'Elastivity' of graviton collisions

test response

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>Given the clear distinction you make between "shielding" and "shadowing," I don't see why normal shadowing would not be detectable when one body eclipses another.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

Refer to my "swarm of bees" analogy. See specific example to follow.

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>Now interpose the Earth. It doesn't matter if you "shadow" some gravitons or "shield" even more gravitons, either way, there are still less gravitons now between the satellite and the Sun, than there were when the Earth was not interposed, because the Sun had already created a shadow, and now the Earth's shadow compounds it.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

In ordinary gravitation, masses are highly porous to gravitons. If the Sun blocks some gravitons and the Earth blocks other gravitons, then their combined effects are additive. That's "shadowing", and represents ordinary gravity. In the swarm of bees analogy. We have just added more bees to the swarm, blocking more sunlight. But the swarm is not yet so dense that any two of them are in the same line, with one bee in the shadow of another.

But if the Earth were dense enough, some of its matter ingredients might be in the same line as an already blocked graviton, and therefore those matter ingredients do not have the blocking effect that would normally occur, which appears to decrease the total gravity from Sun plus Earth affecting the satellite. This is just like making the swarm of bees so dense that some bees are in the shadows of other bees, so they do not contribute to blockage of sunlight. It is as if they were not there at all.

In gravitational "shielding", parts of the matter content of a massive body do not contribute to that body's gravitational force because some of its matter ingredients are redundant, and could only serve to block gravitons already blocked. While they may contribute to a body's inertia, they do not contribute to its external gravitational field.

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>To picture this, imagine shining a flashlight through a translucent object. You get say, a faint shadow. Now put another translucent object behind the first one. The shadow becomes darker. Doesn't it? Or am I all wet?<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

Two masses or two translucent objects will generally double the force or darkness of the flashlight beam, respectively. However, if you kept adding identical translucent objects into the flashlight beam path, the amount of additional darkening each one contributes would eventually drop, and would approach zero as the beam gets dimmer and dimmer. When the beam is totally blocked, more translucent objects have no effect. And if you lined up super-dense masses that block all gravitons, adding more of them would have no effect. So the gravitation on a satellite would not just keep getting stronger as we added more and more mass in front of it. Eventually, we would block all gravitions, and more masses would have no effect. -|Tom|-

Tom,

I am curious about the evidence yea or nay on gravitational shielding. If as you say some stellar bodies have more mass than what their gravity indicates then how can we divine this without having the body explode so that we can count the extra matter? Are there other clues to help us? I remember reading about a star that supposedly exploded but was seen to still be intact after the event. Could this body have burped out some of its extra material and then gone back to normal?

I also had another question that is a little off topic. To what degree do we have any definitive knowledge about the interior of any of the gas giants? I read that recent shockwave experiments with hydrogen indicate that it solidifies at lesser depth than previously thought and that this has modified the model for the interior of Jupiter and the other giants. I understand that the standard theory believes that there is no sharp transition from gas to solid as you go down deeper. But do we know this as fact? Have we bounced radio waves down into Jupiter or performed some either kind of test to confirm this notion or does the interior still remain mysterious?

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>[Jeremy]: I am curious about the evidence yea or nay on gravitational shielding. If as you say some stellar bodies have more mass than what their gravity indicates then how can we divine this without having the body explode so that we can count the extra matter?<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

Lageos satellites show an anomalous acceleration that suggests the possibility that part of the Sun's gravity is shielded whenever the Earth passes between the satellite and the Sun. That is the best observational possibility presently in existence.

But in general, no, we wouldn't have to blow up a star and count atoms. Self-shielding might make a star's gravitational mass weaker, hiding some of the interior mass. But its inertial mass (resistance to acceleration) would not be changed. So we would see this effect as a weakened gravitational constant (less gravitational acceleration resulting from a given gravitational mass).

This might explain why most cases of close, massive stars with observable, elliptical orbits have pericenter advances well below the predictions of GR -- an otherwise unexplained mystery.

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>To what degree do we have any definitive knowledge about the interior of any of the gas giants?<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

Planetary interiors are all theory. Even for Earth and Moon, the only bodies for which we have seismic data for waves passing through the interior, we only know for sure that wave speeds change at certain depths. Whether these boundaries represent changes in composition, phase changes, density discontinuities, or whetever can be answered only by modeling and testing. We are presently short on both models and tests. In the extreme case, we have Lamprecht's recent book <i>Hollow Planets</i>. Although he does not persuade me that the Earth is hollow, the book has value in pointing up how subject to interpretation most of what we think we know really is. -|Tom|-

The models of interiors of spheres also lack understanding of gravity since the mass center is not the gravity center. When the mass center is used as a gravity center a lot of nonsense results. Models are always started by assuming the mass center and gravity center are the same thing so they always are wrong.

Tom makes reference to a book that makes the case for planets being hollow and while I have not seen this book it is as good an idea about planet interiors as assuming the planet has a dense core. The gravity of a sphere will not allow a dense core to exist because the gravity force is not centered at the mass center. The mass of a sphere is not at the center but all around it and throughout the sphere. The density at the center is not greater than the average density of the sphere and in fact the sphere is less dense at the center so a hollow planet is not that far out an idea.