What if gravity is not a force?
12/02/2019
Gravity is that thing which accelerates us into place onto the earth. It’s well understood that energy (and therefore its mass equivalent) causes gravity. And it’s understood and proven that gravity results in time dilation (where time passes relatively less quickly where more gravity is present).
The funny thing is, no other force has any known separate effect on time. And in fact, other forces like electromagnetism themselves cause gravity by virtue of their own energy. So gravity is a funny thing. In quantum physics I hear talk of little gravitons being flitted off and causing interactions like other forces do, and that is all fine and good. And maybe somehow that has an effect on time. But it seems to me that gravity might be significantly different from the other forces.
Gravity is supposed to cause time dilation. By large scale modeling of average behavior of space time curvature that causes the change in movements and behaviors, that makes sense. But what if time dilation is not caused by gravity, but rather the gravity is itself time dilation? This is sort of a restatement of the same thing, but it reverses or obviates the causality.
If we flip it like this then I can propose an alternative. Have you ever watched or played a video game on an old computer where the console is overloaded by an overcrowded screen? If you haven't I will describe the effect. As more animations appear on the screen, all of them slow down. Due to the time it takes to process all of the extra animations, my real time experience in watching the animation is slowed. Everything on the screen moves slower.
It occurs to me that this kind of time dilation may not be unlike the regional time dilation described by spacetime curvature. And that all of the extra animations on my video game are not unlike all of the extra energy contained in mass.
I propose that perhaps the unification of the quantum with gravity is to consider that there may be a semi fixed cycle time to process potential interactions, and that an increase in the density of energy increases the number of cycles necessary to proceed with each step in time.
If we imagine a grid of simulation voxels (a term borrowed from weather forecasting describing a division in space) but that were not fixed in time, but rather each working asynchronously through computation of interaction cycles. There would potentially be areas of less energy, and thereby less time density, and those of more. Thus a grid of 100 such rendering screens operating at once with the same interacting dataset, but in which some needed to process more than others before each progression of each step, could, I suspect, mirror the effects of gravity. At the intersection of the monitors it would be most clear. Two interacting objects across that threshold would directly model the resulting force (or effective space-time curvature) of time dilation. Where in an extreme case one may move two steps in the same time that another moves one, but remain bound to one another according to the same rules, the effect would be obvious.
I suspect that at some very low level quanta of energy (or similar stuff), we might model it as a single state machine function cycling continuously and probabilistically against all the other quanta, but consuming cycles against the others only according to those probabilities of interaction or influence. And thereby, affecting the result of gravity. A mathematical description of this effect could be created and affect the same description of space time curvature at a macro level, but the model would be useful to fully describe that same effect at the smallest level as well.
This quantum state machine computational model could thus potentially resolve the gravity question with respect to quantum physics, and allow relativity and the standard model to work together. As a descriptive model it seems useful.
Beyond a useful descriptive model, it may fit well enough that a prediction may be made from this concept that time is quantized, which seems fairly compatible with existing theory and potentially testable. And a further prediction is that there may be some forms or configurations of energy that are more computationally intensive than others per unit of energy or region in space. And in those cases we may be able to create a differential increase or decrease in effective gravity, which can also be tested experimentally.
Just a thought.