I Don't Believe in Gravity...

In a previous post, I suggested the Big Bang may not have been the almighty universe-spawner it’s made out to be (if the universe did expand from a single point, wouldn’t it have done so in a uniform fashion, rather than bits of it clustering together to form galaxies and nebulae and whatnot?).  For the latest episode of Bollocks My Scientifically Illiterate Brain Comes Up With During Its Downtime, I’m going to attempt to explain why I don’t believe in gravity… Buckle up, kids!

As I said previously, such nonsense is not born from - or backed by - any cold, hard scientific knowledge; it is merely how I interpret what little I’ve picked up from what little I’ve read and watched on the subject.  This particular theory spawned from an interview Prof. Brian Cox gave with Robert Lewellyn, when he mentioned massless particles are always moving at the speed of light.  Not from any outside influence (unless one considers the (or a...) Big Bang the initial ‘push’); it’s simply what they do (28m22s):

(the whole thing’s worth watching)

One thing that has long bothered me in physics is how light appears to be affected by gravity.  Light bends around planets, supposedly diverted off course by the planet’s gravitational pull, but if the strength of gravitational attraction is determined by mass, how can something massless be affected by it at all?

It depends on how you view gravity.  The idea of gravity as an attracting force between objects of mass was initially (supposedly) put forward by Newton, and was the established view for centuries.  Then Einstein came along:



So the fact that light is always moving means it isn’t attracted to the object at all; it just follows the curve of the object’s impression in the fabric of space-time.

This also helps answer another query: A black-hole is an object of such dense mass that even light can’t escape its ‘pull’.  However, a black-hole is (at least initially) no more massive than the star that formed it - it’s simply more compact - so why is its gravitational pull apparently so much stronger, to the point that even light can’t escape?  Stars come in a range of sizes, from those smaller than our own sun, to those that could swallow our entire solar system as an appetizer.  And yet, no matter how big, all stars emit light, while, no matter how small, all black-holes swallow it.

Going back to the demonstration above, if you were to compact the weight in the centre of the sheet to a fraction of the size, it would sink just as deeply into the fabric (as it’s no lighter or heavier than it was), but the diameter of its impression would be smaller, and so its sides steeper.  In terms of a black-hole, its mass is packed so tightly that the ‘sides’ of its impression become sheer.  Therefore, regardless of how massive (or not) the core of the black-hole is, the shape of its impression on space-time causes anything caught in its ‘pull’ - no matter the speed it’s travelling, or its angle of approach - to be diverted directly to its centre.

But what about objects of mass themselves?  They certainly appear to be attracted to each other, but are they really?  What if, like light, everything in the universe is moving at its own pace, relative to its mass?

Well, everything is.  Supermassive black-holes drift through the cosmos, orbited by stars, that are orbited by planets, that are orbited by satellites; the smaller objects moving at the speed of the larger, plus their own orbiting speed.

So, if everything from light to black-holes is moving at its own pace, and its path through the universe is only interrupted when it hits the space-time impression of another object, then where does gravity come into it?

It’s like a shadow.  A shadow isn’t a tangible thing; it’s simply the effect of blocked light.  It seems to me that gravity isn’t an attracting force at all; it merely describes an object’s interaction with another object’s space-time impression.

In the next episode: what if light is space-time?