Gravity

[Bengt E Nyman]

Introduction

The complexity of the universe is possibly beyond the grasp of the human brain, as for your dog, your cellphone is just another thing to play with.

A sign of this is when physics resorts to complex mathematical models which do not tie into a human way to visualize or understand. These mathematical models may not picture or explain how things work, but they do serve as important tools for performing certain calculations and predictions. They can also be important as names and placeholders for phenomena not yet fully understood and explained, temporarily allowing science to get around them and continue.

A couple of examples are Relativity and SpaceTime, concepts devised in the early 1900. Both are complex mathematical tools without the features or the pretense to offer a human, common sense explanation for how the phenomenon in question really works. Other examples are the encapsulation of certain subatomic phenomena into fictional names and particles such as gravitons and gluons, serving as placeholders for causes to gravity and strong force. This is not a criticism of these fictional models. They serve as useful models and placeholders for less than fully understood phenomena. However, they also deserve a more complete understanding and disclosure at a later date.

One such phenomenon is gravity.

In 1964 physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig proposed the quark model, detailing the content inside protons and neutrons. One important aspect of this is that even neutral particles like the neutron contains electrically charged sub particles called up- and down-quarks. At a microscopic level protons and neutrons can consequently be regarded as triangles with electrically charged corners, even if in case of the neutron the sum of the -1/3, -1/3 and +2/3e corner charges equals zero.

These electrically charged corners are key to a new and more detailed model of gravity and strong force. This new insight has been made possible by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig's discovery in 1964 and can therefore not be expected from older models such as relativity and spacetime devised in the early 1900.

Imagine two neutrons floating in empty space. Since they are both neutral, do they care about each other ? What if they drift a little closer ? What if the positively charged corner of one is pointing toward a negatively charged corner of the other ? Could they attract each other ?

According to Coulombs Law the attraction between two dissimilar electrical charges is the product of the sizes of the two charges divided by the square of the distance between them.

F=Ke(q1 x q2)/r^2

As we go on, this description will become more and more detailed and more and more mathematical. If you want to skip that, the bottom line is this: Gravity, which keeps us on the ground, and strong force which holds the atom nuclei together are the results of electrostatic forces between electrically charged particles like protons and electrons in atoms and between electrically charged sub-particles like up- and down-quarks in neutrons and protons.

To be continued ?

 

[swansont]

To be continued ?

 

!

Moderator Note

Nope. You were told not to re-introduce the topic.