PROLOGUE
(A brief history of the physics paper on this website)
The paper presented on this website is the result of an insight that occurred to me some twenty-five or so years ago.
I was thinking, one day, about the nature of empty space and the motion of falling objects---something I have had a fascination with since high school.
It was clear to me early on that empty space, the vacuum, is not nothing. Special relativity declares that, for its purposes, there is no need to consider the vacuum to be a physical medium. General relativity, however, makes a physical medium absolutely mandatory. The vacuum, according to general relativity, is a real, physical medium that is capable of being “distorted” by the matter embedded in it. The resulting distortion of space is what we know as the gravitational field.
What, exactly, was meant by the “distortions” of space was never clear to me, however, and so, on that particular day, a surprising thought suddenly hit me: one way in which space could be distorted would be by simply being more dense in some places than in other places. After all, given that the expansion of the entire universe is due to the expansion of space itself, would it not be reasonable to expect the same sort of expansion (or contraction) to happen in localized regions? My thought, then, was that the expansion or contraction of space could occur locally---on a scale of any size---and that those expansions and contractions would manifest as changes in the local density of space.
If, for example, the space surrounding Earth thins out as you get closer to the surface, what would happen to an object falling freely through this thinning out space? It would have to continually increase its speed---it would have to accelerate.
The reason for this is is two-fold. First, it is the metric of a space that defines the way distance through that particular space is measured. If the metric changes, the density of that space would have to change accordingly. Or, conversly, as the density of space changes, the very meaning of "distance" changes with it. Second, the conservation of momentum dictates that a freely falling (inertially moving) object must cover the same distance through space each second. Hence, the falling object must accelerate.
That was the realization. There would be (for some reason---which I didn't know at the time) a trade-off between the local density of space and the velocity of an inertially moving object drifting through the region.
I tried at the time to figure all of this out but couldn't do it. I could find neither a gradient function that would work nor the justification for the basic density/velocity trade-off. The idea wouldn’t leave me alone, though, and periodically over the years, it would bubble back up. Then, in the summer of 2004, with the vast resources of the internet at hand, I tried again and fairly quickly discovered how it could work.
The task was to find a vacuum density gradient function that would produce the right kind of motion. The first attempt used a highly simplified, non-relativistic assumption (where the mass is considered to be constant) and eventually resulted in the "old paper" (no longer posted on this website). The second attempt incorproated the full machinery of general relativity and resulted in the new paper intitled “Cavities In A Lambda Vacuum and The Meaning Matter”.
The justification found in the theory of general relativity is based on the law of conservation of momentum. General relativity demands that, in order to satisfy the conservation of momentum, an inertially moving object must accelerate in order to make up for the way the energy density of space is thinning out. And, most importantly, it must do this as an exact mirror image of the density gradient. The object's momentum---its mass times its velocity---must change as the mirror image of the density gradient.
Looked at from the other direction, if we start out with the observed motion produced by a gravitational field, the density gradient has to be that which will produce the proper motion. Hence, knowing the acceleration, the gradient function is a forgone conclusion: the space, itself, surrounding a massive object must have a density gradient that is a mirror image of the momentum curve of objects drifting through the region.
The paper is surprising in several ways. The main surprise is that the gradient function implies that matter does not distort the space around it but that matter, itself, is simply a distortion of space in the same way that the gravitational field is a distortion of space. Both matter and the gravitational field consist of variations in the density of space with matter being the region of the greatest possible variation: the region where space ends completely. According to the gradient function, the space surrounding a massive particle thins out to zero density in the region supposedly occupied by the particle. The existence of this region of zero density implies rather strongly that matter must be a hole (a cavity) in the fabric of space.
In order to illustrate the basic principle involved, my idealized fluid model ignores all of the properties of an actual fluid except for cohesive forces. If one were to include all of the physical properties of free space including viscosity, the electrical properties (the permitivity and permeability), and wave effects, the picture would be far more complex. Nonetheless, the simplified model allows the basic effects of a density gradient to be clearly revealed. Both matter and gravity are energy density variations in the vacuum.
It’s an inside-out universe where empty space rules. Matter is downgraded to being less than empty space (to being a hole in space) and gravity is the result of the way the hole changes the density of the surrounding space.
Do I consider these ideas to be realistic? Yes … at least until someone (politely, I hope) points out the errors in my reasoning.
I have a bachelor level degree in physics with a minor in mathematics. I worked for a number of years as an aerospace physicist doing research in atmospheric physics but have never worked professionally in the arena of theoretical physics. So, in this endeavor, I am very much an amateur. I do this as a recreation and hobby because I find it interesting. I am seventy years old and have studied theoretical physics on my own for many years and consider my understanding of these things to be fairly good.
I hope that you, the reader, will find the ideas presented in this paper to be interesting, provocative and perhaps useful. Please feel free to let me know what you think.
Respectfully,
Douglas C. George
