an Accelerating Body II
Afterwards, I will use this to explain what we see in Galaxies and Planets.
The base diagram is shown below: not a ball nestled in a dip but a ball impaled by a pin.
To visualise: Not a ball sitting in a pocket but a ball impaled on the head of a pin.
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The Shape of the Universe
A moving body rotates in orbit around a gravitational centre.
We end up with a simplistic notion of a body in orbit around another body. This gets us started, so to continue, let’s introduce acceleration on both sides: Page 32
The Shape of the Universe
Accelerating bodies - orbit will not decay; acceleration swivels to be orthogonal, in stable orbit.
When the Orbiting body is itself accelerating, then the Orbit will not decay.
On entry into a stable Orbit, the acceleration – the pin-head – swivels to remain orthogonal to (at 90 degrees to) the acceleration of the main body (see Top View).
This happens whether or not the body is rotating.
Now, in a way this is a particular case, where the acceleration of one body is to the side of the the acceleration upwards of the other body. What about where the acceleration of both bodies is upwards (or downwards)? The last step then, is to look at this case, and describe it.
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The Shape of the Universe
The ‘Top View’ shows a body ‘dropped’ (in fact, accelerating) into the gravitational field of a body accelerating in the same direction.
The ‘Front View’ shows that the body is not ‘pulled’ into a stable orbit now, but is partially
‘pushed’ into an exaggerated Orbit. The ‘swivel’ we saw before does not start occurring until the body passes the centre point of acceleration, the pin tip; also the lowest point. The ‘pull’
only occurs after this.
We see a similar effect when a jet plane pulls out of an extreme nose-dive. Only beyond the lowest point of the dive does the force of Earth’s gravity get applied, as the jet pulls up to climb away, and it does so with extreme force, of multiple gravities.
I argue that the ‘rise’ on the other side of the Orbit is very unlikely to be an exact match to the fall. This would require a perfect sphere with an exact centre of gravity at the exact centre of the Orbit.
Much more likely is that some instability will cause the rise to veer to one side or the other so as to minimise the drag over time. Once the Orbit has become unstable in this fashion then Page 34
The Shape of the Universe
the expectation would be that it continues to change and further stabilise. The most stable Orbit is of course around the Equator and, in the case of planets orbiting stars or more likely stars orbiting stars, these orbits will develop over geological time, even millions of years.
The side-view shows the development of the exaggerated Orbit over time, graphically.
Obviously there would be many, many more orbits with a much finer degree of change between them as the situation stabilises over geological eons. But the end result is clear.
In 3 Dimensional space, we can roughly apportion all Orbits to either the side view model, or the top-view model, by defining the angle of approach as either acute or obtuse. If the angle of approach is between 0 and 45 degrees, it is obtuse, if it is greater than 45 degrees, up to 90
degrees, it is acute. All obtuse approaches are characterised by the second visualisation above and all acute approaches are defined by the third diagram above.
This is important because of the difference between the second and third diagrams. In the former there is no exchange of gravitational force (acceleration). In the second case there is a loss of gravitational acceleration from the approaching body and a corresponding gain in the receiving body.
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Normally, our experience of acceleration is that it is not cumulative. When one car accelerates to overtake another car, there is no circumstance where the car that is overtaken speeds up.
If there were even the tiniest slipstream effect, it would not apply in the vacuum of space.
And to recall the idea of the jet plane diving toward the Earth and then pulling out of the dive: clearly this has no effect on the Earth’s gravitational field.
In the case of a body ‘dropping’, and then being ‘pushed’, and then being ‘pulled’ as described above, this does affect the gravitational field of both parties.
Think instead of a skydiver falling towards Earth without a parachute, then add a second powered skydiver who falls towards the first and starts to catch up. When the faster skydiver reaches the first, it does not simply overtake, like the car, instead it embraces and keeps hold of the first skydiver so that they are falling together, end over end. Now they are both faster than the first skydiver and if they are rotating, one cannot tell by looking which was the powered and which the unpowered skydiver.
