TreborS

DH Quark: Got to look that one up.

Please refer to Fun With Science #2 for further info on mathematics.

My views of the universe and all of it’s quirks (and quarks) are the result of at least 70 of my 76 years of inputs into this little brain of mine. My bread-and-butter field was electronic engineering. When I wasn’t doing that, I was ingesting everything in the sciences, religion & even pseudo-sciences. For any calculations you need all the inputs you can get a hold of. I have no conscious control of the outputs of these calculations. Not everything that was input was accepted. Too many humans are apt to swallow anything. For example, there are almost as many religions today as there are people. When you accept all, you end up by building the rest of your outputs on quicksand. My mind has a tendency to simplify instead of complicate things. It tends to generalize instead of specialize. There has been a lot of indigestible matter that has been left by the wayside. I’m not saying that I’m correct in all the results that I have been writing about. But, honestly, they are the best I can do after all the filtering and reorganization that this little mind did. One cannot ask for much more. It’s true what I stated at the beginning. Too many people have digested too much and will not be too pleased with having fun poked at their specialty. I’m also too old to keep up with all the responses. I print everything out and read at my leisure. The Texas desert air is good for old codgers and for their cogitations. No bugs like in Maine where I grew up. I do not get riled at the negative or sometimes even insulting responses. I expected that when I started. In one of the forums, I was kept too busy trying to respond to all so that I never even got to finish my input thread. I suggest that you sit back and think, think, think. Much of the information out there is set in shaky ground. Swallow some mental “Tums”. After you settle down, smile and smell the roses. As for myself, I have many more threads to inflict on y’all.

Been there, done that & bought the T-shirt.....TreborS

Like I mentioned in the 1st FUN WITH SCIENCE, we can have a lot of fun with most of the fields of science as long as we don’t get carried away and take it too seriously. Most people do take it too seriously. When I start one of these, I don’t know if the fun we will have is funny HaHa or funny peculiar. Does it really matter? In many of the sciences, most of the advances are theoretical. Of course, if it’s your theory that gets made fun of, you could get a little bent out of shape. This time, let’s have a little fun with mathematics. It’s about time I get back at math because, it had it’s fun with me in my younger days. I was pretty good at it then but now, anything beyond my ten fingers and a calculator is beyond me. Scientists and not only mathematicians have been having fun with math. They have all attempted to define all the results of their thinking and their work into representative formulae. That is fine and is as it should be. But, sometimes things get out of hand. Most of us regard certain people almost like Gods. We believe almost everything they say and do. I was the same. One day, I realized that mathematicians like Einstein are not Gods and that some of the things they say are colored by the type of people they are. Scientists and mathematicians think in formulae and numbers. They look at the universe and develop formulas that define certain aspects of it like gravity. Formulas are nice things but, they are only tools. You can take certain particulars at a certain time and crank them in a formula and voila––an answer. Formulas such as ‘‘field formulas’’ take all possibilities in consideration. That’s why you can crank any set of factors in them for a particular time and place and get a comprehensive answer for that set of factors . Some mathematicians have gone a little further. They have inverted the formulas that they developed and have turned them around and used them to re-engineer the universe. A mathematical construct like a gravitational field formula suddenly became a space-time gravitational warp. We can’t take a mathematical construct that contains all possible states of time and space and apply it to a universe where only the present is happening. The past is gone and the future is not here yet and so, the gravitational field cannot define the present. The universe and it’s components do their own things. They react and interact to the natural formulae that were composed by the original engineer and Creator before time & space began. Man’s formulae are only tools that try to approximate the original ones. When they are used as the tools that they are, there are no problems, real or imaginary. Did we end up with a funny Haha or a funny peculiar this time?..........TreborS

Dear Uncool, I could be utterly and entirely wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time in my 76 years. If I am wrong, it won’t be for a long period of time. Then, I will know and, if your were correct, I will bow to your excellent reasoning. I may even come back and pull your toes. Until then, I’ll keep smiling and smelling the roses along the way.............TreborS

