There's gravity, it moves fast and it's affecting all the matter we can observe. We're going to need more computing.

[Dills0n]

I heard some people think that gravity isn't some particle or secret bond between dark energy and other dark magic things (which in fact are most likely just ordinary matter) but something to the effect of gravity is the motion of matter through time and it generates space? I like the gravity in KSP compared to other space games I play. I recently looked at a picture of the Spheres of Influence. My only gripe is that we as humans understand little about gravity. I also heard some big-wigs and head-hanchos of many organizations are scrambling to get a better understanding of the measurement for G. Will their clocks fall, err I mean fail, as everything comes to a grinding halt, asymptotically approaching the center of their "dials"?! Remember we only accelerate when the ground comes up to meet our behinds! 

The link to gravitationlab can give you "an answer" about the, yet unproven, largely talked about interior workings of our friend G.

Spoiler

 

Ideas Lab: Measuring "Big G" Challenge, National Science Foundation, Division of Physics.

Paper: Deep space experiment to measure G, Classical and Quantum Gravity, IOP Publishing.

Several other links to check -- wait a second, there's something under your nose, yep, wait ... Nope that's just gravity.

Phys.org article about the Deep Space Experiment to Measure G

Gravitation Lab, this person has been bothered by the fact that we are mired in space and time but know little about the other thing that keeps the muck and mudfog rolling thick, Gravity. Here's some papers he's written over the past couple decades?

^[PDF]Gravity: The Inside Story, R. Benish, 2010

^[PDF]The Direction of Gravity, R. Benish, July 6 2010

 

400 years after Galileo proposed it, we just like to pretend, but no one has ever proved that the object will even oscillate or not.

Edited December 29, 2016 by Dills0n
changed the sentence referring to gravitation lab link to exclude reference to LHC because anyone knows the LHC wasn't designed to measure G. Changed more grammar.

[Red Iron Crown]

More about real science than KSP, moving to the Science forum.

[Dills0n]

Thanks, after I started writing the post, I decided I wasn't certain where it should end up!

[PB666]

On 12/22/2016 at 5:57 PM, Dills0n said:

I heard some people think that gravity isn't some particle or secret bond between dark energy and other dark magic things (which in fact are most likely just ordinary matter) but something to the effect of gravity is the motion of matter through time and it generates space? I like the gravity in KSP compared to other space games I play. I recently looked at a picture of the Spheres of Influence. My only gripe is that we as humans understand little about gravity. I also heard some big-wigs and head-hanchos of many organizations are scrambling to get a better understanding of the measurement for G. Will their clocks fall, err I mean fail, as everything comes to a grinding halt, asymptotically approaching the center of their "dials"?! Remember we only accelerate when the ground comes up to meet our behinds! 

The link to gravitationlab can give you "an answer" about the, yet unproven, largely talked about interior workings of our friend G.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Ideas Lab: Measuring "Big G" Challenge, National Science Foundation, Division of Physics.

Paper: Deep space experiment to measure G, Classical and Quantum Gravity, IOP Publishing.

Several other links to check -- wait a second, there's something under your nose, yep, wait ... Nope that's just gravity.

Phys.org article about the Deep Space Experiment to Measure G

Gravitation Lab, this person has been bothered by the fact that we are mired in space and time but know little about the other thing that keeps the muck and mudfog rolling thick, Gravity. Here's some papers he's written over the past couple decades?

^[PDF]Gravity: The Inside Story, R. Benish, 2010

^[PDF]The Direction of Gravity, R. Benish, July 6 2010

 

400 years after Galileo proposed it, we just like to pretend, but no one has ever proved that the object will even oscillate or not, much like some religious figures in our histories, mainly the main, ones who have aliases including three letters.

 

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-philosophy-of-guessing-has-harmed-physics-expert-says/

 

[HebaruSan]

You've got two completely separate and unrelated topics mixed together here, but I'll try to untangle them for a reply...

On 12/22/2016 at 5:57 PM, Dills0n said:

I also heard some big-wigs and head-hanchos of many organizations are scrambling to get a better understanding of the measurement for G. Will their clocks fall, err I mean fail, as everything comes to a grinding halt, asymptotically approaching the center of their "dials"?! Remember we only accelerate when the ground comes up to meet our behinds! 

Quote

Ideas Lab: Measuring "Big G" Challenge, National Science Foundation, Division of Physics.

