Ozy and Millie
Wisdom for short attention spans.
Over at my home station
- Storefront! September 6, 2019So the Phoebe and Her Unicorn Amazon storefront, with apparel, backpacks, bags, and cushions, is open! We still have shirts on Topatoco, too. Read more →
- Happy to announce this book September 6, 2019So I’ve illustrated a picture book! Its co-author is young Maddox Lyons, a 12-year-old trans boy, and it’s about a little trans boy trying to be understood by his parents and the world. I think this is a wonderful project and I hope it opens some minds! It’s available to preorder now. Read more →
- Apparel! May 29, 2019So there’s a shirt on Topatoco now! Read more →
- So I screwed up my PO box December 12, 2018If you’ve gotten fan mail back, it’s my fault. I failed to keep my PO box paid up, and I know some people got mail back. I’m really sorry! Feel free to send stuff along to the new address: Dana Simpson PO Box 6347 Santa Barbara, CA 93160-6347 Again, I’m really sorry for the inconvenience! […]
- The unicorn of Today July 9, 2018So the Today Show had Amazon.com list some summer reading books for young reluctant readers. I’m #8! I’m almost more excited that Breaking Cat News, by my friend Georgia Dunn, is #2. Go Georgia! Go kitties! Read more →
A theory disproven by Einstein! Newton thought gravity was a force. Relativity showed him wrong.
Are you sure you’re not thinking about time?
Um, what? Gravity is indeed a force, in fact it’s one of the four fundamental forces.
I’ve wondered if it’s the absence of most energy in matter due to the casimir effect. Vaccuum is filled with particle-antiparticle pairs that disappear, with energy as the result. So, since matter does not have the energy of vacuum due to the casimir effect, wouldn’t the energy of vacuum tend to “push” matter, sort of like water on submerged rocks?
You’re postulating an interesting idea but you’ll have to reconcile it with Hawking radiation which depends on the interaction between gravity and the Casmir effect.
General Relativity has it that gravity is the result of the curvature of space-time around concentrations of mass; that curvature tends to seek a minimum, and the concentration of mass prevents it from achieving that minimum. The attraction between two massive bodies is their mutual curvatures attempting to reach minimal curvature within their vicinity. Casimir force on two parallel plates near each other in a vacuum result from the inequality in the sum total sizes of virtual particle-pair formation and annihilation paths, or vacuum fluctuations, between the plates as compared with the sum total sizes of those paths outside the plates, and is unrelated to their mass or to gravity, but only to their size and the distance between them.
In the end, it’s all geometry, but it’s applied differently depending on the force in question.
Vacuum is indeed considered to be full of particle-antiparticle pairs, but that does not make it a net producer of energy. Energy is released when the pair annihilates, but that simply returns the energy that was ‘condensed’ to form the pair in the first place.
perhaps this is irrelevant, but the theory of relativity was dis-proven when researchers (i think in Australia) found variances in the speed of light under certain conditions…
It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say it was disproven; the part of it that contends nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum was called into question when neutrinos observed at CERN appeared to be traveling faster than the speed of light. I think the results have yet to be reproduced, but I’m not sure about that. Mind you, that wouldn’t invalidate the entire theory, it just suggests that, like Newton’s Laws, it may be insufficient to explain everything we observe.
The apparent super-fast neutrinos were actually due to equipment and timing errors between CERN (where they were produced) and Gran Sasso in Italy (where they were detected). Subsequent experiments using different detectors continue to clock neutrinos at their normal relativistic speeds. Sorry, Fox, relativity is still valid.
It will undoubtedly be found at some point in the future that Einstein’s Relativity is an incomplete special-case description of something bigger, but that wouldn’t make it invalid within its special case. Newton’s Laws are like that now: we know they aren’t a complete description, but for most ‘normal’ applications the difference is too small to be relevant.
There is no gravity. The Earth sucks.
In theory, everything is a theory.
a game theory?
I actually have the gravitation-is-just-a-theory bumper sticker on my car.