Gravity:
The Ultimate Force by
Roger Munday
Introduction
The physical sciences and in particular theoretical physics, 100 years
after the introduction of quantum and relativity theories, are at an
impasse.
Physicists have no idea how the fundamentally important
force of gravity, which dominates our lives, is generated
or transmitted between matter, either at atomic or at astronomic
separations, and eminent physicists have publicly expressed their
pessimism about being able to solve this problem, suggesting that
a solution will not be found for decades.
This is not the only unsolved scientific problem; other
forces that are fundamentally important to the existence
of life on earth are unexplained.
For example light is suggested to be both a wave and a
particle, and most theoretical physicists currently accept
this paradoxical proposition. This of course is simply
not possible, and their general acceptance of this concept
simply demonstrates that they have no idea of the nature of light
and how it is transmitted.
Another example is the force of convection, for which current
atomic theory provides no sensible explanation, and this
is of immense importance to our understanding of climate
and weather.
Of course any theory involving the interactions of atomic
matter must take the all-pervasive force of gravitational
attraction into consideration, as this force will in all
cases influence such interactions. Accordingly any such
hypothesis that has been formulated in ignorance of the
cause or the transmission of this force, or implies that
its effects can be ignored, is of questionable validity.
In order to understand how the physical sciences evolved
to this state today, this book examines the history of
atomic theory and describes how current thinking is based
upon a historical sequence of hypotheses, which were based
upon unproven assumptions as to the characteristics and
structure of atomic matter and date back to the Greek philosophers
of 2500 years ago.
The 1900 presentation of Max Planck’s ‘quantum effect’
and the subsequent development of quantum theory and mechanics
led to completely new, mathematical approach to the scientific
process. As Buckminster Fuller later wrote; ‘the physically
conceptual models were now all suspect, scientists were
now going to work entirely in the terms of abstract, “empty-set”,
completely unmodelable, mathematical abstractions’.1
Ultimately this has led to the situation today where the
physical sciences are completely dominated by mathematicians,
who essentially communicate with one another in a mathematical
language, and one result of this has been the exclusion
of the general public, academics and scientists in other
disciplines, engineers and technicians from any direct
involvement or debate in this field in the last 70 odd
years.
This isolation of physicists within their mathematical
world could perhaps be accepted if there had been some
recognisable progress in the last century towards a common
understanding of the basic forces of nature, but there
has not, and as one commentator has said ‘since—1930 there
have been no major gains in our understanding of the underlying
structure of matter.’ 2
The pure, physical sciences at present seem to be focused
on matter at two levels, the sub-atomic, in dividing the
nucleus of the atom into its constituent particles, and,
at the other extreme, speculating upon such concepts as
the birth and the death of the universe.
These activities seem to me to be a diversion, away from
an area where physicists clearly have no direction, into
areas which are beyond direct human perception and where,
on the one hand their success or otherwise can be obscured
by the extreme complexity of the scientific language of
mathematics, and on the other, where they can theorise
and speculate on the cosmos with little fear of contradiction.
With respect to particle physics, Werner Heisenberg, one
of the main architects of current (quantum) atomic theory
once suggested that, if it were possible to divide the
nucleus into smaller and smaller component particles, ultimately
the point would be arrived at where there would be no purpose
in proceeding, and clearly, if this process does not lead
to a better understanding of natural forces, then it has
no purpose.
With respect to cosmology, while such speculations as to
whether or not the universe collapses in ten or fifteen
billion years may be a satisfying indulgence for some,
they serve no practical purpose for the human and the other
forms of life on earth today.
As the universe is comprised solely of matter, our understanding
of the structure and characteristics of its ultimate ‘building
block’, the atom, is fundamental to all of science, and
the lack of progress in this aspect of physics in the last
70 years is an indication that there is something fundamentally
wrong with the basis of this understanding.
1 From ‘Utopia or Oblivion’
2 ‘The Big Bang Never Happened’, Eric J. Lerner
Continued >
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