 

The story here is that the National Science Foundation announced on December 11, 2015 (so over a year ago) that they would be accepting proposals for projects to perform measurements to determine an even more precise value for G. They're talking about the 'G' in the equation for the strength of the force of gravity (Newtonian version below):

   F = G * m1 * m2 / r²

That is, they're not "measuring gravity" as it may appear if you take the 'G' to be a romantic metaphor (as in your "our friend G"); they're measuring the value of a specific physical constant. Some basic background on that constant here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant

The currently known value is (in SI units, and assuming Wikipedia didn't leave off any known sig figs):

   G = 6.67408 * 10^-11

The NSF proposed to pay someone to improve this to something like:

   G = 6.67408329 * 10^-11 

(The red underlined part is entirely speculative on my part and given just to illustrate the point of this proposal. Those three numbers could turn out to be anything.) A worthwhile housekeeping project and foundation for further research, but nothing that remotely overturns any accepted physics in itself. No, nothing untoward will happen to their clocks. And they're certainly not "scrambling."

The NSF's database shows that 14 projects in 6 US states totaling $13,679,171.00 were awarded under this program:

https://nsf.gov/awards/award_visualization.jsp?org=NSF&pims_id=505229&ProgEleCode=1243&from=fund#

I'm not adept enough at using NSF's web site to determine for certain whether any have published yet, but this one from UC-Irvine says End Date: May 31, 2017 (Estimated):

https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1642051&HistoricalAwards=false

So if you're interested in this research, it may be a few months yet before you'll have results to look at.

Quote

Paper: Deep space experiment to measure G, Classical and Quantum Gravity, IOP Publishing.

Several other links to check -- wait a second, there's something under your nose, yep, wait ... Nope that's just gravity.

Phys.org article about the Deep Space Experiment to Measure G

Those two links are to the same article from May 17, 2016, and seem to relate to one of the projects [proposed to be?] funded under the above NSF grant program. They want to slingshot an experiment out of the solar system (!!) and then "drop" a tiny ball through a tiny hole in a tiny earth and measure its oscillations, making very precise observations in order to use the shell theorem to deduce a very precise value for G. It will probably be much longer than a few months before you see results from this experiment, as the article says they'd try to piggyback on a bigger project, presumably along the lines of the Voyagers, and I don't know of any such probes planned to leave the solar system at this point. It's a neat idea, and a cute thing to leave floating around for the aliens to find. Notably, no one involved in this project is quoted in the article expecting or even suspecting that it might falsify the shell theorem.

 

On 12/22/2016 at 5:57 PM, Dills0n said:

I heard some people think that gravity isn't some particle or secret bond between dark energy and other dark magic things (which in fact are most likely just ordinary matter) but something to the effect of gravity is the motion of matter through time and it generates space? I like the gravity in KSP compared to other space games I play. I recently looked at a picture of the Spheres of Influence. My only gripe is that we as humans understand little about gravity. 

The link to gravitationlab can give you "an answer" about the, yet unproven, largely talked about interior workings of our friend G.

Quote

Gravitation Lab, this person has been bothered by the fact that we are mired in space and time but know little about the other thing that keeps the muck and mudfog rolling thick, Gravity. Here's some papers he's written over the past couple decades?

^[PDF]Gravity: The Inside Story, R. Benish, 2010

^[PDF]The Direction of Gravity, R. Benish, July 6 2010

400 years after Galileo proposed it, we just like to pretend, but no one has ever proved that the object will even oscillate or not.

This is the same topic as your other thread. It's probably best to keep discussion of it over there to avoid redundancy. I can see how you would think they're related, as the experiment mentioned above would directly test Mr. Benish's ideas, but we should be careful not to present this in a way that implies that that experiment was designed as a test of the shell theorem.

 

[PB666]

8 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

You've got two completely separate and unrelated topics mixed together here, but I'll try to untangle them for a reply...

The story here is that the National Science Foundation announced on December 11, 2015 (so over a year ago) that they would be accepting proposals for projects to perform measurements to determine an even more precise value for G. They're talking about the 'G' in the equation for the strength of the force of gravity (Newtonian version below):

   F = G * m1 * m2 / r²

That is, they're not "measuring gravity" as it may appear if you take the 'G' to be a romantic metaphor (as in your "our friend G"); they're measuring the value of a specific physical constant. Some basic background on that constant here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant

The currently known value is (in SI units, and assuming Wikipedia didn't leave off any known sig figs):

   G = 6.67408 * 10^-11

The NSF proposed to pay someone to improve this to something like:

   G = 6.67408329 * 10^-11 

(The red underlined part is entirely speculative on my part and given just to illustrate the point of this proposal. Those three numbers could turn out to be anything.) A worthwhile housekeeping project and foundation for further research, but nothing that remotely overturns any accepted physics in itself. No, nothing untoward will happen to their clocks. And they're certainly not "scrambling."

