The Fifth Heresy: Time for Gravity

Einstein was the first person the notice the equivalence of gravity and acceleration which he called his ‘happiest thought’. It is the central idea behind the set of equivalences we call ‘General Relativity’.

The Heretics want to go beyond Einstein’s view of acceleration and gravity. The equations Einstein put forward are mathematically correct[1] but we want to get an idea of what processes make them so? Like Einstein himself, the Heretics have a problem with conventional explanations that rely on the idea of ‘curved space-time’ because we do not understand what ‘space-time’ is in physics, apart from a line on a graph, and do not know what it might curve in (or what might curve in it). So, we are looking to find a different way to picture acceleration and gravity. We will start simple, by stripping away complexity. Our ideas start from thinking of just two spherical things, let’s say two things the size of planets. They are alone in space with nothing else affecting them. We are going to ask what happens to them but, before we do, we need to define our terms.

The way Einstein – and science today – uses the word ‘acceleration’ is slightly different to the commonplace use of the word ‘acceleration’. The everyday use of ‘acceleration’ is how fast your Ferrari increases in speed. It understandably ignores the (absurdly) small amount the Ferrari’s acceleration pushes the earth in the other direction. To avoid confusion, we will use the terms ‘acceltion’ and ‘deceltion’ for our technical explanations – otherwise statements like, ‘on Earth, you are accelerating when you are sitting down’, seem silly. You are not accelerating in the common use of the word, but hopefully you can accept that you may be ‘accelling’ while in your chair – as will be explained later. ‘Accelling’ and ‘acceltion’ are close relatives of the everyday terms ‘accelerating’ and ‘acceleration’ but not the same in all situations. It needs force (the application of energy in a direction) for two objects to accel away from each other, so when the force of gravity makes object A increase its speed relative to object B, it is not accelling, just increasing its speed. Objects that change in speed or direction are either accelling, having the force of energy applied to them, or they are being affected by the force of gravity – or, generally, both together, given that gravity is everywhere.

For the moment we will talk of ‘the force of gravity’ as though it is like (but opposed to) the forces that accel objects – it can certainly behave in very similar way. Newton described gravity this way, as a ‘force’ operating to move things at a distance, although he was never happy with this description. In the second part of this chapter, we will look at the Heretic view that the effect we call gravity is not a force (nor the ‘curvature of space-time’) but an effect produced by another attribute of mass.

Acceltion is things being separated by force, gravity pulls them together. That is all. To separate two objects requires the application of energy in the form of force. This energy is exactly returned when the force of gravity brings them together again.

In a closed system, one where there are no influences from outside, with just our two objects, there is never any overall acceltion. To accel something one way, we must accel something equally the other way: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The centre of mass (also known as the ‘centre of gravity’) of the two objects together never changes. The momentum of the two objects put together is zero because the combined acceltion and masses of the two things going in opposite directions cancel each other out. A rocket may increase its speed one way, but the increase in speed of all the ‘burned’ fuel it throws out the other way matches it, equal and opposite to the rocket.

Acceltion can only apply to ball-waves, not to F-waves, which move at the speed of the medium they are in, the vacuum fundamental Field. Acceltion shortens the ball-wave’ wavelength in the direction of acceltion, so that the combined speed of the ball-wave in the direction of motion (internal wave speed plus overall ball movement speed) remains at the speed of the field. This shortening of the wavelength inside the ball-wave requires the energy we call ‘inertia’. Together with the effective solidity of ball-waves, inertia is the signature of mass.

In the closed system of two objects, once the accelling force stops, the objects will slow down, their separation will then stop, and they will start to move back towards each other under the influence of gravity. Eventually they crash back together at their former location, the centre of mass never changed between their separation and reconnection. The energy originally used to separate them is emitted when they return, largely in the form of heat, but also in bits being accelled away from the crash (that will repeat the process, returning under gravity).

Relative to the centre-of-gravity of the system, the wavelengths of the ball-waves in the two separating objects remains constant viewed from the centre of mass of the two:  the lengthening Doppler effect of the ball-wave moving away from the centre of mass compensates for the shortening in the ball-wave created by the acceleration. This remains the case as the ball waves stop and reverse their speed to move back together and the Doppler effect and the internal ball-wave shortening also reverses. When they hit – and after some mess – the energy that originally accelled them will remain in the form of heat, but the momentum of the two oppositely accelling parts will be lost as the bits of the recombined object move equally in all directions.

