On 29 May 1919, just six months after the end of World War I, expeditions organised by Arthur Eddington were dispatched to the tropics to photograph the position of stars during a solar eclipse. The aim was to see if their light was deflected by the gravity of the sun as much as Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted it would be. Six months later, the results were published confirming that it was and Einstein became world famous.
The model that Einstein used to explain the behaviour of objects in gravitational fields is sometimes described by analogy with a rubber sheet. If we imagine a sheet that is stretched completely flat, then a marble placed on it will stay where it is; if the marble is rolled, it will move in a straight line. If, on the other hand, there is a weight on the sheet, the sheet will not be flat, it will dip and a marble placed on the sheet will roll down hill towards the weight. A marble that is rolled across such a sheet, will not roll in a straight line, but will be deflected as it rolls around the rim of the dip created by the weight. If it is going too slow, it will not have the ‘energy’ to climb up the slope and will spiral into the dip created by the weight. Much faster and it will achieve the escape velocity, the amount of energy it needs to climb out of the dip and continue on its way. At a certain speed, the amount of energy is enough to stop the marble falling into the dip, but not enough to climb out, so the marble goes into orbit around the weight.
Any dip in the rubber sheet caused by a weight, can be thought of as a ‘field of influence’, no matter how far from the weight, the rubber sheet will slope, however slightly, towards it; a marble placed anywhere on the sheet will start to roll towards the weight. In space, of course, there is no rubber sheet, but the gravitational fields of influence clearly exist and the mathematics that Einstein devised, based on the idea that mass warps space-time in an analogous way, describes what we can see happening, at least within the solar system, very accurately.
Part of the inspiration of the warped spacetime model was that Einstein didn’t like the idea of what he called ‘spooky action at a distance’. In this he differed from Isaac Newton who said:
“Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power … I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy … To us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and acts according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.”
There is a brand of physicists, particularly associated with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, that agree with this position, it is known by some as ‘shut up and calculate’. In terms of understanding what happens and manipulating matter so that the result you want to happen does happen, it doesn’t really matter why, or because of what, it happens. For practical purposes, the only thing that matters about gravity is the field of influence, the area in which, for whatever reason, matter will behave in a way that can be measured and predicted. Philosophically, it (the influence) is the only thing that you know exists. There are some types of positivists who take the view that the field is the only thing that actually exists.
Einstein was confident that there was a medium with mechanical properties that carried the gravitational field, he spoke about a ‘gravitational ether’, in effect, he argued that there exists a 3D version of the rubber sheet. Six months after the announcement Einstein gave a lecture at the University of Leiden in which he argued for such a medium. He summed up as follows:
Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether.
These days, physicists are more likely to argue that the vacuum has physical qualities. This is how David Deutsch describes it:
“The vacuum, which we perceive as empty at everyday scales and even at atomic scales, is not really emptiness, but a richly structured entity known as a ‘quantum field’. Elementary particles are higher-energy configurations of this entity: ‘excitations of the vacuum’.”
A rubber sheet is useful for visualising such excitations. If matter is thought of as a standing wave, a bit like a drum skin, then energy is a moving wave. It’s a lot easier to understand the interchangeability of mass and energy that way. If the model of an atom is simplified so that the nucleus is the sum of its components, the distortion it makes in the sheet can be simplified so that it looks the same as if there were a weight on it. An electron can be visualised as the distortion an orbiting marble makes, but without the marble. A photon is then a wave moving through the rubber sheet.
What happens to electrons looks like them absorbing waves with specific amplitudes. That amplitude is added the electrons original amplitude, it gains energy and jumps through the rubber sheet to an orbit higher up the rim of the dip made by the nucleus.
It’s a helpful metaphor, but it is quite clearly not what actually happens. A more useful image for three dimensions is something else that Einstein said in his Leiden lecture:
“…according to our present conceptions the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field.”
If we substitute electromagnetic with quantum field, we can imagine that the distortion of the rubber sheet represents the density of the quantum field. In which case, on the large scale the bending of the light around the sun can be compared to refraction, with a suitable refractive index, the result would be indistinguishable. But it’s not just photons that would be affected; the fundamental particles that make up atoms are effectively tumbling over each other, part of their orbit is in the same direction any starlight takes, half the time it is going exactly the opposite way, so they get refracted when travelling in both directions; the net force is towards the source of gravity.
How then to explain differences in density? When Einstein gave the lecture, he didn’t know the universe was expanding. Like most people he assumed it was the same size it always had been. As far back as Anaximander people had asked why the universe didn’t collapse under gravity. Newton had argued that space was infinite and that therefore the pull on every point was ultimately balanced. Everyone knew that wouldn’t work and Einstein introduced another force, a push to counteract the pull of gravity and called it the cosmological constant. He later called it the greatest blunder of his career.
