The Conceptual Flaw of a 'Curved Space'

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by SteveA</i>
<br />I see physical space as warped <i>over time</i> by gravity.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">That is not the case even in the geometric interpretation of general relativity. It is only "spacetime" (a form of proper time) and not space that is curved by gravity.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Thank you for the correction. I haven't spent enough time considering how gravity affects (perceived) time and likely miss this often.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">you'd have to apply a force on the rope to deflect it into a constant straight line between the satellites but if you apply this force, does it still represent a "straight line"?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Yes. What else would it represent? If the rope sags from gravity, just increase the tension until the sag is gone.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Ok, let's hypothetically say we could create an effectively infinite force on a small rope. If these forces were limited to lightspeed transmission rates, would this follow a path different from light? I can envision a straight line between two points but without a physical reference, it's difficult to determine what "straight" is and everything physical (except possibly gravity itself) would seem to be affected by inertia and/or gravity.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">It is just the reverse. Light is bent near a mass by refraction in a light-carrying medium (called "elysium").<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Sounds good to me. I agree this is possible.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">A taut, motionless rope has no bending unless you deliberately allow it to sag, which would introduce a curvature in the opposite direction than the curvature of light. Clearly, a sag in a rope has nothing to do with space curvature.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Ok, let's say we had a perfect crystalline object and no force was applied to any of the bonds, so each atom experienced no angular bending etc. This might be what we'd physically envision as a straight line. I'm a bit struck with a paradox of how to physically place this in space compatible with the idea of a straight line. No matter where you placed it, unless it was perfectly parallel to a flat gravitational source, there would be a different gravitational force acting along the length of the bar, so it would undergo some stress and deform. If these physical forces were limited to lightspeed communication, then it would seem no more stable than using light itself as a reference. You could of course compensate for this bending, but that would seem to require an outside force at all points along it's length and that external reference would itself also be subject to bending by gravitational forces.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that matter, being composed of wave energies just as light is doesn't seem to provide any more stable reference than light itself, though I very likely am missing a principle that places matter in a different context than light itself. If matter was defined as the deviation from a uniform and flat spacetime, then this would detach it from its typical physical interpretation.

*insert 5 minutes of thinking here ... *

I think I'm stuck on the cause and effect relationship between gravity and energy. If gravity is a stationary warping of spacetime, then the relationship between matter and gravity could be largely coincidental as energy is warped over time toward this (I'm trying to think of something like elysium with small reflections/interactions in space that would bias/reflect energy waves toward gravity). This view seems to avoid problems with singularities and would likely be an easier system to model and analyze also as it allows for a rigid hull in which elysium reside, though it's quite possible it doesn't correlate with observations. On the other hand, if energy itself creates these non-linearities (from my POV, sadly quite possible as it makes a lattice equivalent more difficult, though not impossible. I'm certain there's a transformation between the two though) then we see more problems with singularities, as energy attracts itself (though using a more gaussian/binomial distribution for gravity could model this and possibly allow for fractal characteristics on different scales).

I know we're all learning (though who knows if someone hasn't figured all this stuff out but it's simply too difficult to understand ) but from your perspective, Tom, do you believe elysium are most likely fluid and non-stationary or have you seen possible models in which these could operate in a relatively rigid, lattice arrangement (with observed space being largely a product of the shape of the hull)? I assume, by computational equivalence truly both are possible but are there any glaring problems with a lattice system that would likely make it a patchwork of problems (like the standard model?)?

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Light doesn't experience time ...<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Light doesn't experience the passing of any <i>proper</i> time. But it experiences coordinate time, as everything does, which is all that really matters. Gravitational phenomena are normally described in terms of coordinate time. For example, it takes light 8.3 minutes to travel from Sun to Earth.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Thank you again for the correction.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">With regard to the speed of gravity,
Though with regard to gravity, I believe We might not see gravitational effects for 8.3 minutes but my assumption is that gravity does travel faster <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Two possibilities I see here - Either 1) gravity is a stationary field, or 2) gravity travels at lightspeed but the universe is much smaller (in terms of lightspeed dimensions) than we typically perceive - in the later case, it would seem likely either planck sized or possibly thousands to hundreds of billions of planck sized objects (much of anything beyond that and it might as well be infinite from my POV ). It's not too difficult to imagine how such a system could create a universe with coarse macroscopic self-similar features at most any scale.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">so it follows a path of non-acceleration.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">That path is nonetheless curved by refraction in an optical medium, or in "the space-time medium" (as a relativist might say). No one claims the path of light is a straight line through the space near a mass.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

There seem to be some more "juicy details" to dig into here.

