An earlier piece of mine on this site questioned some of the assumptions upon which many of today's generally accepted beliefs concerning cosmology and astronomy are based. Specifically, the insistence on gravity as the dominant influence in the forming and shaping of the universe is rooted in models that trace back to the eighteenth century, when only the principles of mechanical science were understood. Since then, an enormous amount has been learned about the vastly more powerful and complex forces of electromagnetism – our whole world of electrical engineering and electronics is a result – yet theories that attempt to explain the workings of the cosmos take little or no account of them.

Gravity is the weakest force known to physics. A tiny magnet can snap a nail up effortlessly against the gravitational pull of the entire Earth. If the Sun were reduced to the size of a dust grain, the next nearest star would be about four miles away. The gravitational attraction between two specks of dust four miles apart isn't much. On the same scale of distance, the galaxy would be a disk 100,000 miles across made up of 200 billion specks of dust, all miles apart. Present theory looks to a force spread this diffusely to account not only for the structure and behavior of our galaxy, but also the events observed across all the other countless galaxies scattered over immensely greater distances.



But the commitment to a gravity-only model had become so ingrained that the response, instead of a willingness to re-examine the theory, has been to postulate the presence of invisible "dark matter" to make up the difference – later extended to the notion of "dark energy" to account for enormous forces evidently at work that the observed amount of matter can't account for.

Things have now reached the bizarre point where, according to the prevailing belief system, no less than 96 percent of the universe has to be there in forms unseen in order to explain the behavior of the 4 percent that is seen.

Inventing unobservables to explain away failed predictions is almost always the sign of a theory that's in trouble. Over 99 percent of the observed universe exists in the form of "plasma" – a gas-like state of matter consisting all or in part of charged particles that respond to electrical and magnetic forces, which are immensely more powerful than gravity.



http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan5.1.1.html

basically,

The conclusion is clear: Electromagnetic forces are tremendously stronger than gravity but conspire to cancel out so perfectly that for large bodies gravity can dominate.

Electromagnetic forces can't act across such large distances simply because of the inverse square law. Gravity is weak at short ranges but is immensely stronger at greater ranges. There was a simple possibility that was raised about this dark matter issue some time back - the possibility that not all dead stars end up as black holes and evaporate. Smaller stars might fizzle into brown dwarfs, and some stars may even have failed to ignite at birth.

As such, there's a possibility of the Universe being littered with plenty of matter that do not actively radiate visible, IR or UV radiation, hence we do not pick them up on our telescopes and yet they exert gravitational effects.

gravity also act as inverse square.

thing is gravity only attract, em both attract and repel (cancelling each other out in larger bodies)

Yes, gravity also obeys the inverse square law if we view it from classical mechanics. In quantum mechanics and M-theory, this is not necessarily the case. There's a possibility for gravity to actually be a very strong force but much of it leaks into the bulk beyond our brane.

lolxxx.... both govern by inverse sq

Both are governed by inverse square law, but gravity's effects are weaker at extremely short ranges than it does at longer ranges although gravity waves fall off according to the inverse square law. Much further out, gravity likewise weakens. All forces have their ranges.

Similarly, the strong nuclear force and electroweak force are both present within an atom, and yet why are their ranges so different? You can hardly detect the strong force beyond the atomic nuclei and within the nuclei it's way stronger than the electroweak force, and yet the electroweak force ends up extending macroscopically into electromagnetism.

How do you explain these ranges based on inverse square law alone?

This post has been edited by jswong: Apr 21 2010, 02:44 AM