So acceltion can be seen as taking the zero overall momentum of a single object or system and splitting in into two objects, each with opposite momentum, while gravity pulls them back and, when they crash together, the momentum becomes homogeneous again.

The effects of gravity and acceltion are equal and opposite.

Acceltion has only one direction: away. The two masses accelling are separating, moving away from each other. This makes acceltion absolute, not relative to an observer, as speed is. Everyone can see the two objects being accelled increasing their speed relative to each other by the same amount, regardless of their own speed relative to the two of them. Any other observation – whether they are going left, right, north or south, is relative to the observers and depends on their standpoints.

It is not only when two masses are being separated that they are accelling, it is also when they are not in ‘free-fall’ towards each other. So long as the two masses are not increasing speed towards each other at the rate set by the gravitational attraction of their two masses, some force is effectively accelling them ‘apart’. That is why the sensation of weight on earth feels like the sensation of ‘g-forces’ when a plane takes off or you corner fast in a car: you are accelling when you are simply sitting still because a force is making you resist gravity. This is obvious if you are, say, hovering in a helicopter: force is being used to keep you stationary against gravity, but we take for granted the force that stops us falling through our chair under the attraction of gravity.

Acceltion can come from two sources: being hit by an object or being hit by a powerful F-wave. (Also, from the excess energy when a ball-wave is being formed from a powerful F-wave, but we can treat this as the same as the second type of acceltion.)

If we take a bullet, for example, fired from a gun, the bullet is accelled by rapidly expanding gasses that also accel the gun the opposite way, providing the recoil. The gasses are brought to expand by chemical reactions and heat, both caused by the electrons in the explosive behind the bullet falling into lower orbits and emitting F-waves, mostly in the infra-red (heat) part of the spectrum. These excite other atoms, causing them heat up and turn into gasses of hugely larger volume that, held back elsewhere by the metal of the barrel, push the bullet out of the barrel of the gun.

If we trace the acceltion of this bullet back to its origin, it came originally from momentum transferred from F-waves. It appears to be always the case that two objects that are accelled by hitting each other must each have been subject to acceltion earlier by F-wave, either directly or indirectly. Even if the collision in question is caused by gravitational attraction, the original separation between the balls was, we think, the result of F-wave-caused acceltion. All acceltion comes back to objects being hit by F-waves and the energy of the F-wave being shared with the object’s ball-waves by the F-wave getting longer and the ball-wave getting shorter in the direction of acceltion..

F-waves can transfer momentum to an object if the equal and opposite momentum is transferred to an object at the opposite side of the wavefront at the same time[2]. Alternatively, it could be that the object that emitted the F-wave recoils in the opposite direction to the momentum that is being transferred. We do not know which of these happens or whether they both happen at different times. This simultaneous transfer of momentum is non-local. That is, the two transfers take place at points separated further than light could travel in the time (faster than the speed of the Field). It has only been possible to see this as an allowed process since non-locality was convincingly shown to be possible around 2015. The ideas presented here could not have been considered very seriously before then and the processes we are discussing were more mysterious then.

It is generally thought that the universe started from a single ‘point’ at the time of the ‘big bang’. While the origin and very first moments of this are not fully agreed, the evidence is strong that, a little time after the start, the universe was ‘hot’ – full of energy. This was in the form of powerful, short F-waves, moving away from their point of origin at the speed of the Field. As the F-wave wavefronts moved outwards in a growing sphere, their wavelength got longer until they hit the point where the wavelength was right for the F-waves to ‘burst’ into tiny ball-waves. The first ball-waves formed were, we believe, dark matter, which took most of the energy of the F-waves, followed by the precursors of electrons and protons, the tau and anti-tau. All these ball-waves were given momentum away from the point of origin of the F-waves by the excess from energy they were formed by. This is the reason why the material universe is expanding.

