LIGO: Gravitational Waves or Gravitational Tidal Effect?

General relativity correctly predicted the precession of the perihelion of Mercury and the correct angle of deflection of starlight by the sun both of which Newton’s theory of universal gravitation apparently had failed to correctly predict.

Newton’s theory of universal gravity also fails to describe the orbital decay of binary systems such as the Hulse-Taylor binary system which observation was consistent with general relativity. Favoring general relativity as the theory that correctly describes gravity is a clear cut decision considering its successes. General relativity succeeded where Newton’s theory of gravity had failed. But is the matter really settled? Let’s take a closer look at how Newton’s theory of gravity has been applied to the observations cited above.

In order to describe the evolution of two gravitationally interacting bodies    and    , the magnitude of the gravitational force is calculated using Newton’s equation for gravity    where    and    are the masses of the bodies, then substituted in the equation for Newton’s second law of motion; the familiar    where   is the acceleration of . This is as straightforward a calculation as can be but there lays the problem.

Gravity, according to Newton’s law, is instantaneous. It follows that if gravity is instantaneous, so must the action of gravity be instantaneous. So applying the second law of motion (which is time dependent) to describe the effect of Newtonian gravity introduces a lag in the action that is incompatible with instantaneous gravity. This lag of the action of gravity introduced by using the second law of motion is precisely what caused predictive errors in Newtonian mechanical description of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, of the bending of star light and of the orbital decay of binary systems. In fact, once the time dependency and consequently the time lag are eliminated from the gravitational action, we find that Newtonian gravity is in perfect agreement with observations (see Special and General Relativity Axiomatic Derivations).

The fact is that Newtonian gravity (when correctly applied) and general relativity can and with equal precision predict the behaviour of gravitationally interacting bodies for the above phenomena is problematic. This forces us to find other ways to answer the question as to whether gravity is a force that acts instantaneously between bodies or if is the effect of curvature of space due to the presence of matter. Clearly, the two explanations of the nature of gravity are foundationally incompatible.

It follows from QGD’s equation for gravity    that gravity becomes repulsive when bodies separated by distances such that   . That is, there is a threshold distance     (from observations) beyond which gravity becomes repulsive and increases proportionally to the square of the distance.  The effect of repulsive gravity as described by QGD is consistent with the observed expansion of the universe which is currently attributed to dark energy. This allows for new predictions that are distinct from those of general relativity.

If QGD is correct, the magnitude of the gravitational repulsion between the Earth and the black holes that caused the GW150914 event must be    greater than the magnitude of the attractive gravitational force in close proximity to the binary system that caused the event. Such gravitational effect is astronomically greater than the signal detected by LIGO in 2015. In fact, the repulsive force would be enough to tear our galaxy apart from the gravitational tidal force and accelerate it to speed approaching the speed of light. And the repulsive force between the Earth and the recently observed GW170104 event, presumed to be a twice the distance, would be four times as great. The reason our galaxy (and others) is not torn apart is that the distribution of matter in the universe is nearly homogenous so that the repulsive gravitational forces from distant massive systems acting on each individual particle that compose our galaxy are nearly cancelled out by the repulsions from systems in the opposite directions; resulting in a weak net gravitational effect. So, if the GW150914 and GW170104 events are gravitational, the detected signals would be tidal effects of the net gravitational forces acting on the detectors . That is, the signals are not gravitational waves but the measurement of the instantaneous gravitational tidal effect    where     is the detector and    is one of a total of    massive structures forming the universe. So, LIGO may be thought as measuring the fluctuations of the gravitational tidal effect of the universe on its instruments.

