(Universal) Gravity is BS
or,
Local, Quantum Gravity
or,
QG>UG

Introduction.

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The "Winding Problem" says, how come galaxies have spiral arms if they are old enough to have rotated 20 times in their history? A drizzle of cream across a stirred cup of coffee only briefly appears as a spiral, and soon, after a couple of turns, blends into structurelessness. Spiral galaxy arms could have rotated 20 times if they had been painted on a plate, and the plate spun. But there's no plate. The inner orbits should go MUCH faster than the outer ones, not a little, or barely at all. This is a problem for our idea of gravity, which demands four times the gravitational force (and therefore orbital velocity) at half the distance. Either the tips go a lot faster than they should in order to maintain contact with the rest of the arm, or the whole arm rotates more slowly than it should to keep from falling into the center.

I say, gravity isn't what we thought. It reaches out a certain distance, and then it peters out.

Newton defines f=ma, which in the case of gravity between objects 1 and 2, says

f_g = g * m₁ * m₂ / r².

It is as if each unit or particle of mass in each object somehow reaches out to each other massy particle, and says Come to Me, and whatever that force is between just a single pair, if you add up all the pairwise particle effects between the two objects, you just scale that force by m₁ * m₂, since each object is some number of unit masses. Then we need 1/r² to scale each of the forces by the distance, and a units conversion, then that's gravity, according to Newton, and nearly so according to Einstein. Except it doesn't work. Sealfon, Verde and Jimenez at Penn begin:

Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which generalizes Newton’s law of gravity, has been extensively tested and verified. But precision tests of the inverse-square force law have been performed only on scales ≤ 10¹³ m ([1] and references therein). An enormous extrapolation is required to apply this law to cosmological scales > 10²²m [2].

(The Milky Way is estimated 9x10²⁰m in diameter.)

To me, the winding problem suggests gravity peters out at galactic and intergalactic scales. This would make sense if gravity were some kind of projection into space associated with each massy particle (or Space itself may be a projection of matter), because such an influence would be pretty hard to project out forever, and so a sharp or gradual decline of such influence around some limiting distance would seem to only make sense.

That is my argument in this essay.

Forgive the lengthy statement here. I make the positive case four times, plus destroying the counterarguments. I want to share it more than I want to shrink it, so I'm putting it out there and if you will communicate issues with me I will condense and improve it. Maybe the last is the best, so I put it up front, just before giving what-for to the supposed alternative explanations out there, which seem to me like, what shall I say, interstellar vacuum.

Fourth Pass First.

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Here's my fourth pass at expressing these thoughts, to my high school pal Tom Browne.

Hey Tom, what do you think?: I propose that there is a minimum unit of matter which as part of its nature throws out a minimum unit or quantum of gravity, let's call that latter a graviton, distributed spherically and superficially around itself and pulling toward itself all of space and incidentally all mass in the universe but only out to a fixed radius, call it Rg, and outside the sphere of that radius, not at all. This radius Rg is say a third of a galactic radius for an average galaxy, or so. By "superficially", I mean that the pull on a bit of space at some radius is in proportion to the relative amount of the sphere's surface at the given radius occluded by that bit of space. Like a shadow effect, although another bit of space behind the first is no less pulled or squeezed because of the effect on the first.

Then the force of gravity on a particle will be in the direction of the average inverse-distance-squared-weighted center of gravity of the mass within the radius Rg of the particle. A triple integral over all space summing up these quanta of gravitational effects, zero outside Rg, will calculate the local effect of gravity.

Then matter far from the center of a galaxy will not be gravitationally influenced by the black hole at the center of the galaxy nor the other half of the galaxy across the other side nor even some part of the near side of the galaxy nor anywhere outside a sphere around it.

Then arms will form with matter orbiting, or rather slowly spiraling inward around, the center-lines of the arms.

7/23/2020: Although clear enough let me elaborate: Instead of orbitally rotating around the galactic center, each particle or star will rotate around its local center of gravity, which will only be the galactic center if that lies within Rg of the particle, but will instead be the centerline of its arm, if outside that radius. Also, because the mass in an arm is more at the root than at the tip, the local CoG will be closer to the center of the galaxy than the particle itself. This accounts for the whip-segment-like cohesion of an arm that pulls the next bit of the arm along behind the leading, adjacent, inner bit, and it further predicts, if you didn't figure this out already, that spiral arms should be (1) rotating around their centerlines and also (2) pulling toward their root, so there should be evidence of both in the pictures. Well, I made this prediction before I saw the photographs, because I'm just an armchair philosopher contemplating stuff in my head, but here

is one in today's news of a lovely spiral arm galaxy (or two), and do you not generally speaking see light tending toward the red on one side of each spiral arm and light tending toward the blue on the other side of each spiral arm, consistent with the red-shift and blue-shift of light from objects moving away from and toward the viewer? Do you not further see several strands diagonally oriented in toward the center of the arm and toward the root thereof, as if drawn by some unseen force not just around the arm centerline but toward the arm root? Yes you do. There is a lot going on in such a photo, but yes those are generally generally true.

