Time Travel Could Be Enabled by Circulating Lasers

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Weak and strong gravitational fields can be produced by a single continuously circulating unidirectional beam of light. In the weak gravitational field of a unidirectional ring laser, it is predicted that a spinning neutral particle, when placed in the ring, is dragged around by the resulting gravitational field.

Ron Mallett has new exact solutions of the Einstein field equations for the exterior and interior gravitational fields of the light cylinder.

Ron Mallet has found the exterior gravitational field contains closed timelike lines. The strong gravitational field can be produced by a circulating cylinder of light.

The closed timelike lines indicates the possibility of time travel into the past.

There is coverage of Mallett work by CNN.

A paper on Arxiv argues that it would take too much energy to generate gravitational effects.

The general theory of relativity indicates that both matter and energy can create a gravitational field. The energy of a light beam can produce a gravitational field.

136 thoughts on “Time Travel Could Be Enabled by Circulating Lasers”

  1. Well, I still haven’t tried time travel the way Randy Cramer did it when he was sent to Mars or the way Andrew Basiago did it during Project Pegasus, so there’s still room for me to perhaps do it correctly! xD

    *I’m not knockin’ those two guys, by the way. All in good fun, and very interesting stories, fantastical as they may seem.

  2. Have seen the # of craters on the moon which is ~ 1/4 size of earth? So to say Uranus was big or Jupiter shielded the planets is not a convincing argument.
    Furthermore, our 400lb gorilla was effective enough to enable resonance orbits yet we still have the anomalies of Oberon & Charon (ps Charon is around a planet (Pluto) 70% the size of the moon)
    I will accept the argument that a large rock hit Uranus & titled it to its side BUT if the Sun’s gravitational field is so large as to make all the planets follow defined trajectories then the orbitals of Oberon & Charon cannot be simulated as they would be affected by the sun’s gravitational field esp when they are in an orbit infront of the plant and closer to the sun since the gravitational pull of the sun should be larger than that of the planet they are revolving around.

    You may laugh at 0.44 m/kg² but when someone smarter than you or I figures out the relationship I’ll be thinking of you as I sip on my beer.

    ref: re: impossibility of timetravel – some math to keep you entertained on your weekends
    https://www.academia.edu/4970585/New_insights_into_the_special_theory_of_relativity
    https://phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime-dimension.html

    Cheers
    Bill

  3. Relativity has a concept called “proper time”, which in simple terms is the time measured by the object itself. The proper time of a photon is actually zero.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time
    https://www.researchgate.net/post/Proper_time_of_a_photon-can_anyone_help

    I suspect that the proper time of an FTL ship might actually be negative (edit: or more likely, imaginary), if it’s even defined at all in the current understanding of relativity. Proposals like warp drives basically use various hacks that try to work around this. If we ever do manage to build an FTL drive, we will almost certainly need to expand our theories of relativity and causality beyond current understanding.

    Some more relevant reading here:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_diagram#The_speed_of_light_as_a_limit

  4. light has physical meaning, but the image of the object is just a bunch of fotons with the right frequencies that get reflected. It´s not part of the object itself, but now to think of it, what if the object itself is a source of light? hmm.
    The one meaningfull thing would be mass, but I´m not sure if photons carry mass at that speed.
    Otherwise, according to E=mc2 something weird would happen.
    Afaik, it doesn´t have any other (meaningfull) physical meaning.

    The object, even if it travels ftl (with its ref. frame), is not travelling back in time, because even light needs time to travel.
    Even quantum entanglement measurement is not faster then immediate and already proven to be faster then light.

    As you said, it all boiles down to the frame of reference frame, where causality stays intact.

  7. Well, Bill … the ‘rock’ was pretty big as ‘rocks’ go (0.7 to 1.5 M♁) and pre-smackeroo Uranus was somewhat surprisingly small (12.7 to 13.3 M♁) Uranus’s mass today is fairly accurately known at 14.1 M♁.

    Given that in the first quarter billion years of the Sol system, Jupiter acted as the “400 lb gorilla” in the outer planetary system, shepherding the hundreds of planetessimals into resonance orbits (barring their own gravitational destabilizations), present supercomputer numerical modeling points to a rapid ejection of just about all the planetessimals that didn’t somehow find a collision course to consolidate with Jup, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune.  

    Which is a juicy thought for Oört and Kuiper Belt planet searchers.  Hundreds of ejected planetessimals.  

    The Oberon orbit, by the way isn’t inclined appreciably away from Uranus’s own highly inclined orbital axis. About 1.4°, so saith Wikipedia. There is a lovely article about all that, there. 

    Again, best of luck.
    Keep digging…
    I don’t think you’ve hit gold yet.

