Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Experimental Verification of Gravitational Discussion


In our case also, there are physical experiments that can verify
various aspects of the discussion as we have posed.

Gravity itself is too weak a force for direct measurements,
and the scales also make experiments and measurements normally difficult and cost-prohibitive.
However, the same mathematics is used in Classical Electrodynamics (CED),
so electrical experiments can be devised that are easier and cheaper.
As many are aware, CED has been replaced formally by QED,
(Quantum Electrodynamics), an entirely different beast.
But both GR and QED are what is called "overkill" tools
for much ordinary work in both gravity and electricity.
For most engineering jobs, Newtonian Physics (NP) and CED
are the right tool for the right job.
This is scientific pragmatism, not ideology.

The most important points of our discussion however,
are not based upon the known differences between NP/CED and SR/GR/QED.
Our work is not a replacement for any of these theories,
but a refinement of all of them, and all of them are affected.

The most important points of our discussion also however,
only require a few thought experiments, and some reminders
regarding already established scientific facts which have been left unapplied.

This makes the work important enough to look at,
while also gratefully easy to 'prove' or 'disprove'
to the satisfaction of most physicists.
All that is required is:

(1) Checking the math, and its appropriateness to the physical applications.

(2) Carrying out the thought-experiments, and applying known and undisputed physical aspects to the problems.

(3) Proposing and executing physical experiments, specially designed to expose predicted effects and differences from previous 'modeling'.

We can say that (1) has been repeatedly done, (2) can be done by the reader, and (3) is open to scientific investigators and researchers, with no limits.

Here are some specific points:

(1) The 'continuum' model is quite useful and fruitful as a theoretical construct in dealing with fields and spacetime, but quantization of energy etc. is also a daily fact. It is not surprising that at a molecular level, where discrete masses and charges are actually heavily concentrated point-particles distributed across relatively vast distances, that simplified 'continuum' treatments fail.

(2) A Thought experiment such as the firing of a mass or charged particle at a hollow sphere made of a low number of discrete particles (like a molecular carbon-ball) is enough to carry the point home that the inside of a structure made of such crudely distributed masses/charges cannot have a 'flat' gravitational or EM field. The trajectory of the fired particle will be bent.

We don't need to do a real experiment, because thousands of such trajectory experiments with electrons and neutrons have already been done, and exhibit the expected patterns of the thought-experiment, suggesting that Carbon-balls would not act like perfect "continuum"-style hollow spheres. If they did, many other experiments would have had different outcomes.

Example Scattering Pattern for X-ray bombardments:


Figure 6. a, Experimental corrected X-ray scattering pattern obtained from an orthorhombic hen egg-white lysozyme. This picture has been previously published and described by Faure et al. (1994). It was collected using synchrotron radiation with image plates and has had parasitic scattering due to solvent, air and the capillary subtracted. b, Very diffuse X-ray scattering pattern obtained from the intramolecular protein motion from the full simulation, including all protein degrees of freedom.

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