Dark Matter Needed To Save Bankrupt Gravitational Theories

Biever, C., Dark Matter No-Show at Sensitive Underground Lab, New Scientist, Apr 14th 2011 (Hat tip: Fungus)

It's just like a wimp to be a no-show when summoned for interrogation. That seems to be the result of an experiment to detect the weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, thought to make up elusive dark matter that is thought to make up much of the mass of the universe.

After 100 days of monitoring, a tub of cryogenically chilled liquid xenon deep in an Italian mountain has shown no trace of the particles it is designed to catch. The result doesn't rule out the existence of WIMPs, but it does seem these particles are slipperier than previously hoped.

The Xenon100 experiment, at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy, is one of the most sensitive dark matter detectors in the world. The results of the 100-day trial were hotly anticipated.

"It's like being at a wedding waiting for the bride," one nervous team member said before they were announced, according to Science News.

Dark matter is needed to explain where the gravity comes from that stops spinning galaxies from flying apart. It is thought to make up about 83 per cent of the universe but what it is actually made of is one of the biggest mysteries in physics.

Most cosmologists now think it is made of WIMPS. Such particles are thought to form an enormous cloud surrounding the Milky Way, through which the Earth is moving.

As their name suggests, WIMPs are expected only rarely to interact with normal matter. Occasionally however, particles should hit xenon atoms in the tub at Gran Sasso, producing telltale light signals. Because the tub is down a mine, it is shielded from interference from cosmic radiation by 1400 metres of rock.

But yesterday the Xenon100 team posted a paper online in which they report that, over a period of 100 days last year, they saw signals corresponding to only three particles. That is consistent with what they expected to see from background radiation. So no dark matter signal was seen.

Scientism Says Gravitation Cannot Be Questioned

"...to establish it [gravitation] as original or primitive in certain parts of matter is to resort either to miracle or an imaginary occult quality." -- Gottfreid W. Leibniz, polymath, July 1710

"Since Newton announced his universal law of gravitation, scientists have accepted and educators taught it, and rarely has it been questioned. Occasionally one has the temerity to say that gravitation is a myth, an invented word to cover scientific ignorance." -- C.H. Kilmer, historian, October 1915

Here is a recent example of someone who still has faith in Newton's pre-Space Age 17th century creationist hypothesis:

Ford, M., Is Gravity Not Actually a Force? Forcing Theory to Meet Experiments, Ars Technica, Apr 2011

How are controversial ideas handled by modern science? A common charge leveled against science (generally by those who are unhappy with its conclusions) is that the only way to get funding or continue your research is by going along with the current theories and not rocking the boat. For those who spend their careers in science, this is laughable—it is those who successfully rock the boat who are the most successful. In this article, we are going to look at a manuscript that purports to overturn hundreds of years of accepted ideas about gravity, and use it as an illustration of how controversial ideas are dealt with in modern physics.

It was Isaac Newton who first proposed a universal law of gravitation, where every massive body in the universe was attracted to every other one. This simple law proved extremely powerful, able to explain the orbits of planets and the reason the apocryphal apple fell on his head. However, Newton was never able to explain why gravity worked or what exactly it was. Two hundred plus years later, Albert Einstein was able to offer a more complete description of gravity—one where Newton's laws are a limited case. According to Einstein, gravity was due to the warpage of spacetime by mass and energy; all objects followed straight paths, just on curved spaces.

With the advent of quantum theory over the past 100 years, scientists have been able to develop an elegant mathematical framework capable of uniting three of the four fundamental forces that are thought to exist in the universe. The fourth, gravity, still remains the fly in the ointment, and has resisted unification to this point. Early last year, Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde published a manuscript to the arXiv that purports to explain why science cannot reconcile all four fundamental forces. According to him, it is simple: "gravity doesn’t exist."

"But what do you know about gravitation? Nothing, except that it is a very recent development, not too well established, and that the math is so hard that only twelve men in Lagash are supposed to understand it." -- Isaac Asimov, writer, 1941

"The mathematical proofs of Newton are completely erroneous." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1942

"It was only the downfall of Newtonian theory in this century which made scientists realize that their standards of honesty had been utopian." -- Imre Lakatos, philosopher, 1973

"Well, you know, if you flip a coin it doesn't come back down again if you're in space." -- Buzz Aldrin, astronaut, 2007

"The only solution would be to reject Newton's classical theory of gravitation. We probably live in a non-Newton universe." -- Pavel Kroupa, astronomer, May 2009