    Just saying,
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
    _____

    M♁ is ‘mass of one Earth’

  8. Cleaned up the superscripts a bit…

    G = 6.67×10⁻¹¹ (kg ⋅ m³ / kg² ⋅ s²) 
    = 0.74×10⁻²⁷ kg ⋅ m/kg² ⋅ 9×10¹⁶ m²/s²
    = 0.74×10⁻²⁷ kg ⋅ m/kg² ⋅ c² (c=speed of light)

    Simplifying further 

    = 0.74×10⁻²⁷ (kg ⋅ m/kg²) ⋅ c² 
    = 0.44 m/kg² ⋅ c² ⋅ 1.67×10⁻²⁷kg … where
    1.67×10⁻²⁷ kg = rest mass of H atom.

    Still under investigation is the meaning of 0.44 m/kg²

    LOL. 
    Good luck!

    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  9. The image of an object is a measurement of that object. That carries more weight than just a bunch of light. It has physical meaning.

    But you’re correct that a measurement shouldn’t be taken at face value. Just as when we see red-shifted light, we don’t assume the source emitted light at the exact frequency that we’re measuring.

    Btw, it gets weirder. If you do a lightcone analysis, you’ll find that observers “in front” of the origin (in the same general direction that the ship is traveling) will temporarily see multiple concurrent images of the FTL ship.

    For example, the guy at the destination initially sees the ship still docked at the origin (1 image). Then the ship suddenly appears in front of him, but he still sees it docked at the origin at the same time (2 images). Then he sees it docked in front of him at the destination, and still docked at the origin, and receding back from the destination towards the origin (3 images). Then the latter two merge as he sees the ship leaving the origin, and disappear as soon as crosses light speed. After that it’s back to normal – just the one image of the ship docked at the destination.

    Obviously, the ship didn’t actually split in three.

    After giving it some more thought, I think the most important bit for causality is what the ship itself observes. In the ship’s frame of reference, its own causality is intact, and in the right order.

  10. forget is, that the image of an object is not the object itself.
    Meaning that the object arrives before its image, which is totally ok. As long as you don´t forget your towel 😉

    edit for grammar

  13. > you’d still arrive at your destination after you departed

    According to relativity, time depends on the reference frame. With FTL, there’s always at least one frame of reference in which you arrive before you leave. (That might even be in all reference frames, but that’s a more complex analysis, so I’m not sure if that’s the case or not.)

    Consider an observer at the destination of an FTL ship. Let’s say the ship went in a more-or-less straight line: Source -> A -> B -> C -> Destination.

    Because the ship is FTL, it will reach point A before the light that shows it leaving the source. It will reach point B before the light that shows it crossing A. And so on. So an observer at the destination will see this in reverse: Destination -> C -> B -> A -> Source. To him it looks like the ship appears out of nowhere, and then moves backwards towards the source.

    But since the ship was actually moving forward in space, he has to conclude that it was moving backward in time.

    With regards to causality, the key point is that the ship arrives at the destination before it leaves the origin, at least according to some observers, such as the one at the destination. If you take the simplistic view of causality that states that the cause has to be before the effect, this break this simplistic view.

    You get the same with a wormhole, and the same with time travel: effect before cause, from at least some reference frames.

    Whether or not you can meet your past self doesn’t really matter.

  14. I still don’t get you guys (starting from Improbus post). Why’d causality and FTL be mutually exclusive? You get somewhere say, through a wormhole or whatever, but you’d still arrive at your destination after you departed. There’s no way to meet yourself from the past even if you decide to immediately go back, amiright?

  16. From a momentum standpoint, which is what matters here, it’s the same. The problem with using mirrors/fibers, is that the required power level to pull it off would destroy any physical mirror. Gravitational bending is really the only feasible approach to bending THAT MUCH light, and would happen anyway, because you need enough light to form something like a black hole anyway.

  17. Considering we have no observations of time travel, and don’t even know if it’s possible at all, some hand waving is to be expected.

  18. It “can be shown” at about the same level as this guy’s helical lazors. It’s all speculation so far.

  19. I didn’t say I find it suspicious. Just noted the coincidence is more than just apparent size – it’s also the timing. But on the other hand, that also means it’s only a temporary coincidence.

  23. So, I tried replicating this with my own methods. I rigged a whirling strobe in my living room and stood under it listening to Shiny Disco Balls by Who Da Funk. And it worked. I traveled back in time, but with a caveat. I was only able to go back nine hours, to when I was arriving at work that day. T_T

    So, I tried again after work (again). But that time, my cat batted a single d20 die into the strobe circle and it landed on 1, and I ended up at the beginning of the Cambrian, and I couldn’t breathe. O_O

    I have zero idea of how I got back here. >_> Also, being as I believe in a greater multiverse, I’ve got no idea where “here” even is.

  24. Your thought experiment wasn’t off the mark at all, since it didn’t try to demonstrate anything,
    but was only a good explanation of the accepted
    theory. Your black hole is my pressure pot.

  27. I imagine because they are the most prominent bodies in the sky. I find it disturbing, Michael K agrees.The testimony of two
    men is true, It can be suspicious.

