phil_newby

Thanks, very interesting!

I wonder about Gravity; why is it apparently so weak and yet we hope there is loads of dark matter to explain how strong it is overall - and is it really so different from the other forces? if it is a force mediated by a particle like a graviton - similar to the photon mediating the EM force, can a graviton escape the gravity of a black hole in a way that photos can't - or do they only go inwards? i've heard speculation that gravity's apparent weakness might be that it seeps away into/through other hidden dimensions. As time is also a dimension - could gravity seep through time in a way that other forces don't seem to? Could the gravitational effects we describe as dark matter actually be the accumulated effect of the gravity of past and future masses seeping through time? Is gravity's bending effect on space-time another way of describing this seepage?

Hi All I've been wondering about dark matter... I understand that most of the mass of a proton or neutron is not the 3 quarks that make each one up but the plethora of virtual quarks that seem to hang about inside them. So couldn't the seething mass of virtual particles that fill the vacuum of space make up a significant proportion of the so called dark matter that appears to be missing from our universal accounting of matter? I assume someone has already thought of this and knows why it can not be the case I'd love to know phil