Why does the stock market keep rising, setting record after record? The economy really isn't that good. All the experts agree that most stocks are wildly overpriced, compared to the performance of the companies the stocks represent. The global economy is showing sure and certain signs of a slow down. So why does the market keep rising?
Simple. Supply and demand. In this case, the supply of money and demand for stocks keeps growing, while the actual number of stocks stays relatively stagnant. (Yes, this is a bit oversimplified, but still effectively true.) People, millions of people, have money taken out of their paychecks every two weeks or so. This money is transferred into their retirement accounts, whatever form they might take. This money is then managed by brokers (who take their cut) and invested in stocks, bonds, and money market accounts. Of these, stocks are the traditional money makers. The bond market is terrible, and has been for years - one of the effects of very low interest rates. Money markets aren't much better, since we're printing dollars by the container ship load. So that leaves stocks.
Every two weeks, a new deluge of money hits the brokerage houses. Who must then invest this money in order to justify their very existence. So they mostly buy stocks with it. What stocks do they buy? The stocks that other brokerage houses are willing to sell to make a profit for their investors. So the price goes up, and all the brokers make a little money on each trade, plus a little more in management and maintenance fees.
And two weeks later (every week, really, since companies aren't all on the same pay cycle) it all happens again. And again. And again. Driving the prices ever higher, with dollars seeking stocks.
When does the market go down? When the brokers get spooked by something, whether it's a real threat or not. They're a bit like horses that way. When they get spooked, they run away, selling stocks to take the lowest loss, or to lock in a long-term gain. This is when the short sellers make their fortunes.
But the flow of money into the system keeps coming, floating all boats. The dip ends, and the market rallies. The prices stabilize, and then raise back up again.
When will the market start going down for a long term? When money starts leaving the system, by people withdrawing their funds from their accounts. Or when debts force companies, especially banks and other financial institutions, into bankruptcy. That's when money really gets erased from the system.
Our elders have their pension funds, paid by their companies. We have retirement accounts, dependent upon the market. Our children have debts.
Nothing lasts forever, and the current trend of rising markets must eventually end. When that happens, there will be a panic of selling and profit taking, driving the market prices down even faster. This is how the system works.
The stock market, as a whole, has very little to do with the actual financial health of the companies whose stocks are traded. It operates on the flow of money, and rumors driving the confident yet skittish herds of brokers this way and that. Plus the occasional predator preying on the herds, and the parasites taking their drops of blood. It is a human institution, after all.
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Why gravity is so weak
Gravity - it's a real downer. It's a drag all the time. But it's fantastically weak. A small refrigerator magnet can hold up a paperclip against the gravitic pull of THE ENTIRE PLANET EARTH.
And nobody knows why. Why is gravity so weak? How weak is it? Gravity is about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that's forty zeros, 10^40) times weaker than electromagnetism.
Please notice that that figure is in the same ballpark as the reduced Planck's constant (about 10^-34).
Please also notice that gravity, seemingly alone of all forces, actively operates in the realm of complex numbers. Imaginary space, direction, and energy. Which implies that space, itself, exists on the complex field, not just our real number plane. We just experience the real number portion of it. Maybe that's why we can't explain over 95% of the energy of the universe.
So, if gravity operates equally across all of quantised complex space, you would only expect something less than 10^-34 of that force to align exactly with the real number plane. It's simple probability. No extra, tiny, curled up dimensions required. Simply advanced math and a different perspective.
So, gravity is weak because it operates in complex space, in real-number space. We exist and interact solely with real number space and phenomena. Hence, gravity seems weak to us.
Corollary - What if 'dark matter' is really 'imaginary matter'? Matter existing off the real number plane of normal physics, and interacting solely along the imaginary plane? Imaginary space, direction, time and energy? That would make sense of dark energy, why it affects gravity (and our gravity affects it), and why it doesn't seem to interact at all with normal, real number, everyday existence.
Fun fact - when something falls into a black hole, it crosses over from the real number plane of physics to the complex field at the same moment it crosses the event horizon. Does the speed of light have any meaning in the complex plane? Or does it just apply here, in ordinary real-number space? Black holes aren't dissipating with any noticeable speed, so the vast majority of the energy must be retained. Dark matter seems to congregate around normal matter galaxies, so they are probably feeling the pull of black holes, too. But this isn't proof. Of course, by the nature of things we can probably never have real proof, but it's fun to think about.