  28. I don’t get it.
    There are thousands of different things around us. The visible size of the sun and the moon. The tidal effects of the sun and the moon. The relative areas of the land and sea on earth. The relative sizes of all the planets in our solar system. The size of the different continents… You could list them for hours.
    Why is one of those comparisons being equal particularly suspicious?

  31. Actually, until you mentioned it I had not noticed he was black. Maybe it was mentioned in the sections of the video where he was going on, and on, and on about his background that had no bearing whatsoever on the physics, I’ll admit I wasn’t concentrating too hard on those bits.

  32. It’s that unfortunate tendency of MSM’s to suppose that their viewers are utter morons and decide, instead of presenting the theory, to pitch a “human interest” story because the physics professor who is developing this theory happens to be black.

    Dr Mallet’s story is indeed inspiring, and a good example of how the Armed Forces can bootstrap poor folks into the middle class and beyond, but it was unfortunately not what I had hoped to see at this moment.

  33. Why does it need to be light? There are other wavelengths Moving close to speed of light where it’s probably easier to create a helix wave front…. try radio waves.

  34. using fiber optics to get light to go in a loop is still cheating because it relying on refraction inside of the fiber… it’s not really going in a loop it’s bouncing off the wall of the fiber…

  36. Corruption by economics. Brian makes a story out of this for clicks, and people do click, and both Brian and the people here who clicked know in advance this was all bullshit. I guess its a form of entertainment even when you know its a scam.

  37. As the picture clearly shows… Time Travel Could Be Enabled by Circulating Lasers… in a bong

  40. Greta Thunberg knows more about climate change than this guy does about time travel.

    And, Greta knows jack shit.

  43. Which kind of was my point, but who knows, I could be full of fish eggs, too. Has BEEN KNOWN to have been the case before!

  46. Yes, that should happen, the problem being that it would only happen to any appreciable extent at ludicrous power densities. Maybe achievable densities if the light was very well columated to begin with, so there was little divergence to counter.

  47. Thanks for that. I just picked up Fundamentals of Astrodynamics for my daughter and I was trying to get a clear understanding that in chapter one.
    You explained it perfectly to this dummy, and I will pass that knowledge to her.
    /cheers

  48. Wow. That dude is still peddling this theory?
    I think I saw him on Ancient Aliens or something several years back.

  51. Any FTL travel is time travel from some reference frame. But that just means that that reference frame would observe a time-reversed causality chain: the ship arrives at the destination before it leaves its origin.

    But the causality is still there: the ship arrives at the destination because it leaves its origin, and because it traverses the whole path in between, in the correct sequence. It just looks like it’s moving backwards in time while traversing that path – from that particular observer’s point of view.

  54. No. I did that. I was intrigued and watched the video to see if he mentioned going back to 1919.

    He might have? How could I tell? The video is cut like a music video, with deliberate stutters, sound distortion, video loops, background music… it’s not designed to convey any information at all, it’s just supposed to look and sound cool.

  55. I wasn’t disagreeing. Just trying to formulate a more detailed description, including why heavier isotopes are less stable.

    While I agree with your statements re the well etc, it’s a little difficult to process without explaining that ball at the top of well has more potential energy (from gravity, in this case). Hence heavier. And likewise, the squeezed spring is heavier because of the potential mechanical energy that it contains.

    Sometimes one has to fill in the details to see the connection.

  57. That’s the one thing that isn’t ridiculous here. He gets the light to go in a loop by using mirrors.
    A coil of optic fibre should be easier still.

  58. I’ve always wondered.
    How long is infinitely long?

    As far as I am aware, if something is further away than the time it takes for light to reach us from there, then it cannot affect us in any way.

    So providing our cylinder is long enough that light takes longer to reach us from the end than the length of our experiment, then as far as we are concerned the end is infinitely far away.

    It means you need a cylinder at least 1 AU long to get enough time travel to know which horse wins the cup in time to place your bet. But this reduces the problem from impossible to easier than a Dyson sphere

  60. Come on F111F. Can’t you just slip us some tips? Lottery numbers? Stocks to buy? Clothing fashions to never, ever be photographed in?

  61. I believe this is the case. The lasers are attracted to eachother.
    But I’ve certainly not the physics to argue it.

  62. That’s my point. A squeezed spring is heavier
    than a relaxed one (uranium), while a ball at h
    the bottom of a deep well is lighter than a ball
    at the top (the protons of helium).

  63. I agree with the inadequacies of your thought experiment Goat.

    You have assumed what is to be proven.

    Not to say that I disagree with the mass=energy thing, but this black hole argument doesn’t actually prove it, because you need to start by assuming that the mass will not disappear before you can show that the mass does not disappear.

    My objection is to your rhetoric, not your physics.

  69. Well it obviously works because we’ve clearly traveled back to the early ’00s when Ronald Mallett was all over the news shilling his time vortex contraption.

  70. >That also rules out FTL space travel.
    Not really. It could turn out that attempting to fly a trajectory that would lead to time travel causes you to collide with your own past lightcone, infinitely blueshifted, and get annihilated. It might be that FTL travel is possible if you are very careful and only stick to viable courses.