After the formation of the ball-waves and after giving them the momentum to make the material universe expand, the remaining fraction of the original energy has lengthened and cooled, becoming the cosmic background radiation today. This picture makes it seem reasonable to expect gravity to bring everything back together again – eventually. Gravity, the equal and opposite force, will gradually slow down the expansive momentum until its stops and reverses. However, there is a crucial, well-established, and long-standing observation that the universe, having behaved this way for several billions of years, then started to expand faster – for no reason we yet know[3]. In the meantime, the interaction between all the gravitational pulls of stars and galaxies with this expansive momentum provides a very complex pattern: still expanding overall but with sub-regions of all kinds where gravity is ‘locally’ strong enough to pull together against this.

The equal and opposite nature of acceltion and the force of gravity makes it essential that ‘inertial mass’, that is, how difficult it is to accel things apart, and ‘gravitational mass’, the force that brings things together, have the same value. If they were not the same, there would be a system whereby you could use whichever force was weaker in one way and the stronger force in the other way to generate energy from nothing.

The force of gravity pulls objects together at a rate that increases as the objects get closer and at a rate that depends on their combined masses. People think that all objects, however heavy, will fall towards earth at the same rate (1g) but this is simply because the objects we have in mind are so tiny by comparison with the earth: a cannon ball and a ping-pong ball fall to the earth in a vacuum at the same speed to a very high degree of accuracy because the gravity-caused speed of the earth towards either of them is utterly negligible. If the object were very heavy, say another planet, the earth and the other planet would increase speed towards each other faster than could be explained by Earth’s gravity alone – the gravity of the other planet would have to be included. This is obvious in astronomy but irrelevant on earth.

But what about two things, A and B, that are increasing speed towards each other faster than the increase that would happen by the force of gravity alone? Here, surely, the forces of acceltion and gravity are added together? No: acceltion is only the process of separation. In this picture you have a coincidence; two objects, B and C are accelling away from each other but B’s increase in speed happens to be in the direction of A which has gravity attracting in the same direction.

Both gravity and acceltion, unlike speed or direction, are absolute. You don’t have to say what they are relative to. They are the pushing apart or pulling together of two centres of mass along a straight line between them. In the actual universe, the existence of many other objects and centres of mass/gravity, each pulling in their own way, complicates this simple picture. Wherever you are standing and however fast you think an object is travelling, its gravitational attraction at a fixed distance will be measured to be the same. The more the combined mass of two objects, the less they will separate for any given input of force (energy) and the faster they will come back together again under the force of gravity.

The distance two objects separate depends on the amount of force applied and the combined mass of the two objects: more force results in more separation, more mass in less separation. If the separating force is applied more quickly, the two objects will separate faster, but they will still separate to the same maximum distance apart and will stop and return, joining them back together at the same time as that would have if the same force had been applied more slowly. Unlike the separating force, the force of gravity per unit mass of both objects that pulls them back together is always at the same. So, while we can reduce or increase the rate at which energy is applied to separating two objects, the rate at which the energy is ‘returned’ by gravity is fixed.

This explains why objects continue to move apart after the accelling force has stopped. It is simply that the accelling force separating things has been applied faster than the force of gravity that pulls them back. Separation continuing after the accelling force has stopped is simply a consequence of the fact that the rate at which accelling power is applied can be varied while the opposing force of gravity is fixed.

Gravity also causes F-waves like light to lose energy (increase wavelength/redshift) when they move away from a source of gravity and to gain it (blueshift) when they move towards the source.

Newton was reluctantly forced to accept that gravity acts like a force at a distance, accepting that the connection between object affected by gravity was, in effect, magical or certainly without explanation. We now know that it looks like a force because ball-waves – mass – reduce the speed of the Field. When viewed away from any large object, mass, can be seen to make F-waves go slower and it does so not only in the immediate area of the mass, but extending out from it. We can see this clearly from earth. It is gravity slowing of the speed of the field that produces the appearance of an attractive force but, because the slower speed of the field equally slows the measurement of time in a gravity pool, it is not observable locally, only when we look into or out of a gravity pool.

Looked at from outside a gravitational field, events inside the gravitational field happen more slowly because F-waves move more slowly there. Inside the gravity pool, though, the things we count to measure time – remember that time can only be measured by counting events – are slowed by the slower speed of the Field, so ‘time goes slower’ as well. Looked at from an area of less gravity, our quartz crystal vibrations and caesium isotope levels change more slowly than they do in the lower gravity area, so the clocks in the gravitational pool are seen (from outside) to go slower. Inside the area of higher gravity, everything proceeds as normal, light is measured to go at its expected speed, despite the slower speed of the Field when seen from outside. The opposite happens if you are in the gravity pool looking out: things in areas with less gravity seem to have their time speeded up.

