A "gravity wave" has finally been detected. Looking at the (rather poor) reporting, I am reminded of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect - all news reporting is bunk. You just don't recognize is as dangerously wrong outside your areas of knowledge. That even goes for the name of the thing. It's not a wave of gravity. That's just silly. It's a ripple in space-time, caused by a gravitic event. It's like tossing a rock in a pond, and calling the resulting waves in the water "stone waves".
Anyways, the first thought I had after hearing about the announcement (well, the second thought really. The first thought was "Cool!") was "Yay! This proves my theory of spacetime liquidity!" And indeed it does. Which led my thoughts back in the direction of my theories on the nature of spacetime, gravity, and motion. Which led to me realizing in a dream this morning that I was on the right track, but for the wrong reasons, because I was stupidly omitting basic truths.
What I have been thinking about is the size of particles of spacetime, and how they shrink in the presence of high gravity and fast (high energy) particles. I've been theorizing that the presence of mass (energy) in a point of spacetime (hereon "point") removed energy from the point, causing it to contract. This comes from over use of the liquid spacetime metaphor. A miss-application, if you will. And then the correct answer hit me. (Yes, in a dream. I have most of my best ideas while dozing or daydreaming.) The mass and energy of the particle isn't removing energy from the point. Spacetime doesn't directly care about such things. What spacetime concerns itself is exactly what its name suggests - space and time. And velocity and gravity are simply time vectors. A form of energy. But they are adding energy to the point, not subtracting from it. Shouldn't adding energy make something bigger?
Doofus! This was the moment of breakthrough. Adding energy to a thing MAKES IT SMALLER! The more energy a wave has, the higher its frequency, the smaller its wavelength. This is why researchers need to create staggeringly stupendous amounts of energy to detect minuscule particles. So, the energy of a point is (at least partially) determined by its time vector content. This solves almost all the problems I've been having with my theory.
The gravity field induces a time vector in points. The higher the gravity, the larger the vector, the greater the energy, the smaller the point becomes. Particles have intrinsic velocity, which is simply a time vector, that works exactly the same way on the points they occupy. This is why gravity doesn't care about the mass of a particle, and affects all particles equally. It isn't working on the mass - it's one time vector adding to another time vector, and producing a resultant unified vector. Gravity decreases the size of a point by adding energy to it. Velocity decreases the size of a point by adding energy to it. This is why both forces (yes, I know, imprecise wording) dilate time ad space.
Spacetime generally acts as a liquid. Individual points move in relation to each other, and have differing diameters in inverse relation to their energy. (Energy is frequency, size is wavelength. they're inverses.) Black holes are where spacetime condenses from a liquid to a solid. (Notionally, the inflationary period of the early universe was when spacetime acted as a gas, and at the moment of creation, spacetime was a plasma, where time and space did not exist, there being only energy.)
So, back to the gravity wave. According to what I've read, the researchers attribute the wave (moving at the speed of light) to the impact of two black holes over a billion light-years away. They estimate that the impact released around three sols of mass/energy. (A sol being the mass of our sun. Yes, I just made that up. But you knew what I meant, didn't you?) Where did this energy come from, and where did it go? The articles I read claimed that the energy was released directly as gravity, causing the wave. To which I snort, and reply 'Bupkis!'
The energy was released as decondensing spacetime. A lot of it. Which immediately shoved the local spacetime rather violently out of its way. Which created a rather strong wave through spacetime, propagating at the maximum possible rate, light speed. The distant ripples of which we detected here on Earth as a quarter-second long series of stretches and contractions of spacetime. Which means that spacetime is fluid, and if it is fluid, that means that at a sufficiently small scale it is granular and mobile. And if it is granular and mobile, that means that spacetime is a thing in and of itself. (If you can deform something, there must be something there to deform, nicht war?) QED
So, to summarize this and previous posts -
Mass (energy) creates a gravitic field. This field propagates infinitely quickly.
Gravity is directional time. The gravitic field strength at any point of spacetime creates a time vector at that point. The vector point in the direction of higher field strength, with a length proportional to the local strength of the gravitic field.