If we spread a beam of light through a prism, we see a spacial separation to the frequencies of light, just as gravity bends light spacially, though by my own definition (which may be incorrect) I see light as primarily the straight lines that define spacetime (wait, read further, I think I resolved the discrepancy further on in this post ... I left this comment intact so you can trace the chain of thought). They have constant velocity in spacetime and don't interact with each other (unless they emit gravity, which I'm hoping to avoid if possible). If all matter is simply composed of energy and effectively represented as wave cancellations (the conversion between matter and energy - wave cancellations so matter would be "stored" as an imaginary potential in the complex plane, "underneath" real space). So in reality light and matter are simply the real and imaginary components of a <i>straight</i> vector travelling through, what I envision as a small "subspace", of which we only sense the surface as real. Interactions with the hull of this, create warped fractal versions of this over time and give us the appearance of a warped spacetime, with perceived spacial dimensions being more of a macroscopic perceptual approximation of things but the path of energy within this "subspace" (if you know a better term, I'm open to suggestions), would seem to be necessarily straight or we'd need to further subdivide this space to explain another level of complexity.

Anyway, for the prism example, this would correlate with light not simply travelling along the surface of this subspace (like the steel bar example I gave earlier) but diving down beneath the surface slightly and being reflect up at slightly different locations in space, though each initially took a straight path in both space (the surface) and spacetime (they travel straight through this elysium ... ah, maybe that's where the definitions are mixed up, you see elysium as the hull of this subspace, not the transmission medium within it), though they are reflected back in slightly different locations in space (again, individual subjective perspective I assume would be the surface of this subspace).

These ideas might be old hat to you but I'm trying to follow through with how this would affect perceived frequency spreading over time. If we strike an object, higher frequencies hit us first, so higher frequencies travel straighter like an object travelling toward us (or possibly near us?), the birth of a star, the formation of the big bang (where distances are envisioned as being close) etc. and then gradually appear to be spread out cooler, redder and spread out over space - which correlates fine with later reflections of an event having travelled through an <i>apparent</i> long distance through spacetime (though spacetime need not physically exist for more than a planck time or some relatively small multiple of it), as spacetime could be the subjective interpretation of reflections/echoes/stored states of a smaller largely resonant subspace (3-D recursive with a fractal component over time, likely consciously observed on the 2-D surface).

My guess is that I'm confusing elysium with the resonant medium inside this subspace, whereas elysium would be this subspace/resonant cavity itself.

Ahha, so if that's correct then translating my view of how the universe operates would equate to having some relatively small number of elysium bending <i>and likely splitting and/or reflecting energy along their surface</i>, though (hopefully) energy would be transmitted inside elysium in a straight fashion (so elysium could act like a water particle deflecting and diffracting energy). My guess is that conscious observations are done on the surface of a single elysium as these would correlate well with observations of constant velocity of energy and the conscious perspective of spacetime. (Wow, that places a tantilizing definition of what "elysium" would be with a ton of hints Though I recognize we can interprete things through our own understand of them and I'm open to alternate explainations)

But again, comparing individual elysium to a waveguide, we would tend to see lower frequency energy transmitted later, and more diffused in space. I might be looking for them, but there seem to be many ways this same principle operates on larger scales. It's likely there is a direction to the universe - inward and outward. I'll stop here before rambling but it seems many of the concepts of distance, time, matter, energy, velocity, frequency, (age?) and wavelength can be explained as a single phenomenon operating along the lines of frequency spreading along waveguide and with a fractal component, the Big Bang doesn't need to be an impulse but can potentially be a never ending recurance instead, and the universe could be like a prism/waveguide feeding back on itself but like a pumped photonic crystal, frequency shifted in the feedback.

A quick analogy of this system would be the universe as an optical computer, elysium are individual computational units, frequency is similar to routing and "spacetime" is memory storage. The quantum and fractal aspects seem a product of at least recursion (by elysium reflecting at least some energy inward, though this might be my subjective perspective of things but paradoxically/ironically that reinforces the idea! LOL Sorry for the thought drift), if not discrete communications.