"Dark matter is an excuse for the failure of gravitational theories." -- Stephen Smith, author, June 17th 2010

Imaginary Neutron Stars Produce Imaginary Gravitational Waves

"According to electric star theory, neutron stars belong in the same category with invisible pink unicorns." -- Stephen Smith, writer, November 2008

"It is claimed that the LIGO and LISA projects will detect Einstein's gravitational waves. The existence of these waves is entirely theoretical. Over the past forty years or so no Einstein gravitational waves have been detected. How long must the search go on, at great expense to the public purse, before the astrophysical scientists admit that their search is fruitless and a waste of vast sums of public money? The fact is, from day one, the search for these elusive waves has been destined to detect nothing." -- Stephen J. Crothers, astrophysicist, August 2009

Break out your tinfoil hats. Gravitational pseudoscientists make more grossly inaccurate predictions based upon make believe.

Science Daily: Distribution of Gravitational Wave Sources Predicted.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2010) — A pair of neutron stars spiraling toward each other until they merge in a violent explosion should produce detectable gravitational waves. A new study led by an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, predicts for the first time where such mergers are likely to occur in the local galactic neighborhood.

Dark Lensing

I'm going camping in a remote wilderness for 3 weeks and will not have internet; I am still alive.

Steve Smith: Dark Lensing.

"Gravitational lensing" theory is currently in fashion among astronomers. They use it to explain the arcs of glowing material surrounding some galaxies. They also use it in conjunction with other theories to help deal with puzzling observations. One of those puzzles involves the so-called expanding Universe.

According to a recent press release, scientists have, for the first time, combined data from the Hubble Space Telescope with ground-based measurements to map the effect that gravity might have on light as it travels through space. Recent calculations seem to show that the Universe is expanding faster than it should, perhaps because there is a greater amount of mass than previously thought. In particular, the research group looked at previously catalogued redshift information from 194,000 galaxies, plugging the figures into a statistical model they designed.

Minute differences in how some galaxies are shaped point to what they claim is a "warping of spacetime" due to unseen conglomerations of matter. It is that space-bending effect that holds their hypothesis together. The intense gravity generated by the concentrations of invisible (or "dark") matter is said to cause light rays from remote objects to bend as if seen through a lens. However, it is a "weak gravitational lensing" effect, so the slight variations can only be identified statistically.

In the image at the top of the page, galactic redshift data was plotted against the altered shapes of distant galaxies due to weak gravitational lensing. Based on complex software programs, the gravity model produced galaxy cluster plots that indicate the presence of enough dark matter to account for the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

Conventional “gravity-only” astronomy sees the bending of light by gravitational "lensing." What is more important is that the entire premise depends on a single assumption, that higher redshift equals greater distance. Halton Arp has made several assertions that counter that assumption, however.

As Arp's galactic compendium grew, he noticed that there was something wrong with conventional time-speed-distance calculations—he found objects with higher redshift values in front of objects with lower redshift. Surely, such a conundrum should have immediately called into question the very nature of that "cosmological constant."

It is often written in the popular press that dark matter makes up “25% of the Universe” or that dark energy makes up “75% of the rest of the Universe.” To anyone familiar with plasma physics, it is well known that plasma makes up 99.99% of the Universe. It is a fascinating convergence that the amount of gravitational mass invented to save conventional theories is the same as the ionized plasma that is overlooked.

Funding The Tinfoil Hat Brigade

"It is claimed that the LIGO and LISA projects will detect Einstein's gravitational waves. The existence of these waves is entirely theoretical. Over the past forty years or so no Einstein gravitational waves have been detected. How long must the search go on, at great expense to the public purse, before the astrophysical scientists admit that their search is fruitless and a waste of vast sums of public money? The fact is, from day one, the search for these elusive waves has been destined to detect nothing." -- Stephen J. Crothers, astrophysicist, August 2009

New Scientist: Gravity Genius [sic]: How I Will Spend [i.e. waste] Half a Million Bucks [that could be used to save millions of people's lives in Africa].

Among this year's 23 recipients of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius award", who have won $500,000 each, no strings attached, is Nergis Mavalvala, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a collaborator on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

LIGO is on the hunt for gravitational waves, as-yet unseen ripples in space-time that are predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity and should be particularly strong when neutron stars or black holes merge. So what does a gravity hunter spend half a million dollars on? And what do gravitational waves have to do with quantum mechanics? To find out, New Scientist visited Mavalvala in her office at MIT.

