WHAT IS THE GRAVITATION FORCE MEDIATOR?

In the previous post about the Catt discovery, the point comes across that in charging up, a capacitor with a vacuum between its plates allows energy to flow across the vacuum between the plates, in the direction of the electric field lines.

This energy is in a sense photon-type electromagnetic radiation, but in a sense it is not like that. The electromagnetic energy which travels along lines of force like this has no frequency (frequency is zero), so it does not oscillate like a photon. It therefore can't be detected by a radio, since it can't resonate electrons in an aerial. This non-oscillatory radiation causes electromagnetic forces, as explained in the April 2003 issue of Electronics World. But what about the force mediator of gravity?

According to the latest revision of my page http://members.lycos.co.uk/nigelbryancook/ , it might be true that the graviton is oscillatory radiation of extremely high frequency; beyond normal gamma rays. Normally you would think that the impulse from such radiation would simply blast a nucleus apart or induce fission, but when you calculate the actual radiation frequency for Hawking radiation from electron-size black holes in the spacetime fabric (5th dimension), you see that even nuclei are quite transparent to such radiation.

We know that the impulsive strikes from 'gravitons' on a nucleus will just cause it to jiggle about slightly, because there will be almost equal strikes from all directions. Indeed, the gravitons would presumably be striking Higgs bosons surrounding the fundamental particles in the nucleus, which may diffuse and smooth out the impacts. The question is, does the Hawking radiation formula apply to black holes of fundamental particle size? It should not according to some of the approximations used in its derivation. However, it is interesting to consider the fabric of spacetime as black holes that are emitting light speed radiation which could cause gravity. What is really needed are detailed quantitative calculations to see if it is completely absurd, or if it could be made to work.

There are quite a few crackpot ideas around about the mediator of gravity which are simply not crazy enough to be right. Neutrinos have been claimed by crackpots to cause gravity. The problem is, they do not do the nuclear physics needed to justify the existence of sufficiently many, strongly interacting neutrinos to do the job of causing gravity. A vague, 'arm-waving' idea is crackpot unless or until it can be made more rigorous and testable. What matters in science is being able to test ideas properly. Simply naming the mediator the 'graviton', and calculating a predicted spin from conservation principles in physics, is not really very useful. If it turned out that 'gravitons' were a type of high energy Hawking radiation which interacted with the Higgs boson in the right way to give gravity, that would be useful.

A simpler idea is that by Dr Dr Rueda and Dr Haisch published in Physical Review A v49 p 678 (1994), saying the virtual photon sea causes inertial mass, and their more recent idea in Annalen der Physik v14 p479 that the same effect causes gravitational mass, by the shielding mechanism for space pressure discussed by Feynman in 1965. They also explain inertial force by the increased pressure against the fabric of space that you feel when accelerating. It was dismissed by Sheldon Glashow for making no predictions. However, Nobel laureate Dr Glashow may not have actually read the paper.

LeSage's gravity mechanism of 1748 (LeSage was an electrical engineer who made the world's first transmission line for telegraph message signalling) was similarly dismissed. In fact, LeSage used the mechanism to predict that atoms were mainly void, which was heresy in Newton's time but was verified by Rutherford's nuclear physics in 1912. So it did make a prediction which was subsequently confirmed, albeit a non-numerical one. (LeSage did not predict the size of the nucleus or anything that detailed.)

http://members.lycos.co.uk/nigelbryancook/EW.htm :

LeSage also, between 1747-82, explained gravity as a shadowing effect of space pressure (see diagram above). The speculative, non-quantitative mechanism was published in French (George Louis LeSage, Lucrece Newtonien, Nouveaux Memoires De L’Academie Royal de Sciences et Belle Letters, 1782, pp. 404-31). But there was no general relativity or electromagnetism to prove the physical nature of space, which LeSage assumed to be particles like a gas but is actually a continuum or perfect fluid with 377 ohms fixed impedance to all forms of energy (matter is electrical in nature).

Comment on one internet page: ‘It seems that LeSage in 1747, on the basis of gravitational arguments alone and because gravity is no surface effect, deduced that the atomic structure was practically empty and wide open. Certainly an unorthodox idea in his day. Rutherford’s work in 1911 confirmed the accuracy of that early idea and it is now generally accepted.’
LeSage argued that there is some kind of pressure in space, and that masses shield one another from the space pressure, thus being pushed together by the unshielded space pressure on the opposite side.