Could that agree with your view of elysium? (You can ignore the fractal claim if you want)

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">though there seems to be an obvious need to have a reference view of space that isn't warped, it's difficult to find any physical method of defining this.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">It's no problem. Astronomers use a Euclidean-flat-space, orthogonal set of x,y,z axes to measure space for almost all applications. Combine that with the local gravitational potential field defining a local preferred inertial frame, and we can describe all dynamical problems without ambiguity. -|Tom|-<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Sounds good, though I'll emphasize this is still a mental description that may not correlate well with observable physics (though it would be easy to imagine it truly operating inside elysium itself).

Interesting sidenote: I saw an article on trigonometric measurments done in a manner avoiding irrational values. It appears similar to working with complex numbers though used the terms "spread" and ... something else (dang, I'm getting older ). I can't help feeling the pythagorean equivalence of 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2 and other interesting numerical tidbits, like all numbers being the the sum of up to 4 squares etc. give clues as to likely the shape of things in our universe ... just throwing out a thought

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">P.S. "Harry" was a spambot. Ignore his posts.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

I'm a sucker

I just thought of something you might love, Tom

The difference between gravity and diffraction is that gravity bends light by a constant amount otherwise they might operate identically.

If the frequency of light is perceived by a detector as # energy pulses (I know that's a naive description) / time period and we assume the number of energy pulses remained constant, then what scaling factor would be left to alter the perceived frequency? Time. How do we know that light was truly emitted at the same color we see it if the rate of time passage can be different in different areas of space (spacetime?). (Also, there may be only one "color" of light - a quanta and the rest are somehow mirrored into higher frequencies? ... just thinking ...)

You've already said time changes inside a gravity well - so what if gravity is 1/rate of local time passage instead? Such a scaling would be inverse to perceived energy of detections and would likely create a fixed angular deflection, despite inherent frequency of the energy (we can only observe a photon once, so how can we truly know what frequency it left at if rates of time between the transmitter and detector differ?). Energy inside a gravity well would emit light at a slower rate also. And this could explain why gravitational objects appear to have mass - waves travel slower due to local time differences in that area and so more potential energy is present - in other words if space had a large volume of energy but we could only see differential variations on the surface, then in areas where waves propogated slower (physical time passing slower) then more waves are fit into a smaller area, with the likelyhood of interactions between these wave occuring according to the square of the effect (if you put 5 times as many objects in a fixed space, you'll find 25 times as many collisions per time period ... this could be a change of 5% of time though if 100 "dark matter" objects were already present) it might be that the slower differential of time passage somehow is included in this to create the mass=volume^3 relationship, as depth only occurs over time (so a change in time increases the number of interactions by the square of time, plus objects remain in that area longer ... for a perceived cubic relationship, though mass only increased by the square!!!!???? ... no singularities?! I think I slipped and need to think this over better - it could be no computations occur past this point - a.k.a. the state machine locked up or you need to reboot ). This would explain why time dialation occurs inside gravity - light travels along a time gradient toward slower time. This might also explain why distant light appears redshifted and why far galaxies appear to be moving away faster than the speed of light (though I need to think over these relationships but it could be we're observing things from a different level of gravity/time).

So the relationship might be gravity = 1/time!

Mass might be seen as the volume (surface area over time) of this space in which time operates slower <b>but if we were to assume that time is a thin dimension</b>, then masses may not increase by the cube as gravity becomes higher. It could depend on the "depth" of time which might be thinner than we realize, so a large mass can't physically extend through time for long. Look at the calculated entrophies for black holes - they're proportional to the surface area (my guess is it's surface area * rate of time) The "surface" of a black hole is likely defined by a time gradient and not a gravitational one (this makes sense too ... I might just be reiterating equivalencies here. Sorry, I just stepped into the pool and am trying to figure my way around), but in effect the edge of a blackhole more be more like a time directional, than a space directional. (Ok, I'm rambling out loud now so ignore whatever doesn't make sense ).

On a second line of thought:

Going back to elysium, they might interact with a force of 1/d^2 between themselves. In that event, having them compacted would make them transmit information faster. If elysium were displaced by mass then that would make them less dense near matter and though they'd be spaced further, the 1/d^2 relationship would make them communicate effectively slower (slower time near mass, light travels slower etc.) Packing elysium into a tube in space would create something similar to a wormhole and allow energy to be transmitted faster.

