Revealing the Operation of the Universe

Gravity

Although gravity has always been a familiar daily experience it was not well understood until Isaac Newton described it as an attracting force roughly three cent-uries ago. Even still, enough questions and problems remained that Albert Einstein completely redefined gravity a century ago as "warped 4-dimensional space-time." Yet even Einstein’s version is now known to have its own problems, most notably an inability to explain the motion of stars in the heavens unless mysterious unseen "dark matter" is assumed to fill most of the empty space between them. This leaves us with two radically different and problematic explanations for gravity – Newton’s vs. Einstein’s – with ongoing debates about additional theories or ad hoc modifications to these existing ones.

Electric charge effects also have been known to exist for centuries, but were only formally described by Benjamin Franklin in terms of positively and negatively charged objects that attract or repel each other. Yet, as useful as this electric charge theory has been for practical purposes, it still leaves many questions unanswered, such as what creates and powers electric charge itself, enabling objects to endlessly attract or repel each other once they are charged. There is also the question of why the closely packed, positively charged protons in the nucleus of the atom don’t powerfully repel each other and fly apart. The only solution so far has been to invent a further unexplained, unending attracting force said to be holding them together (now known as the "strong nuclear force").

Magnets have been known for ages as unusual rocks that somehow attract certain metals. But how do permanent magnets cling endlessly to our refrigerators, holding their own sizable weight plus whatever is pinned under them, with no power source and no draining of their energy from all this effort? Science has never provided a clear explanation, at best offering only mathematical abstractions to claim that no energy is required to hold objects up against gravity.

Even the nature of light has been hotly debated for generations, alternately thought to be either a wave of energy or a particle (the photon). This debate continued back and forth until it was decided, roughly a century ago, that light is rather mysteriously both a wave and a particle. This odd conclusion arose as part the theory of Quantum Mechanics, which is widely described as one of the most paradoxical and bizarre theories in science, where all of nature is described in terms of tiny packets with only probabilities of one outcome or another.

As each of these examples shows, we are still far from having all the answers – even to many of our common daily experiences, which is why science is still embarked on an age-old quest to understand what is really going on in our universe. What is matter? What is energy? What underlies all the phenomena, effects and activity in the physical world around us? This quest for the ultimate physical understanding is often stated as the search for the Theory of Everything.

One of the expectations of this ultimate theory is that it will tie everything neatly together with one simple physical principle that has so far been overlooked, showing that all matter, energy, forces and phenomena are manifestations of the same underlying physical first-cause. This is in stark contrast to today’s patchwork of dozens of separate forces, particles, energies and effects, which are often accompanied by complex mathematical abstractions that are far removed from solid sensible physical explanations.

But, as earnestly as we are searching for this completely new understanding, there is an inherent problem: It may well be that we will only find it by completely rethinking many of the time-honored ideas and beliefs that today’s science is built upon. But how do we get outside the "scientific box" we are trapped within to arrive at a fresh new perspective on it all when our centuries-old scientific legacy is all we know? It now appears a compelling new theory has arrived that powerfully answers this question by revisiting several of Einstein’s most famous ideas, but taking them much more literally than Einstein did.

As an example, consider another of Einstein’s abstract ideas that takes on a powerful new meaning when interpreted literally – his inspirational thought experiment on gravity. Einstein famously stated that it would be impossible to tell the difference between the gravitational experience of standing in a box on Earth and that of being pulled upward through space in that same box at a steady acceleration of one g-force. In Expansion Theory, the Earth (and all of its constituent atoms) is expanding continually, pushing everything on its surface upward through space – just as in Einstein’s accelerating box in space. However, our expanding planet is literally the accelerating platform in space that Einstein envisioned merely as an abstract thought experiment.

This example also demonstrates how such a simple and obvious phenomenon in plain view might be overlooked for millennia. With all atoms and objects expanding equally it would be impossible to see the expansion directly – nothing would change in relative size. All we would notice is a constant force underfoot and all dropped objects falling at the same speed regardless of mass (as the ground actually rises to meet them all equally). Further, this demonstrates how the very notion of "gravitational energy" now vanishes completely as a separate ethereal force or entity in nature. There need be no "energy" driving this process, as this very notion displays a misunderstanding of the concept of actively expanding matter – returning instead to our current idea of matter as passive lumps pushed or pulled about by separate active "energy" phenomena.

According to Expansion Theory, the concept of "energy" is a completely unnecessary invention in a universe where all matter actively expands by virtue of its very existence. And indeed, the concept of expanding atomic matter is readily extended to explain all known gravitational effects, such as orbits and ocean tides, with expanding subatomic matter, such as expanding electrons, explaining electricity, magnetism, light and many other common phenomena currently classified as energy today. In the process, such exotic and increasingly troubled theories as Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity and General Relativity become unnecessary, replaced by the singular concept of expanding matter.

So, has it finally happened? Has our long quest for the Theory of Everything finally come to an end? The jury is still out, but the evidence is compelling: a sweeping rethink that replaces many of today’s complex and troubled theories, all via a single simple new principle in nature that has been overlooked for centuries. If Expansion Theory is the right perspective on nature it would seem that Einstein almost had it decades ago, if he had only taken his inspirational ideas a bit more literally.

Mark McCutcheon has a degree in engineering-physics and is the author of the international physics bestseller The Final Theory: Re-thinking Our Scientific Legacy, in which he presents the new concept of expanding matter as Expansion Theory. Much more information can be found at www. TheFinalTheory.com, where the first chapter can be downloaded free of charge.