Congratulations on the award. Was it at all expected?

Oh my goodness, no. When I got the call I thought it was a prank. I really thought at some point somebody was going to say, "Gotcha!"

How do you plan on using the award money?

It's hard to answer, with the few days I've had to think about it. I'll almost certainly spend some of the money on trying out far-out ideas. Scientists always have some ideas that are very risky: you know that they may not pan out, but if they did – wouldn't that be awesome? Those ideas are sometimes hard to get funded because they're so speculative.

Are there any particular topics on your risky wish list?

There's this idea that if you make a measurement on a quantum state you destroy it. But there are ways to get around that problem called quantum non-demolition techniques – these include ways to detect single photons repeatedly without destroying their delicate quantum states. The ideas are very sound but the implementations are quite difficult. My guess is the most likely place where an award like this would be used is in trying out these implementations and in seeing if our current technologies and knowledge can get us there.

A lot of your work has focused on using quantum mechanics to improve LIGO's ability to detect gravitational waves. What's the basic idea behind the experiment?

You take two laser beams at right angles to each other and you shoot them toward two mirrors, each one 4 kilometres away. If there is a gravitational wave, the mirror positions will change and we'll see that the light will take either a longer or a shorter time to go out and come back. Each detector can detect mirror motion that is a thousand times smaller than the size of a proton.

Why is quantum mechanics important in taking these measurements?

This all comes down to the idea that you use a light beam to measure the position of the mirror. We have very powerful laser beams, so there are a lot of photons. These photons carry momentum and there's some uncertainty in the momentum because they are quantum particles. This makes some uncertainty in your mirror position. One of the things that my group has done in the past few years is learn how to optically trap and cool a mirror, just the way people do optical trapping and cooling of atoms.

No gravitational wave has been directly detected yet. Why are they so hard to find?

Gravitational waves are weak, and they don't interact very strongly with our detectors. So that's the fundamental reason why it's so hard to do. The other problem is that we live on a very vibrant planet filled with motion, so everything you can imagine wants to move our mirror more than the gravitational wave.

Do you ever think about what it will be like when you do find one?

Pure ecstasy, probably. I think it will be amazing. But I think the first detections will very much go in the direction of understanding whether we've understood our instrument and making sure it really is a detection. It will probably be very much strengthened if the event we see is also seen by telescopes.

LIGO has been hunting for gravitational waves since 2002, and so far you haven't detected any. Is that at all discouraging?

No. It shouldn't be discouraging to anyone. We've always known that this first generation of instruments we would build for LIGO would have the sensitivity to see a gravitational wave only if it came from one of the strongest sources, and it would have to be from a very nearby source. We've always known that it was a bit of a long shot. What's going on now at LIGO is a very major upgrade called Advanced LIGO [set to begin observations in 2015]. If we haven't detected anything with this improved detector then I think disappointment and head-scratching will set in.

The Myth of Gravitation 2010

The New York Times: A Scientist Takes On Gravity.

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

Observation Falsifies Gravitation

"I hope that some reader interested in astronomical matters will take occasion to make some reply to this letter [The Myth of Gravitation] and possibly contend that electro-magnetism cannot supersede Newton's theory of gravitation in the suspension and movement of the universe of worlds." -- C.H. Kilmer, historian, October 1915

"The mathematical proofs of Newton are completely erroneous." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1942

"Gravitation is an electromagnetic phenomenon." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, Cosmos Without Gravitation: Attraction, Repulsion, and Electromagnetic Circumduction In The Solar System, 1946

"It was only the downfall of Newtonian theory in this century which made scientists realize that their standards of honesty had been utopian." -- Imre Lakatos, philosopher, 1973

Discovery: FAR-OUT WORLD LEAVES ASTRONOMERS BAFFLED.

A planet-like object about eight times the size of Jupiter is locked in orbit around very young star, though the exact relationship between the two remains a mystery.

Circling 300 times farther from the star than Earth orbits the sun, the object could be a planet, perhaps one that was catapulted out into the nether regions after a collision or close encounter with an as-yet undetected sibling planet.

"There is no theory for how a true planet can form at 300 AU (astronomical units, with one unit equal to 93 million miles, the mean distance between Earth and the sun). It's not really a lack of imagination. It's a lack of physics," California Institute of Technology astronomer John Johnson told Discovery News.

Current theories, observations and computer models show that planets form from a disk of gas and dust that circles young stars. Less material is available as the distance to the parent star grows.