Combining these two views would seem to say that either 1) a black hole is a void in Elysium - mass has displaced the means to communicate through space so the "surface" of a black hole might resemble a normal space in many ways or 2) alternately communication between elysium, if it's a 1/d^2 relationship would be very slow as the "space" inside of a blackhole would be very empty (so if elysium could communicate from inside and out, then it would be a long distance and a 1/d^2 (assuming that's the relationship) would imply slow communication.

I'm just throwing out some more ideas.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by SteveA</i>
A force would need to be applied to this rope. The rope itself would tend to orbit along the same path as the satellites, so you'd have to apply a force on the rope to deflect it into a constant straight line between the satellites but if you apply this force, does it still represent a "straight line"?
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

You could hypothetically assume that the rope or string has an infinitesimally small mass, so the gravitational force on it and the force required to straighten it are zero.

Alternatively you can also realize a straight line between two points in space by equipping a projectile with a propulsion system programmed such as to exactly offset the gravitational force at any point. Again, if the mass of this projectile is assumed to be infinitesimally small, the required propulsion power would be infinitesimally small as well.

Whew. That was a bit too lengthy to attempt to follow in detail.<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by SteveA</i>
<br />Ok, let's hypothetically say we could create an effectively infinite force on a small rope. If these forces were limited to lightspeed transmission rates, would this follow a path different from light?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">A rope cannot follow the same path as light no matter what you do to it. If the rope is taut, it follows a straight line. If you let it sag, it develops a convex curvature with respect to the source mass. Meanwhile. light always follows a path with concave curvature.

Consider the path of light from a star. Ordinarily, that path is a straight line to the observer. But if the Sun is near the path, say, during a solar eclipse, the starlight path is curved and we see the star displaced from its normal direction in space. We can still look in the same direction where the star is normally located (the straight line path), but the star is no longer seen there, and instead appears to be relocated when the Sun is near its light path. Of course, the star has not moved, but its light path has curved while on its way to us.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I can envision a straight line between two points but without a physical reference, it's difficult to determine what "straight" is and everything physical (except possibly gravity itself) would seem to be affected by inertia and/or gravity.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">"Curved" would be meaningless unless it was with respect to some standard for "straight". The simple way to tell which is which is this: A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. For two points on a curved path, there always exists a shorter path connecting them than the curved path. Not so if the path is straight.

Gravity and inertia are simply forces. They don't affect space, so they do not alter our ability to use flat Euclidean geometry to describe the positions and motions of bodies in space.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">matter, being composed of wave energies just as light is doesn't seem to provide any more stable reference than light itself<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">A straight line is a geometric concept. Its existence does not require matter. We can create an origin and three orthogonal axes in our minds, and it will serve us well for measuring location and motion for everything in the universe.

In practice, we use the universe of stars painted on the background sky as an aid to realizing our ideal Euclidean coordinate system.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">If gravity is a stationary warping of spacetime<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">That notion (called "geometric GR") remains popular among relativists despite it having been falsified in 2002. However, field GR was always preferred by Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman, among others; and that remains viable. In field GR, gravity is a classical force that produces 3-space acceleration of target bodies relative to source masses.

In the modern vision of field GR, the Le Sage mechanism (now called "pushing gravity") not only survives, but thrives. Gravity is caused by a universal flux of ultra-small, ultra-fast "gravitons" coming from all directions. Any two bodies in space shadow one another from some graviton impacts, and therefore feel a net push toward each other. The apple falls from the tree because the Earth blocks some gravitons, creating a net graviton wind blowing downward.

You can get up to speed on the modern understanding of the origin and nature of gravity in the 20-author book "Pushing Gravity" or with the "Gravity" CD available through this web site. A much earlier discussion of this idea is also available by clicking on metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/possi...pertiesofgravity.asp

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">do you believe elysium are most likely fluid and non-stationary or have you seen possible models in which these could operate in a relatively rigid, lattice arrangement (with observed space being largely a product of the shape of the hull)?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Elysium is the light-carrying medium, and its individual constituents are called "elysons". Elysium appears to be ocean-like because of its transverse waves. But it is certainly not "rigid" because it must flow through space and change in response to gravity.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">With regard to the speed of gravity: Though with regard to gravity, I believe We might not see gravitational effects for 8.3 minutes but my assumption is that gravity does travel faster<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">See the latest on the speed of gravity at links on our page metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/gravity.asp

