"if you put a balloon in a vacuum environment, it will get bigger and bigger until *bam* it pops. I suspect matter expands in a similar fashion and for the same reason."
-Mark McCutcheon, The Final Theory

so I really enjoyed this book and thought I would post some of the highlights.

re-examining gravity:
geometric orbits
prior to Isaac Newton's theoretical discovery of gravity, there was already a framework of equations that perfectly describe the motion of orbiting bodies without any appeal to force, written by Johannes Kepler.
1. the orbiting body moves about in an elliptical fashion, with the orbited body at a focal point.
2. the area swept out by the distance between the orbited body and the orbited body over an equal amount of time is equal.
3. the average distance between the two bodies, cubed, divided by the time taken to orbit, squared, is constant.
note there's no mention of mass or force, yet any orbit can be described by these principles.
even for falling objects force is an unnecessary construct. the simple equation, distance = 1/2 acceleration*time^2 is well more than enough to describe this. nevertheless, something must be behind all this motion...
introducing a new concept:
the expanding matter hypothesis
imagine a two dimensional world. imagine a flatland person in it. now imagine we introduce a single expanding particle to it. to the person it would look like he is falling into the particle as it got bigger. then when he hit it he would feel forcefully pushed against as it got bigger and bigger yet. but in such a universe, things aren't staying the same relative size. so now imagine that we introduce a limitless amount of particles, each expanding at the same universal rate...
new possibilities:
the artificial gravity generator
under Isaac Newton, in order to have artificial gravity equivalent to that of the earth, you would need something as massive as the earth in order to do it.
but under the expanding matter hypothesis you only need something as long as the earth's radius, with a counter weight at the base.


a strong pipe, expanding both directions from the center.

a strong pipe, expanding mostly in one direction.

....

the first principle equation:
if everything is expanding, then there are two things we need to consider, absolute distance decrease and relative distance decrease. imagine two equal sized objects that start off 6 radii apart, and then double in size over a period of time. in and absolute sense, they are now 4 radii part. in a relative sense, they are 2 radii apart.

both needs to be considered in the principle equation [...]
D' = (D -n^2 *A *(R1 +R2))/(1 +n^2 *A) where A is 0.00000077/s^2
[...]
plugging the values we can calculate that everything must double in size roughly every 19 minutes.
[...]

the book is pretty weird, he goes on to describe magnetism, electricity, and light under the expanding matter hypothesis. part of me wants to believe it but it's just such a radical idea I don't see how I can.

Well, it sounds like nonsense to me

Edit: I looked it up. It really is nonsense. His 'theory' is full of massive flaws. I can explain why if you care.

Is the book/article/theory really called "The Final Theory"? Because that's not the kind of title that a real non-crank scientist tends to use.

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Not for a scientific paper, no - but real scientists sometimes write popular books explaining their ideas, and a title such as this one wouldn't strike me as ridiculous.

However, from the summary given in the OP, it would appear that this guy is indeed a total crank. (In my opinion life is far too short for me to bother searching for more information to confirm this.)

Yeah, maybe that's the difference. I still can't think of any examples, though.

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"A Brief History of Time" or "The Universe in a Nutshell" by Stephen Hawking?

"Why Newton was a dimwit: how the revolutionary new theory personally developed by Dr. Crank explains everything once and for all" is the model of what I'm thinking of with crank titles.

"A brief history of time" doesn't fit at all. If I write a history, you can write another one that improves on it.

"The universe in a nutshell" maybe fits ever so slightly.

"The final theory" is a title that fits wonderfully because of the suggestion that it's the one true theory that will endure forever.

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hey anmal, i would be very interested in your disproof of the theory.
i've taken physics classes, so it's not like i'm totally ignorant, but i fear i am being naive.
i don't see any easy way to diprove the thoery.
here's some examples taken straight out of the book.
put a rock on a spring, and hold the tip of the spring letting gravity stretch it out.
then let go. note that the spring collapses during freefall. under newton, this should not happen, as gravity should pull downward with the same force whether i'm holding onto the spring or not. even under einstien, the spacial warping should be constant. it shouldn't let up when i let go.

take a plastic balloon and a two glass test tubes. rub the balloon on each test tube vigorously.
try to bring the two test tubes together. note they repel. slowy try to bring the balloon into contact with one of the test tubes. note they attract. you have attaction and repusion, with only one pole, hence a monopole magnet. the fact you get static electric discarge doesn't disprove it as magnetism, it only solidifies the relationship between magnetism and electricity. magnetism IS electricity. it is electricity that has yet to be discharged.

he gives other simple experiments as well you can try.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a-little-bit-of-knowledge

This has a great story about a guy how thinks he's found a way to disprove relativity. It's actually surprisingly respectful, and very interesting.