"You actually have to have material out there to have the planet forming," Johnson said.

Another option is that the object, designated as 1RXS J160929.1-210524 b and located about 500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, is a new type of failed star -- something akin to a brown dwarf, though about half the size -- which formed along with the primary star about 5 million years ago.

But scientists similarly are at a loss to explain how such a relatively small object could have survived the stellar birthing process.

"The models show it's difficult to successfully produce a low-mass object next to a much more massive object," said University of Montreal astronomer David Lafreniere, who lead a team that photographed the object in 2008, the first time a planet beyond the solar system was directly imaged.

Confirmation this week by Lafreniere and colleagues that the object is indeed in orbit with its parent -- or sibling -- star should galvanize follow-on studies that could illuminate the relationship, such as finding sister planets or building an inventory of similar systems elsewhere in the galaxy.

"This is a puzzle right now," Lafreniere said. "How do you end up with an object with this mass with this large of a separation?"

The research will appear in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

"Dark Matter ... Does Not Exist At All"

New Scientist: Galaxy study hints at cracks in dark matter theories. (Hat tip: Anaconda)

Dark matter is either weirder than we thought or does not exist at all, a new study suggests.

A galaxy is supposed to sit at the heart of a giant cloud of dark matter and interact with it through gravity alone. The dark matter originally provided enough attraction for the galaxy to form and now keeps it rotating. But observations are not bearing out this simple picture.

Since dark matter does not radiate light, astronomers infer its distribution by looking at how a galaxy's gas and stars are moving. Previous studies have suggested that dark matter must be uniformly distributed within a galaxy's central region – a confounding result since the dark matter's gravity should make it progressively denser towards a galaxy's centre. ...

"There is absolutely no rule in physics that explains these results," says study co-author Hong Sheng Zhao of the University of St Andrews in the UK.

... they say our understanding of gravity may need modification to eliminate the need for dark matter entirely.

Gravitation Is Imaginary

Stephen J. Crothers: Einstein's Elusive Gravitational Waves.

It is claimed that the LIGO and LISA projects will detect Einstein's gravitational waves. The existence of these waves is entirely theoretical. Over the past forty years or so no Einstein gravitational waves have been detected. How long must the search go on, at great expense to the public purse, before the astrophysical scientists admit that their search is fruitless and a waste of vast sums of public money? The fact is, from day one, the search for these elusive waves has been destined to detect nothing.

Owned.

Alleged "Planetary Disk" Defies Gravitation

"All planets revolve in approximately one plane. They revolve in a plane perpendicular to the lines of force of the sun’s magnetic field." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1946

"When first observed by Voyager, the spoke movements [of Saturn's Rings] seemed to defy gravity and had the scientists very perplexed. Since the spokes rotate at the same rate as Saturn's magnetic field, it is apparent that the electromagnetic forces are also at work." -- Ron Baalke, astrophysicist, 1998

Science Daily: Planet-forming Disk Discovered Orbiting Twin Suns.

ScienceDaily (June 11, 2009) — Astronomers have announced that a sequence of images collected with the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) clearly reveals the presence of a rotating molecular disk orbiting the young binary star system V4046 Sagittarii. The SMA images provide an unusually vivid snapshot of the process of formation of giant planets, comets, and Pluto-like bodies. The results also confirm that such objects may just as easily form around double stars as around single stars like our Sun.

These findings are being presented by UCLA graduate student David Rodriguez in a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, Calif.

"It's a case of seeing is believing," says Joel Kastner of the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology, the lead scientist on the study. "We had the first evidence for this rotating disk in radio telescope observations of V4046 Sagittarii that we made last summer. But at that point, all we had were molecular spectra, and there are different ways to interpret the spectra. Once we saw the image data from the SMA, there was no doubt that we have a rotating disk here."

A disk is in a flat plane and therefore obviously not being formed, affected, or influenced in any way by gravitation.

Clinical Insanity: The Saga Continues

The Day The Universe Froze: New Model For Dark Energy.

ScienceDaily (May 11, 2009) — Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today.

Evidence? Who needs evidence?