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Two possibilities I see here - Either 1) gravity is a stationary field, or 2) gravity travels at lightspeed but the universe is much smaller (in terms of lightspeed dimensions) than we typically perceive<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Neither choice is correct, not even approximately, as you will see at the previous link. -|Tom|-

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Thomas</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by SteveA</i>
A force would need to be applied to this rope. The rope itself would tend to orbit along the same path as the satellites, so you'd have to apply a force on the rope to deflect it into a constant straight line between the satellites but if you apply this force, does it still represent a "straight line"?
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

You could hypothetically assume that the rope or string has an infinitesimally small mass, so the gravitational force on it and the force required to straighten it are zero.

Alternatively you can also realize a straight line between two points in space by equipping a projectile with a propulsion system programmed such as to exactly offset the gravitational force at any point. Again, if the mass of this projectile is assumed to be infinitesimally small, the required propulsion power would be infinitesimally small as well.

<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

If we take mass out of the equation, then maybe yes, we could see a straight line, but consider that we've removed all <i>known</i> forces on it and would assume it would be a straight line as we imagine by looking at similar objects nearby us.

But consider that the Earth was believed to be flat also by these same lines of logic. In some ways the Earth is flat, it depends on your <i>perspective</i>. Time dialation and relativity all attempt to deal with this perspective issue - you can't measure something without a reference and I'm almost certain references change depending on the scale you use.

So yes, we can talk about flat space, because we speak English and share similar math backgrounds and have a similar innate understanding of how things operate in our immediate environment - these are all human perspectives of a certain scale and specific set of mathematical formulas but let me give you a simple example of what I'm looking at so we can share some common view of a phenomenon that seems prevalent everywhere in the universe, yet is often overlooked. (Sidenote: I believe the reason why this happens is because of the duke-it-out science and religious views had a couple hundred years or so ... science has a phobia of touching ideas that might have religious implications)

So here's a simple example of why I think flat space is simply a weak approximation of things:

Imagine you're standing on a patch of Earth inside a room with mirrored walls and holding a ball. You can see many other people from different perspectives (and time delays, a the light you see took time to bounce around inside this room). Let's make it more accurate and bend the top of the mirrors out slightly so we see a curvature to the Earth surface (you can even do this in a slightly elliptical fashion for greater accuracy). Now look out at all the mirror images of the ball ... from a larger perspective it has wave characteristics, just as matter has, and just as matter and/or light if we attempt to interact with the ball we only find one there, though we can predict the pattern of which this is most likely to be found (most likely along some peak of the wavelength, exactly as photons operate).

Now drop the ball and look in the mirrors - you see a large number of other objects falling toward a center point according to "gravitational forces". No matter how "massive" the object is, it still falls at the same rate - in other words, whether you look at 1000 copies of the ball or a single one, they all accelerate at the same rate. Coincidentally enough, after adjusting for the delay of light, all these balls fell toward each other at the same time! "Gravity" operates faster than light speed!("Spooky action at a distance"? Just like quantum phenomenon.)

Now bend one of the mirrors slightly so it appears to make larger reflections everytime a light wave strikes it and drop the ball again - in the mirror you see a meteorite strike a large planet. (Now I recognize there's a scaling issue to gravity here) And again, gravity operates faster than light because the true space that's been effectively stretched.

Now let's take two electrically charged balls, one positive and one negative and have them orbit each other inside this box. Electrical forces follow a 1/d^2 relationship, just as "gravity" does. Now look in the mirror and see a planet orbitting around a sun. (This again is a bit simplistic but hopefully people get the idea. Again, gravity between the planet and the sun appears to be faster than lightspeed.

There are simply way too many natural phenomenon that follow these characteristics. Of course if we want to look around inside the box and talk about how flat space is, that's fine but I'm thinking outside the box.

