I am writing this article not to compete with but as a supplement to Moshe ben-Avraham’s definitive answer to the question of whether the Standard Model is the best model of our physical world because I will not pretend to be better informed than he and because he has provided us with an elegant explanation of why he believes what he does. I agree with him.
The very fact that physicists continue to be puzzled by this standard explanation of the fundamental nature of matter in spite of all the evidence that supports it is that in expecting things out of it that do not exist, any attempt to do experimentation to reveal what is not there meets only with reinforcement of the existing theory. In particular, I speak of the gravity particle, the holy grail of sub-nuclear physics. It might very well be that another logical explanation for the phenomenon of gravity is forthcoming and I present one for consideration.
I think that gravity particles don’t exist. I could expound relentlessly about the strangeness of reality. There are the strange accommodations of relativity and quantum mechanics and how they relate to the colossal and the quantum scales, and of course how we at the macro scale relate to all of that. Well, to my mind, the nature of gravity is the strangest of them all.
Most theoretical physicists predict that some day the particle for gravity will be found. They have already given it a name – the graviton. If they are getting paid to look for it they are guaranteed to have a very secure future, because of course gravitons don’t exist, as I see it, and they will be searching forever. Alright, enough of the disclaimers, you may assume that the following is my theory of gravity. I accept it.
Gravity occurs as the result of spatial displacement. Space is as much a creation as the matter which occupies it, which means that it is made of something. We do know that space is mutable, and that it has a varying constitution because of the presence of gravity fields. It is, after all, warped, in some places more than others. And gravity wells like black holes are known to exist. So a projectile pointed in a seemingly straight line will encounter variable space/time relationships relative to its on board clocks with respect to the different stretches of space through which it travels. These relationships are in theory quantifiable if we could actually place a working odometer on board the projectile, but I digress.
Let us give a name to that of which space is made. We may assume that it is some form of particle which has characteristics unique unto itself, that is, it is not a matter particle and it is not a force particle. Its main feature is that it defines the volumetrics of space. Let’s call it a space boson. Let’s give it the shape of a cone, such that its spec point of origin is at the point and that this spec spirals outward until it meets some quantum threshold at which point it falls back into itself to recoil outward again from the beginning, and so on. It does this for perpetuity, and it can not be destroyed through any natural process. Because of its nature, it has a mutability, that is, it can assume a different shape, from a long pointed cone with a large base to a flattened bowl shape. They are so tiny that their volume almost defies description. Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute at the University of Guelph in Ontario has proposed that the smallest unit of space that can be occupied by a volume is 10^-43 of a cubic meter. That is so small that there are more of those units of volume in a cubic meter than there are atoms in the observable Universe. These space bosons almost approach that size at their smallest volumetric definition.
If there were no objects occupying space, then space would have a uniform consistency throughout and every space boson would define the same volume. Space has a tendency to stabilize under those conditions, and that tendency exists even when a body displaces it. In that idea lies the cause of gravity. Because space bosons are so tiny, even a subatomic particle displaces them. When an entire planet or moon occupies a space there are enough displaced space bosons to create an ordered field around the object. In other words, they have a concentric orientation with respect to the center of the object. When there is another object in proximity with its own field of space bosons with their own orientation the two fields will merge. When this happens, the space bosons undergo a cancellation of sorts, analogous to the cancellation of two sine waves superimposed on one another and out of phase with each other, and while they do not cancel out their existence, this does result in a tendency for bosons of opposite orientation to assume a reduced volumetric definition because they have opposing characteristics. In other words, the effective volume of space between the two objects is reduced, and the natural result of this is that the objects are brought closer together. Here is where the physics of matter takes over, because once the objects’ respective spatial fields begin to affect each other, the result of the motion of the objects toward each other creates momentum, and we witness what we interpret as gravity. Gravity being a weak “force”, we can actually resist it up to a point, depending on the number of space bosons that are being displaced, which is of course directly proportional to an object’s mass.
So it is left to wonder whether we will ever control gravity. We can control gravity if we can learn to control a space boson’s orientation.
Incidentally, and interestingly, gravity is a weak force in the same way that the actual effect of relativity is almost negligible. The on board clock of a GPS satellite in orbit around Earth traveling at a very high velocity and out of gravity’s pull needs to be corrected by only about 35 microseconds for every twenty four hours of our time. That is only important when considering that a very tiny error of angular measurement at the satellite’s point of origin adds up to a significant distance when the vectors reach Earth.
I guess you could say that the point that I am making is that no matter how weird we find reality expressed at the quantum scale, we should never forget that there are practical and logical explanations for things being the way they are. The Standard Model is the most elegant illustration of that fact. It is not wrong, only incomplete.