This is not just theory; we see this with communication and GPS satellites. They have a slightly faster time than we have because they are further out in the earth’s gravitational pool. We need to adjust for this difference or problems arise[4]. ‘Slowing time’ in a gravity pool is not a zany theory but a calculation we need to include in practical engineering where gravity levels differ significantly.

The gravitational effect of the slowing speed of the Field goes beyond the immediate presence of matter. The speed of the Field does not suddenly change in the presence of mass from vacuum speed to ‘mass speed’ but in a smooth extended transition. A unit of the Field, A, closer to the mass, decreases the Field speed in the area of the neighbouring unit B that is further from the mass but, because B is also next to C, further from the mass, the speed in the area of B lies between the speeds at A and C. This has been described as like a rubber sheet because the presence of matter sits like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet, pulling the sheet down smoothly over a very long distance.

The consequence of slower F-waves, and hence ‘slower time’ near mass (seen from a lower gravity area) is the appearance of a ‘force of gravity’. It results in the gravitational effects we observe.

For a rocket going straight past a planet, the side closer to the planet will be in very slightly higher gravity than the far side. So, that side will move very slightly slower than the side away from the planet, causing the rocket’s path to turn towards the planet. We, in the rocket, will see this as an attractive force pulling us down towards the planet. The same, one-sided slowing effect bends waves, allowing large masses to act as ‘gravitational lenses’ for F-waves. A rocket moving directly away from a planet will be stretched, as its top end moves faster than its lower end. Like a spring being pulled longer and longer, energy is required and, when the energy runs out, the need to relax the tension will pull the rocket back down.

If we look at individual ball-waves that have been accelled against a gravitational attraction, you will recall that the acceltion came from the ball-wave being hit (by another ball-wave or a powerful F-wave). This caused the ball-wave to move away from the direction it was hit and to shorten its wavelength (add energy) inside the ball-wave in the same direction, hence inertia. As it moves away from the source of gravity, like the rocket, its ‘lower’ end will be moving slower than its ‘upper’ end, stretching its internal wave, gradually slowing it until it is once again spherical, the wave returning to its original energy state. Externally it is stationary (relative to its original state before being hit). The effect of gravity, the differential time experienced by front-and-back will not stop though and so it will be pulled backwards – with the part furthest from the gravity source moving faster and so compressing – blue-shifting – the wave in its direction of motion.

The same effect applies to waves as they emerge from the gravitational pool. The end of the wave closer to the source of gravity goes very slightly slower that the end further away, so their wavelength gets longer. We call this ‘gravitational redshift’. At the extreme of mass density, looked at from the outside, the waves are rendered so long that they vanish altogether. This is a ‘black hole’. Everything we see as a result of the ‘gravitational force’ comes about because mass slows the speed of F-waves.

We do not know how mass slows the speed of the Field but it is not at all surprising. We know that the speed of longitudinal waves depends only on the medium they are going through and the medium of mass is certainly different to the medium of matter – it would be astonishing if they had the same wave-speed. Sound goes at different speeds in different mediums where there is more or where there is less matter. But we don’t know why that speed is slower not faster than the vacuum speed, although some ideas have been put forward.

The simplest idea why the speed of waves through matter is slower than the speed of waves through the vacuum is very simple indeed. Indeed, the varying speed of light can be seen as refraction in the most everyday objects, the bending of light as it moves from a thinner to a denser medium. That is how a magnifying glass works, for example, or why a stick, held at an angle in water, looks as though it is bent at the water surface. But this is a different effect, since this slowing effect varies by wavelength – hence the rainbow fringing around objects through a cheap lens, for example, – and is limited to the area with the presence of mass, rather than extending outwards. This seems to rule out the idea that the matter slowing of the Field is caused by simple obstruction.