Here, I just did a search and found another site that's saying the same things if the pencil beam observations alone are true, it seems impossible that the universe doesn't have such large macroscopic features possibly continuing in both finer and larger detail and I've already found around 13 other forms of natural phenomenon that agree with these ideas also and that site simply added a few more to the list. (BTW, even atoms seem to have both a linear and octave component. My guess why larger atoms aren't stable is simply because warps in space begin to be incompatible with this octave structure at larger scales, and that's a good thing or the universe would be a rigid crystal on all scales).

www.fractaluniverse.org/index.php

Even if we attempt to moderate this and say it's likely humans will perceive concepts in a relativistic/analogical manner but the universe is truly flat and infinite, then we haven't helped human understanding, nor our ability to model useful phenomenon in a humanly comprehensible form - truly we don't see, nor hear, nor touch, nor taste, nor even truly think in a real 3-D space. At most we envision space as a cube with straight lines or for some intertwined planes, but noone can truly mentally envision a 3-D object of more than maybe 20 points without adding some linear or planar characteristics to it, yet we can instantly recognize a face composed of thousands of points on a <i>plane</i>. On top of this, it takes so much less computational power to model surfaces instead of volumes, and the results are much more intuitive and visible.

I don't want to confuse things so I'll stop there but this is almost certainly the next big find ... though truly I believe some people have figured out a lot of this stuff but that it's difficult to understand.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
<br />Whew. That was a bit too lengthy to attempt to follow in detail.<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by SteveA</i>
<br />Ok, let's hypothetically say we could create an effectively infinite force on a small rope. If these forces were limited to lightspeed transmission rates, would this follow a path different from light?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">A rope cannot follow the same path as light no matter what you do to it. If the rope is taut, it follows a straight line. If you let it sag, it develops a convex curvature with respect to the source mass. Meanwhile. light always follows a path with concave curvature.

Consider the path of light from a star. Ordinarily, that path is a straight line to the observer. But if the Sun is near the path, say, during a solar eclipse, the starlight path is curved and we see the star displaced from its normal direction in space. We can still look in the same direction where the star is normally located (the straight line path), but the star is no longer seen there, and instead appears to be relocated when the Sun is near its light path. Of course, the star has not moved, but its light path has curved while on its way to us.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I can envision a straight line between two points but without a physical reference, it's difficult to determine what "straight" is and everything physical (except possibly gravity itself) would seem to be affected by inertia and/or gravity.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">"Curved" would be meaningless unless it was with respect to some standard for "straight". The simple way to tell which is which is this: A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. For two points on a curved path, there always exists a shorter path connecting them than the curved path. Not so if the path is straight.

Gravity and inertia are simply forces. They don't affect space, so they do not alter our ability to use flat Euclidean geometry to describe the positions and motions of bodies in space.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">matter, being composed of wave energies just as light is doesn't seem to provide any more stable reference than light itself<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">A straight line is a geometric concept. Its existence does not require matter. We can create an origin and three orthogonal axes in our minds, and it will serve us well for measuring location and motion for everything in the universe.

In practice, we use the universe of stars painted on the background sky as an aid to realizing our ideal Euclidean coordinate system.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">If gravity is a stationary warping of spacetime<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">That notion (called "geometric GR") remains popular among relativists despite it having been falsified in 2002. However, field GR was always preferred by Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman, among others; and that remains viable. In field GR, gravity is a classical force that produces 3-space acceleration of target bodies relative to source masses.

In the modern vision of field GR, the Le Sage mechanism (now called "pushing gravity") not only survives, but thrives. Gravity is caused by a universal flux of ultra-small, ultra-fast "gravitons" coming from all directions. Any two bodies in space shadow one another from some graviton impacts, and therefore feel a net push toward each other. The apple falls from the tree because the Earth blocks some gravitons, creating a net graviton wind blowing downward.

You can get up to speed on the modern understanding of the origin and nature of gravity in the 20-author book "Pushing Gravity" or with the "Gravity" CD available through this web site. A much earlier discussion of this idea is also available by clicking on metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/possi...pertiesofgravity.asp

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">do you believe elysium are most likely fluid and non-stationary or have you seen possible models in which these could operate in a relatively rigid, lattice arrangement (with observed space being largely a product of the shape of the hull)?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Elysium is the light-carrying medium, and its individual constituents are called "elysons". Elysium appears to be ocean-like because of its transverse waves. But it is certainly not "rigid" because it must flow through space and change in response to gravity.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">With regard to the speed of gravity: Though with regard to gravity, I believe We might not see gravitational effects for 8.3 minutes but my assumption is that gravity does travel faster<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">See the latest on the speed of gravity at links on our page metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/gravity.asp

