Silas:

Thank you. Yes, the sodium emission D lines, with their characteristic spacing and their carrying most of sodium’s visible light energy, are now admitted to membership in the absolute information club. No relative motion or reference frames of the source or you, the observer, neither linear nor rotational, neither “inertial” nor “non-inertial” would fool you about which atoms emitted those lines. That information is beyond relativity; it is absolute!

overrated:

Thanks for your stimulating questions. So I now must be an experimentalist as well as a theoretician. OK. Here is a possible experiment. Accelerate particle emitting radioactive nuclei with a suitably short half-life to inertialistic velocity (formerly relativistic velocity). At that velocity the particles emitted will predominantly travel in directions other than the travel direction of the nuclei. The emission distribution should approximate a cardioid with the notch facing the travel direction of the nuclei. Under relativity theory I think it should be a circle. It seems like a challenging experiment to design and execute. I might be able to make time available to manage the project if you could obtain the funding. Surely you don’t expect me to do everything myself. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

Moving_target:
GRAVITY AND LEVITY

Twinkle little star while you may, ‘cause
The gravity monster will get you someday.

I must begin by telling you that I find nothing attractive about Gravity. Aside from the dreadful, ultimate fate it deals to stars, it causes all kinds of harmful accidents to us humans. It even causes people to sag and become less attractive as they get older. Most of my relativist friends are appalled by a black hole curvature of space-time that would rip apart space-time itself. Gravity is worse than just naughty; it is absolutely repulsive.

The words ‘attractive’ [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] and ‘repulsive’ [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_evil.gif[/img] are so emotionally charged that scientists (other than behavioral scientists and psychologists) shouldn’t touch them, not even with a ten-foot pole. We could consider forces to be either tensile or compressive. But those descriptions are engineering and materials sciences oriented. Pushing forces and pulling forces, though suggestive of ideas from childhood, are openly honest, unmistakably descriptive, and well suited to the vocabulary of physics. We will soon be dealing with force in the abstract. Perhaps it is best to begin with the concrete.

Concrete is made of cement, sand, stones and water. A paving contractor I know likes children in the abstract but not in the concrete.[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_lol.gif[/img] On the other hand the Mafia does not like enemies in the abstract. It prefers them in the concrete.[img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_lol.gif[/img] Concrete is very successful at resisting compressive forces, but is as weak as a pup when it comes to tensile forces. That is why they sell so much reinforcing rod. Nonetheless, there is a little tensile strength in concrete or they wouldn’t be able to sell garden benches made of it.

There is evidence that gravity is somewhat analogous to concrete. Gravity can generate very strong compressive forces, strong enough to squeeze the life out of any star. In any force field that follows the inverse square rule of field strength, the field is radially symmetric because the field pushes against itself in all directions. The lines of force in the field are closest at the surface of the body that gives rise to the field. They push against the body to keep themselves in the surrounding space. Once in space the lines of force push against each other to achieve the maximum separation between the lines of force. That results in radial symmetry. All that force fields want to do is push, push, push.

If a field pulled against itself in all directions, it would pull itself closer together until it was all on the surface of the body and was no longer a field at all. Therefore, force fields cannot pull; they can only push. Here the analogy to concrete stops. A force field cannot exert the slightest pulling force. The idea of force fields wasn’t thought of until long after Newton’s time; so we can understand his thinking gravity was attractive.

Quantum theory invokes quantum particles in place of fields to produce action at a distance. Quantum particles don’t say, “Come here.” They say, “Here I come!” They can push things in front of them but they cannot pull things behind them. The graviton is the quantum particle of gravity.

There is a position between any two bodies where the gravitational push is the same toward either body. A test particle at that location will move to neither. At that location the field intensities (or graviton fluxes) are equal and oppositely directed. The field intensities are, therefore, vectorially additive and zero at that location. That implies that the gravitational pushing forces between two bodies are weaker than the pushing forces outside them. Consequently, gravity pushes the two bodies towards each other. Newton’s law of universal gravitation is restated to reflect this view in A Journey Beyond The Universe.

Now you can understand why I wrote above that gravity is absolutely repulsive and not at all attractive. The implication of this understanding of gravity for the gravitational source theory of inertia is that the weaker gravitational pushing force of an accelerating body’s own rear field can have no effect on the stronger, opposing, pushing force of its forward gravitational inertial field. (Do not forget the second body that exerts the additional motivating force for the acceleration.)

Force fields, the gravitational field included, are real things. Nothing real can be infinite in any sense. No real rate of change can be infinite. Those ideas are explained more fundamentally in my books.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Richard J. Hanak on 2002-08-20 10:32 ]</font>