Fascinating read on physics (with pretty pictures! :-)

[skids]

Slashdot picked up this guy's homepage today:

http://www.stanford.edu/~afmayer/

Skip the introduction and go for the "lecture 1" doc. It's all about where GR jumped the tracks, a tweak to it that explains a lot of "unmodelled effects" and looks anew at the nature of the time/space manifold. If he's right, it's more than fascinating, it's revolutionary -- but either way it's a nice tour of some of the unexplained phenomina astrophysicists cope with.

The basic gist is that there's a cumulative red-shift in light as it passes through a gravity field (or in a closed accelerating system), transverse to the field.

Oh and remember Time is just an abstract concept invented by carbon based life forms to monitor their ongoing decay -- "The Brak Show"

[bananas]

1. This seems to be the slashdot thread

http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/02/05/006254.shtml
Physicist Claims Time Has a Geometry
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Saturday February 04, @08:33PM
from the high-time-to-check-it-out dept.

[phantom power]

2. Some things about this tweaked my "crackpot" detector.

One example: For a guy with such contempt for dark matter and dark energy, he's very cavalier about basing his entire cosmology on "equilibrium maintained by wormholes." Just for openers, there is currently no reason to suspect that wormholes can be stable. And he doesn't offer any, that I saw.

He also spends quite a lot of time on the straw-man argument that everybody else has been assuming some kind of flat-space model of spacetime. I mean, since when? Then later, he (inconsistently) points out the Einstein himself postulated a closed-hypersurface cosmology.

However, I happen to agree with him that resorting to "dark matter and dark energy" indicate that something may be a bit "off" about our current cosmology models. Or, maybe a lot off.

[skids]

3. I guess the "proof" will be in the pudding.

He does make various predictions, primarily that the results from the gyroscope probe satellite won't be what was predicted, that radiation signatures accompany orbiting mass, and a few tests that wouldn't be horribly impossible to perform.

(As far as the wormhole point, is stability a requirement?)

[phantom power]

4. Yes....

His predictions seem all falsifiable, and so it's at least possible to treat his stuff scientifically. And his demonstrations that his theory explained certain data better, seemed reasonable, although I'd defer to an astronomer on that.

Regarding wormhole stability, he seems to be reviving the old idea that black holes are connected to conjugate white-holes, in some other part of the universe. The large black holes he's talking about are long-lived, and so the associated wormholes must also be long-lived (at least, I think).

The most recent stuff I read about worm-holes is that they are only stable (long-lived) if their openings are held open by a "negative-gravity" field (repulsive). To my knowledge, a negative-gravity field has never been observed, and I'm not aware of anybody proposing even a hypothetical method of producing one. At any rate, such a thing is at least as exotic and poorly understood as dark matter or energy.

On the other hand, those were discussing "naked" wormholes, not hidden behind any event horizon. Maybe time-dilation deep inside a black hole would allow a short-lived wormhole to appear long-lived to us observers far up the gravity well. I'm waving my hands big-time, here.

[skids]

5. White holes.

I've seen other theories too associating black holes with gamma bursts and such.

The question is -- is it one stable wormhole, or a whole crapload of smaller unstable wormholes that happen to follow the same general path -- passing only a few particles, perhaps even just one, each? In his theory wormholes can only exit at the exact opposite side of the curvature from where they originate.

[phantom power]

6. Hmm... That stumps my knowledge of wormholes!