I hereby label the positive imaginary axis of greater reality 'Heaven' and the negative axis 'Hell'. They are all around us, all the time. They're just set the width of one thought to the side, slightly out of phase with what we think of as reality.
And nobody knows why. Why is gravity so weak? How weak is it? Gravity is about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that's forty zeros, 10^40) times weaker than electromagnetism.
Please notice that that figure is in the same ballpark as the reduced Planck's constant (about 10^-34).
Please also notice that gravity, seemingly alone of all forces, actively operates in the realm of complex numbers. Imaginary space, direction, and energy. Which implies that space, itself, exists on the complex field, not just our real number plane. We just experience the real number portion of it. Maybe that's why we can't explain over 95% of the energy of the universe.
So, if gravity operates equally across all of quantised complex space, you would only expect something less than 10^-34 of that force to align exactly with the real number plane. It's simple probability. No extra, tiny, curled up dimensions required. Simply advanced math and a different perspective.
So, gravity is weak because it operates in complex space, in real-number space. We exist and interact solely with real number space and phenomena. Hence, gravity seems weak to us.
Corollary - What if 'dark matter' is really 'imaginary matter'? Matter existing off the real number plane of normal physics, and interacting solely along the imaginary plane? Imaginary space, direction, time and energy? That would make sense of dark energy, why it affects gravity (and our gravity affects it), and why it doesn't seem to interact at all with normal, real number, everyday existence.
Fun fact - when something falls into a black hole, it crosses over from the real number plane of physics to the complex field at the same moment it crosses the event horizon. Does the speed of light have any meaning in the complex plane? Or does it just apply here, in ordinary real-number space? Black holes aren't dissipating with any noticeable speed, so the vast majority of the energy must be retained. Dark matter seems to congregate around normal matter galaxies, so they are probably feeling the pull of black holes, too. But this isn't proof. Of course, by the nature of things we can probably never have real proof, but it's fun to think about.
I hereby label the positive imaginary axis of greater reality 'Heaven' and the negative axis 'Hell'. They are all around us, all the time. They're just set the width of one thought to the side, slightly out of phase with what we think of as reality.
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
Let's talk about time
Time. We all know it. Or do we? There really isn't a good definition of time that doesn't refer to time. Relativity shows that time does not pass at the same rate from all perspectives.
Let's start with some basics. Time only goes forward. You can't go backwards in time. You can, however, stop in time. Photons don't recognize the passage of time. They don't recognize the existence of space, either, so it all averages out.
Why is this? Think of time as a vector. It has a starting point, a length, and it points in a direction. If you change the length, that's just changing the length, not making it go a different direction. If you rotate the vector, you just change the direction it's going. It's still going from now to when. It's just pointed in a different direction. Even if you reverse the direction, it still points from now to when. It's not going backwards. Change the starting point, and you're just moving the vector around.
You can't go backwards because the vector always points to somewhere else, or to nowhere at all. It can't point from it's starting point to somewhere before that point - there is no such place. Unless you want to speculate that the imaginary plane of existence counts as real, and that the length and direction of the vector are written as complex numbers. Then you might be onto something. But without that, in our real universe working with real numbers, it's not valid.
Why do time and space contract when something moves more quickly, or when experiencing a greater force of gravity? Because if they didn't, causality would explode. For more on that, go read up on general and special relativity. How does this work? Go check out my previous blog post, and some of the earlier ones on the subject. Summary - Spacetime is an energy field. All other energy fields (electromagnetism, mass, etc.) draw from this field. Momentum is a highly local (Planck length or less - my guess is 1/2 Planck length) distortion of the field around a particle. Velocity is the sine of the slope of the energy gradient. Time and space perception are the cosine of the slope. Notice that perceived passage of time is at ninety degrees to the passage of space. Thus, the fourth dimension is at right angles to the third. Nifty, ain't it?
Is there a universal time? Yes. There must be. Proof: Using relativity, photons do not experience the passage of time. Therefore, they do not move, they do not change, they exist in a timeless (literally) now. However, we can see that this is utter nonsense. Photons are created, move along predictable paths, influenced by the natural forces, change according to natural law, and eventually perish when they are absorbed upon interacting with a particle. (Except the ones that escape into empty space forever - a possibility.) If no time passes, how can the photon change? A photon obviously can and does change, or red and blue shifts wouldn't happen. So, there must be a universal tick affecting them as they move along, completely oblivious to what is happening to them.