The Lord Was Not Just a Watchmaker

"...lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, he [God] hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another." -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, 1687

"...to establish it [gravitation] as original or primitive in certain parts of matter is to resort either to miracle or an imaginary occult quality." -- Gottfreid W. Leibniz, polymath, July 1710

"But then if there were events of this character, discharges between planets and so on, I put one of the most outrageous claims before the scientific readers, that in the solar system and in the universe generally, not just gravitation and inertia are the two forces of action but that also electricity and magnetism are participating in the mechanism, so the Lord was not just a watchmaker. The universe is not free of those forces with which the man makes his life easy already more than 100 years. They were unknown practically or little known in the time of Newton in the second half of the 17th century. But today we know that electricity and magnetism, these are not just small phenomena that we can repeat as a kind of a little trick in the lab, that they permeate every field from neurology into botony and chemistry, and astronomy should not be free. And it was admitted by authorities that this was the most outrageous point in my claims. But the vengeance came early and swiftly. In 1960, already in 1955, radio noises from Jupiter were detected and this was one of the crucial tests that I offered for the truth of my theory. In 1958, the magnetosphere was discovered around the Earth, another claim. In 1960, the interplanetary magnetic field was discovered and solar plasma, so-called solar wind, moving rapidly along the magnetic lines and then it was discovered that the electromagnetic field of the Earth reaches the moon ." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, cosmologist, 1966

"It was only the downfall of Newtonian theory in this century which made scientists realize that their standards of honesty had been utopian." -- Imre Lakatos, philosopher, 1973

Wal Thornhill: Newton's Electric Clockwork Solar System.

We are told that gravity rules the cosmos. The story of the big bang, the origin of galaxies and stars, and our ultimate fate are founded on this belief. But the March 2009 Astronomy magazine carries the surprising headline, “Is there something we don't know about gravity?” The question should be, “why do we think that physicists know anything about gravity beyond mathematical descriptions of its observed effects?”

All that modern physics has done is to obscure the need for serious investigation of an unsolved problem. Even some effects attributed to the action of gravity, like the bending of light, need not have anything to do with gravity. Indeed, we are so far from understanding gravity that we don't know the right questions to ask.

For example, orbital dynamicists have long known that Newton's law of gravity applied to the solar system predicts chaos in the short-term—perhaps a few million years—not aeons-long clockwork stability. So the first question that must be asked is why does the solar system appear to run like clockwork? This is not done in the usual history of the solar system. A strict application of Newtonian dynamics would render retro-calculation of planetary histories impossible. How can you concoct a history if you have no idea where the group of actors were in the past? Without understanding the cause of stability of the planetary system, the foundation of geology and planetary science is missing! We cannot explain the origin of the solar system.

Though Hannes Alfvén has two books on the subject...=)

I See Plasma But Not Gravitation

Universe Today: Hubble Immortalizes Itself With New Image: “Fountain of Youth”.

Peratt Vs. Newton

Tom Wilson points out an Anthony Peratt paper which debunks Newtonian gravitation and the idiotic inverse square so-called "law": A New Look at Near Neighbors Part One. (Hat tip: Anaconda)

It is worth a few words here to summarize some very important seminal work in the paper by Anthony Peratt mentioned above. In his study, Peratt performed particle-in-cell computer simulations of Birkeland current interactions. The results illustrated how plasma dynamics lead to galactic structures evolving from double radio galaxies, to radio quasars, to ellipticals and then to spiral galaxies. This paper is thick with insight. There are some papers that you can read over and over and continually find new gems, this is one of those papers.

As Peratt's simulations revealed, a galaxy evolves as two (or more) Birkeland currents moving together with an attractive force proportional to the inverse of their linear distance (note it is not the inverse square law). In astronomical observations, the two Birkeland currents are detected as radio “lobes” due to synchrotron radiation.

As the two pinched Birkeland filaments come close to each other, intergalactic plasma is trapped, forming an elliptical core at the geometric center between the two filaments, which later becomes the nucleus of the galaxy. Magnetic fields between the filaments condense and aggregate the intervening plasma, raising its internal energies. The elliptical core at this point is analogous to a radio quasar.

The two Birkeland filaments (also concentrating matter within their magnetically pinched volume) torque around each other, changing the morphology of the core plasma (flattening the ellipse) and eventually evolving into trailing arms as electric current, axial to the arms, flows into the core of the galaxy. At that point the two Birkeland filaments merge with the core. So the core of a galaxy derives from whatever intergalactic plasma was trapped between the two (or more) Birkeland filaments and the arms of the spiral derive mostly from the pinched Birkeland filaments themselves. ...

4) M33 has been said to lack a super-massive black hole at its core (that is to say, the rotational velocity decreases closer to the galactic core).

Galaxies Defy Gravitation and Big Bang

A new Hubble Space Telescope image shows three galaxies defying the myth of gravitation and the Big Bang myth: Stars forced to relocate near the Southern Fish.

