More on Gravity

I recently posted a picture of the femur from a huge dinosaur ... see: Femur Found in France ... and speculated whether gravity has changed over the eons. I say this because it is doubtful that an animal this enormous could live today with today’s gravity pull. Note that the largest animal on Earth now is the blue whale which survives in an environment, sea water, where it’s buoyancy helps counteract today’s gravity. And the blue whale is much smaller than the land animal represented by the femur found in France. Therefore, it seems clear to me that gravity here on Earth must have increased to a level where such a behemoth could not exist today.

Einstein’s View

The questions then persist ... how and why? Newton called gravity a force and Einstein called it a warp in the space-time continuum. Others speculate gravity comes from an elementary particle called a graviton. In order to continue this discussion further, read first: Universe Today Write-up. On the other hand, I have speculate before that gravity is a fifth dimension ... one of the seven new ones predicted to exist in string theory mathematics.

I have also opined that the amount of gravity is finite and that, during the Big Bang, not all gravity found some mass “to attach to” ... and became dark matter (an ironic term since it apparently has no mass). And that this orphaned gravity is what causing the universe to expand ... because only that attached to mass would cause the universe to contract ... as the sum of  known mass would suggest. If this reasoning turns out to be fact, dark matter and dark energy are one and the same.

How can gravity be both another dimension and a form of free-floating dark matter? This I haven’t fully figured out yet. Maybe just the difference between a dimension and the metric that measures it?

So, to return to the original speculation about the Earth acquiring more gravity over time ... which has caused our animal populations to shrink in physical size. Perhaps “dark matter” or meandering gravity, unattached after the universe was created, does continually find homes in places like Earth ... and results in higher gravity readings over the eons. Of course, this needs be occurring simultaneously everywhere ... or else the gravitational relations between celestial bodies would go awry ... which would not be good.

Afterthought: Could the tipping point and the rapid disappearance of the dinosaurs have been finally caused by too much gravity?

More Dark Stuff

To expand on yesterday's suppositions on dark matter and dark energy ... see: Dark Stuff, I  offer the following flights of my fancy:

Let's imagine that there is, in fact, a 5h dimension -- force. Let us call it virtual gravity (a force, mass/acceleration). Now, at the beginning of time, matter was being created in vast quantities. This matter needed gravity and could well grab acceleration from the denominator of virtual gravity ... leaving lots of virtual mass to stand alone as dark matter?

Initially matter and virtual matter would be pretty balanced, but as the billions of suns in our universe convert mass into energy, the ratio of dark matter to real matter would swing to where it is today -- 3 or 4 to one.

Next,  to dark energy. Because of the preponderance of dark matter, for billions of years our universe was collapsing until about five billion years ago when it started expanding again ... and this expansion is now accelerating. How can this be?  Let's go back to our 5th dimensional model. When matter is converted to energy, it likely loses its gravity. As, in our real world, more real matter is converted to real energy, the denominator, acceleration, in the virtual world is growing faster than the numerator (mass) and so things are reversed and our universe is once again expanding faster and faster. (Perhaps instead of dark energy, it should be called dark acceleration?)

Could be ...

Afterward: And the reason we cannot "see" dark matter and dark energy is that they live in a dimension beyon our senses and current understanding.

Dark Stuff

Dark Matter Map of the Universe

I was watching PBS last night. The viewed program's subject was dark matter and dark energy ... both concepts involving lots of speculation but few facts ... a little like the Mueller Russian collusion investigation. Although scientists don't know what comprises dark matter, they have been able to map its existence in the universe. Over eleven years ago I wrote a blog on this subject in "Junkier Science" with some speculations of my own on these subjects ... see: The Dark Side ... (still holds up.)

To summarize my included speculations I suggested that dark matter and dark energy may exist in dimension(s) beyond our current known four. (If Einstein can name a metric, time, as th e fourth dimension, why can't another metric, force (gravity), be another of the supposed eleven dimensions  under string theory?

Anyway, I find this type of loopy scientific speculation to be fun. I hope you do too.

Afterward: When Einstein called gravity a "warp in the space-time continuum"' he was suggesting that it was dimensional ... a mapping a fifth dimension onto a four-dimensional world.