Figuring Out Gravity

I’m struggling with my science.

I'm currently working on a science fiction novel as I mentioned here. One of the primary things that one needs to contend with in any science fiction novel is the existence of artificial gravity and propulsion through space.

I know. I know. Everyone else ignores it. And those that don't really mess the whole idea up.

In StarTrek, you have gravity plating on every deck of these massive ships. They use energy currents to produce a stimulating effect on gravitons to pull the crew and objects towards the bottom of the ship. The force can even be fluctuated to increase or decrease the pull. But how do you not have increased pull the higher up the ship you go? Or why are the gravitons only working in a single direction? Doesn't gravity pull objects towards it no matter what direction they are oriented? Why don't things close to the plating at the ceiling feel a pull upwards?

In Defying Gravity you use magnetism in the astronauts spacesuits. While that is extremely likely to be a direction we take the problem of gravity in the near future of space travel, it leaves multiple problems. For instance, is EVERYTHING on the ship magnetized to keep it from flying away? And magnetic hairspray? Ugh. They were lucky I liked the story.

Other stories such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ringworld, and Babylon 5 attempt rotation, but that requires HUGE ships that can rarely be docked and certainly cannot travel close to or in the atmospheres of other planets.

Some have even used super dense material such as black holes and acceleration around, toward, or away from them to create the force of gravity.

So I'm struggling with gravity.

The thing is, so is science.

With the completion of the LHC and the discovery of the Higgs Boson, we are only just beginning to discover the foundational principles of mass. The Standard Model upon which the existence of the Higgs was predicted does not even begin to account for theories of gravity, its relationship to mass, and whether it can be isolated.

In fact, our understanding of gravity is currently limited. We don’t rightly know if it’s a force, a form of acceleration, or a function of mass.

Theories exist that express gravity as a force. In these theories, gravitational forces are similar to the electromagnetic force that attracts inverse charges in atoms, electrons, quarks, and gluons. We’ve managed to isolate and explore such forces down to the tiniest levels we have just discovered, but when it comes to such a force on larger bodies, we are left clueless.

The idea is that everything that has mass has gravity, and that is proven. We all exert forces on one another, and just as I am pulled to the center of the earth, the center of the earth is pulled toward me. The more massive the object, the more its gravitational pull. That’s why planets have stronger pulls than moons, stars have stronger pulls than planets, and more massive stars have even stronger pulls.

The use of mass to produce a field of gravity, then, would hardly be artificial. It would be actual gravity that could be manipulated by manipulating mass. You could use (as I suggested in my previous blog) a flow of energy to stimulate Higgs bosons to generate mass. If enough energy was used, or the Higgs on certain elements were used to create more massive or denser particles, one could, given several hundred years of scientific development, produce enough gravitational force to simulate the acceleration/force of earth’s pull on the human body.

However, if you introduce gravity in that way, there are some serious problems. If a station generates the same massive gravitational pull as a planet, there's no way the station could be situated anywhere near a planet. Already the pull of the moon seriously affects both people, animals, and natural cycles on this planet. Adding an artificial moon with the gravitational pull of an earth-sized planet would wreak havoc on a planet's eco-system. The stations would have to be established outside of the reach planetary orbits.

There’s also no way to use it in spacecraft. For one, it would make it very difficult for one spacecraft to interact with another, such as a docking station. They would have competing gravity fields, which would make coming into any sort of contact difficult. Conceivably, the smaller ships could moderate their fields as they approach planets or stations, but they would be affected by the station's gravity once they got close enough. Their approach would have to be carefully orchestrated to dim their gravity as they approach, and their orientation would have to be based on the station's center of gravity. That would determine the "down" position for the last stages of the flight. 

(Of course now that I've typed a lot of that, that would be a great way to establish a principle of gravity. In fact, if I cannot find another way, I may be revisiting this idea!)

In order to generate a form of artificial gravity, one would have to simulate gravity without mass. 

One theory is to use linear acceleration. After all, we experience gravity as a form of acceleration. We are pulled toward the earth at 1 standard gravity (1g) or 9.81m/s². That means that in free fall, we approach the center of the earth with an increase in acceleration of 1g. The only thing that stops us from continuously falling is the physical barrier of the earth. 

Conceivably, if you continuously increased a ship's acceleration by 1g for ever with the floor oriented away from your direction of acceleration, your inhabitants would experience earthlike gravity. But as soon as you slowed or, God forbid, stopped your inhabitants would immediately feel it and either begin floating or slam into the ceiling.

So that's out.

What's a science fiction writer to do?

Manipulation of the Higgs could create mass, but we have the problems mentioned above...

Perhaps the problem is I've been thinking of gravity as a force that attracts and pulls. Could I use an alternative force that pushes? Maybe an extrapolated use of the Casimir Effect? It along with an understanding of large mass gravitational force is already forming the basis for my outer-orbit propulsion systems.

Do I go with the very, very limited understanding of gravitons and extrapolate ad nauseum until it looks more like science fiction hand wavium?

HELP!

If you have any ideas, and I know my friends are smart, please help.

Science in Science Fiction

My current work in progress is actually my first foray into real hard science fiction. Usually I prefer writing urban fantasy and fantasy, because there's so much less research involved, and frankly I read a lot more urban fantasy than I do science fiction. However, earlier this year, I decided I wanted to write a space opera about a group of individuals in the middle of an interstellar war.

Since I know little about war and even less about physics, that meant I had to do a lot of research. I'm basing a lot of my political climate and structure of the war on the events and intricacies of World War I, making that part of the novel much easier to write.

My trouble was with the physics. You see, if I'm going to even read science fiction, I want to have it fit together in a plausible and workable way. No hand-waving and warp drives for me unless they're grounded in some actual theories and research. So in developing my world, I've had to understand a number of things about the possibility of anti-gravity, propulsion systems for quick space flight, and even the bending of space time for warp drives in order to make interstellar flight even possible.

I've been reading all sorts of stuff, fitting together recent discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider with basic understanding of gravitational forces and magnetic propulsion systems. Richard Feynman and Frank Wilczek have been my gurus, and I've been peppering my science-minded friends with questions about spin, mass, and charge in order to develop a realistic and potentially workable theory of anti-gravity and propulsion.

Over the past few weeks I thought I had a brilliant idea about using energy to animate a special kind of matter or condensate. The matter would in turn either behave as though it had much greater mass and attract bodies to it in a way comparative to gravitational pull, or it would behave in the opposite way, pushing an anti-gravity force against the gravitational fields of other objects. This matter would then form the basis for both gravity systems on spaceships and as a propulsion system to navigate through space by pushing and pulling on nearby large interstellar bodies.

This was all a theory, until today.

While reading up on a science fiction writers' forum, I found evidence that my brilliant theory could work with some research that is actually currently being explored by Eagleworks Laboratories and NASA. Using vacuum particles and anti-particles that pop into and out of existence in the Quantum vacuum that occupies space-time, scientists theorize that they could develop a propulsion system that actually propels against the vacuum condensate itself.

I think that if I can extrapolate further, the theories on vacuum fluctuation density could be used as a gravitic force as I've theorized it. With the right energy levels, the density of the Bosons and virtual particles could become both an independent energy source, and enable manipulation of weak and strong force, giving us both means of both pushing and pulling matter against other matter.

What do you think?