In 1927 a Belgian priest proposed that the universe isn’t collapsing, because it is expanding and that it began with what he called “a primeval atom or cosmic egg”. Two years later, Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of the red shift of distant galaxies, that had been measured since 1912, by Vesto Slipher among others and is compelling evidence that the Lemaitre was right. Sadly for him, the name that stuck was the Big Bang theory, attributed to Fred Hoyle, who didn’t believe in it. If the idea of a cosmic egg is taken seriously, then there are two basic possibilities; firstly that it started a chain reaction in the pre-existing ‘richly structured’ quantum vacuum, but it is hard to see how that would result in the recession of galaxies. Or, secondly, it was a point of effectively infinite density that has spent the best part of 14billion years expanding. If that is the case, then everything that exists, all the ‘condensations’ of the quantum field, are made of stuff that has a staggering capacity for expansion. If such ‘particles’ are stable points they can be imagined to be oozing richly structured quantum vacuum/spacetime/aether, call it what you will, the density of which falls according to an inverse square relation, much like gravity.
As a bonus, gravity becomes a localised effect, beyond which, the oozing becomes a push, as Einstein claimed and has recently been observed and attributed to dark energy.
The Ealing Interpretation.
-
Bill Wiltrack
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Re: The Ealing Interpretation.
.
This is excellent. Could you expand upon this idea please?
Also, would it kill you to hit the enter key once in a while?...like after a paragraph.
.
This is excellent. Could you expand upon this idea please?
Also, would it kill you to hit the enter key once in a while?...like after a paragraph.
.
Re: The Ealing Interpretation.
Sorry, Bill.
On 29 May 1919, just six months after the end of World War I, expeditions organised by Arthur Eddington were dispatched to the tropics to photograph the position of stars during a solar eclipse.
The aim was to see if their light was deflected by the gravity of the sun as much as Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted it would be.
Six months later, the results were published confirming that it was and Einstein became world famous.
The model that Einstein used to explain the behaviour of objects in gravitational fields is sometimes described by analogy with a rubber sheet.
If we imagine a sheet that is stretched completely flat, then a marble placed on it will stay where it is; if the marble is rolled, it will move in a straight line.
If, on the other hand, there is a weight on the sheet, the sheet will not be flat, it will dip and a marble placed on the sheet will roll down hill towards the weight.
A marble that is rolled across such a sheet, will not roll in a straight line, but will be deflected as it rolls around the rim of the dip created by the weight.
If it is going too slow, it will not have the ‘energy’ to climb up the slope and will spiral into the dip created by the weight.
Much faster and it will achieve the escape velocity, the amount of energy it needs to climb out of the dip and continue on its way.
At a certain speed, the amount of energy is enough to stop the marble falling into the dip, but not enough to climb out, so the marble goes into orbit around the weight.
Any dip in the rubber sheet caused by a weight, can be thought of as a ‘field of influence’, no matter how far from the weight, the rubber sheet will slope, however slightly, towards it; a marble placed anywhere on the sheet will start to roll towards the weight.
In space, of course, there is no rubber sheet, but the gravitational fields of influence clearly exist and the mathematics that Einstein devised, based on the idea that mass warps space-time in an analogous way, describes what we can see happening, at least within the solar system, very accurately.
Part of the inspiration of the warped spacetime model was that Einstein didn’t like the idea of what he called ‘spooky action at a distance’.
In this he differed from Isaac Newton who said:
“Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power …
I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy …
To us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and acts according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.”
There is a brand of physicists, particularly associated with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, that agree with this position, it is known by some as ‘shut up and calculate’.
In terms of understanding what happens and manipulating matter so that the result you want to happen does happen, it doesn’t really matter why, or because of what, it happens.
For practical purposes, the only thing that matters about gravity is the field of influence, the area in which, for whatever reason, matter will behave in a way that can be measured and predicted.
Philosophically, it (the influence) is the only thing that you know exists.
There are some types of positivists who take the view that the field is the only thing that actually exists.
Einstein was confident that there was a medium with mechanical properties that carried the gravitational field, he spoke about a ‘gravitational ether’, in effect, he argued that there exists a 3D version of the rubber sheet.
Six months after the announcement Einstein gave a lecture at the University of Leiden in which he argued for such a medium.
He summed up as follows:
"Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether."
These days, physicists are more likely to argue that the vacuum has physical qualities.
This is how David Deutsch describes it:
“The vacuum, which we perceive as empty at everyday scales and even at atomic scales, is not really emptiness, but a richly structured entity known as a ‘quantum field’. Elementary particles are higher-energy configurations of this entity: ‘excitations of the vacuum’.”