  71. You may be right that the extra mass in uranium comes from electrostatic repulsion potential energy. The daughter nuclei would not have as much of it, so would be lighter in total.

    But I think the electrostatic repulsion alone doesn’t overcome the nuclear binding energy. If it did, uranium wouldn’t form at all. Yet it has a half-life of over 4 billion years.

    Instead, I think it comes close. The closer it gets, the less stable the nucleus is. Add a neutron, and it adds more strong nuclear force. That pulls the nucleus tighter against the electrostatic repulsion force from the protons, which builds up more electrostatic potential energy. Like squeezing a spring.

    This makes the nucleus less stable. Shorter half-life. But it still needs that little bit of extra push from the weak force to break things apart. And I guess the weak force is somehow statistic in nature.

  73. That’s like saying that water goes from something
    to nothing at the moment of evaporation. The most
    famous equation of all says that they are the same thing!

  74. that time travel is enabled by kicking this ‘researcher’ in the nuts every second for at least an hour. It’s a resonance thing, most won’t understand the math.

  75. In uranium what is positive is not nuclear binding
    energy, but electrostatic repulsion energy which
    overcomes nuclear binding energy, because 92
    protons exert more force than 2.

  77. Either paradoxes like that are impossible (something will prevent it), or the multi-world interpretation has to be true, in which case it creates a branched causality sequence.

    In the one branch, the traveler successfully enters the time machine, and goes back in time. Then he prevents his copy from entering the time machine in the 2nd branch.

    There’s also a view that if time started with the big bang, and is the 4th dimension of our universe, then all events must have already occurred. Past, present, and future. You can visualize this as a 4-dimensional blob that is our universe, in which time is just the 4th dimension of the blob.

    So if the future hasn’t occured yet, then that blob has to be growing in the 4th dimension. In that case, time must exist outside of the universe (otherwise, how can that blob grow?). The other option is that the blob is fully formed and static, in which case all events are already built into it.

    So anyway, in that latter case, all time travel events are also baked in, and so paradoxes can’t exist. Hope that makes sense..

  79. You can make logical time constructs all you like but they mean nothing if the underlying axioms don’t match physical reality.

  80. The local bending is strong enough to keep the moons in orbit, but they all ‘feel’ the bending from the sun to keep the clusters in orbit around the sun.

  81. I believe GoatGuy adequately covered that. Basically everything coming out of gas and dust cloud condensing into a star system is going to *tend* to rotate in the same direction, but it’s a statistical thing, it’s quite possible for late collisions to result in oddball rotations.

  82. Binding energy is Always negative, I think.
    Water emits energy when it condenses,
    absorb it when it evaporates.

  83. It is bending spacetime, but not “down”, since spacetime isn’t two-dimensional. The rubber sheet is an analogy that’s easy to visualize, but every analogy has it’s limits. You can’t transfer it to reality 1 to 1.

    This is a more accurate depiction: https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960×0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fstartswithabang%2Ffiles%2F2018%2F08%2Fspacetimelu31.jpg

    But even this is inaccurate, since it’s only 3D, whereas spacetime is 4D. (If you can’t view it, search for “gravity curvature of spacetime 3d” in google images).

    This one is also 3D, but includes frame dragging: http://www.thephysicsmill.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/fig1b.png

  84. And what about the paradox of the traveler deciding to prevent his former
    self to enter the machine, just to see what happens?

  85. So what is the real mechanism by which gravity works b/c it has been described as a “bending/curvature” of space-time = “bending of space”?
    The current bending of space cannot explain the rotations of Oberon around Uranus & Charon around Pluto, given the bending of space created by the sun so as to keep the planets and asteroids etc in orbit around it.

  87. Which makes me think that the solution to the Fermi
    paradox is the most obvious: the first race do develop
    technology is immeasurably advantaged over the others
    (even just 1000 years of difference close any match),
    and we are not the first.

  88. So you’d argue that two parallel laser beams (ignoring their natural self diverging tendencies) would attach each other, and that photons within each would also attract each other? Assume a short pulse, say 1ps, and gobs of Exawatts. Beyond NIF class.

  89. We physicists tend to think that “masses go to something else”, not to nothing.

    Just Saying,
    -= GoatGuy ✓ =-

  90. I’m afraid I can’t see the obviousness of your thought experiment. Why can’t the 1kg masses simply disappear from the universe once they are converted to pure energy? Energy is conserved, but mass goes from something to nothing at the moment of conversion.

  91. And it just happened to be at the right distance to have the same apparent size at the exactly the right time for us to observe that. Wasn’t always so.

  92. The somewhat weird implication, which I haven’t realized before, is that binding energy can be negative, like in helium. edit: and have negative mass as a result…

    (But it can also be positive, like in uranium.)

  93. > They are mutually exclusive.

