Physics, Rogue Science?

The Nature of Gravitation

On this page we will see what the aether-wave-rotation model of light and electromagnetism has to say about gravitation.

One of the ways in which the aether-wave-rotation model is scientifically attractive is that it contains a very restricted range of options.
Because of the inverse square nature of gravitational attraction, we need to look at waves as the carriers of gravitational effects.

Light is observed to bend as it passes the Sun. This effect is attributable to the reducing gravitational field strength with distance, but how does it work?
If other waves emitted by the gravitating body are the cause, then we know that they decrease in magnitude with distance, and so in this respect they match our observations. In a fluidic aether these must be pressure waves. Adjacent points in space will therefore experience different magnitudes of pressure variation, but the average background pressure at different points will be the same, so the gravitational effect on light cannot be due to average pressure.
Sound waves are known to travel at different speeds depending on pressure, including when that pressure variation is caused by (is part of) the sound wave itself. The peaks and troughs of a sound wave are known to travel at different speeds, gradually distorting a smooth waveform to a saw-tooth shape.
So where there is a background of waves, then further waves – in this case our light signal – travel through a medium where the pressure is already varying, and this will have a varying effect on speed, as detailed below. This variation will be slightly greater where the wave front is closer to the Sun and slightly less at greater distances.
While we might expect the overall impact on the speed of the wave at each point to be the same, with the slower portions of its motion cancelling out the faster sections, it won’t be. Consider the following.

If we travel at 40 metres per second for 1200 metres, it takes 30 seconds.
If instead we travel the first 600 metres at 30 m/s and the second 600 m at 50 m/s, it takes (20+12=) 32 s, for an average speed of 37.5 m/s.
If we travel the first 600 metres at 20 m/s and the second 600 m at 60 m/s, it takes (30+10=) 40 s, for an average speed of 30 m/s.
(To maintain the same average speed, we would need to travel at the different speeds for the same time, not the same distance!)
This models what is happening in the situation described.

We can see that a wave-noisy background, with that wave noise diminishing with distance from the Sun or other gravitating body, would naturally slow wave light, if it behaves as sound does.
Also that this leads naturally to bending, as the slowing is greater nearer to the source of the wave-noise background. Delay is also caused, and the two effects are predicted mathematically by the same slowing. This explanation is only available for wave light, and not for particles.
We can think of this as a non-linear relationship between varying background pressure and wave speed, and return to this later when we re-examine the cosmological redshift.
We would expect this effect (called a second-order effect) to be small, in comparison with interactions of rotations, and indeed gravity is far weaker than electromagnetism.

It is much more difficult to envision what effect this would have on the vortex ring particles that we have adopted as our model for the building blocks of matter.
This cannot be determined at this time. However, the fact that there is a plausible mechanism for light bending and delay suggests that this is worthy of further study, not least because the mechanism for gravitational attraction has eluded us for so long.
The curved paths of matter (planets, comets) and light under gravity are not the same, which has allowed us to rule out general relativity, but they are simply mathematically related. We therefore expect that the mechanisms may also be related.
We will therefore tentatively adopt this as the mechanism for gravitation in this model.

What hasn’t yet been mentioned is that these waves occur naturally in this model.
The model has a fluidic background medium and vortex ring particles as matter. These rings are considered to be in a constant state of vibration, and naturally disturb the surrounding medium. Each particle, in this model, therefore emits continuous pressure waves, and these are generally at frequencies that we do not detect as light; they are not the frequencies to which our detectors are attuned; they are not the frequencies that generate wave-pattern changes in our detector atoms.
In this model, the magnitude of gravitational effects is dependent upon the number of vortex ring particles, i.e. the mass. This is a big advantage for this model over Le Sage-type gravitational masking theories.

There is other wave noise in the background medium depicted here.
The wave emission of light means that only a tiny proportion of emitted light is available at the detector, with the rest available for further detections or adding to the background noise.
Vibrating atoms and molecules in this model are each naturally attuned to a small number of specific frequencies that will induce a step change in their vibration. This is a physical depiction of existing (mathematical) models of emission and absorption. In this new model, most of the energy for that change comes from the noisy background, which is therefore also capable of inducing ‘spontaneous’ (or false) detections.
The rotations of vortex ring particles also spread to the background, and again some is detected (as an electromagnetic effect) and the rest adds to the (rotational) background noise. This seems to be the ‘noisy vacuum’ of Dirac, quantified by the eminent authors of ‘Gravitation’:
‘No point is more central than this, that empty space is not empty. It is the seat of the most violent physics. The electromagnetic field fluctuates. Virtual pairs of positive and negative electrons, in effect, are continually being created and annihilated, and likewise … pairs of other particles.’
‘The enormous factor from nuclear densities ~10¹⁴ g/cm³ to the density of field fluctuation energy in the vacuum ~10⁹⁴ g/cm³, argues that elementary particles represent a percentage-wise almost completely negligible change in the locally violent conditions that characterize the vacuum. … In other words, elementary particles do not form a really basic starting point to the description of nature. Instead they represent a first order correction to vacuum physics.’
Once again, the new model provides a physical basis with associated causal reasoning for existing theory.

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