Some Distinctive Predictions of QGD that Are Now Being Tested (or will be in the near Future)

If gravity is instantaneous as predicted by QGD and Newton’s law of universal gravity, then

• we will never detect multi-messengers signals from events predicted to simultaneously generate gravitational and electromagnetic signals.  Electromagnetic signal from the merging, for example, of neutron stars, would arrive up to billions of years after the gravitational signal.
• Gravitational signal from the merging of massive objects at distance close the threshold distance would be undetectable.
• No loss in mass of the merging massive objects in the form of gravitational waves (in fact, there is no mechanism that may account for the conversion of mass into gravitational waves). The mass of the object resulting from the merging will be equal to the sum of the masses of the merged objects.
• Angular radius of the shadow of Sagittarius A* should be 10 times larger than predicted by general relativity

(more can be found in different section of this blog and in Introduction to Quantum-Geometry Dynamics)

New LIGO Announcement Tomorrow (Where’s the Fanfare)

Last year was all about Advanced LIGO’s announcement that they had for the first time detected gravitational waves predicted to exist a hundred years earlier. Understandingly, the press coverage was proportional to the importance of the discovery. The conference which was released in the entire world was, to my knowledge, amongst the events that received the widest press coverage ever for a scientific discovery.

In the field of astrophysics, the only comparable event was probably the detection of primordial gravitational waves by the BICEP2 experiment announced with great fanfare in 2014.

Immediately after the BICEP2 announcement, I predicted that the results would be refuted by further observations. It was not that I was skeptic. It was not just a random opinion, but a direct consequence of quantum-geometry dynamics. The level of confidence in the BICEP2 discovery was so high than very few doubted the validity of the results. I was one of few people who immediately predicted that the results would not hold and as we all know the BICEP2 discovery was refuted later that year.

I made a similar prediction for the LIGO detections the days prior and following the announcement in February 2016. Since the announcement, the sensitivity of LIGO was increased and the second run of observation started in November 2016. Tomorrow, the results of the second run of observations will be released, but this time, there is no press coverage except from two minor local news sources. The release is not even mentioned on the Facebook page of the LIGO collaboration. Why is the release so hush hush? One would think that after the last year’s announcement of the detection of gravitational waves (and the unrelenting news coverage since then) that any news from LIGO would be treated as a highest priority by the media if that is what the LIGO collaboration made the slightest effort to publicize it. But the lack of any attempt to draw attention to the results is probably, as I predicted, because the earlier detection have not be corroborated by new detections.

Good science requires that before being considered a discovery the results of any observation or experiment must be reproducible. Considering its higher sensitivity, the duration of the second run and the theoretical probability of more detection, Advanced LIGO should have made more detections in its second run and it had in its first. Because of that, null results are even more significant than the detection announced last year as they cast doubts on the validity of the discovery.

My prediction is no new detections of black hole mergers announced tomorrow but not to worry, that only provides new constraints on the frequency of events capable of producing detectable gravitational waves, right?

[UPDATE] It seems that they are announcing the detection of one black holes merger (see article here).

From the article:

“Normally, an event like this would trigger an alert to the astronomy community, which could then attempt observations in the area of the sky where the event took place. But, in this case, a recent period of maintenance had left one of the two detectors set in a calibration mode.”

That is disappointing since the simultaneous independent detections of the non-gravitational signals would test the predicted speed of propagation of gravitational waves and would put to rest the prediction of QGD that gravity is instantaneous and that the signals detected by LIGO are due to the tidal effect of gravity.

If QGD’s equation for gravity is correct, gravity becomes repulsive at distances greater than 10Mpc and the magnitude of the repulsion increases as a function of distance (this would account of the expansion of the universe we attribute to dark energy). That means that the greater the distance, the greater the tidal effect of gravity.

Locality, Certainty and Simultaneity under Instantaneous Interactions

Non-locality is based on the assumption that an event which affects a system cannot affect another system which is independent of it. Independent systems being defined as systems which are separated by a distance sufficiently large to prohibit one from influencing the other without violating the speed limit imposed by special relativity. But if gravity is instantaneous, then no systems is truly independent which means that all systems are local and can affect each other instantaneously regardless of distance.

Under instantaneous interactions, the entire universe is local.

locality-certainty-and-simultaneity

The pdf file can be downloaded here.