    Not necessarily. But the understanding of causality will need to be extended with time travel. Without time travel, causality is a simple linear phenomenon. A causes B causes C and so on, and each cause is always at an earlier time than the result.

    With time travel, you get more complex constructs. In the simplest case, you get time-reversed causality. A -> B -> C chains where B causes C, but happens at a later time. A little hard to imagine, but the causality relationship is still there. A simple example is a time traveler appearing in 1900 because he entered a time machine in 2200. The event in 2200 causes the event in 1900.

    Worse constructs include things like closed time loops (aka causality loops: A causes B causes A), branched causality (assuming the multi-world interpretation of quantum mechanics), and who knows what else.

    But in all of those cases, small local bits of the causality chain are still the same as in classical physics, without time travel. So this would just be an extension, the same way that quantum mechanics and relativity are extensions of Newtonian mechanics.

  98. There is another little simple strangeness that eclipses all the others.
    The only planet with life has a satellite whose apparent diameter
    is equal to that of its star. Just a matter of distance…

  99. I think the other poster hinted at another example: in nuclear reactions, the binding energy of a nucleus is counted – and measured – as part of its mass.

    For example, the mass of a free proton is 938 MeV/c^2; the mass of a free neutron is 940 MeV/c^2; so the mass of 2 protons and 2 neutrons is 3756 MeV/c^2. But the mass of an alpha particle is only 3727 MeV/c^2. The difference is the source of fusion energy.

    Do the protons and neutrons somehow get lighter inside a nucleus (or heavier inside nuclei heavier than iron)? I don’t think so. Rather, the nuclear binding energy directly contributes to the mass of the nucleus.

    Or am I misinterpreting this?

  100. So you are saying that only Uranus was hit by a large enough object to tilt its axis but the other 8 planets were not? Probability would suggest otherwise esp given evidence of asteroid hits on the planets & moons. (esp in the early stages following creation of the planets)
    But, you did not explain Oberon’s revolution around Uranus, which is not in the same plane as the rest of the planets and moons and travels in a plane facing the sun.
    Also, how how do you explain Charon’s revolution towards the sun? i.e. orthogonal to all other rotations of every other moon? Yet, there are other more distant bodies revolving around the sun in the more common gravitational axis?
    The common gravitational well with the sun in the center weighing space downwards that is typically depicted does not explain these observations.

    BTW another interpretation of G is:
    6.67/10^11 (kg . m^3 / kg^2.s^2) = 0.74/10^27 kg.m/kg^2 x 9e16 m^2/s^2
    =0.74/10^27 kg.m/kg^2 x c^2 (c=speed of light)
    Simplifying further =
    0.74/10^27 (kg.m/kg^2) x c^2 = 0.44 m/kg^2 x c^2 x 1.67/10^27kg
    1.67/10^27 kg = rest mass of H atom.
    Still under investigation is the meaning of 0.44 m/kg^2

  101. I must say that I have really enjoyed this post. Controversial stuff like this always generates excellent discussion and I invariably walk away with new knowledge or better understanding of previously known subjects. I am not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination but I do find it incredibly interesting. Thank you to all the smart people on here who have shared their knowledge and thank you Brian for posting this.

  102. It’s even mentioned in this paper; All he did in this one was sort of trivially extend the result of that earlier paper to cover a very dense spinning cylinder of light.

    The “very dense” part is the problem.

    Well, that and the result only really being valid for an *infinitely long* spinning cylinder, which would be kind of hard to construct with any level of technology.

  104. You can have time travel or you can have causality. They are mutually exclusive. That also rules out FTL space travel.

  106. Didn’t John Cramer do some experiments years back that demonstrated that it was impossible to send information backwards in time ?

  107. K GTO… are you also suggesting that Parallel Universes don’t exist either ? And what about black holes, and dark matters ? I can’t agree with you on this and recommend you spend a little more time on the internet and watch a little more cable TV.

    Goodness, would you also suggesting that the laser bong depicted above can’t carry it’s users through time ?

  109. Did they really say that in the video? I shall see it if I accidentally ingest some
    poisonous substance.

  111. The stretched canvas is just an analogy, you realize. It’s not meant to be a realistic description of what is going on.

  112. On the bright side, if you did have that much light circulating in a helix, its own gravitation would do the job of bending its path into that helix. So it’s mostly a problem of generating an intense enough light beam to form a “kugelblitz”, a photonic black hole. One with the theoretical limit of angular momentum.

    Which actually makes this several steps more plausible than all those space drives that require you to somehow obtain negative mass.

  114. Well, there is that. (Neutrino false flag)

    Every so often, cuckoo clock types pop up with amazing mathematical derivations that posit extra dimensions, free-energy machines of limitless power, of teleportation, and FTL time travel. And antigravity, pro-gravity and whatever. 

    Remember the Vortex scûmbåg, Lynden LaRouche?  1970s, airport cult, purporting to have solved all of the universe’s mathematically interesting problems with vortex-math theory.  

