Push / Pull (Remedial Physics)

There is a theory that gravity is a pushing force.  That is to say that gravity is a property of space and not matter.  I say fine; it’s entirely plausible, but that for all purposes we can understand at the moment it makes no difference, and there is currently no way to prove it one way or the other.


An idea that never seems to die (millions of people believe in it completeyt) is that we can extract electrical power “from gravity”.  I can’t believe I wasted an hour on YouTube on something that sounded interesting, but ended up as another of millions of perpetual motion energy system assertions.  I’m not linking to it.  Stay away.


Again; No, Little Grasshopper.  Gravity is a part of the mechanism by which we might extract energy for our own purposes, but in and of itself it isn’t energy in the sense that we can “extract” power from it”.  Hydroelectric uses gravity, but the energy we’re extracting came from the sun (sun heats ocean water, water evaporates as a result…you know the rest).  It’s like a spring in engineering.  My Victrola phonograph’s turntable isn’t powered by spring energy.  You have to put energy in before you get any out, and there’s loss along the way.  The spring stores energy from the muscles I used to wind it up, my muscles get their energy from the food I eat, and the food I eat gets its energy from the sun through photosynthesis.  The Victrola is powered by trillions of tons of exploding hydrogen nucleii, which I suppose you can call “the energy of the universe” or “God Power” if you like.  But it isn’t spring energy anymore than hydroelectric is gravity energy.


But everyone wants desperately to believe that they’re smarter than all physicists and engineers, past and present, combined, and that they have The Secret to endless, essentially free energy.  Tidal power (extracting some of the energy of the Earth’s rotation), hydro power, solar power (photovoltaic) and all the rest are all perfectly viable but certainly not free and some of them require massive engineering projects.  You are never going to build a “gravity power” machine without some source besides gravity, at least not until we can figure out what gravity is, and exactly how it interacts with matter.  So far it’s a mystery, and I assert that it will remain a mystery for a very long time, or until some “quantum leap” of understanding of the nature of the universe is achieved.


In the same YouTube piece they, again, for the nth time, brought up the suppressed technologies meme– Big Dark Corporation buys up patents for endless free energy machines and locks them away from human eyes forever, so they can continue to make BIG BUCKS POLLUTING THE EARTH.  As if there is no money in selling and maintaining endless free energy machines.  Naw; it’d never sell, and for sure no government or other company could ever find out about it, no matter what.  Ever.  And someone with more power than anyone else snuck into the patent office and erased the patent before anyone, including the patent office workers, ever saw it.  That 100 MPG carburator we heard about back in the 1960s (you just bolt it onto your Chrysler 440 V8 and presto, your 5,000 pound 1966 Town & Country gets 100 MPG) was suppressed by the Big Oil Companies more effectively than any secret in the history of history.  And I am Karl Marx’s uncle. (Hillary Clinton be goin’, “I can’t believe you’re Karl’s uncle because you’ve obviously been bought off by the oil companies!”)


While we’re dismissing silly ideas; that asteroid belt out there is constantly, almost universally, being referred to as “leftovers” and suchlike, from the formation of the solar system.  That’s a misunderstanding or at best a disservice to the students.  Those hard, dense, nickel/iron chunks we keep finding can be only one thing– planet core material.  If the Earth were smashed all to hell, resulting in another asteroid belt for a time, and you somehow managed to survive, would you want the pieces referred to as “leftover flotsam from the formation of the solar system”?  One could argue that the asteroids are “leftover” in the sense that total planet annihiliation is part of solar system formation but the implication has  been they just never ended up as anything and so there they are, still out there.  Maybe I’ll start referring to the asteroid belt as “collateral damage”.  And now that I think about it I’m sure Bush had something to do with it.


Please, because this needs to be said until it is understood;  It is entirely possible to be a towering genius in one field and be a blithering idiot in another.  It happens to me all the time.  So for you blithering idiots out there (you know who you are because you think you’re a towering genius); you just need to get into some other field.

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3 thoughts on “Push / Pull (Remedial Physics)

  1. Nitpick Alert:
    The Victrola is powered by trillions of tons of exploding hydrogen nucleii, which I suppose you can call “the energy of the universe” or “God Power” if you like. But it isn’t spring energy anymore than hydroelectric is gravity energy.

    Is the “exploding hydrogen nucleii” bit accurate?

    I would have said “fusing nucleii”: both to better describe it as a FUSION not FISSION process, and as an acknowledgement that it is not just hydrogen that fuses.

    Edit: First effort to post resulted in an error. Apologies if this posts twice.

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