What is gravity?
Well, it’s an acceleration.
What is acceleration?
It is a means of exchanging energy for velocity.
What is velocity?
It is speed in a particular direction.
Okay.
Now if something falls we assume it gains energy but of course this is not true it loses energy.
A car that is accelerating on a straight is losing energy from the engine.
A car that accelerates off a cliff is losing energy from itself.
Imagine an ice cube on a sunny day.
It melts.
The liquid is eventually changed into water vapour and it goes up to join a cloud.
So, water given energy defies gravity.
When water vapour gives off some energy in the form of latent heat it turns back into water.
So clouds eventually give off enough energy to rain.
Catch some rain and stick it in the fridge and the rain will turn to ice.
So, we can see that you can exchange energy for structure.
Now, if you imagine a bouncing ball you can see that it exchanges some of its energy to fall but gets that energy back in the bounce.
Or. If you roll the ball down a V shaped incline which has a steep down and a less steep up the ball will never the less reach the same high even though it had to roll further on the way back up (if there were no friction).
In other words the speed of the ball is exchanged for enough energy to take the ball back to its initial height.
So, why does something that falls seem to gain energy?
Because it has increased its velocity in the downward direction and hence its lower mass and energy are not apparent!
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I recently looked up "mass" and found this definition - "The property of a body that causes it to have weight in a gravitational field."
It’s just NOT true!
Imagine you are an astronaut spacewalking, you’re in a gravitational field but you don’t have any weight do you? Isaac would have changed his mind about several things if he’d lived to see men in space.
The ironic thing is that men who we pay to think about space haven’t realised that Isaac was mistaken even though Albert tried his best to help them see it!

Comments
Mangone | May 16, 2010 - 12:17
Okay, let’s have a bit of fun with a quick chat about orbits.
Now, we’ve already defined velocity as speed in a particular direction and hence Newton needed a force to constantly adjust the direction. A bit of thought should allow us to see that, in fact, it is the force that is rotating and that in 6 months time it will be in the absolute opposite direction to the one it is now. Without the need for a specific direction we can see the problem as simply one of distance to the sun and assume the direction to be forward and gravity to be down.
So, this allows us to simplify the problem to what keeps the object in orbit?
Well, it’s simply its speed and its inertia - you could say it is falling sideways ;O)
The further away from sun the less speed you require to balance the books…
Or according to Newton the forward inertia of the orbiting body must be enough to cause the vector of the resultant force to be at a right angle to the force of gravity.
This means that the body cannot fall unless it can lose some energy.
Often, it can lose mass-energy by accelerating toward the sun but this increases its speed and hence increases its effect on the resultant vector causing it to move further away from the sun again only to gain mass-energy and fall back - most orbits have elements of this and are called elliptical.
Mangone | May 17, 2010 - 07:18
I am told that the law of entropy predicts a run down Universe.
Yet, I look at the local Universe and I see that matter simply becomes more ordered as it loses energy.
Energy enables change and so the more energy a system has the less constant its structure.
The sun is the most energetic body in our Solar System and it shows :O)
There is order imposed by the Laws which ensures balance as matter and energy learn to understand one another and find new expressions of their infinite possibilities.
The different forms and functions that that the Universe has learned can be used to create ever more complex systems as the Universe explores itself.
Mangone | May 19, 2010 - 17:41
I was recently chatting about my theory of orbits explaining that it relied to a very small extent on space-time having an effect similar to the one that makes planes fly. Explaining it made me realise that it didn't need to be an effect of space-time as the solar system is well within the sun's bubble (the heliosphere) and that would be enough to supply the tiny extra force that is needed.
The nearest edge of the solar system's bubble, or heliosphere, is about one hundred times as far from the sun as the Earth is ie. about 9.3 billion miles away - approximately two and a half times farther out than the non-planet Pluto.
http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=09010827-conference-lea...