Proof two - a particle entering a black hole experiences accelerations and gravitational shifts to perceived time. At the moment the particle reaches the event horizon, time stops for it. But the particle obvious continues on into the black hole, spending only an infinitesimal moment of 'real' time crossing the threshold at the speed of light. How can it do this if there is no time for it to happen? Universal tick.
Photons move at the rate of one smallest unit of space per one tick of the universal clock. Please note that this is movement, velocity, momentum. It is unrelated to spin, except that a whole (or, rather, half) number of rotations must happen per tick to keep everything even. No, I can't prove it, but it makes sense and seems to agree with known properties. (Particles spin faster than the speed of light. Sort of. It's OK, because they are really tiny, and they're not actually going anywhere. Divide really fast speed by essentially no distance, and it all evens out.)
Let's start with some basics. Time only goes forward. You can't go backwards in time. You can, however, stop in time. Photons don't recognize the passage of time. They don't recognize the existence of space, either, so it all averages out.
Why is this? Think of time as a vector. It has a starting point, a length, and it points in a direction. If you change the length, that's just changing the length, not making it go a different direction. If you rotate the vector, you just change the direction it's going. It's still going from now to when. It's just pointed in a different direction. Even if you reverse the direction, it still points from now to when. It's not going backwards. Change the starting point, and you're just moving the vector around.
You can't go backwards because the vector always points to somewhere else, or to nowhere at all. It can't point from it's starting point to somewhere before that point - there is no such place. Unless you want to speculate that the imaginary plane of existence counts as real, and that the length and direction of the vector are written as complex numbers. Then you might be onto something. But without that, in our real universe working with real numbers, it's not valid.
Why do time and space contract when something moves more quickly, or when experiencing a greater force of gravity? Because if they didn't, causality would explode. For more on that, go read up on general and special relativity. How does this work? Go check out my previous blog post, and some of the earlier ones on the subject. Summary - Spacetime is an energy field. All other energy fields (electromagnetism, mass, etc.) draw from this field. Momentum is a highly local (Planck length or less - my guess is 1/2 Planck length) distortion of the field around a particle. Velocity is the sine of the slope of the energy gradient. Time and space perception are the cosine of the slope. Notice that perceived passage of time is at ninety degrees to the passage of space. Thus, the fourth dimension is at right angles to the third. Nifty, ain't it?
Is there a universal time? Yes. There must be. Proof: Using relativity, photons do not experience the passage of time. Therefore, they do not move, they do not change, they exist in a timeless (literally) now. However, we can see that this is utter nonsense. Photons are created, move along predictable paths, influenced by the natural forces, change according to natural law, and eventually perish when they are absorbed upon interacting with a particle. (Except the ones that escape into empty space forever - a possibility.) If no time passes, how can the photon change? A photon obviously can and does change, or red and blue shifts wouldn't happen. So, there must be a universal tick affecting them as they move along, completely oblivious to what is happening to them.
Proof two - a particle entering a black hole experiences accelerations and gravitational shifts to perceived time. At the moment the particle reaches the event horizon, time stops for it. But the particle obvious continues on into the black hole, spending only an infinitesimal moment of 'real' time crossing the threshold at the speed of light. How can it do this if there is no time for it to happen? Universal tick.
Photons move at the rate of one smallest unit of space per one tick of the universal clock. Please note that this is movement, velocity, momentum. It is unrelated to spin, except that a whole (or, rather, half) number of rotations must happen per tick to keep everything even. No, I can't prove it, but it makes sense and seems to agree with known properties. (Particles spin faster than the speed of light. Sort of. It's OK, because they are really tiny, and they're not actually going anywhere. Divide really fast speed by essentially no distance, and it all evens out.)
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
Gravity isn't what you think it is.
I've spent a lot of the last few years learning about the principles of relativity, which leads to study of gravity and quantum physics. I will admit I am not a professional, trained physicist. I passed the introductory classes in college, but that was (mumble) years ago. I am, however, an interested and intelligent layman, and a military trained (and quite successful) analyst. I am also quite bright, but not quite at the level of genius I have seen in a few others. That being said, I have an idea about gravity that seems to tie all the loose threads of gravity, dark energy, and quantum physics together. It's really quite simple and elegant, and just different enough to be off the beaten track of every day physics.
