Gravity as a conservative force

[Mr.Umez]

Lots of good points here by everyone!

So John, I can understand your analogy of weights with different torques being similiar to a windmill. I think that is acceptable also as long as you keep the comparisons very loose. As others have stated above, the analogy will quickly fall apart if you use it for any finer points.

To explain the 'finer points' you won't go wrong with using Newton's basic concepts of mass, force, and momentum, and how your device uses the force of gravity to keep the wheel going. Unless a working wheel proves an exception to Newton's laws, no one is going to argue with that.

Also, the concept of energy is a post-Newton idea, so you can shatter those laws without disproving Newton. You just can't mess with Newton, he's the man, my hero, the one you can't say anything bad about without me laughing at you, then slapping you silly for heresy!

:)

[ken_behrendt]

Fletcher wrote:

You might want to reflect on why PE = mgh (vertical distance only) & see if you can refute it with the same passion as your 4th law.

Refute it?! Without that relationship, it would have been impossible to use Bessler's 4th Law of Motion to rationalize the ability of a chronically overbalanced gravity wheel to output kinetic energy to both accelerate itself and perform work external to itself. That expression for gravitational potential energy is so important that I would not want to tamper with it.


John wrote:

In the end what matters is how we explain Bessler's wheels without altering any of the laws of physics, which I think in our hearts we know is necessary. We cannot say that because Bessler's wheel worked we must change the laws of physics, but if we can somehow slip in an explanation which does not ruffle the feathers of our learned tutors, then perhaps we may have achieved something.

Again, I can only state my belief that Bessler's 4th Law of Motion can satisfactorily provide this explanation. This new law of motion does not violate any of the accepted laws of physics or motion and manages to provide an explanation of the process the rotating weights undergo within such a wheel. Any explanation of how weights could move around a closed path, yet continuously lose gravitational potential energy (and the rest mass responsible for it) is sure to interest our "learned" tutors.


ken

[PIMAN]

Maybe a tad out of the box, but an interesting theory I recall reading a while back proposed that gravity was simply an effect of temperature . It pondered that in the same way water attracts and condenses onto a cold beverage on a hot day, the temperature difference between matter and space may be responsible for the force of gravity. At first I thought "Whaaa?", and I replied "No, not just yet... give this a chance." Then I did some more thinking and I said to myself "Well, I suppose it's...." and I interrupted, "Ah Ah Ah, let it stew some more." So I did. Here's some points I came up with that support the idea:

Absolute zero is not achievable in matter. Even in the deepest regions of space, there are slight temperature gradients in matter caused by background radiation. Hence...

All matter exists at a higher temperature than the surrounding "vacuum" space. This would assign the force of gravity to ALL matter, as seems to be the case.

Light travels through "empty" space without producing heat. Light is absorbed or reflected by matter, always producing heat.

Space is almost a perfect vacuum, much like a Kirby.

A powerful vacuum can be created using temperature gradients.

Space being a vacuum, why is our atmosphere not sucked into oblivion?

Since the sun obviously heats the earth, why is the core molten and the crust solid? Should it not be the other way around? Why glaciers on mountaintops but a river in the Grand Canyon.

Does a planet rotate in deep space, or is this a light/dark effect of the sun's temperature heating one hemisphere, like a radiometer?

Are solar systems attracted by magnetism or repulsed? Could it be that they are actually repulsed magnetically but attracted by the sun's heat? Could our molten core attract the moon? Could the moons temperature cause the tides?

The more I thought about it, the more I agreed "It makes more sense than string theory" to which I snapped "Ya, well string theory makes no sense at all!" and to that I/we concluded "As a 'matter' of fact, neither does gravity."

I will simmer on this a while longer.

PIMAN

[Fletcher]

I have a feeling that everyone will disagree with me again and I do feel that this might be because I am not putting my point across clearly enough, and for that I apologise.

In the end what matters is how we explain Bessler's wheels without altering any of the laws of physics, which I think in our hearts we know is necessary. We cannot say that because Bessler's wheel worked we must change the laws of physics, but if we can somehow slip in an explanation which does not ruffle the feathers of our learned tutors, then perhaps we may have achieved something.

John Collins

I don't think anyone hearterly disagree's with you John & if they do it is not just for the sake of it. It is simply a case of refinement of our interpretation of the ultimate simulation we live in daily, the real world.

The discussions we have help define the problem so that we can hope to find a solution form a better understanding of how things work & interact.

FWIW I can happily live with the analogies you have given. As you say they provide a stress free way to view gravity as a conservative force yet still contain the hint of being able output work. In this you have the 'whip hand' so to speak :) with a path forward thru the maze defined & your build well under way.

I too believe that when the answer is revealed that the wheel will make clever use of known physics that won't unduly ruffle academic feathers. A sobering thought.

[Thomas]

At what speed does gravity travel? Apparently, it's unknown, at least at the present time. I guess my real question is why don't we have the answer.

If we have an object and we know its weight, its shape, the distance we drop it, the density of the atmosphere at various known altitudes, and the time it takes to reach its terminal velocity, couldn't we use this information to calculate the speed of gravity?

Obviously the answer is no, otherwise some one would have done it long ago. But why can't we? What information is missing?

I fear someone smarter than I (many on this discussion board) will set me straight on this one.

Tom

[jim_mich]

Many people can run an eight minute mile so they're running at 7.5 MPH. But they can't push a car at that speed!

When looking at planets and stars there is a time delay. We see the sun as it was 8 minutes and 19 seconds ago. If the sun exploded we could party or pray for 8 minutes before turning into crispy critters. If gravity traveled at the speed of light then planet orbits would show this delayed affect. Astronomers see no measurable delayed affect. So gravity is either instantaneous or so much faster than light at to be undetectable. I favor that it is much faster than light speed but not instantaneous.