I don't have a 'disproof', because I don't know much about the specifics of the theory. There are several massive problems that seem obvious, on reading your summary, though.

Here are the first three I thought of:

1) This doesn't explain orbits. If things getting bigger explains gravity, why are they also going around one another?
2) It doesn't explain tides. Why would things getting bigger cause tides which follow the moon?
3) It doesn't explain why we stay a constant distance from the sun. If the earth and sun are getting bigger exponentially, and the earth is moving away at any given speed, they will appear to be getting closer to one another. I haven't really thought about this one much, but the scaling problem seems pretty big.



As a general rule, if someone gives you a trivial experiment which goes against general relativity, they or you have misunderstood the experiment. Though frankly I don't understand why you say 'under einstein' (presumably referring to relativity) when talking about a completely non-relativistic effect. If the author is dressing things up this way, he's trying to hide something .

In any case, I don't see why the spring shouldn't collapse during freefall. Gravity exerts a more or less equal force upon every part of the system, but there is still a separate force from the spring seeking to return to its equilibrium position. It isn't obvious to me that anything unusual has occurred.



Magnetic monopoles have never been discovered. It isn't even obvious that they exist, though it's reasonably probable. Recently we have been able to create quasiparticles which behave in some ways like magnetic monopoles. This is cutting edge science. Again, if someone gives you a trivial experiment that creates a magnetic monopole...either you or they have probably misunderstood it

Personally I don't understand this experiment at all. You have transferred some electrons around, and so are observing well known and understood electric field effects. Where is the problem with this? Magnetism doesn't need to be invoked at all.

It is true and electricity and magnetism are aspects of the same force. It is not true that this experiment has done anything impressive, especially anything to do with magnetic monopoles.

By that logic: if you have a spring and pull on it, it is obviously stretched out. If you let go it collapses again AGAINST GRAVITY What have you proved now?

An experiment that would work is having a cup filled with water and drill a hole in it water would start flowing out. If you now release the cut the water stops running out. Why? Because gravity, AND ONLY GRAVITY, is exerting force on the cup and the water whereas in your example the spring itself is exerting a force.

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If this is the best example the guy can find, he's a quack. Newtonian mechanics predicts the spring will collapse because the spring is subject to internal forces due to its extension. The gravitation force only predicts that the spring will fall.



The experiment demonstrates static electricity, no magnets. You will find, for example, that neither the balloon nor the test tube will deflect a compass needle.

Please read my unwritten monograph, The Penultimate Theory of Something.

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the explaintion is kinda lengthy and a diagram really helps here, but i'm unable to upload a picture as i'm at work (on my lunch break). i'll address this when i get home

he proposes several possibilies.
1) solar winds 2) the thermal under water jets 3) the wobbling earth. he suspects the wobbling earth to be the primary culprit, but these other two obviously would have a factor as well.

i agree competely here. apparently he doesn't seem to think this as a big problem.
the earth rotates around the sun at a phenominal speed, and he proposes that the perpendicular motion is sufficent to counter act this.

There is no explanation, given the theory so far. Given the author's significant misunderstandings in the experiments you outlined, I remain sceptical





His 'possibilities' are pathetic. It is in no way obvious that they 'would have a factor' as well. There's simply no way for solar winds to cause tidal phenomena as we observe them. There also are no thermal underwater jets causing mass water movement. Especially not at precisely the rate that the moon orbits

'The wobbling earth' is an equally terrible explanation. There is nothing in physics whereby precession would cause these effects.

Conveniently, even a simple theory of gravity quickly and easily explains tides.



Don't suppose that, it's plain wrong - especially since there still is no reason for the Earth to orbit at all under his 'theory'. You can't brush this under the rug; unless there is a reason that it isn't a problem, the whole theory is phenomenally broken on a very simple level. His 'proposal' there is simply 'the Earth magically moves in such a way that everything appears fine', but the movement necessary would be (at a guess) an exponentially increasing orbit size. There is absolutely no justification for this kind of movement.

