Exchange Force Gimmick in Standard Physics
The highly acclaimed TV special based on Brian Greene's, The Elegant Universe, included a dramatic presentation of the standard "explanation" for attractive forces. Brian is shown with a clone of himself separated by 10 meters or so. The two Brians represent oppositely charged particles. They are playing "catch" with a glowing (virtual) photon. The result of this game is that, with each throw and catch the Brians move closer and closer to each other.
Photons, of course, possess energy and momentum. I've often wondered how many 12-year old viewers of this act have stopped to ask themselves how playing catch with a heavy object could possibly cause the players to move toward each other? And then I've lamented that the weight of Hollywood-like authority has probably squelched most such subversive budding objections. (The man on TV said...)
(Adapted from A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking, Figure 10.5 & 10.6)
Gravity is supposed to work the same way, except that the charged particles are replaced by any massive bodies and the "force carrying particle" is not a photon, but a graviton. Stephen Hawking's picture (above) shows the idea.
This wouldn't be so objectionable if the advocates of such projectile-induced attraction stories would only admit:
"Of course this makes no sense, but for various reasons we have agreed to pretend that it does make sense. Truth is, we don't have an explanation that really makes sense."
But I've never seen any such qualifications or reservations regarding these exchange force discussions. Therefore, I have the impression that they are not pretending; physicists really think a game of catch ("exchange") with gravitons explains gravitational attraction. Imagine being an adolescent who has not yet been corrupted by authority. How then might we convince ourselves that this is not evidence of a multitude of naked emperors all enabling their collective fantasy? Now that's a tough one.
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MORE PROJECTILE-INDUCED ATTRACTIONS, A POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE AND VARIOUS CONSEQUENCES
Another enlightening example of standard "exchange force" thinking has recently come to my attention. In her book, Warped Passages, Lisa Randall uses imagery similar to that presented above, at least for repulsive forces:
"You might think of the repulsive force communicated by the photon as an interaction between two ice skaters throwing a bowling ball back and forth; each time one of them catches the ball, he slides away from the other across the ice. Attractive forces, on the other hand, are more like two novices tossing a frisbee to each other; unlike the ice skaters, who slide further apart, these beginning frisbee players would approach each other with each successive throw."
The force "communicator" in the case of like charges, e.g., two electrons or two positrons, is represented by bowling balls. If one of the particles is replaced by its anti-particle, the bowling balls are replaced by frisbees. But in this example the frisbees don't really "communicate" the force (as these still have momentum and would still cause a repulsive effect if caught or thrown). Rather, it's the incompetence (novice status) of the players that results in their "feeling the need" to move closer together, and so they do. The cause of the "attraction" is evidently totally arbitrary; it might as well be a siren's song or the offer of money or chocolate, and then muscles do the rest.
It has sometimes (long ago) been suggested that attractions are caused by flocks of angels whose flapping wings push attracting bodies toward one another. Human beings are the best storytellers. Of course "graviton" sounds more scientific than "angelon" or "frisbeeon." But we are still in the genre of fiction. The story becomes non-fiction (scientific) only when it is admitted that what really happens is unknown. Nobody has ever successfully explained the underlying mechanism of attractive forces.
My guess is that, if an explanation is ever found, "exchanged" particles (bowling balls, frisbees, bosons, or "thingons" of any kind) will not be key agents. In the standard conception various synonymous verbs are used to describe the purpose of these projectiles; they are said to transmit, convey, carry, communicate or mediate their particular forces. As the above typical examples suggest, exactly how the transmission, conveyance...etc. takes place, is left quite vague, at best.
In the case of repulsive forces the projectile analogy does appear to make some sense. But in the case of attractive forces the analogy appears to make no sense at all; it is a self-deception. Seeing this, one can hardly escape the impression that something big and important is missing.
I suspect that an underlying pattern of movement is being overlooked. Perhaps there is some kind of non-particulate "substratum" whose ultimately continuous movement is observable only as quantized changes (which may therefore sometimes give the impression that "particles" are responsible). In the case of electromagnetism the envisaged motion is dipolar (+/-, N/S). Whereas in the case of nuclear forces and gravity the motion is monopolar. I suspect that the standard assumption of time reversal invariance is also a key mistake. For the pattern of motion suggested above would need to be perpetually outward. The scale of the substratum would need to be always increasing; as time increases so do both space and mass.
Gravity might then be seen as a kind of "residual" effect of the strong outward nuclear motion. Alternatively, we might conceive of a mechanical analogy in which the "weakness" of gravity is represented by a very slowly moving, yet cosmically huge "gear." A very small turn of this gear corresponds to a huge number of nuclear or electromagnetic oscillations or pulsations. In this crude and perhaps naive picture, the various forces are ultimately inseparable. Turning off or excluding one necessarily turns off the others.
Fortunately, these ideas are testable. If the interior solution experiment described on the home page (and Paper 1) proves that the test object does not oscillate, the "substratum's" underlying outward movement would be revealed; so too would the asymmetry of time and the 4th dimension of space. If, on the other hand, the test object oscillates as per Newton, then the above ideas are wrong.
If the above ideas are essentially correct, then we should expect to find connections between the parameters of cosmology and the parameters of nuclear and electromagnetic physics. In other words, we would expect to begin to explain the well known "Large Numbers Coincidences" occurring between these seemingly disparate regimes. A key result that we might expect from exploring these numerical relationships is a definition of Newton's constant, G, in terms of the other constants.
After showing how this scheme predicts values of the density parameter Ω_m, and the Hubble constant, H_0, in excellent agreement with observations, Paper 2 culminates in a definition of G in terms of the nuclear density ρ_N, the energy density of the cosmic background radiation μ_CBR, the speed of light c, the Bohr radius a_0, the cosmic radius R_SGM, the mass of an electron m_e, the mass of a proton m_p, and the fine structure constant, alpha:
Wheras in the standard model Newton's constant remains curiously and conspicuously disconnected from the rest of physics.
The ideas leading us to expect relationships like those in the above equations are admittedly still embryonic; a fully developed mathematical theory in which they rigorously emerge would surely be preferable. It is nevertheless worthwhile to present the relationships even at this stage because they may be important clues as to how to build the mathematical theory.
To show the connection between gravity, Newton's constant and the rest of physics, I suspect that we need to replace the idea that gravity is a force of attraction with the idea that gravity is a process of outward movement. Due to what we may call "metaphysical inertia," this replacement is very unlikely to be considered by the likes of Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking and Lisa Randall before empirical evidence requires it. The interior solution experiment is way overdue: to oscillate or not to oscillate?