[graham]

I saw a program on tv the other day and they were investigating gravity.
They did an animation showing the sun and all the planets orbiting the sun.
They envisioned that if the sun were to suddely disappear, a loss of its gravitational pull would emanate like a wave moving at the speed of light . Mercury first, followed by Venus and then Earth etc etc would one by one fly off into space .

So they had gravity moving at the speed of light .

Graham

[Jon J Hutton]

I agree Jim,

The solar eclipse test
Yet another manifestation of the difference between the propagation speeds of gravity and light can be seen in the case of solar eclipses (Van Flandern, 1993, pp. 49-50). The Moon, being relatively nearby and sharing the EarthÂ’s 30 km/s orbital motion around the Sun, has relatively little aberration (0.7 arc seconds, due to the MoonÂ’s 1 km/s orbital speed around Earth). The Sun, as mentioned earlier, has an aberration of just over 20 arc seconds. It takes the Moon about 38 seconds of time to move 20 arc seconds on the sky relative to the Sun. Since the observed times of eclipses of the Sun by the Moon agree with predicted times to within a couple of seconds, we can use the orbits of the Sun and the Moon near times of maximum solar eclipse to compare the time of predicted gravitational maximum with the time of visible maximum eclipse.



In practice, the maximum gravitational perturbation by the Sun on the orbit of the Moon near eclipses may be taken as the time when the lunar and solar longitudes are equal. Details of the procedure are provided in the reference cited. We find that maximum eclipse occurs roughly 38±1.9 seconds of time, on average, before the time of gravity maximum. If gravity is a propagating force, this 3-body (Sun-Moon-Earth) test implies that gravity propagates at least 20 times faster than light.

[Michael]

I'm glad John has started this thread because thinking about relativities take on light and the comparision to gravitational acceleration has gotten me to thinking, maybe light doesn't travel at all, maybe it's an illusion, and only a partial take on reality that we all believe.

[Vic Hays]

So gravity is either instantaneous or so much faster than light at to be undetectable. I favor that it is much faster than light speed but not instantaneous.

Two scientists have claimed to measure the speed of gravity at the speed of light, but there is some question as to whether they actually measured what they thought they were measuring.

Gravity may travel at quantum speed which has been estimated at up to 90 times the speed of light. Perhaps it is even instantaneous. It seems irrational to have the existence of anything that can travel instantaneously, but then the action of entwined pairs is not rational. Einstein called it spooky physics. Perhaps it is distance that does not exist.

[Wheeler]

John
Your post has cleared up for me what you were trying to say.
This thread has a good amount of science and thoughtfulness put into it.

From my experiments gravity is a simple flow of energy.
It can be redirected.
No need to consider it with the speed of light unless you wish to overcomplicate the whole thing.
Science has simply overlooked the key to finding details.
Thanks for a fine thread.
We need solid science in the forum.

[jim_mich]

OK, so gravity propogating at somewhere between 20 and 90 times the speed of light seems about right to me. Its so fast as to be very hard to measure.

Back to why its so difficult to harness gravity. When wind blows or a river flows the air or water molecules are carriers of energy. The energy was imparted to them earlier by the sun's energy warming the air causing air currents to flow, or warming water causing it to evaporate and condense as rain. Then gravity takes its turn and pushes the molecules back down.

So how does nature do this? Heat from the sun warms the molecules and they spread apart making them lighter. Then the heat is lost and the molecules become denser and fall. Can this be done in some way with weights? Not the heating and cooling part. Can the weights be made thinner or denser (closer together and farther apart) around the wheel in such a way to cause out of balance? Remember "Radius of Gyration"?

[Fletcher]

I haven't really thought to much about it but I do know that scientists are right now trying to detect gravity waves. They have set up apparatus that should detect gravity waves formed by exploding supernova (not the group ;) should they exist. If gravity ripples are detectable it should lend weight to a couple of things. First that gravity is or is not instantaneous i.e. the waves will be detected b4 the observations are seen in a telescope, & secondly at what speed gravity travels at based on the same information & any advance or lag between the observations.

Of course they may never detect any gravity waves because they don't exist or at least do not conform to wave mechanics like light which exhibits characteristics of both wave & particle physics which gravity might do also.

My hunch is that it is neither i.e quantifiable in that way. I know I tend to view it as cause & effect i.e. we have 2 bodies with mass therefore they have gravitational attraction proportional to their masses & distance apart. Perhaps I am viewing it the wrong way but other than that I am no closer to resolving in my mind just what it might be or how fast or indeed instantaneous it might be. I'll just have to read the papers to see if they get any results to the experiments.

[Thomas]

Ok, here's another one. If gravity is something that is on the move, where does it go and when does it stop?

If the earth was a solid mass, and we could drill a hole through it a mile wide, right to the other side, what would happen if we jumped in the hole? Would we stop in the center and float? Would we suddenly stop or momentarily oscillate back and fourth when we reached the center? Would we be compressed to the size of a marble?

I know I'm not being realistic, but I'm trying to see if anyone else has thought about the affects of gravity, beyond the surface of the earth.

Tom

[Wheeler]

Tom
This is a very good question.

Ok, here's another one. If gravity is something that is on the move, where does it go and when does it stop?

If the earth was a solid mass, and we could drill a hole through it a mile wide, right to the other side, what would happen if we jumped in the hole? Would we stop in the center and float? Would we suddenly stop or momentarily oscillate back and fourth when we reached the center? Would we be compressed to the size of a marble?

You are looking at the physics and questioning it.
I found that I could find answers by going back and asking basic questions like you are.
Do not be intimidated.