(Personally, I think 'it's broken and wrong' is the correct explanation anyway)

doubling every 19 minutes would mean doubling 75 times in a day.
that's a 65,298,760,041,523,225,564,460.189164846 percent increase in size, per day. yeeeaaaahhhhh......

When you come up with a new model, it must explain or have an eye to explaining the preponderance of available data, make testable predictions that differentiate itself from the current model while respecting razors that belonged to German men or something.

Anyway, I would like to address the real travesty here; that in the fourth, fifth and sixth posts, when pulling for a popular layman-targeted book with an exciting name explaining an important but esoteric field in an interesting and accessible style, no one mentioned The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I guess it's not related to physics. Go, take it out of the library (or amazon it).



*Ignore Dawkins' subsequent works on his new topic when regarding this book.


Edit: It occurs to me that if you have a passing interest in physics and are not following http://backreaction.blogspot.com/ you are making a grave, grave error. One of the best things on the internet.

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There sure are a lot of cranks out there...

Just a few things:

1. What does his theory explain that conventional physics does not? Does he have any data to support those claims? Do his claims even have a higher degree of accuracy than Newton's equations - which though old, are extremely impressive in their predictive strength under all but the most extreme scales.

2. What is the mathematical foundation his theory is built upon? Words and high level concepts are useless without this.

I wouldn't even bother looking at a theory that doesn't clearly state these two up front. This guy has the smell of a nutjob all over him.

yeah, i agree for the most part that the expandimg matter hypothesis is broken and wrong primarly from the scaling problem. never the less i would like to address a few of the posts made here.

newtonain theory doesn't just say objects fall it says why they fall: that the earth is literally pulling down on them.
when holding a rock on a spring, the only force stretching it out is gravity. that being the case, the spring should continue to stay steached out during free fall because gravity is still forcefully pulling down on it. only wind resistance should allow it to collapse back in. but the spring collapses back in on itself even in an air free evironment.
in short the spring acts precicely as it would if you streached it out with the same force as gravity and let go in a zero gravity environment.
i can give a couple other examples as to why i suspect gravity to not be a force.


you haven't really proven anything here, as you've applied a force outside the system. if you lift a rock, you're applying a force against gravity. however in no obvious way does this charge the atoms of the earth to prepare for you to let go and allow it to fall back to earth. gravity in of itself seems like a perpetual free energy device.



the fact that you have attraction and repulsion is magnetism. that it doesn't repel a compass needle doesn't make it not magnetism, just a diffent form of magnetism. there are a couple reasons why it might not deflect a compass needle a) monopole magnets may only affect eachother and not standard bi-pole magnets. b) the magentic force may not be strong enough to overcome the earth's magnetism.

You are plain wrong, though the situation is perhaps designed to be unintuitive. As has already been explained, the internal physics of the system are such that its behaviour when dropped is unsurprising.

When you say 'I suspect gravity to not be a force', well, I'm not sure what to say. Perhaps you should look up what a force is. I suppose you can say that gravity is not a force, but that it exerts a force (depending on how you define what), but I assume this kind of wordplay is not what you are representing as profound.



The lack of understanding here is frankly astounding. I recommend reading at least the wikipedia articles on electricity and magnetism before you start saying things like this, assuming your objective is to understand rather than to confuse.

The fact that you have attraction and repulsion is because of the distribution of electric charges. Magnetism is not necessary in any way (except by its relation to electrical charges, which is not relevant here).

A monopole magnet would by necessity affect other magnets. It wouldn't be a magnet if it didn't...that's what magnetism is. If your monopole is powerful enough to deflect the balloon/test tubes system, I don't see why it wouldn't deflect a compass needle.

You actually appear to instead be postulating the existence of a new kind of charge which nobody has ever noticed before, which is observed when you rub balloons against things, and which interacts exactly the same way as electrical charges.

The balloons/tubes experiment is very well explained by conventional electromagnetism and the redistribution of electrons caused by your actions. What is your problem with the current theory that makes you think you have found a problem with it?


Edit: Just read your other comment, which is also flawed:



Saying 'charge the atoms of the earth' seems like a way of intentionally blurring what gravity is. Viewed as a contortion of spacetime, there isn't really a problem, and we know that this view seems to be correct.

Gravity is in no way a 'perpetual energy device'. What makes you think it is?