We are going to be sharing the highlights of a half-century journey of discovery of The New Physics, in a way that anyone can understand. Luckily, you won’t have to wait 50 years for the results.
In this post, I am going to share how this all got started.
Back in the late 1970’s my daughter (she would have been 4 or 5 years old at the time) exclaimed to me that all these roads were “soooo stupid!” because there was all that space in the sky; why couldn’t we just float around in “airchairs” and then we wouldn’t have to pave all these roads and we could just live in parklands and forests, and save all that concrete and asphalt. I agreed with her that this was a really great idea, but we just didn’t understand enough about how gravity works to do that yet. She asked me if I would work on that, and I said I would.
What we didn’t understand, at that time, was what causes gravitational attraction. And if we didn’t understand it’s cause, our chances of overcoming it were nil.
You might be thinking Newton understood gravitation, because he discovered the “Law of Gravitation”. I didn’t go into the details with my daughter at the time, but having worked as a physicist I knew that Newton, who discovered the Law of Gravitation, was very troubled by gravity, because although it was clear to him that any two objects attract each other with predictable force, he could not explain why they should. Take any two objects, and put them out in space where there are no other larger objects nearby, and they will drift directly towards each other. (By isolating the objects in space in our mental experiment, we are avoiding pesky interfering effects like friction, or other gravitational fields.) Newton figured out a formula that expressed how fast they would drift towards each other, but not why they would. (I won’t state the formula now, to keep my promise to keep the math out of the way, but it is useful to know that the more massive either object, the faster they drift, and the closer their centers-of-mass are together, the faster they drift.)
If you are among the scientific community, you might be thinking that with the discovery of General Relativity, Einstein explained what caused gravitation. The common view is that the presence of an object in space “curves” space in a way that causes objects to “fall” towards each other at the rate expressed by Newton’s formula. But this only kicks the can down the road, leaving us with the equivalent question: why or even how does an object “curve” space?
So, sometime back in the late 1970’s at my daughter’s request I started to think about this problem. Gravity is all around us. Really, we ought to understand what causes it.
Spoiler alert: I figured this out, and I am going to share this with you across the next several posts. And in subsequent posts, I will share with you the answers to the other mysteries of physics this insight unlocks. However, I have not discovered anti-gravity: a way to make an airchair. Now that I know what causes gravity, I see just how difficult it would be to do this. Doesn’t mean it can’t be done, just that I haven’t figured it out yet. Once you know what causes gravity, maybe you will figure out how to make an airchair. If you do, please let me know….