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Two possibilities I see here - Either 1) gravity is a stationary field, or 2) gravity travels at lightspeed but the universe is much smaller (in terms of lightspeed dimensions) than we typically perceive<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Neither choice is correct, not even approximately, as you will see at the previous link. -|Tom|-

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Thank you much for the link and the research you've done. I appreciate you working on alternate explainations of how the universe operates. I have little reason to doubt any of the accuracy of data you've collected and some of your ideas were what stimulated me to try to find a model that incorporated these observations as well. I'm simply trying to add a perspective you might have missed. I apologize for not having more detailed mathematical verification of the concepts I'm trying to present and likely I'll need to do this to have more concrete evidence to show but read the above rely to Thomas and see if the general 'flavor' of it is to your liking. If so, I can do some more work and try to give greater detail of the likely mechanics and observations that would correlate with it. There is absolutely nothing that I can see in this model that denies gravity as being perceived as communicating faster than light and it would even seem to unify gravity with electromagnetic force but simply aliased by non-linearities which are likely the equivalent of quantum binding forces and/or the edges of the universe.

If we were to convert this to the perspective of elysons and assume they don't exist on an infinite scale, then what would the "unconnected edges" look like? What would a delay between them appear as? My view is that elysium is an elyson itself or a small collection of elyson. Unconnected edges would give a reflection and delays would appear as space. Unfold the view, with unconnected edges as a reflection and distances determined by delay and you see the same fractal universe I'm talking about, which quantum phenomenon and faster than light gravity etc. all explainable by the tolopology. So this is more than simply a Grand Unification of Forces, it seems likely an explaination for everything including how conscious observations of the universe are made (though it still doesn't seem likely it could explain consciousness itself, but at least what perspective conscious observations are done from).

I read a comment of yours that gravity would require motion to operate and you claim mass doesn't move. I see mass as a vibration parallel to the observer. So for the example of the mirrored room, the ball would be bouncing back and forth in line with your sight (if you look very closely you'd see lots of "reflections" stacked up at that spot). If gravity is a differential of the rate of time inside this box then the edge of the ball moving through slower time would be delayed, and this would cause the apparently stationary ball to begin "falling", in the same manner you see elysons as providing a drag on light etc. Do you see the similarities?

The beauty of this is that you can start with a small structure, unfold it to see quarks, unfold it again to see elementray particles, unfold it again to see atomic structures continuing on to spiral galaxies and by doing it many times, in the limit you approach a recuring shape of the universe. It might also be possible to unfold time evolution in a similar fashion, though states would likely be a problem but if you can develop a calculus for approximately time linearly then it might not be impossible to find a shape correlating to a hurricane, plug in the sampled data and use this universal calculus to predict it's future travel. The accuracy, as in every other model is determined by the initial states and time period of evolution but the beauty of this is that you don't need to create separate models for air or fluids or magnetic forces or solar flares or coronas etc. etc. etc. They'd all follow the exact same laws, unless this fractal symmetry truly does vary over scale, but eevn then you'd still be able to approximate these mechanics rather well, all in a humanly interpretable fashion on convenient scales. It would be like a fast fourier transform for the universe.

If you doubt this is possible, give me an example or two of phenomenon you'd assume couldn't be predicted by this model and I'll show you how it could be done on these (at least I hope to be able to and believe it's possible). So find something(s) you believe would be impossible to describe like this and I'll get to work and see whether or not there truly are stumbling blocks (of course you might very well want to help demonstrate the possibility of this as well []).

To start off, take the idea of pushing gravitational particles - if reflections occured within this box, then these reflections would travel in an opposite direction and collide with a mass on the return trip. Or, if a particle had a charge, attempting to approach either side of the box would be repulsive, so charges would tend to accumulate in the center (as a proton). A pulsing charge could orbit in a period some odd multiple of the pulsing frequency and be attracted to its own reflection (why do mass quarks have odd spins and why are atomic structures so stable in fixed integral multiples of electrons? []) etc. There are a ton of phenomenon like these that seem very easy to explain with a small enclosed reflective system. I could keep going but I challenge you to find something you'd see as impossible under this model. (I'd enjoy trying to crunch some numbers anyway or maybe do some simulations ... actually I've already done some simulations of these and for example blackbody radiation seems very like to be defined by the size of this space)