The NSF's database shows that 14 projects in 6 US states totaling $13,679,171.00 were awarded under this program:

https://nsf.gov/awards/award_visualization.jsp?org=NSF&pims_id=505229&ProgEleCode=1243&from=fund#

I'm not adept enough at using NSF's web site to determine for certain whether any have published yet, but this one from UC-Irvine says End Date: May 31, 2017 (Estimated):

https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1642051&HistoricalAwards=false

So if you're interested in this research, it may be a few months yet before you'll have results to look at.

Those two links are to the same article from May 17, 2016, and seem to relate to one of the projects [proposed to be?] funded under the above NSF grant program. They want to slingshot an experiment out of the solar system (!!) and then "drop" a tiny ball through a tiny hole in a tiny earth and measure its oscillations, making very precise observations in order to use the shell theorem to deduce a very precise value for G. It will probably be much longer than a few months before you see results from this experiment, as the article says they'd try to piggyback on a bigger project, presumably along the lines of the Voyagers, and I don't know of any such probes planned to leave the solar system at this point. It's a neat idea, and a cute thing to leave floating around for the aliens to find. Notably, no one involved in this project is quoted in the article expecting or even suspecting that it might falsify the shell theorem.

 

This is the same topic as your other thread. It's probably best to keep discussion of it over there to avoid redundancy. I can see how you would think they're related, as the experiment mentioned above would directly test Mr. Benish's ideas, but we should be careful not to present this in a way that implies that that experiment was designed as a test of the shell theorem.

 

I don't think such a precise universal G value exists. G is essentially a measure of a colloid foam structure of unresolved space-time that we want to believe is more uniform than it is. IMO the structure of space time has slight difference that appear to us as warping, but at finer scale represent the nature of fields in specific parts of the universe. For example if you were in a black hole, in the center of the sun or on a dirt ball floating between the stars, or setting on a moon the very moment the parent star supernova'd light wave passed over the G constant you would measure might differ.

 

[HebaruSan]

33 minutes ago, PB666 said:

I don't think such a precise universal G value exists. G is essentially a measure of a colloid foam structure of unresolved space-time that we want to believe is more uniform than it is. IMO the structure of space time has slight difference that appear to us as warping, but at finer scale represent the nature of fields in specific parts of the universe. For example if you were in a black hole, in the center of the sun or on a dirt ball floating between the stars, or setting on a moon the very moment the parent star supernova'd light wave passed over the G constant you would measure might differ.

Unfortunately the deadline for a preliminary proposal was May 16, 2016, and the full proposal was due October 26, 2016, so it's too late to submit your experiment. But I have to believe that there will be plenty of future programs that it could fit into.

I'm curious, though. The phys.org article emphasized the need to get far from the sun to minimize the distortion of its gravity on the measurements; we've all presumably seen how nearby bodies in orbit often do not appear to float freely for very long before their paths diverge. How would you measure G inside a gravity well, given that such a simple oscillating motion is off the table?

[PB666]

10 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

Unfortunately the deadline for a preliminary proposal was May 16, 2016, and the full proposal was due October 26, 2016, so it's too late to submit your experiment. But I have to believe that there will be plenty of future programs that it could fit into.

I'm curious, though. The phys.org article emphasized the need to get far from the sun to minimize the distortion of its gravity on the measurements; we've all presumably seen how nearby bodies in orbit often do not appear to float freely for very long before their paths diverge. How would you measure G inside a gravity well, given that such a simple oscillating motion is off the table?

Static shifts. Bigger question how do you separate the effects of shifts cause by a huge pulse of EM radiation versus the space-time shift cause by the loss of mass during a supernova? Presumably each form of energy shapes the substructure of the quantum foam in different ways, the problem is we don't have a clue as to how.

The further you are from the sun, the faster you are moving the less deviation, translates to relative deviation. If we place an object at point of equal gravitational attaction between the  4 closest stars (a rough approximation) and remove all velocity relative to the average motion of the mass of course its not going to stay in its position forever. But compared to the changes created by objects on earth, such as the passing of the moon, Venus, the wobble of the sun, Jupiter, the forces should be alot less. I still don't think a interstellar gravity experiment will ever detect quantum space-time.

 

[HebaruSan]

3 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Static shifts.

