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Saturday, February 12, 2011

Electromagnetic Continuum Into Gravity

The E.M spectrum , Continuous and Infinite along either directions

The nature of gravity has always been in question since the time Newton’s Law of Gravity was put forth. General Relativity (G.R) was introduced in 1915 by Einstein. He gave gravity a nature within a geometrical framework which is explained by the curvature of spacetime. The curvature being proportional to the mass-energy density and linear momentum of matter and radiation. In a nut shell spacetime tells matter how to move, matter tells spacetime how to curve. Several experiments have confirmed that Einstein’s equations stand correct , but only within limitations.
Violations of Einstein’s general relativity do exist and ‘Dark Matter’ is a hypothesized evident form of this violation. When G.R is employed to calculate orbits of the stars in a galaxy or the total mass, gravitational forces acting among various gravitational systems. Anomalies in results tend to occur, visibly missing but physically present mass that keeps the stars at the edge of the galaxies from getting shot out of the orbit, for the missing mass of galaxies, cluster of galaxies, mass of the universe etc.  From experiments confirmed by gravitational lensing we know there is more mass than what meets the eye. This unexplained mass account for the 23% of the mass-energy density (which is a huge factor in galactic terms) visible mass being 4%. This goes to show that either there are unresolvable issues with General Relativity and it does not give a complete explanation of the nature of gravity or there is indeed dark matter. Since dark matter is hypothetical and does not interact with EM radiation as such detection seems to be an challenging feat. Taking up the case with Newton’s Laws of Gravity, which seemed to explain gravitational systems and mass presence centuries ago, up until anomalies were observed . This provoked physicists to come up with a more stringent theory of Gravity that could explain these anomalies and resolve the conflicts therefore G.R was born. Similar analogues drawn seem to point to the fact that we seem to have gotten gravity all wrong yet again. Within the reasonable ranges G.R works efficiently but on further larger galactic scales, the experimental results don’t seem to tally with the expected theoretically deduced results. 
Gravitational 'Ripples' or 'Waves'

In recent times through the observation of binary pulsars, the existence of ‘gravitational waves’ have also been gaining light. The Standard model of particle physics has hypothesized the force carriers of these gravitational waves as to be ‘gravitons’, the gauge boson for gravity . When compared analogues could be drawn between E.M waves, whose force carriers (gauge bosons) are ‘Photons’. It has also been calculated through recent experiments that the speed of these gravitational waves is equal to that of the speed of light (of the E.M waves). Another interesting fact that comes into mind is that the E.M spectrum does not have fixed transitions boundaries, one kind of E.M waves say RADIO seem to smoothly merge into the other's frequency range say MICROWAVE. There is no discreteness in the spectrum, it exists as a continuum. The limiting boundaries are also not specified as the E.M spectrum is defined only for those range of frequencies and wavelengths which have applications for human usage and there on.
E.M Radiation interacts with matter in different ways depending on the which part of the spectrum it belongs to. Each type of radiation interacts is specified way entirely different from another type of radiation within the spectrum. In principle, the E.M spectrum also is infinite and continuous. The long wavelength limit being the estimated size of the universe of the order of Yottameter(10^+24). The short wavelength limit being in the vicinity of the Planck length (1.616252(81)×10^−35) . The main idea being tried to convey here is that gravity could be just another form of the radiation that all matter emits irrespective of its properties and nature. All matter interacts with E.M waves and emits E.M waves at the appropriate energies of excitation. Thus they seem to have an familiar relationship with E.M forces. Both Electromagnetic and gravitational forces vary as the inverse square of distance without limits (to infinity). The range of the wavelength of these gravitational waves would be of the order of the size of the universe, thus appropriate and convenient to extend it throughout the known universe and the corresponding frequency of the order of attohertz (10^-18).  This frequency corresponds to extremely low energies of the orders of the gravitational force (from E=hf , where ‘h’ is the plank’s constant, ‘f’ is frequency) and could explain why the gravitational force is such low orders of magnitude weaker than the E.M force the weak and strong nuclear forces. Given the different interactions with matter for various parts of the spectrum, gravity’s nature would be defined by this part of the spectrum. Further analogy with E.M waves brings about the question of attractive and repulsive gravity alike E.M attractive and repulsive forces. Throughout the universe we are familiar with the attractive form of gravity .We now also know repulsive gravity exists, which is nothing but dark energy resulting in the accelerated expansion of the universe, could also be a reason for the cause of the big bang (due to negative pressure which is another concept in itself).

Thus by incorporating the gravity into the E.M spectrum(extending its boundary horizon)into very low orders of magnitude in frequency and paramount orders of magnitude in wavelength, we could possibly have an explanation to dark energy and resolve the conflicts of dark matter. A more thorough explanation of how dark energy could possibly be of this nature would be given in the following posts.