Gravity and Its relativistic power

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December 15, 2005

Joel Akin

  Gravity has a name and the name is a difficult one to pronounce. Take for example weight. How do you begin with a measurement? Think of a measurement as the ground you are standing on. Now we have to take the weight of the ground, plus your weight, plus the weight of the air and all the things that move on it. Where is your balance and where do you begin to hold the weight in your hands? To try to understand the weight of the earth or the moon or the planets or the stars you have to begin with something. Something small which you might hold in your hands. Take for example a rock. A small pebble maybe an ounce. Now you look at the small rock and you measure its dimensions and find out its round. You roll it around in your palm and you try to think "What if this were the earth and on that earth someone was holding a pebble and to them it weighed in at an ounce. Now follow that thought down to multiple dimensions until you can no longer imagine the smallness of it. How small did it get?

Now you can see the problem of trying to explain to you the difficulties of weighing something and the difficulties of setting a standard. To us wee humans we find the measurements we start with must be standards which will hold weight with other measurers. For example lets say around one of the local stars there were a race of beings called the Longerians. They measured things by the weight of rations. Each time they would eat something it would be measured out and so their measuring would be a meals worth or perhaps two. Thus the weight standard would revolve around how much food you ate and perhaps how much you 'eliminated' from the weight ratio.

Now lets assume that weight held numbers and in the numbers there was something called the positive/negative central charging point. Is there such a place? Well, lets think about it for a moment. We know that gravity is what holds us down but is gravity what we can lift ourselves? In a sense there is a duplication system here. A negative positive reaction. So what lifted gravity up? The answer was our arm muscle. So if our arm muscle can counteract the forces of gravity that means that gravity is weaker then you or I.

Now when we start thinking about the force of gravity and its relativistic strength we run into a difficulty called "Is gravity real".

Now I know that gravity holds me down but I also know I can lift that pebble which was held to the ground by gravity. Thus that pebble's bind to earth was related to its size and its weight. But does that pebble then contribute to the force of gravity or does it counteract it? If I want to pick that pebble up and put it on my shelf or in my pocket does it still contribute to gravity? Even if I find a way of counteracting say a boulder and pick it up I still need some kind of leverage to do so and that means the ground I stand on. If I want to throw that boulder I still must have some kind of arm strength and ground leverage to do so. And in throwing that boulder I know that its own weight will pull it down to earth. Right? Or does the weight of the rock not matter. After all we know there are planets and moons and asteroids that are just bigger boulders. They seem to be floating free in space with no leverage to speak of and nothing to cling to. Do we have a contradiction in thought? Or do we perhaps have a new way of looking at things.

Gravity is a mystery because I know if I have enough strength I can throw that boulder off the earth and out into space. And if I can throw it very, very hard it won't stay in this solar system but will continue on until the next star system. But how hard do I have to throw and do I need leverage to make it so?

Take a rocket for example. We know that rockets, like rocks, go up and up and up into the atmosphere until they have broken free of it but is the air what holds them back and what is the motivating power that pushes them up towards airlessness? In a rockets case it needs a launching point but it also needs a motivating 'arm' to throw it or lift it, push it or pull it. You see the deeper we get into gravity the more mysteries we begin to find. We know that the motivating power is the rocket fuel which pushes it but the earth itself is the pebble the rocket is trying to escape from. This tiny pebble then becomes the pulling force that tries to prevent the rocket from escaping and it is the air that becomes the leverage, in a sense, against which the fuel pushes. Yet we also know that in outer space the rocket still hasn't escaped from earths gravity nor the suns. It would take a lot of motivation to get it to pull itself up but where to? Out there are curtains and pockets and shields full of gravity just longing to pull something towards it. Like a curious planet. Just waiting for the next rock to fall in its lap.

So we know that gravity pulls and it pushes sometimes but does it ever show itself in a way we can understand? If we look at gravity as a box we can find that it holds within it all manner of goodies called thermodynamic motions. Each motion carries itself forward and each move forward carries a product chain we might call weight. If you want weight to hold you down then grab onto the chain and let it pull you in. Hitching a ride with gravity will keep you centered and being centered is perhaps one of the better ways to keep gravity in check. There is much more to gravity we'll be studying as time goes on. Until then go out and throw a rock into a pond and watch it splash down.