- Quintessence is an energy field that can change over time. It changes slowly and almost constantly. It is a property of space itself. During its slow walk, gravity ties the galaxies together into gigantic pods. When gravity can no longer hold things together, the big rip will tear the galaxies/pods asunder. Ninety-five percent of the universe is invisible dark energy and dark matter. This ninety-five percent of the universe gave birth to the visible five percent of the universe and keeps it functioning appropriately. What you see ain’t what you got. The story is in what you don’t see. Gravity may be weak, but it is all over.
- Gravity is too weak to be measured in an atom. The gravitational constant at the quantum level leads to a very much smaller force than the forces the elementary particles see in their vicinity. The weak and the strong forces. Are short-range, their effect disappears when the sizes grow more significantly than a nuclear radius. They cannot build up into one strong component that can appear macroscopically. The electromagnetic force is long-range, just like the gravitational force. Gravity is only attractive. It can build up to the forces we see controlling the space around us, the galaxies and clusters. It survives long distances. The electromagnetic force in space can be quite evident as a state of matter called plasma which carries magnetic fields and creates storms in space caused by sun explosions.
- Radiation from stellar black holes is mainly from coalescing binary systems when one or both of the components is a black hole.
- Evey black hole needs to be allowed to decay entirely into elementary particles. There is not an enormous number of stabilized massive elementary black hole states. Two black holes that sit next to each other stay together because their gravitational attraction is balanced with their electrostatic repulsion. All matter has a positive gravitational pull on all other matter. Since gravity is always attractive, it just keeps adding up.
- The matrix nature of a gravitational wave’s amplitude comes from general relativity and has no Newtonian analog. When a gravitational wave passes by the earth, it squeezes and stretches space.
- Dark matter only couples with ordinary matter gravitationally. Dark matter is called dark because it does not interact with the electromagnetic field, which means it does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation and is, therefore, difficult to detect.
- The three forces of electro-magnet, weak, and strong are quantized; gravity is not. No one knows for sure where gravitational fields come from or how individual particles act inside them. Gravitons: have not been discovered.
- Space and time are quantized in the way quantities like energy and momentum are quantized in ordinary quantum field theories.
- The need is for a theory that goes beyond general relativity into the quantum. At distances very close to the center of a black hole (more immediate than the Planck length), quantum fluctuations of spacetime are expected to play an important role. To describe these quantum effects, a theory of quantum gravity is needed. The rules need to be changed to get to zero sizes.
- Gravitational radiation is one of the last unopened windows into the universe. All the matter in the universe is transparent to gravitational waves. Gravity must obey the principles of Special Relativity. When the gravitational field of an object changes, the changes ripple outwards through space and take a finite time to reach other objects. These ripples are called gravitational radiation or gravitational waves. Gravitational waves travel at exactly the speed of light. The most striking aspect of gravitational waves is their weakness. Gravitational Radiation is to gravity what light is to electromagnetism.
