Vinaire's Blog

Reference: Essays on Substance

The Gravitational Waves

According to the AI:

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, caused by massive objects undergoing acceleration, such as colliding black holes, merging neutron stars, or supernovae. These waves propagate outward from their source at the speed of light, carrying information about their origins and the nature of gravity itself.

Key Characteristics

• Nature: Gravitational waves are distortions in space-time, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 as part of his general theory of relativity.
• Speed: They travel at the speed of light (approximately 186,000 miles per second).
• Effects: As they pass through space, gravitational waves stretch and compress space-time along their path.

Sources of Gravitational Waves
Gravitational waves are generated by some of the most energetic events in the universe:

• Collisions and mergers of black holes or neutron stars.
• Supernovae (explosions of massive stars).
• Rotating neutron stars with irregular shapes.
• Potential remnants from the Big Bang.

Detection
Gravitational waves were first directly detected in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). This landmark observation came from the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away. LIGO and similar observatories use highly sensitive instruments to measure the minute distortions in space-time caused by passing gravitational waves.

Importance
The discovery and study of gravitational waves have opened a new window into understanding the universe. Unlike electromagnetic waves (light), gravitational waves provide insights into phenomena that are otherwise invisible, such as black hole collisions. They also offer a new way to test Einstein’s theory of relativity and explore cosmic events in unprecedented detail.

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According to Substance Theory:

1. Not only motion, but mass (consistency) is also relative.
2. The velocity of a particle in free space is constant because its motion is balanced by the inertia of its mass (consistency).
3. All bodies arrange themselves dynamically in space such that their mass (consistency) and motions are in equilibrium at all times. This describes gravity.
4. It is natural that when gravitational relationships change, their effect will propagate very quickly to other bodies near and far.
5. What propagates is the readjustment of the configurations of masses and motions, and not some wave in abstract space-time dimension.
6. How fast these readjustments propagate is not necessarily the speed of light, which is a postulate underlying General Relativity.
7. The speed at which gravitational readjustments propagate is an open question.

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Reference: Essays on Substance

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking means that you can see both similarities and differences and do not just think in identities. The bug in human mind is the identity thinking.

The ultimate identity thinking would by when one assigns God to be the cause of everything and thinks no further.

When one starts to move away from identity thinking, he first thinks in black and white and does not recognize any shade of gray. To him, everything that Newton said is right; and everything that Einstein said is wrong. Christianity is good; all other religions are bad. God is good; Man is evil. This kind of thinking is very close to identity thinking.

A more flexible thinking starts to recognize some shades of gray. He starts to think in terms of categories, but such categories are few and strictly defined. They are limited in their scope. Here we have an abundance of fixed ideas, and an unwillingness to look beyond those fixed ideas. They cannot think creatively. They cannot accept a new idea because their ability to evaluate is quite primitive.

The above is the “identity thinking” end of the scale of logic. At the other end is thinking that recognizes differences and similarities appropriately. This is the thinking of scientists. They think in terms of infinite categories. These categories can subdivide and their numbers can grow indefinitely. They balance the information belonging to these infinite categories using the first Law of Thought.

FIRST LAW OF THOUGHT: All thought related to a subject must be continuous, consistent and harmonious.

At this end of the logic scale resides Critical Thinking.

Understanding of subjects, such as, physics and Nuclear Physics cannot occur without critical thinking.

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Reference: Essays on Substance

Inertia and Absolute Motion

Newton saw the planets moving against an unchanging background of star-studded skies, and so he conceived the idea of absolute motion. Absolute motion required a reference to a fixed, unmoving background. Newton conceived this reference as absolute space and gave it an abstract definition. An abstract space cannot be visualized as something real, and that is where Newton’s definition of absolute motion fell apart.

But Newton was not too far from the truth. What made star-studded skies a fixed, unmoving background was not space but the stars that maintained unchanging configurations. The unchanging configuration came about because stars had a high inertia (both linear and rotational) that kept them pinned to a location in space.

We can easily visualize an object of infinite inertia to provide a fixed, unmoving reference point. For example, the back hole at the center of a galaxy has higher inertia than any other individual star in the galaxy. It, therefore, provides a fixed, unmoving reference point for rest of the galaxy. The motion of a body with respect to such a fixed, unmoving reference point, may then be plotted on an absolute scale of motion.

The inertia of Earth is much less than the inertia of the black hole at the center of galaxy. Therefore, Earth will have a measure of absolute motion with respect to the center of galaxy. Similarly, light will have absolute motion with respect to the center of galaxy; but this motion will be very large because light hardly has any inertia. Thus, it is possible to have a scale of absolute motion, which would be inverse of the scale of inertia.

In the post, Michelson-Morley’s Null Result, we made a rough calculation of the drift speed of Earth based on its estimated inertia. That drift speed was found to be much smaller than the speed of Earth relative to the Sun. This was because the calculated drift speed of Earth represented the absolute motion of Earth in space. By conceiving motion as inverse of inertia, and taking into account the gravitational effects, we can find the absolute motion of particles in space.

The above reasoning also provides an insight into why light has extremely large but finite speed. It is because light has a very small but finite inertia. This gives rise to the following postulate of the Theory of Substance:

The velocity of a particle in free space is constant because its motion is balanced by the inertia of its mass, or consistency. The motion increases as the mass, or consistency, decreases.

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