What do you mean by that? Google finds mostly references to a self-described "power trio ... with a goal to form an electrifying collaboration of free flowing precision, old school vibe, and high energy blues / rock."

[PB666]

18 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

What do you mean by that? Google finds mostly references to a self-described "power trio ... with a goal to form an electrifying collaboration of free flowing precision, old school vibe, and high energy blues / rock."

LIGO basically, you sit in a spot that you hope doesn't move as a result of local forces and wait for space-time to flux.

Lets just put it like this, or at least this is how I view the research. Previously we had space based gravity sensors and cryo-accelerometers here on earth. Then we have ligo, next we have the gravity sensor pair in space.

Basically this translates into see two black holes collide into

pre LIGO - a signal that is statistically indistinguishable from noise

LIGO - a signal that is a few sigma above noise observed on two machine

post LIGO - the ability to see fine structure in the signal and much stronger than the noise signal.

Futurama (i.e. some unknown technology of the future) - the ability to see individuals 'gravitons'

[K^2]

On 12/22/2016 at 3:57 PM, Dills0n said:

I heard some people think that gravity isn't some particle or secret bond between dark energy and other dark magic things (which in fact are most likely just ordinary matter) but something to the effect of gravity is the motion of matter through time and it generates space?

We've had proper description of gravity for one hundred years now. It's called General Relativity. And it's a theory that withstood not only the test of time and countless experiments, but has for the past fifty years been understood to be a special case of Gauge Theory. I don't know where you are getting your ideas from, but it's not from scientists of any kind.

The only reason we are looking for alternative explanations for gravity is because General Relativity doesn't quantize well. Some people think that alternative explanation could come with mathematical tools that will let us bypass this problem. But it's more of the limitation of Quantum Mechanics than of General Relativity. Unless you are trying to work out quantum physics at the event horizon of a black hole, our current understanding of gravity is quite complete. Even for things like neutron stars, where you have to actually use Quantum Field Theory in curved space-time dictated by General Relativity, the two theories work quite nicely together and make accurate predictions.

So I'd argue we know what gravity is. It's a gauge interaction due to the underlying local symmetries of the four-dimensional manifold we happen to be a part of. We can still ask questions about the symmetries involved and about consequences of it all, but none of it changes the answer to what is gravity. This we already know.

[kerbiloid]

As gravity has energy, does it have _E=mc² mass which creates additional gravity and self-gravity between gravity?

[YNM]

Gravity, as in "pulled by gravity", are just spacetime curvature, which is a metric tensor. Coordinate sets. It's not energy.

EDIT : Although... Given gravitational waves DO actually takes some energy... Hmm...

 

@OP : the first post did looked a bit weird IMO, but as everyone says, gravity will stays, for the time being, predictable through General Relativity, and in some cases, Newton's Law of Gravity. Yes new interpretations are abound (look up the emerging gravity thing), but IMO, facts over thoughts - observation over laws/theories.

Edited January 2, 2017 by YNM

[Dills0n]

On 12/29/2016 at 1:10 PM, HebaruSan said:

You've got two completely separate and unrelated topics mixed together here, but I'll try to untangle them for a reply...

The story here is that the National Science Foundation announced on December 11, 2015 (so over a year ago) that they would be accepting proposals for projects to perform measurements to determine an even more precise value for G. They're talking about the 'G' in the equation for the strength of the force of gravity (Newtonian version below):

   F = G * m1 * m2 / r²

That is, they're not "measuring gravity" as it may appear if you take the 'G' to be a romantic metaphor (as in your "our friend G"); they're measuring the value of a specific physical constant. Some basic background on that constant here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant

The currently known value is (in SI units, and assuming Wikipedia didn't leave off any known sig figs):

   G = 6.67408 * 10^-11

The NSF proposed to pay someone to improve this to something like:

   G = 6.67408329 * 10^-11 

(The red underlined part is entirely speculative on my part and given just to illustrate the point of this proposal. Those three numbers could turn out to be anything.) A worthwhile housekeeping project and foundation for further research, but nothing that remotely overturns any accepted physics in itself. No, nothing untoward will happen to their clocks. And they're certainly not "scrambling."

The NSF's database shows that 14 projects in 6 US states totaling $13,679,171.00 were awarded under this program:

https://nsf.gov/awards/award_visualization.jsp?org=NSF&pims_id=505229&ProgEleCode=1243&from=fund#

I'm not adept enough at using NSF's web site to determine for certain whether any have published yet, but this one from UC-Irvine says End Date: May 31, 2017 (Estimated):

https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1642051&HistoricalAwards=false

So if you're interested in this research, it may be a few months yet before you'll have results to look at.