    I, being a math goat, and unaccountably getting to airports in the 1970s hours before boarding time, was endlessly entertained by gently goading the v-nuts … scientifically.  

    I even bought one of their trash-math treatises. And read it, scribbled in red, purple, green, sepia, teal and pink ink … all over it, its formulæ, the margins, with endless corrections. Excellent napkin pictures of stars, orbs, rings. Everything. Space shit. 

    Which, to their almost-total amazement, I’d pull forth nearing boarding time, and flip to a random page, pleading to engage them in a quantitative discussion at a later date, of just exactly where the Good Lynden and his monetary henchmen went a bit … ahem … wrong. 

    NEVER ONCE got a call back. Left dozens, perhaps a hundred business cards. Not a once. 

    Just Saying,
    -= GoatGuy ✓ =-

  115. Good Lord, Bill. What on Earth (pun intended) are you going on about?  

    Fairly obviously when the Sun was a of matter at the center of an revolving and indistinctly defined ‘cloud’ of infalling matter, like ALL vortex systems, matter swirling “in the groove” (majority rotational inertial moment) tended to be reinforced to stay in the groove. Matter infalling at other angles, velocities, moments … were battered by the majority, eventually to pick up momentum and revector toward the consensus.  

    This swirling disk would thin; local clumping would attract MORE local consolidation, forming planets, asteroids, moons, bits and clumps of all sorts of shapes, but mostly round. Moreover, the ‘common rotational axis’ unsurprisingly would be shared not just by the emerging Sol, but by all the planets. At least … before collisions … of the planetessimals themselves.  

    Uranus with a certainty exceeding 99%, was ‘crashed into’ by one (85%), two (12%) or 3+ (2%) large proto-planets of at least ¼ (total) of the present mass of Uranus.  

    Since ‘smacking each other’ is woefully imprecise, the likelihood of Uranus’s rotational axis being skewed FAR off from the rest of the planets … was pretty significant. It ‘got lucky’, and ended up flipping to its present almost–90° inclination. 

    Lastly, that inclination does NOT point ‘at the sun’. It only points that way by coincidence, each half-orbit it makes around Sol.  

    So… no mysteries, Bill.
    Sorry.

    Just Saying,
    -= GoatGuy ✓ =-

  117. Wasn’t there a paper that showed that a very dense cylinder spinning at half the speed of light could generate regions of space time that would allow people to travel backward and forward thru time.

    Of course, the problem is building that cylinder and getting it to spin that fast.

  118. A teensy, tiny error … 

    G₀ = 6.67408×10⁻¹¹ m³kg⁻¹s⁻² 

    That part isn’t an error. The statement following that G₀ = 66.7 trillionths of a N force, at 1 meter, for 1 kg needs the units to be looked at more closely.  

    this part … m³kg⁻¹s⁻²

    Who knows what this means … but it can ‘regrouped’ to have more meaning, along this line:

    m² ⋅ (m/s²) / kg   which has 3 distinct terms. 

    “/kg” is per kilogram. So, whatever gravitational force is created by a mass is LINEARLY related to the mass. Per kilogram, straight up.  No contest there.

    (m/s²) is the conventional representation of ‘acceleration’.

    The harder one is (m²) … because in the odd way of ‘units’, it isn’t “per meter squared” which we empirically would understand. It really says that the force of gravitation is INVERSELY proportional to the separation between attracting bodies, squared. F = G₀ Mm/d², where d² is meters².  

    Since F = ma … in units is N = kg • (m/s²) … which rearranges as (m/s²) = N/kg, then that too can be substituted in to get a complicated thing which APPROXIMATES for a really large ‘M’ mass and more ordinary ‘m’ masses to what I stated… sort of.  That’s the imprecise part.  Oh well.

    Anyway, just thought the more math-must-be-well-explained goats amongst us would appreciate the insight. 

    -= GoatGuy ✓ =-

  119. I see your point.  

    One of the ironically ‘easiest’ mental analogies to ‘give mass to energy’ is to consider a black hole and 2 chunks of matter outside it… 1 kg of matter, 1 kg of antimatter.  

    Aimed well at the geo-center of the black hole, without otherwise interacting with each other, each chunk adds 1 kg of mass to the BH. 

    Yet, one is matter, one is antimatter.  

    Clearly as they’re ripped apart and spun into an degenerate disk, inside the event horizon, they annihilate. Turning into a profound blast of gamma electromagnetic energy. Which doesn’t escape. The BH remains 2 kg heavier. And exerts whatever contribution 2 kg gives to its gravitational field.

    Energy … ≡ … mass and both ⇒ gravitation

    Just Saying,
    -= GoatGuy ✓ =-

    (PS: you could mentally derive the same result if you convert 2 kg of matter (somehow) to energy, and at 100% efficiency, turn that into a microwave beam (say), point it at the BH’s center, wherein it is forever captured. The BH becomes 2 kg heavier, and exerts 2 kg’s worth additional gravitational force.)