A rubber sheet is useful for visualising such excitations.
If matter is thought of as a standing wave, a bit like a drum skin, then energy is a moving wave.
It’s a lot easier to understand the interchangeability of mass and energy that way.
If the model of an atom is simplified so that the nucleus is the sum of its components, the distortion it makes in the sheet can be simplified so that it looks the same as if there were a weight on it.
An electron can be visualised as the distortion an orbiting marble makes, but without the marble.
A photon is then a wave moving through the rubber sheet.
What happens to electrons looks like them absorbing waves with specific amplitudes.
That amplitude is added the electrons original amplitude, it gains energy and jumps through the rubber sheet to an orbit higher up the rim of the dip made by the nucleus.
It’s a helpful metaphor, but it is quite clearly not what actually happens.
A more useful image for three dimensions is something else that Einstein said in his Leiden lecture:
“…according to our present conceptions the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field.”
If we substitute electromagnetic with quantum field, we can imagine that the distortion of the rubber sheet represents the density of the quantum field.
In which case, on the large scale the bending of the light around the sun can be compared to refraction, with a suitable refractive index, the result would be indistinguishable.
But it’s not just photons that would be affected; the fundamental particles that make up atoms are effectively tumbling over each other, part of their orbit is in the same direction any starlight takes, half the time it is going exactly the opposite way, so they get refracted when travelling in both directions; the net force is towards the source of gravity.
How then to explain differences in density?
When Einstein gave the lecture, he didn’t know the universe was expanding.
Like most people he assumed it was the same size it always had been.
As far back as Anaximander people had asked why the universe didn’t collapse under gravity.
Newton had argued that space was infinite and that therefore the pull on every point was ultimately balanced.
Everyone knew that wouldn’t work and Einstein introduced another force, a push to counteract the pull of gravity and called it the cosmological constant.
He later called it the greatest blunder of his career.
In 1927 a Belgian priest proposed that the universe isn’t collapsing, because it is expanding and that it began with what he called “a primeval atom or cosmic egg”.
Two years later, Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of the red shift of distant galaxies, that had been measured since 1912, by Vesto Slipher among others and is compelling evidence that the Lemaitre was right.
Sadly for him, the name that stuck was the Big Bang theory, attributed to Fred Hoyle, who didn’t believe in it.
If the idea of a cosmic egg is taken seriously, then there are two basic possibilities; firstly that it started a chain reaction in the pre-existing ‘richly structured’ quantum vacuum, but it is hard to see how that would result in the recession of galaxies.
Or, secondly, it was a point of effectively infinite density that has spent the best part of 14billion years expanding.
If that is the case, then everything that exists, all the ‘condensations’ of the quantum field, are made of stuff that has a staggering capacity for expansion.
If such ‘particles’ are stable points they can be imagined to be oozing richly structured quantum vacuum/spacetime/aether, call it what you will, the density of which falls according to an inverse square relation, much like gravity.
As a bonus, gravity becomes a localised effect, beyond which, the oozing becomes a push, as Einstein claimed and has recently been observed and attributed to dark energy.
Is that better?
On 29 May 1919, just six months after the end of World War I, expeditions organised by Arthur Eddington were dispatched to the tropics to photograph the position of stars during a solar eclipse.
The aim was to see if their light was deflected by the gravity of the sun as much as Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted it would be.
Six months later, the results were published confirming that it was and Einstein became world famous.
The model that Einstein used to explain the behaviour of objects in gravitational fields is sometimes described by analogy with a rubber sheet.
If we imagine a sheet that is stretched completely flat, then a marble placed on it will stay where it is; if the marble is rolled, it will move in a straight line.
If, on the other hand, there is a weight on the sheet, the sheet will not be flat, it will dip and a marble placed on the sheet will roll down hill towards the weight.
A marble that is rolled across such a sheet, will not roll in a straight line, but will be deflected as it rolls around the rim of the dip created by the weight.
If it is going too slow, it will not have the ‘energy’ to climb up the slope and will spiral into the dip created by the weight.
Much faster and it will achieve the escape velocity, the amount of energy it needs to climb out of the dip and continue on its way.
At a certain speed, the amount of energy is enough to stop the marble falling into the dip, but not enough to climb out, so the marble goes into orbit around the weight.
Any dip in the rubber sheet caused by a weight, can be thought of as a ‘field of influence’, no matter how far from the weight, the rubber sheet will slope, however slightly, towards it; a marble placed anywhere on the sheet will start to roll towards the weight.