Velocity is directional time. Each particle has a velocity vector, which adds itself to the local point of spacetime to determine its energy, which influences its size. This velocity vector is, in turn, modified by the point's gravity vector to produce a resultant vector by simple summation, with an upper limit on velocity defined by the speed of light.
Any left over energy beyond the light speed limit on a particle adds to the particle's energy in other ways - particularly its spin or frequency. There doesn't seem to be any speed limit to a particle's spin rate, as it's not actually going anywhere.
The relationship between time vectors and perceived time, which is to say the size of a point of spacetime, is defined by the simple equation: velocity squared plus size squared equals the speed of light squared.
The size of a point determines the distance to the next point of spacetime. The greater the distance, the larger space is, and the faster time flows. The less the distance, the more space and time contract.
Particles translate from one point to the next by filling the energy requirement with their time vectors (velocity). The higher the velocity, the more quickly they reach the necessary energy threshold to leave one point and translate to the next. This energy requirement is defined as C, the speed of light. Thus, nothing can move faster than one unit of space per one unit of time.
Points of spacetime are mobile. They have to be, because they shrink and grow based on their energy levels (which is defined by time vectors, plus a baseline energy level that seems to require a universal constant). These points of spacetime interact as a fluid, with larger points pushing against their neighbors more strongly. The odd property of spacetime is that it reacts in a negative way to energy - the more energy a point has, the smaller it becomes. This is because of its fundamental wave nature - higher energy equals smaller wavelength.
The event horizon of a black hole is the point at which liquid spacetime condenses into a solid. We have no experimental data with which to extrapolate the laws of physics from a liquid spacetyime into a solid, so the laws of physics generally break down it this point due to a lack of knowledge. However, since the Pythagorean-like relationship between time energy and the size of space still holds, the interior of a black hole is the domain of complex (imaginary) spacetime. The higher the mass of a black hole, the higher its gravity, the larger the i-component spacetime gets. Thus, a black hole can easily be larger on the inside than it is on the outside, albeit along the imaginary axis of the complex scale.
Things I don't know -
What is the method whereby mass influences the gravitic field? The Higgs particle and field seems to be the best, or at least most popular, answer we currently have. I have no evidence whatsoever, but my intuition is that particle spin creates gravity. And yes, the gravitic field is not limited to the speed of light. Nothing actually moves, after all.
What is the baseline energy of a point of spacetime in the absence of gravity and particles? Does this energy level remain constant over time? What determines this baseline energy?
If the universe is expanding, is it because the points of spacetime are still moving away from each other, or is more spacetime being added at the edges? The continual creation of new points implies that the total energy level of the universe is not fixed. Points moving away from each other implies that they are getting larger, which means that their energy levels are dropping, which means that the total energy level of the universe is not fixed (and that a universal constant is constantly changing). Not to mention that the fundamental constant would be changing everywhere at the same rate, which requires some method of faster-than-light information flow. Which requires some new, arbitrary field just for this purpose. Unless the gravitic field itself doesn't have a baseline strength of zero in the absence of all mass. You know, that just might work. The gravititc field could have a total baseline strength, and this strength at any given point would decrease over time as the universe increases in size, spreading the energy more thinly over a larger area. But what would cause the field to increase in size? Especially as changes in gravity travel infinitely quickly across the field, while the field itself appears to be expanding at the speed of light. Or maybe it's something completely different.
Does anybody ever actually read any of this? I feel that this is an important simplification of previously complex concepts, and I'm trying to put the ideas out in the most clear manner I can. Which, admittedly, probably isn't all that clear. I guess the problem is that I'm not a physicist, and I do this on my own. I'm not at any college or university, and I don't really know any professional physicists. Could one of the half dozen or so people who eventually reads my posts please pass these ideas on the a real physicist, so I could maybe get some feedback? I haven't had a single comment yet. I know it's not everybody's thing, but I can dream that I'm right, and that maybe these ideas will someday help someone understand what seems at first to be a complicated subject.
A good introductory book I can recommend is "How to Teach Relativity to You Dog", by Chad Orzel.