Does the Violation of Bell’s Inequality Refute All Local Realisms?

[UPDATED FEB 2nd 2015]

By simply assuming that a detector does not detect electrons having spins relative to an axis, but rather only discriminates between ranges of spin angles, we derive an inequality which predictions are in agreement with Bell experiments and are thus indistinguishable from the predictions of quantum mechanics for the same experiments.

See paper below:

Does-the-Violation-of-Bells-Inequalty-Refute-all-Local-Realisms

Download Does the Violation of Bell’s Inequality Refute All Local Realisms

QGD Locally Realistic Explanation of Quantum Entanglement Experiments (part 2)

In part 1 of this series we have shown that the results from quantum entanglement experiments using Mach-Zehnder Interferometer setups can be explained in a locally realistic way. In fact, we can see that quantum entanglement is not required to explain the observations and that result from such experiments, in themselves, do not in actuality support the existence of quantum entanglement. In the present article, we will show quantum-geometry dynamics provides an explanation of the results of experiments based on the Stern-Gerlach experiment , which according to Wikipedia “has become a paradigm of quantum measurement,” that does not violate the principle of locality.

Prerequisites for the Present Article

Readers who are not familiar with the Stern-Gerlach experiments should read the excellent introduction provided here before reading on. Also, readers are not familiar with the quantum-geometry dynamics should minimally have read the article titled Quantum-Geometry Dynamics in a Nutshell or, for an in depth understanding read Introduction to Quantum-Geometry Dynamics (from here on referred to as ITQGD).

The Experiment

 

Figure 1

In the above setup (figure 1), the red beam represents an electron beam and the green arrows represent magnetic preons; which according to QGD, are polarized which compose all magnetic fields (see relevant section of ITQGD for a detailed explanation). The first filter allows only up-spin electrons to go through (50% of the electrons). The second filter (filter 3) is rotated 180° relative to filter 1 so that only down-spin electrons are allowed through. Since only up-spin electrons exit from filter 1 to reach filter 3, the above setup filters out both up-spin and down-spin (relative to filter 1) electrons so that 0% of electrons from the source exit the setup.

In the setup shown in figure 2, a second filter has been added between filter 1 and filter 3 which is at 90° relative to the direction of filter 1.

Figure 2

As we have seen above, only up-spin electrons exit filter 1 (50% of the electrons). These up-spin electrons go through filter 2, which filters out electrons down-spin electron relative to filter 2. The electrons not filtered out by filter (25% of electrons) enter filter 3. Since only up-spin electrons relative to filter 1 will exit filter 2, classical physics predicts that since the electrons exiting filter 2 are up-spin relative to filter 1 the, as in the setup in figure 1, they should be filtered out by filter 3 so that no electrons should exit the setup. However, observations show that 12.5% of the electrons from the source exit the setup.

Quantum mechanics attributes the results of this experiment to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. According to quantum mechanics, detecting the orientation of the spin of one electron of a pair of entangled electrons will change the orientation of the spin of the other instantly regardless of the distance that separates them. In other words, even if two entangled electrons were separated by a distance of the order of magnitude of the universe, measuring this property for one electron of an entangled pair must instant affect this property in the other. This phenomenon which Einstein called spooky action at a distance is thought to refute the principle of locality.

Going back to the results from the setup shown in figure 2, the quantum mechanical explanation requires that all electrons are entangled at the source so that only pairs of entangled electrons enter the apparatus. Then detecting the spin of one electron of an entangled pair instantly changes the spin of the other. So according to quantum mechanics, the electrons passing through the setup do not behave classically because the act of detecting their spins in filter 2 (filter and detector are synonymous) changes the orientation of their spin so that up-spin electrons relative to filter 1 become down-spin electrons, hence are allowed through filter 3.

