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Understanding the real world entails creating an analogue of the real world that our minds can visualize. Sometimes, we can do this and it seems to work. However, that doesn’t mean that the Analogue actually is the same as the real world. When Einstein talks about curved space, it doesn’t actually mean that space is physically curved, but is just a way of visualizing the situation. When he came up with this viewpoint, and his equations gave the correct answers, everyone said that Newton was wrong. This is not necessarily the case. When Newtonian calculations are carried out concerning planets revolving around the Sun, some simplifications are used. This always seemed to me a bit of a cheat when I did Applied Maths at school. It was much easier to consider that a moving mass was very small, in fact no more than a point through which its momentum would act. Mostly this was all right. However, I wondered just what difference it made to a planetary system. So I created a computer model of the planet Mercury revolving around the sun using solely the Newtonian mechanics originally proposed, including the inverse square law of gravitational force, assuming a point for both the Sun and Mercury. I adjusted the velocity at the aphelion to give the correct perihelion then measured the angle through which the perihelion moved over a period of 100 terrestrial years. This turned out to be zero +/- 0.5 arc seconds which was the random error of the system. This is exactly what Newton would have expected.

I then replaced the Sun with a point mass at its centre equal to half the sun’s mass, and distributed the other half of the mass between twelve equally spaced points around the centre. Getting the radius for these points was a bit tricky as the sun is not uniformly dense, most of its mass being at the centre. Then, each time I calculated the gravitational pull on the planet, it was done 13 times, once for the central core giving half the force, and once for each of the orbital points giving one 24th of the force each. The force from each of these would be slightly different as the distance is different, especially for the nearest and furthest points on the Sun’s surface.

Although this will not be an accurate simulation of the real situation, it is nearer to the actual than the single point source. When the system was set in motion, we got a precession rate of 43 arc seconds for a period of 100 terrestrial years, which is close to the observed figure.

Now here we have a system that uses only Newtonian mechanics to do the calculations, but it does give the right answers. See the diagram.

I then adjusted the distances, etc., to match the orbit of Venus, and then Earth, and did the same tests. These both gave results inside the errors of measurement of the actual orbits.

This is enough to convince me that Newton was basically correct and that it was only the use of point mass that gave the wrong result. So, if Newton isn’t wrong, then Einstein must be, or at least with his visualization of the situation even though his maths gives the correct result. It’s as I have said before, ‘You can use Maths to evaluate things in the real world, but you can’t work backwards and use the maths to tell you the physical structure of the real world.

Bending of Light Rays Around a large Mass

It is a known fact that if a light ray passes close to a large mass, like the Sun, the path of the light will be slightly bent. There are a number of explanations for this:-

1. Photons have mass, therefore they are attracted towards the Sun.
2. Light travels more slowly in stronger gravitational fields.
3. Space is curved near a large mass (Einstein’s explanation).

Since the third option looks unlikely if you accept the work done above with planetary motion, Then one, or both of the other explanations is correct. I have no trouble accepting the first option which seems completely logical, although the second option is used to explain refraction when light passes from air into glass and its path is deflected. If the second option is correct, then a similar explanation will tell us why Einstein’s equations are used to correct the electronic systems in satellites. If gravity slows the speed of light, then why would it not have the same effect on electrical signals in the circuitry of an atomic clock? Einstein says that time itself slows down, but why not just the timing mechanism itself? It makes more sense to me.

It seems to me that there are a number of experiments or observations that could be made that would help understand what is actually happening here.

1. Does the bending of the light around the sun, for example, tie up with the amount of bending caused by light entering a glass block?
2. Can we correlate the change in the permitivity of free space with the strength of a gravitational field?
3. Does the change in permitivity of free space account for the change in timing rate of an atomic clock?

I think that if we could correlate all these parameters, it would give a much greater understanding of what is, at the moment, described by General Relativity.

If you look at the equation connecting the speed of light and permitivity, you will see that C = 1/sqrt(m0e0)

 where e0 is the permitivity of free space. Closer to a large object, the higher e0 becomes and the slower the speed of light. As this varies along the wave front, the ray will bend towards the object.

More to come...