I really need to give my model of the laws of motion a name. The potential energy field is a good description, but not really a catchy name. How about “objective gravity”? Because that’s what it is. There’s really nothing relative about it. The strange effects of relativity are, after all, subjective. Of course, we can’t escape from our own subjective experience to see it from outside, so there’s that. But still, it’s handy to have a model that works well and actually makes sense when you look at it.
Once again, the potential energy field with a couple of particles doing their thing.
Something I noticed this morning was how the model obviates the need for dark matter (in most cases). Dark matter was theorized because neither Newton nor Einstein can account for the rate of rotation near the outer edges of galaxies. The stars are just moving too fast for the amount of matter visible in the galaxy. It’s as if either there were extra, invisible matter, or the force of gravity was stronger than predicted at the weak field limit.
Well, guess what our simple model does? It always predicts a slightly stronger force of attraction than Newton, and usually predicts a force similar to Einstein’s general relativity. The exception being adjacent to or inside the event horizon of a black hole, where objective gravity doesn’t have any infinities or singularities. In other words, it predicts a sensible and sane universe. (Don’t forget the potential energy field has a bottom that you can’t go below, just like it has a top you can’t rise above.) But how does it predict an extra or flattened force at the weak limit?
See those particles? They’re not points. They have a fixed size. Every particle has the same size, no matter what it is, no matter its mass, no matter its speed. It’s the only way the math works, and the only way observations show it can work. We know that gravity effects everything equally.
It’s the physical size of a particle that makes all the difference. Newton and Einstein both base their theories on particle being truly point-like. Einstein adds in a fudge factor that I have previously shown is an approximation. Objective gravity doesn’t use the tangent at a point - it uses the gradient across a volume. This will always give a slightly greater force than the tangent at the center point. Unless there is no force at all, of course, in which case it (unlike general relativity) correctly predicts exactly zero.
But wait, there’s more!
That volume takes time to move. The gradient is being constantly integrated as the particle moves along. That means that the slower you go, the more time the same points in the gradient have to influence your motion. Thus, the force of gravity effectively flattens out at the slow/weak limit, even though there is no change in the inverse-square curve. That’s something a point-like particle could never do.
The predictive power of a simple diagram never ceases to amaze me.