    You also could accomplish yet-another gravi-inertial thought experiment, where the same 2 kg of energy beam is passed “to the right” of a non-black-hole gravitationally significant mass. To whatever degree of deflection the ‘2 kg energy beam’ bends, the attracting mass is itself accelerated in opposite direction. 

    Reaction ≡ Action.

  120. gravitational Lensing causes light to bend a small amount near the corona of the sun…. That’s how Einstein proved special relativity.. How big of a sun would you need to capture light in orbit around the sun? Black hole.

  121. how Do you get light to go in a loop? you would need a blackhole… is this some attempt to show that light and gravity behave the same as electricity in a loop induces magnetic flux? In a science fiction kind of way, it makes sense since light entering a black hole could actually spin there forever… I suppose you could argue that the spinning light induces the gravitation field… though it doesn’t really work for why the moon has gravity…

  122. I thought if you wanted to go back in time you need to flight really fast around the earth like Superman…. or slingshot around the sun at warp speed… 😉

  123. A not-so-small error on my part. Thanks. Yes… Mercury’s degree-of-orbital-precession turned out to be well predicted by GR, solar mass and Mercury’s orbital distance.  It was the apparent prosolar shift in star positions during eclipses that was the 1919 result.  ⊕1 from me.

  124. cont…
    If we further assume that the solar ‘gravity well’ also induces Earth to weigh the canvass ‘downwards’, this would explain as well why the Moon orbits Earth more or less  around the planet’s equator and causes eclipses every now and then.
    Now let’s look at Uranus and its system of satellites and rings. The moons of Uranus by strange coincidence travel around the giant planet’s equator also. The trouble is that Uranus is lying down on its belly and has its South Pole pointing towards the Sun! Unlike the rings of Saturn, which are near-parallel to the Sun’s equator, the rings of Uranus face the Sun head-on (i.e., perpendicular to the ecliptic!). Uranus does not spin East-West like Earth, but think of it more like North-South if we use Earth as a reference. Imagine that the Earth’s equator ran from pole to pole and the Moon orbited our planet in such a way as to generate a bull’s eye pattern as seen from the Sun (Fig. 1 – Scenario B). To be consistent with General Relativity, Uranus would have to push the canvas ‘outwards’ from our star in order to generate the necessary gravity well in its vicinity that would induce its satellites to orbit facing the Sun. What abstract Mathematics can relativists concoct to explain why Earth pushes the canvas ‘downwards’ whereas Uranus pushes the canvas ‘outwards’? The onus shifts to relativists to prove why the Sun’s ‘gravity well’ affects planets unequally since this violates their own logic.

  125. cont….
    It can be projected tangentially around the hole, with an adequate velocity, and it will then travel in a circle round the side of the hollow. This model shows us how gravitation works according to general relativity: the Sun curves the space in its vicinity, and a planet has to follow the contours of that curvature.” (pp. 76-77)1
    Relativists explain the reason for the orbit of the Earth and of the other planets via a similar analogy.
    At first glance, there is something terribly disquieting about this theory. Why would the Sun have the propensity for weighing the space-time canvas ‘downwards’, meaning in the direction in which the Sun must push space around Mercury to induce the planet to orbit around the plane of the ecliptic (the Sun’s ‘equator’)? As far as we can tell there is no up, down, left or right in space. The Sun could just as well push the invisible canvas outwards or to the side.
    But let’s concede direction for the sake of argument and assume that the Sun weighs the canvas ‘downwards’. Now the problem is that Einstein’s theory is restricted to a two-object system in which the primary is static. Weighing the canvas ‘downwards’ explains, for example, why the Earth, Uranus, and Pluto orbit our star in a counter-clockwise (CCW) direction as viewed from ‘above’. (I define this as an arbitrary standard for the purposes of discussion).

  126. Time is a number line & nothing more. Anyone that tries to convert time so as to have physical properties (like space/objects) is simply deluding themselves.
    re: support of GR using Mercury precession – please consider the following
    In 1915, Einstein mathematically derived that gravity is a result of space-time geometry. He proposed an equation that predicts quite accurately the degree to which Mercury’s orbit shifts, thus solving a problem first tackled by LeVerrier almost 100 years earlier. Relativists continue to regard this equation as strong evidence that General Relativity is essentially correct.
    You can visualize Einstein’s warped space mechanism as a cork swirling in the whirlpool that is generated when water rushes down a drain. The Sun weighs down the canvass of space-time in its vicinity coercing tiny Mercury to trace a rosette-like pattern with its shifting elliptical itineraries.
     “ General relativity gives a different meaning to gravitation than does Newton’s theory. A simple model will give us a foretaste of what is to come. Imagine, once more, that we are in a two dimensional space represented by a sheet of rubber stretched over a horizontal frame. This is a non-curved Euclidean space. In the middle, place a heavy ball to represent the Sun; the rubber stretches, of course, and the ball then sits in a wide hollow. This hollow represents the curvature of space which the Sun’s mass causes …Now let a small ball be a planet going round the Sun.