Gravity is not an attractive force. It is a repulsive force. It does not originate from matter, but from empty space. Stop laughing. I'll explain once you wipe the tears from your eyes.
Postulate an additional energy field. Call it spacetime. Give it a large, positive value at every point. Quantize this energy field. Now, from spacetime, instantaneously subtract the energy of all other fields. Then spread that draw out in a root-square fashion, also instantaneously and infinitely. (All quantum fields act instantaneously and infinitely, by the way. Physicists don't like to talk about it.)
There you have it. Gravity. What? You don't see it? It's an artifact of the curvature of the energy levels of spacetime. As the energy level slopes down, a particle would move in that direction and gain energy. A particle moving up the energy gradient would lose energy. We see this effect all the time, and call it gravity.
Momentum (velocity) is explained as a particle's local energy disruption. In a sphere about the particle, imagine a lower energy level in the direction of travel, neutral energy levels ninety degrees to that direction, and higher energies opposed to the direction of travel. These energy levels interact with the ambient energy of spacetime to create the interaction of gravity with motion. It also explains the blue and redshifts of photons, as they gain or lose energy climbing out of the local energy field of the particle which created them, and the ambient energy field of spacetime. The local field interacts with spacetime to alter the local field. (Other interactions also can alter it, such as the effects of all the other forces through other fields.)
What about relativistic effects? Oh, that's easy. Velocity (measured against the speed of light as 1) is computed as the sine of the slope about any particular particle, including its own energy distortion. Time and space dilation is computed quite simply as the cosine of this same angle.
That's it. That's all there is. It explains everything in one simple, elegant package. It computed gravity effects in terms of energy usage. It explains the exact matching of gravity and velocity based relativistic effects. It explains red and blue shift. It explains the source of all quantum effects - all other fields must draw their energy from spacetime, which is itself quantized. It explains the effects of dark energy. It even explains the inflationary period after the big bang, if you think about it long and hard enough. Gravity waves are simply waves propagating through spacetime, moving along at the normal restrictions of light speed given to any wave in a quantum field. (See? Physicists don't like to talk about the field propagation duality of infinite fields with restricted waves.)
Please ponder and discuss amongst yourselves, and let me know any holes you find in the comments. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.
Gravity is not an attractive force. It is a repulsive force. It does not originate from matter, but from empty space. Stop laughing. I'll explain once you wipe the tears from your eyes.
Postulate an additional energy field. Call it spacetime. Give it a large, positive value at every point. Quantize this energy field. Now, from spacetime, instantaneously subtract the energy of all other fields. Then spread that draw out in a root-square fashion, also instantaneously and infinitely. (All quantum fields act instantaneously and infinitely, by the way. Physicists don't like to talk about it.)
There you have it. Gravity. What? You don't see it? It's an artifact of the curvature of the energy levels of spacetime. As the energy level slopes down, a particle would move in that direction and gain energy. A particle moving up the energy gradient would lose energy. We see this effect all the time, and call it gravity.
Momentum (velocity) is explained as a particle's local energy disruption. In a sphere about the particle, imagine a lower energy level in the direction of travel, neutral energy levels ninety degrees to that direction, and higher energies opposed to the direction of travel. These energy levels interact with the ambient energy of spacetime to create the interaction of gravity with motion. It also explains the blue and redshifts of photons, as they gain or lose energy climbing out of the local energy field of the particle which created them, and the ambient energy field of spacetime. The local field interacts with spacetime to alter the local field. (Other interactions also can alter it, such as the effects of all the other forces through other fields.)
What about relativistic effects? Oh, that's easy. Velocity (measured against the speed of light as 1) is computed as the sine of the slope about any particular particle, including its own energy distortion. Time and space dilation is computed quite simply as the cosine of this same angle.
That's it. That's all there is. It explains everything in one simple, elegant package. It computed gravity effects in terms of energy usage. It explains the exact matching of gravity and velocity based relativistic effects. It explains red and blue shift. It explains the source of all quantum effects - all other fields must draw their energy from spacetime, which is itself quantized. It explains the effects of dark energy. It even explains the inflationary period after the big bang, if you think about it long and hard enough. Gravity waves are simply waves propagating through spacetime, moving along at the normal restrictions of light speed given to any wave in a quantum field. (See? Physicists don't like to talk about the field propagation duality of infinite fields with restricted waves.)
Please ponder and discuss amongst yourselves, and let me know any holes you find in the comments. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.
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