In space, of course, there is no rubber sheet, but the gravitational fields of influence clearly exist and the mathematics that Einstein devised, based on the idea that mass warps space-time in an analogous way, describes what we can see happening, at least within the solar system, very accurately.
Part of the inspiration of the warped spacetime model was that Einstein didn’t like the idea of what he called ‘spooky action at a distance’.
In this he differed from Isaac Newton who said:
“Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power …
I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy …
To us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and acts according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.”
There is a brand of physicists, particularly associated with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, that agree with this position, it is known by some as ‘shut up and calculate’.
In terms of understanding what happens and manipulating matter so that the result you want to happen does happen, it doesn’t really matter why, or because of what, it happens.
For practical purposes, the only thing that matters about gravity is the field of influence, the area in which, for whatever reason, matter will behave in a way that can be measured and predicted.
Philosophically, it (the influence) is the only thing that you know exists.
There are some types of positivists who take the view that the field is the only thing that actually exists.
Einstein was confident that there was a medium with mechanical properties that carried the gravitational field, he spoke about a ‘gravitational ether’, in effect, he argued that there exists a 3D version of the rubber sheet.
Six months after the announcement Einstein gave a lecture at the University of Leiden in which he argued for such a medium.
He summed up as follows:
"Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether."
These days, physicists are more likely to argue that the vacuum has physical qualities.
This is how David Deutsch describes it:
“The vacuum, which we perceive as empty at everyday scales and even at atomic scales, is not really emptiness, but a richly structured entity known as a ‘quantum field’. Elementary particles are higher-energy configurations of this entity: ‘excitations of the vacuum’.”
A rubber sheet is useful for visualising such excitations.
If matter is thought of as a standing wave, a bit like a drum skin, then energy is a moving wave.
It’s a lot easier to understand the interchangeability of mass and energy that way.
If the model of an atom is simplified so that the nucleus is the sum of its components, the distortion it makes in the sheet can be simplified so that it looks the same as if there were a weight on it.
An electron can be visualised as the distortion an orbiting marble makes, but without the marble.
A photon is then a wave moving through the rubber sheet.
What happens to electrons looks like them absorbing waves with specific amplitudes.
That amplitude is added the electrons original amplitude, it gains energy and jumps through the rubber sheet to an orbit higher up the rim of the dip made by the nucleus.
It’s a helpful metaphor, but it is quite clearly not what actually happens.
A more useful image for three dimensions is something else that Einstein said in his Leiden lecture:
“…according to our present conceptions the elementary particles of matter are also, in their essence, nothing else than condensations of the electromagnetic field.”
If we substitute electromagnetic with quantum field, we can imagine that the distortion of the rubber sheet represents the density of the quantum field.
In which case, on the large scale the bending of the light around the sun can be compared to refraction, with a suitable refractive index, the result would be indistinguishable.
But it’s not just photons that would be affected; the fundamental particles that make up atoms are effectively tumbling over each other, part of their orbit is in the same direction any starlight takes, half the time it is going exactly the opposite way, so they get refracted when travelling in both directions; the net force is towards the source of gravity.
How then to explain differences in density?
When Einstein gave the lecture, he didn’t know the universe was expanding.
Like most people he assumed it was the same size it always had been.
As far back as Anaximander people had asked why the universe didn’t collapse under gravity.
Newton had argued that space was infinite and that therefore the pull on every point was ultimately balanced.
Everyone knew that wouldn’t work and Einstein introduced another force, a push to counteract the pull of gravity and called it the cosmological constant.
He later called it the greatest blunder of his career.
In 1927 a Belgian priest proposed that the universe isn’t collapsing, because it is expanding and that it began with what he called “a primeval atom or cosmic egg”.
Two years later, Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of the red shift of distant galaxies, that had been measured since 1912, by Vesto Slipher among others and is compelling evidence that the Lemaitre was right.
Sadly for him, the name that stuck was the Big Bang theory, attributed to Fred Hoyle, who didn’t believe in it.
If the idea of a cosmic egg is taken seriously, then there are two basic possibilities; firstly that it started a chain reaction in the pre-existing ‘richly structured’ quantum vacuum, but it is hard to see how that would result in the recession of galaxies.
Or, secondly, it was a point of effectively infinite density that has spent the best part of 14billion years expanding.
If that is the case, then everything that exists, all the ‘condensations’ of the quantum field, are made of stuff that has a staggering capacity for expansion.
If such ‘particles’ are stable points they can be imagined to be oozing richly structured quantum vacuum/spacetime/aether, call it what you will, the density of which falls according to an inverse square relation, much like gravity.
As a bonus, gravity becomes a localised effect, beyond which, the oozing becomes a push, as Einstein claimed and has recently been observed and attributed to dark energy.
Is that better?