Furthermore, the de-linking of spiral arm style rotation from normal orbital rotation should occur at about Rg from the galactic center, and although rather discrete and discontinuous looking, that's because there is such a huge proportion of total galactic mass at its center, and when your chosen stars' distances start to go just about, and then slightly more than, Rg away from that center, the pull from that concentrated central mass drops proportionately hugely. Next prediction is that spiral arms should be pulled to rotate around the galactic center more by way of following the next inner segment of the whip-line of the arm's center of gravity than by orbital mechanics a la Newton, and it's not exactly a problem if that rather peters out because it's really only getting pulled around at the root of the arm by a rather weak, transitive pull from whatever is also rotating interior to the transition point at Rg from the galactic center. So you might expect for that non-orbital rotational pull to weaken and dissipate, and indeed for a spiral to spiral itself inward to what is ultimately going to form a rather static bar, that doesn't rotate about the galactic center at all, but only rotates around itself.

There you go. I just wanted to pop this into the argument here, after a nice night into and out of sleep, thinking about it. It's been quite a lovely puzzle. Oh, one more thing. Do you notice that the blue bits seem brighter than the corresponding red bits in the photo above? I'm thinking that instead of being a miraculous and coincidental distribution of interstellar dust at just the right places, it's because the Doppler effect not only shifts frequency, but also shifts total energy. So that from the same light source moving toward or away, appearing more blue = higher frequency (and because each sinusoidal wave component is a single pulse there are more of them and more total energy) while redder = lower frequency AND lower total energy, thus not as bright. So far, consistency.

Now, back to the original text from last summer.

Further, bars will form, swallowing up galactic arms as they spiral toward the greater mass in the bar end relative to the dispersed arm.

Then we have an explanation for galactic spiral arms and bars, which otherwise should spin out and de-cohere like cream in coffee after a few rotations, if the effect of gravity were not quantized and local.

Tom said: Keep up the good work veatch.

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Objections Confounded

(6/22/2020)

Some proposed alternatives make no sense. Standing waves and dark matter are super bogus alternatives. I'll tell you why.

Standing Waves Don't Explain Galactic Arms

First, standing waves. This is the argument found in wikipedia and from talking to physicists that galaxy arms are actually standing waves, stars move through them and get slowed down and thickened up in the arms, and then somehow they accelerate out and when they reach the other side they rush quickly across the gap, until then slowing down to be in the next arm over, because the arms are a spirally standing wave type of thing. I don't think so.

Why should I not think so? Well, I have thought about standing waves quite a bit because I am a phonetician and wrote about them in my fancy Ivy League dissertation, which at least some of my advisers actually read (thanks Mark!), and I have also been a whitewater kayaker (even taught kayaking at Stanford, if you want to glean some prestige value for this tidbit of knowledge), and yes standing waves are right there in the middle of both of them.

A standing wave is where there's a wave but it doesn't move downstream. There's a standing wave at the bar of the Columbia River, I've heard: a towering wave, and water rushing through it, but the wave doesn't itself move downstream like the water. It's pretty cool. You can also make a standing wave by tying one end of a rope to a door handle, then flip your held end up and down, so a wave travels down the rope to the door handle, then the reverse wave travels back toward you, and if you do another at the right time, instead of having what's obviously two waves going past each other in the middle of a medium (the rope), there gets to be something like a swing or a vibrating string on a guitar, or maybe a double-vibrating string where there's a lying-down S that reverses itself with every cycle.

Now I know of standing waves in two contexts: the human vocal tract in vowel resonances and the run-out section of a whitewater rapid leaving a drop and entering a flatwater section, while the rapid itself peters out in what are also called whoop-de-doo's (or as I later remembered, compression waves).