Another idea is that mass slows the speed of the Field because of the different sizes of electrons and protons. You will recall that each is surrounded by bubblets of the opposite values. So high Field value electrons are surrounded by low Field value (lFv) bubblets and protons by high Field value (hFv) bubblets (a.k.a. virtual particles in Feynman diagrams). But protons are much smaller, and it seems likely that this reduces the number of hFv bubblets that surround them, compared to the number of lFv bubblets surrounding the much larger electron. If this were so, then, in the presence of mass, there would be a slight preponderance of lFv bubblets over hFv bubblets and the overall value of the Field would be lower in an area with mass. This would slightly raise the average value of bubblets in the vacuum as well. A slightly different medium like this would have a slightly different wave speed. This idea also implies that dark matter, to have the gravitational effect we observe, has the same lFv/positive and hFv/negative size asymmetry as ordinary matter, something we speculated might be the case elsewhere.

It has also been suggested that the slower speed of the Field comes from another way to get a ‘thinner medium’: atoms being larger than their ‘ingredients’. The presence of a positive nucleus in atoms means that the electron ball-waves surrounding it occupy a larger space than they would without the positive charge of the nucleus. This idea means that non-atomic matter – separate protons, neutrons and electrons – would have no gravity, which is not impossible (the difference is very, very small and finding it would provide a good challenge for experimental physicists). But it would be surprising for non-atomic matter to lack gravity.

Whatever the cause, the observation seems clear: matter slows the speed of the Field, resulting in the effect we call gravity.

The picture we have here, that the presence of matter lowers the speed of the Field, can be mapped without change onto the older ‘curved space-time’ model, sometimes explained as ‘the rubber sheet universe’. But it is simpler and avoids the difficult issues in the ‘curved space’ picture that Einstein did not like and the Heretics do not understand.

A simple pattern to the universe on the largest scale appears to follow from this. The universe begins with a hyper-intensive burst of F-wave radiation, emerging from minute point as a sphere. This expands out at the speed of the Field, lengthening as it moves out, until the dark matter 6-D and 5-D ball waves condense out (see Heresy 3). The dark matter particles move at high speed away from the point of origin, propelled by extra F-wave-energy turning into ball-wave momentum (we know this happens from the Compton effect). The remainder of the F-waves continue to lengthen until they turn into electrons and protons. These link to form atoms and condense into stars, still moving apart but ever slowing. The remnants of the energy of the big bang forms the cosmic background radiation we see today

Both the dark matter and ordinary matter will eventually stop moving apart, as gravity wins over the momentum they were given by the initial F-waves. Then the direction of movement of matter will reverse and start to collapse back in at ever increasing speed.  The ball-waves (matter) will, eventually, turn back to F-waves that will return to the point it all began at the speed of the Field, until it becomes again a point where the field values are so intense that the collapse is reversed and the process begins again.

This was more-or-less what most people thought until 1998. Then it was established that the universe had been slowing its rate of expansion, as expected, for around 5.5 billion years, but then had started to expand faster. It is fair to say that, apart from naming whatever causes this ‘dark energy’, this observation has just sat there and there it sits today. A beautiful theory upset by an ugly fact.

There is a missing centrepiece to the Heretics picture of acceltion and gravity, a conspicuous central gap. It is difficult to express it exactly but, why does mass slow the speed of the Field? What does it mean that its opposite, acceltion, separates things in space, moving them to areas where mass is less and the speed of the Field is faster. All this requires a better concept of space and time than we have now. The Heretics have been thinking about this gap for years. Maybe, when we learn how to express the question, the answer will be simple but, for the moment, it is a deep and central void in the picture which we detail and ask for help in the Confession below.

We now leave the simple (!) world of fundamental object and laws and look at how all this became us. This is a history that involves many contingent facts, ratios, etc. in contrast to the attempts to start from first principles we have used so far.

[1] Einstein wrote several papers closing in on General Relativity between 1905 and 1915 when the final paper was presented, some with mathematical errors. It was not until he was helped by Marcel Grossman that he was able to complete the theory. Grossman died shortly after, so he was little celebrated.

[2] F-waves can transfer kinetic energy without an equal and opposite transfer, as when they excite an electron, but not momentum, which has a direction and must be matched by something going equally in the other direction.

[3] Although the reason has been called ‘Dark energy’ and great deal of speculation about it has been published. The reality is that we simply have no good idea yet why the expansion of the universe speeded up.

[4] The clocks on GPS satellites run 45.9 microseconds a day faster, due to Earth’s gravity being weaker nearly 18,000 km above the Earth’s surface. But because of their speed relative to us, they run 7.2 microseconds a day slower. So the overall correction is 38.7 microseconds a day faster.