Those two links are to the same article from May 17, 2016, and seem to relate to one of the projects [proposed to be?] funded under the above NSF grant program. They want to slingshot an experiment out of the solar system (!!) and then "drop" a tiny ball through a tiny hole in a tiny earth and measure its oscillations, making very precise observations in order to use the shell theorem to deduce a very precise value for G. It will probably be much longer than a few months before you see results from this experiment, as the article says they'd try to piggyback on a bigger project, presumably along the lines of the Voyagers, and I don't know of any such probes planned to leave the solar system at this point. It's a neat idea, and a cute thing to leave floating around for the aliens to find. Notably, no one involved in this project is quoted in the article expecting or even suspecting that it might falsify the shell theorem.

 

This is the same topic as your other thread. It's probably best to keep discussion of it over there to avoid redundancy. I can see how you would think they're related, as the experiment mentioned above would directly test Mr. Benish's ideas, but we should be careful not to present this in a way that implies that that experiment was designed as a test of the shell theorem.

 

"scrambling to get a better understanding of the measurement for G." You must have misunderstood me. I know that we have measured G to several decimal places I was simply stating the fact that they want to improve the measurement for G, thus, scrambling to get a better understanding.

20 hours ago, K^2 said:

We've had proper description of gravity for one hundred years now. It's called General Relativity. And it's a theory that withstood not only the test of time and countless experiments, but has for the past fifty years been understood to be a special case of Gauge Theory. I don't know where you are getting your ideas from, but it's not from scientists of any kind.

The only reason we are looking for alternative explanations for gravity is because General Relativity doesn't quantize well. Some people think that alternative explanation could come with mathematical tools that will let us bypass this problem. But it's more of the limitation of Quantum Mechanics than of General Relativity. Unless you are trying to work out quantum physics at the event horizon of a black hole, our current understanding of gravity is quite complete. Even for things like neutron stars, where you have to actually use Quantum Field Theory in curved space-time dictated by General Relativity, the two theories work quite nicely together and make accurate predictions.

So I'd argue we know what gravity is. It's a gauge interaction due to the underlying local symmetries of the four-dimensional manifold we happen to be a part of. We can still ask questions about the symmetries involved and about consequences of it all, but none of it changes the answer to what is gravity. This we already know.

Take a look at figure 3 at http://gravitationlab.com/

Figure 3 isn't made up or speculative it's the truth so far.

[Dills0n]

20 hours ago, K^2 said:

We've had proper description of gravity for one hundred years now. It's called General Relativity. And it's a theory that withstood not only the test of time and countless experiments, but has for the past fifty years been understood to be a special case of Gauge Theory. I don't know where you are getting your ideas from, but it's not from scientists of any kind.

The only reason we are looking for alternative explanations for gravity is because General Relativity doesn't quantize well. Some people think that alternative explanation could come with mathematical tools that will let us bypass this problem. But it's more of the limitation of Quantum Mechanics than of General Relativity. Unless you are trying to work out quantum physics at the event horizon of a black hole, our current understanding of gravity is quite complete. Even for things like neutron stars, where you have to actually use Quantum Field Theory in curved space-time dictated by General Relativity, the two theories work quite nicely together and make accurate predictions.

So I'd argue we know what gravity is. It's a gauge interaction due to the underlying local symmetries of the four-dimensional manifold we happen to be a part of. We can still ask questions about the symmetries involved and about consequences of it all, but none of it changes the answer to what is gravity. This we already know.

Quoting Einstein himself from 1982 publication Physics  and Reality Ideas and Opinions

"[GR does not] consider how the central mass produces this gravitational field" - Neil DeGrasse can drop himself into a hollowed out earth all day but until he does it for real and has a video of it, it's all just fancy and fantasy.

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, YNM said:

It's not energy.

What about its dual nature? Graviton.

[YNM]

Well, graviton would be a tensor particle, with spin of 2 it says... Definitely no idea what they're meaning with that, but it seems that the only way to discover them won't be the same with the ways we discover photons or other fundamental particles.

[kerbiloid]

Would be funny if "dark matter" were a cloud of orphan gravitons captured each other, a gravity self-gravity.
Another funny idea: a black hole made of this.

Edited January 1, 2017 by kerbiloid

[YNM]

Hmm... Gravitational waves DO takes some energy... Graviton confirmed ?