In both cases just like the rope and the guitar string, there is a stress-embodying medium, the rope or the air or the water, within a longitudinal channel, which is subjected to longitudinally-travelling waves of pressure (in the air) or of lateral displacement (of the guitar string) or of longitudinal displacement (of the water in the rapid).

In the case of the vocal tract a popping sound, which is like a sum of low, medium, and high frequency pops all together to make a pretty sharp pop, is created in the larynx once for each glottal cycle, which is called the fundamental frequency. This pop sends a high-pressure wave travelling toward the open end at the lips at the speed of sound. When the wave hits the open end the impedance caused by the constricting channel goes to zero, and the wave sort of falls out the open end, dissipating suddenly so that it pulls a bit of a vacuum behind itself at the lips, which then becomes a low-pressure wave travelling the opposite direction back down toward the glottis. And by the time it reaches the glottis, that might be closed again. When a wave hits a closed wall at the end of its channel, it bounces back up the channel once again. In this way positive and negative reflecting pressure waves travel up and down the vocal tract, added to by more waves with each glottal pulse.

The way to understand it is by considering what happens when two identical (same frequency) waves travel in opposite directions in the same channel. What happens is what you saw in the rope example, a standing wave: at a specific point, think about the two waves travelling past each other. When the high points of both waves pass each other, at that location, the pressures add together and there is double-high pressure there for an instant. At the same location, the low points of both waves (if they are the same length or frequency) will pass each other, half a cycle later in time, and when they subtract together, there is a double-low pressure at that point for an instant. So at that point, the pressure goes up and down, up and down. (If the two waves are of different frequencies, then you get chaos, but if they are the same, you get consistent, repeating, big action.) Whereas there is another point, called a "node", where the waves happen to always cancel each other out: while the air particles move in and out at a maximum fluctuating velocity, the pressure level does not fluctuate. "Node" has a mnemonic: NO DElta, no change.

This is super cool stuff from Veatch 1991. The pressure node, just described, is also a velocity anti-node, where maximum fluctuation occurs, and the pressure anti-node where maximum pressure fluctuation occurs, described above, is also a velocity node. Because at a closed end, there can be no velocity fluctuation for the air particles there are right up against the wall at the end: push on them all you want, the wall is closed and you can only squish them, they aren't going anywhere. Does it make sense? If you'd like more details please have a look at my 1991 Dissertation chapter on vowel acoustics.

The whitewater whoop-de-doo's are the same thing, with a different medium. When a rapid whooshes out from its free-falling channel into the constrained high-impedance zone of flatwater at the bottom, there is a reflecting wave going back upstream, which combines with the downstream-flowing wave to produce two waves crossing against each other, which looks just like, and is, a standing wave. That's why these occur only in the actual flatwater section, the surrounding flatwater is needed to support the reverse wave, and only so far as the free-falling water can really push a flow channel out of the resisting flatwater before it. So the whoop-de-doo's are typically short sections, and kayakers consider them as energy-dissipating structures which is also true. Also super fun because you can ride them right down the middle over the highest peaks and lowest valleys, which accounts for the name.

Now, galaxies have none of the qualities that make standing waves possible. First, there is no medium between the stars that presses the stars within a galactic arm alternatingly forward-faster and then slower as they move through node and anti-node, which pressure could create the acceleration of stars through the gap between arms and create the deceleration of stars entering the next arm to hang out there before the next swing on the standing wave swing. No. No medium, no stress-embodying rope or water or air that can transmit a pressure wave, so no standing wave.

Second, no longitudinal channel. I've never seen a standing wave without a channel, some zone of stuff which bounds the sides of the longitudinal transmission of energy that is the waves going both ways. Maybe you say the center and exterior are the "walls" of a planar rotational standing wave, where the super dense galactic core is one wall, and a super empty galactic exterior is the other wall, if you can figure out how to build a standing wave between wall and cliff without everything just falling, poof, off the cliff, maybe you can work it out but I don't quite see it just yet. Third, where's the counter-rotating wave of the same length in space or frequency in time? A standing wave is a sum of same-frequency directionally counter-traveling waves. So despite the fact that the whole galaxy is rotating left (some are upside down), we need to invent a hidden galactic arm set rotating right, incidentally at the same spatial frequency as the visible galatic arm and further both need to be effectively sinusoidal in density along the cylinders around the galactic center.