There are a number of inconsistencies in the above explanation. First, we know that only one of each pair of entangled electrons is allowed through filter 1. It follows that if the electrons existing filter 1 and entering filter 2 are not entangled pairs so that detecting down-spin electrons in filter 2 should not change the orientation of the spin of the up-spin electrons passing through filter 2 so that the electrons exiting filter 2 should be filtered out by filter 3. Observation shows this to be incorrect which leads to the assumption that the electrons exiting filter 1 are also entangled pairs. We may chose to ignore or explain away the inconsistencies of the quantum mechanical explanation but doing so creates an even graver inconsistency.

Going back to the setup shown in figure 1, if the electrons that enter filter 1 are entangled pairs then detecting a down-spin electron should change the other electron of a pair in such a way that, to be consistent with the explanation of the figure 2 setup, 50% of electrons should through the setup 1 and not the 0% observed. Therefore, electrons appear to behave classically when going through the apparatus of setup 1 but quantum mechanically when passing through the apparatus of setup 2.

QGD’s Interpretation of the Stern-Gerlach Experiment

In order to interpret the above results using quantum-geometry dynamics, we have to remember that QGD proposes that are the only fundamental particles of matter. As a direct consequence, all other particles are composites particles, hence must have structure.

We must also keep in mind QGD’s description of the electromagnetic effect and magnetic fields; the latter being composed of unbound which are polarized as result of their interactions with the bound component of electrons (or any other so-called charged particle).

Note: The reader may be interested in a recent experiment conducted by a group of physicists at the National Institute of Physics in Italy which results are in strong agreement with QGD’s description of the electromagnetic effect and the magnetic field. Their results also imply that electrons have structure and that gravity and the electromagnetic effect are related as described by QGD (see relevant sections of ITQGD). Also, see this article for distinct experiment which results support QGD’s prediction that electrons have structure.

According to QGD, electrons and positrons belong to the same class of particles with the only distinction between them being their dynamic structure. Electrons are made of a series of pairs of bounded whose trajectories are within either open or closed regions of quantum-geometrical space. As we will see, the experimental results from the Stern-Gerlach experiments are consistent with electrons having closed structure.

Figure 3 shows representations of an electron and a positron, the trajectories of the component of one may be thought as the mirror image of the trajectories of the component of the other. This allows QGD to predict that an electron moving through a magnetic field must deflected towards the same direction as a positron moving in opposite direction. Note that this implies that positrons, the anti-particle of the electron, are made of the same matter as electrons and that electron-positron annihilation is due a dynamical mechanism (see ITQGD for a detailed discussion).

Figure 4 illustrates the interaction between an electron and the electromagnetic field generated by the plates of a spin filter. As per the laws of motion described in here, the momentum of an electron can only change by integer multiple of its mass (the number of it contains). We also know from the mechanics of particle formation that for to become bound, they must move in the same direction, that is, if they must interact over a long enough quantum-geometrical distance. Therefore the magnetic from can bound with the component represented by the blue arrows and the magnetic from can bound with the component vectors moving along the periphery represented by the red arrows. Since the “red” interact with a larger volume of quantum-geometrical space than the “blue” , for a given density of the magnetic field they will interact with a greater number of magnetic . If the difference between the sum of the momentums of the interacting magnetic from and the sum of the momentums of interacting magnetic from is equal or greater to , the mass of the electron, a number magnetic from and such that where , and are the sum momentum of the interaction preons(+) from and respectively. It follows that where and are respectively the momentum vectors before and after the absorption of polarized . The change in speed of the electron, here away from , is given by .

Note that Figure 4 shows the special case when the electron is oriented so that is perpendicular to the magnetic field. More generally, and will be proportional to the projection of orbital region on the planes perpendicular to the magnetic field. But for the purpose of this article, we only need to consider the orientation of the electrons relative to planes coincident with the filters magnetic plates.

Following our description we find that an electron moving through a magnetic field will absorb polarized which will impart it their momentum and will change the direction and magnitude of its momentum vector.

