April 9, 2013

• What if gravity is like centrifugal force?

  JDN 2456392 EDT 11:55.

   

  I was thinking today about centrifugal force, and how to decide whether it really qualifies as a real force, rather than an artifact of a bad reference frame. What does it mean to say that a force “really exists”, and how could we tell?

  Well, I came to the conclusion that it really isn’t a real force, because there’s no mechanism for it to happen, no virtual particles exchanged. Also, it’s always directly proportional to your inertial mass, which is pretty darn fishy. What kind of weird force is directly proportional to your mass?

  But then it occurred to me: Actually there is another such force, we call it gravity. But what if gravity is like centrifugal force, actually an artifact of a bad reference frame?

  General Relativity already sort of implies this, actually; it explains gravitation as a curvature of spacetime itself, such that a particle traveling along a gravitational geodesic does not feel any acceleration. You only feel a force if you try to resist the curvature of space.

  There is of course one problem with such a view: What curves the space? Why is space consistently curved a certain amount around every set of a certain number of protons? And what does this have to do with the Higgs mechanism, which we now pretty much need to factor in, seeing as we found the Higgs?
  So here’s a theory, or rather a sketch of a theory without any of the mathematics: The Higgs is not a particle, but a packet of curved space. Such packets have a charge that attracts them to particles like the proton (in much the same way as in the Higgs mechanism in the Standard Model). But then, this is why they create inertia: Curved space resists movement. Inertia is the resistance space has to being curved out of shape.

  This would explain, at last, why inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same thing; inertia and gravitation are the same thing!

  This can even point to a solution to the divergent integrals in quantum gravity: The Higgs is quantized, therefore the curvature of space is quantized. Maybe space itself is quantized… or maybe not, maybe just its curvature is.

  On the other hand, what to do about quantum nonlocality versus Lorentz invariance… yeah, that one has me stumped. Copenhagen is a non-starter; it just hand-waves the problem by saying “you can’t predict it exactly!” True, there is Bell’s Theorem, so… what’s going on then? It really seems like we have to deal with nonlocal realism, rather than this silly local nonrealism.

  I don’t have quite the math skills necessary to work this out formally. I’m sure I could learn, but it would probably take awhile…

  • 12:32 pm
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