  127. Now I’ve watched the video… is that supposed to be a physics talk or a rap video? If you haven’t seen it, do not bother.

  128. I could be wrong, but please elaborate. I don’t think the ‘ol E=mc^2 implies that light has any mass of any flavor (virtual, or real), it just shows that ‘in theory’, pure energy can be converted to mass (assuming there exists some known particle in the standard model which has a mass less than or equal to the energy you provide.

    For the opposite direction, there are multiple examples of some mass being converted to energy (fission, fusion, nuclear transitions, etc.)

    If we accept that ‘space-time’ is distorted by gravity, akin to the common 3D analog of a heavy object on a rubber sheet, this would cause the observations seen with light grazing the sun, or other items with mass, even if photons have exactly zero mass.

    I’ve simply never thought that Einsteins equation implied m=E/c^2 for photons or other things moving at ‘c’, just as an equivalence between types of energy. Any actual experiments to prove this is wrong (or right) thinking?

    Also, if there were any flavor of mass on a photon, shouldn’t the deflection of higher energy photons be greater than lower energy ones? I’ve not seen any research showing differing ‘star shifts’ in the IR .vs. UV during an eclipse.

    And, yes, this so called researcher is a bad joke.

  129. Error in a small detail: While accurate prediction of the precession of Mercury’s orbit was one of the early successes of General Relativity, no solar eclipses were needed to measure that. The test done during the 1919 eclipse was to measure the shift in apparent position of stars whose light passed near the sun during the eclipse.

  132. Something interesting — a mass moving at velocity ‘v’ passing by a gravitational object, is deflected at an angle that is INDEPENDENT of its mass. Depends only on its momentum.  

    A problem with this fellow’s theory is that for there to be appreciable measurable ‘gravitational’ effects, the amount of power contained in the “cylinder of light” is mind-blowingly prodigious.  

    Ginormous.  
    Humungous. 
    Colossal.  
    Titanic.  

    Because of the E=mc² equivalence!

    For, if all ‘masses’ have a mutual gravitational attraction, AND that includes attraction to virtual momentum ‘pure energy’ waves of light … or radio waves … or X-rays, then the virtual ‘m’ need also be prodigious.  

    Because G₀, the gravitation constant, is really, really small. 

    G₀ = 6.67408×10⁻¹¹ m³kg⁻¹s⁻².
    G₀ = 0.0000000000667408 N-kg at 1 m.

    G₀ is 67 trillionths of a newton, for a 1 kg mass, at 1 meter distance.  

    To put that in some perspective, two 1 kg weights 1 meter from each other, in space, would take approximately 2 days to cross the distance and clang into each other, thru mutual gravitation. 

    REALLY small forces.  

    And how much energy are those two 1 kg masses?

    E = ½mc²
    E = ½⋅2⋅299,792,458²
    E = 8.9876×10¹⁶ J … converts to
    E = 24,000,000,000 kilowatt hours of power. 

    For an amazingly small attraction.  
    And this experiment is going to concentrate MORE acceleration?

    Ummm…
    -= GoatGuy ✓ =-

  133. Einstein, rightly — and with a simple mathematical derivation that is breathtakingly sweet — demonstrated that if ‘c’, the speed of light, is an invariant in ALL frames of reference, then (… … … lots of math …. … …) and therefore

    E = mc²

    Which of course we all recognize. But within THAT is contained a chestnut that is rather remarkable: that the equivalence of matter implies that they both interchangeably are affected by all the forces of nature.  

    Yet, tho that seems obvious, it also isn’t. What is energy?
    Ah … now we get to the crux of the matter. 

    Energy is either potential (“bound”) or kinetic (“in motion”).  

    Accelerate a mass to some velocity, and it both takes a certain amount of energy that minimally cannot be less than ½mv², or if in the RF (reference frame) it is being decelerated, then it ’emits’ and transfers to the deceleration system that same amount of energy. Immutable Laws of Physics. 

    In all reference frames. 

    So, when energy is in the form of electromagnetic waves (ranging rather ironically from below audio waves to well beyond the most potent gamma rays), then it comports the energy imparted to it between ‘here’ and ‘yon’ at something close to ‘c’ m/s. And if it is passing a gravitational field, it is deflected by that gravitation, just as if it were a mass of finite (computable) momentum.  

    Really awesome, that. 
    Confirmed early in the 20th Century…
    By observing Mercury during several well-timed eclipses. 

    GoatGuy (more below…)

  136. I do not see an experiment showing that single particle travelling in time. When an experiment (with neutrinos) as little as hinted at the possibility of FTL, people immediately jumped at it.
    Here I see a cry for attention, with the words “just gimme fat grants now” written on this guy’s forehead in not so invisible ink.

    If you wish to make a contribution or get further information on funding for the above links, click on: Funding for Time Travel Research

    I also have to admit I was wrong. I said academics never change. Apparently they do: this one is worse.

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