Quote:How is the earth held at a central point? And how does this provide earth with an intertia? Tycho, imagine a tug-ofwar between two absolutely equal team with each rope tied to a ring that we will use to represent our earth. We are simplifying the problem by using only two team instead of an n-number of teams. Since each team uses identical pulling forces, the ring cannot move. It can be said to have inertia. It is held stationary at one point with a total force that is could be interpreted as a mass. Quote: Mass does not have an apostraphe in it. How is the magnitude of the force the matter/energy relationship of the earth to the rest of the universe? What does matter/energy relationship mean? How does this mean mass? We know that mass does not have an apostrophe in it–I was using the apostrophe as a comical point. Returning to our tug-of-war. If we increase the amount of matter in the earth object, the tug-of-war has an increased amount of pulling teams. This increased n+ number of teams, which is solely due to the increased amount of matter in the earth object, now feels a much greater force. This increase in force represents increased mass which in turn is of a magnitude relationship to the amount of matter in the rest of the universe. What we know as matter is really the sum of the matter in an object plus all it’s internal/external forces which is energy. This, the use of the term matter/enery. Quote: Gravitational force has a fixed limit? What does this mean, what sort of limit? This phrase is part of the statement (If the universe is infinite, then the fixed mass of the earth also tell us that the gravitational force has a fixed limit). This statement is a bit strong. It was meant to imply that the combination an infinite universe and a gravitational that was also unlimited would sort of provide us with an inertia value for the earth that would also be infinite. How many levels of infinities can exist? TreborS

In the real world, there is no such thing as a 3-body problem. Since there is no gravitational umbrella, there is only a 2-body problem: the subject body and the rest of the universe. Any subject body cannot react gravitationally with just another or two other bodies. It is constantly solving the 2-body problem between it’s own center-of-mass and the apparent center-of-mass of everything else. Nature just does it. Man tries to reduce it to a mathematical problem by isolating a few bodies from the n-bodies of the universe. ......TreborS

I’m not sure that I can explain that last paragraph to your satisfaction, but I’ll try. Here goes... A gravitational force exists between every body in the universe. I just happened to select the earth as the body of interest. Any other body anyplace in universe would have suited just as well. All of these forces are omni-directional and they all pull at the earth. This omni-directional pulling attraction has the effect of holding the earth at a universal central point which provided the earth with an inertia. The magnitude of this force is in effect the matter/energy relationship of the earth to the rest of the universe and we call it m’ass. If this is true, this mass we call the earth has a fixed value which tells us a few things about our universe. Since the earth’s mass is finite, so is the universe’s mass. Since the earth’s mass is fixed, the mass of the universe is also fixed and is not expanding or contracting (remember F= G M1 M2). If the universe is infinite, then the fixed mass of the earth also tell us that the gravitational force has a fixed limit. I had not mentioned these inferences before because I though that they were implied and need not be expanded upon. Seems that this explanatory paragraph is shorter than the original one. I might not have done a good enough job....................TraborS