We will see how the very property of an electron which the experiments attempts to measure (here the spin) is changed, not via spooky action at a distance, but by the filter itself following the absorption of magnetic that form the magnetic fields. Therefore, the property of the electron is changed before it enters the next filter. So though a filter answers the question as to whether the spin of an electron is up or down relative to the orientation of the filter, if the electron has structure, the question is incomplete since it ignores that the other directional components of the spin which are essential to fully describe it. The binary up or down question also ignores that the changes an electron will undergo as it moves through a magnetic field. So the answer to the binary question provides an incomplete description of the spin property of the electron. We will see that when describing completely the electron and how it changes we can explain the results of any Stern-Gerlach without having to resort to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.

But before we continue, we will use the simplified representations of electrons shown in figure 5 (the symbols on the right sides of the equality signs).

As you see, the figures take into account both the spatial orientations of electrons and the general orientation of the moving on the periphery, represented by the red arrow and which corresponds to orientations of the bound that interact most with either the top or bottom electromagnetic fields. The orientation of those determines to the spin of the electron represented by the red vector in the in simplified representations.

We can now precisely describe what happens to electrons going through each of the three filters of the setup illustrated in figure 2.

Figure 6 shows electrons entering filter 1 from the left as indicated by the cameo on the bottom right section. The top right coordinate axes provide the relative orientation of the filter.

Given a number of electrons with all possible orientations relative to the magnetic fields, it is easy to see that 50% of them are oriented in such a way they will absorb magnetic coming primarily from the bottom magnetic field resulting in a change of momentum towards the up direction. The other 50% will interact mainly magnetic coming from the top which will result in changes of their momentum towards the bottom. But as they do so, their momentum vectors, hence their spin changes so that the component will come tend to align with the trajectories of the magnetic (this corresponds to the magnetic lines of force).

In figure 7, we changed to perspective to show how the electrons are split into up-spin and down-spin relative to the filter 2. As they move through the magnetic fields, the electrons align with the line of force.

Figure 8 shows the observed results of experiments that use the setup shown in figure 2.

 

 

 

 

The orientations of electrons which, passing through filter 2, hence the orientation of the motion of its component which determines the orientation of the magnetic spin, change as the result of their interaction with the magnetic field as described earlier. Though all electrons exiting filter 2 will be up-spin relative to filter 2, they will have one of two possible orientations relative to filter 3 (see figures 9 and 10). Electrons oriented as shown in figure 9 will be up-spin relative to filter 3 (12.5% of the electron from the source) and those oriented as shown in figure 9 will be up-spin relative to filter 3 (12.5% of the electrons from the source). The down-spin electrons relative to filter 3 will be filtered out so that 12.5% of the electrons from the source will exit the apparatus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The observed results from quantum entanglement experiments using Stern-Gerlach are in agreement with predictions that follow naturally from QGD’s axioms set. The reason electrons from the source exit the setup shown in figure 2 while none exit the figure 1 setup can be attributed to the changes in the orientation of the electrons itself undergo when passing through filter 2.

 

 

Conclusions

We have explained in a locally realistic way the results of the Stern-Gerlash experiments. According to QGD, the spins of electrons do not change because of quantum entanglement, but as a result of their interactions with the magnetic fields. Therefore, quantum entanglement experiments such as the one we have described here do not reveal some weird counterintuitive behaviour of nature, but rather support the prediction that electrons have structure and that magnetic fields are made of polarized unbound .

Implications

In an earlier article, we have shown here that the principle of quantum state superposition is unnecessary to explain the observed results from double-slit experiments. And in the present series of articles, we have shown that from the axiom set of QGD we can provide locally realistic explanations of the experiments which most strongly support quantum entanglement. It follows that the universe, even at its most fundamental scale, is strictly causal and deterministic.

If QGD is correct in that quantum entanglement and quantum state superposition are non-physical mathematical consequences of quantum mechanics, then no technology that exploits these phenomena can be realized.

Note: The present article summarizes a more detailed discussions which will be found in the next edition of Introduction to Quantum-Geometry Dynamics.