In other words, a Gravitational Orbit such as the Milky Way Galaxy has does not need to be created by dark mass or dark energy, it can be created by gravity alone, if we view gravity not as like acceleration, but as acceleration.
Previously we have not been concerned with the sharpness of the pin, but let us consider that here. Clearly, it is not infinitely sharp – or rather, it is infinitely sharp only in the extreme, final case of a black hole. That might be ‘C’ in the diagram above. For a planet or star, which gains from the addition of acceleration/gravity, ‘A’ would be a more realistic starting point for visualisation purposes, and ‘B’ would be the outcome following stabilisation of both Orbits over time.
As hinted, an infinitely sharp pin would be a black hole; even light gets impaled on such a pin.
Previously, the main method of creation for Black Holes was the gravitational collapse of an existing, sufficiently massive star. I suspect the method above shows that black holes could be created by matter alone, without the need for the lifecycle of the star to create a starting point. It would simply happen when enough matter accumulates through movement. To really convince, I think those who understand this would need to see it proven by mathematics. For the rest of us, computer simulation might prove persuasive. Both are beyond my remit and are left as future work for others.
~ • ~
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At the time of this writing, there is a large lake of chilled liquid xenon in America trying to catch the particles assumed as part of dark matter. The experiment just ended and found nothing, so the scientists are recommending another, far more sensitive experiment.
It is called Big Physics, the spending of very large sums of money on the engineering to support further Quantum investigation. Is this as wasteful a search as the Alchemists in Newton's time questing for how to turn lead into gold?
Bear it in mind as we go on to look at and visualise actual examples of Galaxies and planets to answer the basic question of formation, starting with Saturn’s rings.
Pausing to take stock now, have we reached the point where gravity does seem the best candidate for a third Dimension or not? Well, actually, I'm leaning wholly away from that as a conclusion. I am visualising a sort of ‘folded manifold’ of flat space indented with endless varieties of fat and thin, short and long ‘pins’. I suspect we’d naturally lean to seeing those pins in some sort of ‘pincushion sphere’, where the depth of one pin at a certain measure is the same as another pin at a certain measure. It is only a short step of convenience then to see all these pins as nested along an axis of magnitude: a seductive prospect.
If we were to see gravity as a Dimension then the imagined outcome if one could somehow fall through the centre of the Earth becomes quite different. The implication would be that one could not just fall through, but somehow also fall across. Rather like Dr Strange’s Portals, we’d fall in to come out the other side in a completely new place, according to an unknown or arbitrary (we may as well term it spherical) topology, and that would be the point of it all.
Looking even further afield. C S Lewis, a committed Christian of course, was one of the few writers that I have found to have tried to write about the metaphysical nature of Heaven (The Great Divorce, Macmillan). Rather than an essay like mine, he chooses to use a fictional short novel to illustrate the characteristics of Heaven. Intriguingly, one of the most significant features he gives it as a place is enhanced density. Is it coincidence or one of those intuitive insights we can pursue further?
As we are about to see next, we don't have to have a definitive answer to all aspects of the question to put the ideas above to use, which is one reason I am so comfortable flirting with possibilities. Whilst it is fun to imagine this could be somehow usable in some spiritual form, and that gravity may even be a third dimension usable by us; available for getting around in the ‘Star Trek’ sense. I have a serious suggestion to make, for an entirely hidden third spatial Dimension.
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My conjecture will be that the third Dimension is subjective.
As I said, we dont need to understand this to apply the ideas above to the elements of the Universe. If the third Dimension is subjective, I continue to try to understand better what that means. One aspect of a Dimension that is subjective is that it does not have units. With no units, the only division possible is into two halves, but travelling the first half requires one to divide the next half again into two halves, and so on. The subjective experience of moving in such a dimension (with no 'background reference') is then that each 'step' appears to be double the size of the previous one. Earlier drafts of this essay considered an axis of scale as a possible answer to this, but it is since rejected. A more obvious candidate would be time.
Although it is the traditionally acknowledged fourth dimension let us review our understanding of time before we finish.
VOICEOVER: Time and gravity and are not Dimensions, so where is the question-mark? The difficulty is with height…