We can have a lot of fun with most of the fields of science as long as we don’t get carried away and take it too seriously. Most people do take it too seriously. In many of the sciences, most of the advances are theoretical. Of course, if it’s your theory that gets made fun of, you could get a little bent out of shape. We could start with something in physics. Even that name can start me chuckling. Let’s pick on gravity. It’s responsible for things like weight and m’ass. You’ve gotta laugh at something that is pronounced m’cu in French. Now that we’ve selected a part of science, we should get to know what we’re talking about. To be absolutely frank, gravity sucks. It sucks because it is a natural force that attracts objects towards each other. The name was first applied to the force that attracts a body at the surface of the earth towards the center of the earth. For that name, we have to thank the French word which means heaviness. We should be glad that it is not pronounced m’gravity. This force results in something we call weight. This name is not to be confuse with m’ass which is the same thing at the surface to the earth except that weight is expressed in pounds while m’ass is express in kilograms. At the surface to the earth, an object that has 2.2 lb of weight has 1 kilogram of mass. Yep, same thing. Away from the surface to the earth, things change. Weight varies and mass does not. Scientists do not consider this funny. I do. It’s funny because they are caused by the same thing. Gravity. To repeat the schoolbook definition, mass is the quantity of matter in an object. It is the measurement of the inertia or sluggishness that object exhibits in response to any effort made to start it in motion, stop its motion, or change in any way its state of motion. Weight is the force on an object due to gravity. To me, I visualize weight as being represent by a rubber band connection the object to the center of the earth with a tension equal to the weight of the object. This is the simplistic explanation. In reality, every atom of the object is gravitationally attracted by every atom of the earth and visa versa. Nature senses all of these attractions at once. The resultant is an apparent force that is centered at the exact center-of-mass of each of the objects. Instead of zillion upon zillions of rubber bands only one is effectively connected between the center of mass of both objects. This makes computations by men using the gravitational formula F= G M1 M2/D^2 simple indeed.. Nature does it constantly between all the associated atoms. Your right, there is nothing here that we can consider funny HaHa or even funny peculiar. If we move out and consider the solar system, we find that nature again has the upper hand. Nature computes F= G M1 M2/D^2 considering all the components at once. Man runs into a buzz saw here. In astronomy, the problem of determining the motion of three or more celestial bodies moving under no influence other than that of their mutual gravitation. No general solution of this problem (or the more general problem involving more than three bodies) is possible. This statement comes right out of Encyclopedia Britanica. The funny thing is that there really is no such thing as three, four or more body problem in nature. Nature deals with all multiple body situations as if there is only two bodies. In our solar system, the sun solves this problem by always sensing all the planets as if they were a single body centered at the center-of-mass of all these planets. The same is true for the earth. It is gravitationally aware only of the center-of-mass of the sun and all the other planets. In fact, the solar system planets center-of-mass and the sun balance each other’s mass by revolving around a common point which is the center of mass of the solar system. The resultant solar system center-of-mass is not at the center of the sun but, rotates around the center of the sun in an eccentric orbit which follows the odd variations in the center-of -mass of the planets as they travel through their orbits. Large massive bodies like the sun do not like sudden changes. It cannot actually follow the eccentric rotational motions of the combined center of mass. It cheats and follows a much less eccentric rotation. This cheating does not go undetected by the planets. Their orbital distances and velocities are modified in such a way that the erratic motion of their center of gravity are lessened. Planetary orbits thus evolve over time to reduce this eccentricity. That is one reason why most planets revolve in the same direction. Think of the increased erratic behavior a counter-revolving planet would cause. The counter-revolving planet would eventually be made to behave. Another thing is that planetary orbital changes would make planetary conjunctions as infrequent as possible. Funny peculiar isn’t it? Now, back to m’ass. All objects resist changes in their state of motion. All objects have this tendency - they have inertia. But do some objects have more of a tendency to resist changes than others? Absolutely yes! The tendency of an object to resist changes in its state of motion is dependent upon mass. Inertia is that quantity which is solely dependent upon mass. The more mass which an object has, the more inertia it has - the more tendency it has to resist changes in its state of motion. Now, why is that? As we have previously mentioned, there seems to be a complementary gravitational attraction between all bodies in the universe. Of course, there is a greater force of attraction between close bodies as specified per F= G M1 M2/D^2. But, that does not mean that far away bodies are excluded. Again, there is no gravitational umbrella.. If we do our rubber band trick with all the universal objects, a body like the earth would be tied to every other body with all the rubber bands exerting a force on the earth from all directions. This omni-directional force would tend to hold the earth in a fixed position. It would resist any force tending to force it out of this location. It would seem to have an inertia. The value of this inertia would be dependent on the mass of the earth which in turn would be dependent on the value of mass of the rest of the universe. Another funny peculiar because, any change in the mass of the universe such as would be caused by an expanding universe (remember F= G M1 M2) would be reflected as a change in the mass of the earth. That is enough hilarity for today.