Mangone | June 1, 2010 - 14:50
Watching a download of the BBC program about the atom last night it occurred to me that the claim that the atom cannot be visualised is simply NOT true.
The same program had stated that the beginning of the huge leap forward in physics came when Einstein explained Brownian motion and it forced scientists to accept that atoms must exist.
At that time atoms were seen as extremely tiny spheres that jostled around more and more violently with increased temperature.
They were seen to bind together and have various chemical properties which were related to the number and arrangement of electrons, neutrons and protons within the atom.
So, for most practical purposes of the macroscopic universe this visualisation should work well enough.
Since Newton’s laws are obviously based on the statistically observed measurement of the properties of bodies formed from these atoms we can argue that actual inner composition is largely irrelevant and concentrate on how these spheres behave both separately and together.
First we should consider mass.
Arguably the single most important property of mass is inertia.
A measure of the atoms resistance to a change of motion.
Well, rather than try and develop an elaborate explanation of particle swaps or whatever lets just try to find an analogy - well, gyroscopes resist movement so could inertia be related to spin?
Well, yes, put even pendulums resist movement and they only move from side to side.
Still, since we have supposed that Newton’s laws are just a statistical consequence of what happens at atomic level then it would seem likely that the pendulum and gyroscope effect could well be present in the atoms and that a force would increase or decrease the effect in a particular direction.
It’s worth saying at this stage that it is my belief that, disregarding spin, an atom can only move in one direction but that direction can be any of the possible directions. In other words the idea that an atom goes up and right at the same time is only an effect of the co-ordinate system and what engineers would call the Resultant direction is the atoms true direction.
Now, we know that when a body collides with another the inertia can be transferred from one to the other but it is worth considering that this depends on the strength of the atomic bonds in both bodies.
Newton’s balls describe quite well how the transfer proceeds with suitably bonded atoms.
Now we know that aeroplanes fly because the air above their wings travels faster than the air below and so creates an upward force. So, does that mean that the increased inertia of the speeding atoms reduces the tendency of the atoms to deviate from their current direction? Yet, since the wing achieves the increased speed above by having a curved surface that forces the air to travel further along the top wouldn’t that actually increase the pressure from the atoms of the air if was a based on inertia?
Well, it would increase the opposition to the forward direction but reduce the opposition to the downward. This would in effect produce not only lift but might also produce a small force on the wing that tended to pulled the tail down.
A quick look at what our simple model predicts seems to present a problem...
If we had a body moving with sufficient speed i.e. increased inertia, in a horizontal direction then it should resist gravity. So why doesn’t it?
Well, I argue that it does.
After all our Solar System if full of objects that resist the Sol’s gravity - otherwise they would have been swallowed up long since!
A bit more thought brings you to the startling conclusion that since nearly all the mass is in the nucleus of the atom it must be that which supplies most of the inertia and that leaves the electron shell free to carry on holding the structure together.
I meant to add more to this but I'm too upset at the moment so I'll just say that...
I don't believe that time is relative unless you mean that the extra inertia you get from extremely high speeds might slow down certain decays that we imagine to be constants.
Mangone | June 2, 2010 - 17:55
I used to think it was all balls - now I’m sure it is bubbles :O)
It has long been obvious to me that gravity must be to do with bubbles, then I realised the same was true of magnets and it has finally dawned on me that even atoms are bubbles.
Gravity and magnetism form bubbles around bodies which, under the right conditions can combine to form a more efficent bubble.
I wonder if bubbles have a form of binding energy?
It occurred to me that Einstein must have realised this too as he predicted that if a cloud of Hydrogen could give up enough energy it would act like one giant atom.
It finally struck me that it might literally be a giant atom with all the bubbles combining into one big one - the most efficient configuration!
Of course hydrogen has only one electron so it would be the easiest atomic bubbles to combine.
If you think about it, molecules, in a way, are bubbles of atoms too.
Nolan | April 28, 2011 - 06:15
“I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse!”