Text by Bob Shell, Copyright 2024
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Is There a ‘Fifth’ Force of Nature?
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For several weeks newsmedia have been reporting on the possible discovery of a ‘fifth’ force of nature. Scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, sent a muon around their fifty foot accelerator donut. Muons are elementary particles with negative charges like electrons, but are much more massive. The Standard Model of nuclear physics predicts they will behave in predictable ways. Most physicists accept the Standard Model.
When a muon is accelerated in a particle accelerator it spins like a top, and it wobbles. In more technical terms, it precesses. Think of it as like the Earth. Our planet ‘spins,’ rotates as it goes around in its orbit, and it wobbles. That wobble causes the well-known precession of the equinoxes. Similarly, the muon wobbles and precesses. Its precessions ought to be predicted by the Standard Model. Only when the Fermi scientists actually tested it in 2021, it didn’t precess as it should have. It deviated by a tiny fraction, but that tiny fraction’s implications were huge.
Because this upset the Standard Model’s applecart, they recently did the tests again with improved precision, and the damned little muon still refused to follow the Standard Model. This is big news in physics because it shows that the Standard Model is flawed, and, at least in this case, wrong. Perhaps the whole Standard Model is wrong.
This research could open the door to a new Standard Model which would radically reconfigure physics as a whole. Much work will have to be done to develop the new Standard Model.
The reason this is of particular interest to me hinges on the four accepted forces of nature, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force that holds atoms together, the weak nuclear force that allows radioactive decay, and gravity.
In a gedanken, a thought experiment as Einstein called them, I realized some years ago that this is dead wrong.
Gravity is not a force of nature at all. It is merely an emergent phenomenon.
An emergent phenomenon is simply a phenomenon we perceive that actually emerges from something else. A good example is heat. We perceive heat, but heat is merely an emergent phenomenon. Heat is actually molecular/atomic motion, although we do not perceive it as such. We perceive heat.
Similarly, we perceive gravity, but what it actually is, is the effect of mass on spacetime. We are pulled toward the earth, not by an elementary force, but simply because our feet are closer to the mass of the Earth than our heads. Our heads are accelerating through spacetime faster than our feet. Black holes have near infinite ‘gravitational attraction’ because movement through the time dimension of spacetime ceases at the event horizon of a black hole.
Saying that gravity is a fundamental force of nature is just wrong, and has always been wrong. Physicists speak of the difficulty of reconciling the ‘force’ of gravity with general relatively. There is nothing to reconcile. ‘Time dilation’ in proximity to mass is right there in front of their faces in general relatively, and has been experimentally verified. Clocks on the International Space Station run faster than identical clocks on Earth. (Somehow NASA got this backwards in one of their press releases!)
Einstein, riding in an elevator at the Swiss patent office where he worked, had the realization that gravity was nothing more than acceleration. But he didn’t carry that realization to its natural conclusion that gravity isn’t a force at all. I suppose he was too steeped in Newtonian physics to make the leap.
Readers of my 2019 book ‘COSMIC DANCE’ may recall that I wrote about this then. I plan to expand on this idea in the sequel I’m writing now.
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About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 15th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-cicadas/