Related papers: Astronomy and the Fifth Dimension
A simple general relativity theory for objects moving in gravitational fields is developed based on studying the behavior of an atom in a gravitational field. The theory is applied to calculate the satellite time dilation, light deflection…
Aristotle has split physics at the sphere of the moon; above this sphere there is no change except eternal spherical motion, below are two different kinds of motion: Natural motion (without specific cause) and enforced motion. In modern…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
It is shown here that a dynamical Planck mass can drive the scale factor of the universe to accelerate. The negative pressure which drives the cosmic acceleration is identified with the unusual kinetic energy density of the Planck field. No…
Astrophysics = the star physics was beginning its development without a supporting of measurement data, which could not be obtained then. Still astrophysics exists without this support, although now astronomers collected a lot of valuable…
Throughout the Universe many powerful events are driven by strong gravitational effects that require general relativity to fully describe them. These include compact binary mergers, black hole accretion and stellar collapse, where…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
In classes on cosmology, students are often told that photons stretch as space expands, but just how physical is this picture? Does space really expand? In this article, we explore the notion of the redshift of light with Einstein's general…
General Relativity offers the possibility to model attributes of matter, like mass, momentum, angular momentum, spin, chirality etc. from pure space, endowed only with a single field that represents its Riemannian geometry. I review this…
Five-dimensional relativity as an extension of general relativity has field equations that simplify considerably given the adoption of a new gauge. The result is a scalar field governed by the Klein-Gordon equation, in an empty spacetime…
The peculiar velocities of galaxies are driven by gravity, and hence hold the promise of probing details of how gravity forms structures. In particular it is possible to constrain cosmological parameters and to test extensions to the…
General relativity is a mathematical model that uses sophisticated geometry to describe simple physics. It agrees with experiment in the few tests that can be made, but the whole edifice is not physics. Instead of using observations to test…
I give a compact, pedagogical review of our present understanding of the universe as based on general relativity. This includes the uniform models, with special reference to the cosmological 'constant'; and the equations for…
In creating his gravitational field equations Einstein unjustifiedly assumed that inertial mass, and its energy equivalent, is a source of gravity. Denying this assumption allows modifying the field equations to a form in which a positive…
The discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating has been followed by an intense theoretical and experimental response in physics and astronomy. The discovery implies that our most basic notions about how gravity work are violated on…
The stellar astronomy has always been considered the fundamental source of knowledge about the basic building blocks of the universe - the stars. It has proved correctness of many physical theories - like e.g. the idea of nuclear fusion in…
The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe…
Essentially all of our knowledge of the acceleration history of the Universe - including the acceleration itself - is predicated upon the validity of general relativity. Without recourse to this assumption, we use SNeIa to analyze the…
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicts that accelerating mass distributions produce gravitational radiation, analogous to electromagnetic radiation from accelerating charges. These gravitational waves have not been directly…
Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…