Gravitational Attraction

Yes, both attraction and repulsion are observed on very small scales. Rotation has its own independent effect of centrifugal ("center-fleeing") force that is superimposed on any other forces. The reports about spin affecting gravity were from an experiment conducted by a gentleman who was subsequently involved in a scientific fraud and was forced to withdraw claims of a second, confirming experiment that had in fact not been done. That plus the problem that his original results have not been replicated in several tries suggest that the effect you mention does not really exist.

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I'm still getting used to the concept of a substance-requiring universe. "Meta" having definitive meaning in physics other than 'metaphysics' is also a surprise.

If a tree falls in the universe and there's no medium to carry its gravitation...

I have a question;

When most things interact with other things they "use up" or transfer the energy that they bring to the interaction... thus a truck that collides with another sends the second truck flying... but loses (whatever) energy it imparts. When I shine a flashlight at a curtain it loses light energy into the curtain before proceeding out the window.

Does gravity lose energy as it "hits" things and attracts them? Or is it an infinite energy source?

In the Meta Model, gravity is a force carried by gravitions. Some of these gravitons are absorbed by the bodies they strike. This heats up the bodies. That heat becomes the energy powering their atoms, and is eventually released again in radioactive decay or spontaneous photon emissions. The Earth and the other large planets are known to radiate more heat back into space than they take in from the Sun. This is presumably the excess heat deposited by the gravitons.

This heat, in the form of lightwaves, joins that radiated by stars and propagates out into the universe. There, it experiences friction from the medium of gravitons, which slowly cause the lightwaves to lose energy and redshift. That is the mechanism of cosmological redshift.

At the same time the lightwaves are losing energy to the graviton medium, the latter medium is gaining energy lost by the lightwaves. This replaces the energy deposited in bodies such as planets and stars during graviton collisions. So the universe does not run down in this process. If one considers the universe at large, the energy books are balanced.

Tom,

I was curious as to what factors made you choose a particle model of gravity rather than a wave model. T.J.J. See in the 1940's proposed a wave model but didn't seem to get much attention. Modern work in stimulating bubbles with lasers seems to show that one can duplicate all the basic features of gravitation using secondary Bjerknes forces as the cause. Couldn't bodies be radiating aether waves powered by direct conversion of their matter into gravity waves and also assimilating mass from the sea of waves being impinged upon them from the surrounding space?

Also, in regard to the speed of gravity- As you point out in your book that if gravity moved at light velocity this would have the effect of increasing the orbital radius of the planet. This is so, but what if there is a counterforce? The Sun by virtue of its mass distorts the length scale around it by virtue of the gravitational Lorentz contraction. To an outside observer this has the effect of making the Sun's gravity field a noninverse square force. The exponent must be slightly greater than 2. If the exponent is >2 an orbiting body will have the tendency to gradually spiral inward toward the central body. Could both of these effects cancel each other out somewhat and thus reduce the velocity of gravity down somewhat from your estimate?

Good questions, Jeremy.

> I was curious as to what factors made you choose a particle model of gravity rather than a wave model.

Waves have many special properties that particles do not, such as wavelength, amplitude, refraction, diffraction, coherence, interference, and polarization. Particles carry momentum and can strike one another as well as target bodies, ublike waves which pass through one another without effect. Gravity seems to have particle properties, but no wave properties. Especially telling is the astrophysical need for "dark matter", which disappears if gravitons have a characteristic range between mutual collisions of a few thousand lightyears.

> Couldn't bodies be radiating aether waves powered by direct conversion of their matter into gravity waves and also assimilating mass from the sea of waves being impinged upon them from the surrounding space?

If "aether" is the light-carrying medium, then its characteristic wave speed is c, the speed of light. This is also the speed of "gravitational waves", which have never been detected in the solar system, directly or indirectly, and which have nothing to do with gravitational force. The minimum speed for gravitons is 20 billion c, which therefore cannot be waves in the "aether".

> in regard to the speed of gravity- As you point out in your book that if gravity moved at light velocity this would have the effect of increasing the orbital radius of the planet. This is so, but what if there is a counterforce?

There are several arguments against this, but the simplest is that the reason why delayed propagation causes orbits to spiral outward is that a delayed force is non-central. (Its direction of action does not point toward the center.) Tidal friction is another example of a non-central force that is gravitational in origin. Nature has no means to distinguish the two types of forces with transverse (non-central) components: tidal friction and propagation delay. To a dynamical system, they appear the same. Yet no force cancels tidal friction, so no force can exist to cancel propagation delay either.

> [what about] Lorentz contraction? [Or exponents differing from 2?]

These have the wrong functional form to cancel propagation delay. BTW, you cannot simulate GR with an exponent greater than 2. If you chose an exponent so that it gave the right perihelion advance for Mercury, the predicted perihelion advance for all the other planets would be wrong. That was one of Simon Newcombe's brilliant ideas, that was subsequently shown to be the wrong functional form. -|Tom|-