Thursday, April 26, 2007

Reflections on Lens-Thirring Force

In science, the force of tradition is powerful. A new drastic theory is always looked at with great suspicion no matter how it may sound correct or explain the nature so well. I think it's in human nature. There is nothing strange about it.

Still, it is so remarkable that Lens-Thirring force has never been challenged on its accuracy in regard to the direction of the force. Of course, the reason is because it amalgamated Mach's principle with general relativity so well.

It's like, of course, it should be. Everybody knows there is centrifugal force in nature and general relativity should be able to confirm it and moreover Mach said it is the result of the local rotating object in interaction with the rest of the matter in the universe.

Why would anyone want to challenge such a perfect scenario?

May be the crucial reason for this was because there was no cosmological or experimental data associated to their result at the time of their publication. There was no other guiding principles that can direct their mathematical results. Mach's principle was the only relevant light house, which in a sense had little to do with any empirical data.

Since Lens-Thirring force is basically the force caused by the circular acceleration of the individual mass components within the spherical shell(which is modeled as the universe), which comes from the fundamental postulate of general relativity, ie, an acceleration of a mass creates gravity effect, their result should not be different from the one calculated from the dipole gravity method using the relativistic center of mass shift of the rotating hemispherical shell.

They are basically the same forces.

As such, as the second strongest gravity force in nature, it should be able to explain cosmological phenomena hitherto unexplained. The unexpected obstacle in this effort was the obvious conflict between Lens-Thirring force and the supposedly attractive radial force in the equatorial plane in the rotating galaxy. The dark matter problem demands attractive radial gravity force in the galactic plane but Lens-Thirring force which is the small footprint of the same force at the center of the rotating center has the wrong sign because Lens-Thirring force is the outgoing force from the center as the centrifugal force is like.

What if Lens-Thirring force had come out with the opposite sign that is the correct one? First of all, they would have been disappointed by the result itself. And they would have abandoned the whole idea of publishing it. It's a very interesting speculation.. But I'm sure it could have sparked more debate and deeper investigation into the subject.

The question still remains is then what is the real cause of the centrifugal force? In mechanics, it is caused by the tendency of an object trying to stay straight line in circular motion. I don't know if an object requires the existence of all the other matters in the universe to make it want to go straight line to conserve momentum.

Probably not.

There may be other causes of this. Maybe the inertial ether effect. The reason a balloon tends to stay in the same spot when there is no wind blowing is because the total sum of the air molecules trying to give it a net momentum cancels out. It resists motion when it is pushed because of the canceling forces from all the molecules in the air. So, the cross section, the mass and velocity of the air molecules take part in this resistance effect.

Therefore, it becomes natural to speculate that there may be particles working like these "air molecules" for the gravity effect in the universe.

We can go on into this topic further, but it will take us to too far afield.

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