If you can mystically or mysteriously propose all that, then I see why you're saying the dark matter might be a disk of similarly structured spiral arms rotating the opposite direction from the non-dark matter spiral arms. Then they would pull toward the opposite-moving opposite-darkness matter, slow them down some to push them into a more dense spiral arm shape, but then accelerate them again after they're past the main part of one of these dark matter blobs, to chase backwards toward the next arm coming along? Really? Wrong. Shouldn't two sets of gravitationally interacting stuff basically form a single gravitational system rotating around its shared center of gravity? Shouldn't the slowing-down non-dark matter then fall toward the galactic center instead of continuing at a fixed radius from the center of the galaxy, and then after it has fallen shouldn't the acceleration toward an oncoming dark arm be along the orbital tangent from which the dark arm is coming? Or is it entirely convenient that the dark arm is spiralled so as to approach from a higher angle than the tangent, and if so wouldn't that also pull the dark arm itself inward toward the galactic center? It seems like a spiral would spin inward if it were two counter-rotating disks of dark and non-dark matter. Is there a stable orbital structure for a galaxy in these thoughts? Maybe this doesn't finish the argument here after all, but here's the coup de grace: Fourth.

Fourth: if you want to believe the longitudinal standing wave theory you certainly must agree there is some number of ups and downs, equal numbers of ups as downs since they alternate with each other, but not necessarily EVEN numbers of both ups and downs. A standing wave in the vocal tract, for example, can have one, two, three or four Node-plus-AntiNode pairs, just like a guitar string or rope (I'm not sure about whoop-de-doo's, never counted them but I'm guessing there are odd counts as well as even. So there are not just even but also odd numbers of peaks in a standing wave. Yet we find, do we not, that spiral galaxies come with spiral arm PAIRS, which make for EVEN NUMBERED numbers of arms. Well, just go look at a hundred galaxies and you tell me, do half of them have odd numbers of arms? Or are they all, or are they mostly, even-numbered? Look, I'm happy to be wrong. But I think galactic bar shapes and spiral arms are like each other, a bar has two ends, and a spiral arm also has another end, at the end of its opposite on the other side of the galaxy. Simply put, each pair is a single thing; it was a bar, it was a blob cohering as it moved and rotated as one, it was a thing that held together and spread through or part of it swooshed as it rotated through the center to the far side, both ends still rotating together at the end like they were rotating together at the beginning. Hello, obviously. Even numbers equals Not Standing Waves. So, I'm sorry, maybe it was a fun dumb idea but it's a bad idea, it's wrong. Well, just my opinion, maybe I'm wrong.

Dark Matter Doesn't Explain Galactic Arms

Why don't galactic arms rotate as fast as they should? Because of dark matter, we are told. Well dark matter is matter after all, and if it is gravitationally attractive like matter is, then it is gravitationally attractive towards a center of gravity, using gravity. And if so then the center of gravity that the dark matter around a galactic center gravitates toward is the galactic center itself, since we're not talking about structures that are separately centered, whatever they are they are symmetric around the same galactic center that the non-dark matter is centered around.

Okay so the dark matter and the non-dark matter gravitate towards, and therefore by their own mass help to create, the same center of gravity of the galaxy we have always been talking about.

And therefore whether gravitational attraction is of matter dark or non-dark matter and toward dark or non-dark matter, any orbiting or rotating about or gravitational cohering into the structure of a galaxy that the dark matter contributes to is primarily effectuated by gravity itself and primarily toward the center of the galaxy, which the dark matter in a galaxy must itself also be centered upon.

And therefore the supposition of some amount of dark matter in a galaxy merely suggests the total mass of the galaxy is greater than without dark matter.

So if dark and non-dark matter both rotate about the galactic center, then how is it that the dark stuff will form strings out of the non-dark matter, unless it is formed in its own string like, galactic arm shapes to pull the non-dark matter as they rotate into the dark matter strings and then releases them as they rotate out of these strings, unless these inferred dark arms themselves exist. And if dark arms exist, rotating spirally and bar-like around galactic centers so as to explain non-dark arms rotating spirally and bar-like around galactic centers, have we not simply explained one mystery by deriving it from another? Obviously Ockham would be displeased with such galactic antics, such lunatic. For now we have the same problem, how to explain galactic bar and arm shapes made out of dark matter, rotating at one twentieth the rotations per billion years as their own Newtonian gravitational trajectories would require given the gravitational effects from and to dark matter we have just asserted.

Okay? So let's not pretend we have got an explanation, when we assert that mysteriously slow-moving visible galactic assymmetries are explained by invisible mysteriously slow-moving galactic assymmetries. Let's try something else.

Okay?

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