The three pictured galaxies — NGC 7173 (middle left), NCG 7174 (middle right) and NGC 7176 (lower right) — are part of the Hickson Compact Group 90, named after astronomer Paul Hickson, who first catalogued these small clusters of galaxies in the 1980s.

Let's take each myth separately.

The Gravitation Myth

First the occult 17th century myth known as gravitation.

Quoting from Newton's Principia, General Scholium, Book III:

"...lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other, he [God] hath placed those systems at immense distances from one another." -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, 1687

According to Newton's so-called "theory" of universal gravitation the stars are immobile and "fixed" and God has placed them at distances such that gravitation has no effect on them.

In actual physical reality however, the stars are in motion and God has not placed the galaxies at immense distances from eachother thus falsifying Newton's so-called "theory."

When assessing the sanity of contemporary scientists, keep in mind that as recently as 2005, the religious fundamentalist and occult alchemist was voted the "world's greatest scientist."

The Big Bang Myth

If the universe is expanding, how is it possible for galaxies to collide?

And if gravitation is strong enough to counteract the inertia from the Big Bang, how can the universe be expanding?

Geophysical Fluid Flow Cell: Electromagnetic Gravity

"The long and constant persuasion that all the forces of nature are mutually dependent, having one common origin, or rather being different manifestations of one fundamental power, has often made me think on the possibility of establishing, by experiment, a connection between gravity and electricity …no terms could exaggerate the value of the relation they would establish." — Michael Faraday, physicist, 1865

It seems that, in April/May 1985, there was an experiment performed by the United States Microgravity Laboratory aboard Spacelab 3 via the space shuttle Challenger (Mission STS 51-B) that NASA and the scientific establishment don't want you to know about: Geophysical Fluid Flow Cell.

The geophysical fluid flow cell (GFFC) experiment simulates a wide variety of thermal convection phenomena in spherical geometry. By applying an electric field across a spherical capacitor filled with a dielectric liquid, a body force analogous to gravity is generated around the fluid. The force acts as a buoyant force in that its magnitude is proportional to the local temperature of the fluid and in the radial direction perpendicular to the spherical surface. In this manner, cooler fluid sinks toward the surface of the inner sphere while warmer fluid rises toward the outer sphere. The value of this artificial gravity is proportional to the square of the voltage applied across the sphere and can thus be imposed as desired. With practical voltages, its magnitude is only a fraction of earth's and so requires a microgravity environment to be significant. The advantage of using this apparatus is that it simulates atmospheric flows around stars and planets, i.e. the "artificial gravity" is directed toward the center of the sphere much like a self-gravitating body.

The GFFC experiment flew on Spacelab 3 in April/May and operated for more than 100 hours during the mission. The experiment verified that dielectric forces can be used to properly simulate a spherical gravitational field to drive thermal convection.

By Dr. James E. Arnold.

The Myth of Gravitation

Are you familiar with Kilmer?

The real genius?

No, not Val Kilmer.

I mean C.H. Kilmer.

Historian, genealogist, metaphysician, and cosmologist (polymath?) C.H. Kilmer. He lived in Mecklenburg New York (flourished c. 1897-c. 1915), wrote a genealogy of the Kilmer family, was a reverend, and wrote a brilliant letter to the editor of The New York Times. I don't know anything about him other than that.

I'm stealing my book title from him (although I came up with it before I was aware he existed): The Myth of Gravitation.

"Magnetism is possessed by the whole mass of the earth and universe of heavenly bodies, and is an essence of known demonstration and laws. By adopting it we have the advantage over the gravity theory by the use of the polar relation to magnetism. A magnetic north pole presented to a magnetic south pole, or a south pole to a north pole, attracts, while a north pole to another north pole or a south pole to another repels. This gives to us a better reason than gravitation can for the elliptical orbit of the planets instead of the circular. It also gives us some light on the mystery of the tides, the philosophy of which the profoundest study has not solved [See Darwin, Velikovsky, and McCarthy quotes at sidebar]. Certain facts are apparent; but for the explanation of the true theory such men as Laplace and Newton, and others more recent, have labored in vain." -- C.H. Kilmer, historian, October 1915

"Since Newton announced his universal law of gravitation, scientists have accepted and educators taught it, and rarely has it been questioned. Occasionally one has the temerity to say that gravitation is a myth, an invented word to cover scientific ignorance." -- C.H. Kilmer, historian, October 1915