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Re: keeping those darned planets apart



Yes, but as you fire your "bullets" from one planet to another you are
continually losing mass on the original planet. So, you would need to
continually adjust your firing rate and speed, no?

Peter Schoch
Sussex County Community College

William Beaty wrote:

Here's an idea which I'd never encountered before. Suppose we have two
masses (planets) far out in space away from other matter. They will
obviously fall together via gravitational attraction. If we wished to
keep them apart, you would have to create a "contact force" between them,
right? Create some sort of repulsion, or maybe erect a tower to hold them
apart?

There's another way.

Mount a machine-gun on one of the masses. Fire bits of rock as bullets.
fire them at the other planet so that they collide inelastically. Adjust
the firing rate and velocity of the bullets until the planets hover at the
desired spacing.

Is there any repulsive contact-force between the planets? No. NO?!!!!

WEEEEEEEIRD!!!!!!

Firing of the gun creates a "recoil" force-pair, and when the bullet hits
the other planet, it creates an "impact" force-pair, but there is no kind
of force repelling the planets apart at all. The gun accelerates a
bullet, and the other planet decellerates it by just the same amount.
Mass leaks continuously from one planet to the other via the
bullet-stream. KE is injected into the bullets and extracted at the
target, so there is a net flow of energy as well.

This idea came out of John Denker's dislike for "nit-picky word games" and
his insistence that the only way to suspend an airplane against gravity is
to create a force-pair between the airplane and the earth. (Me, I think
physics is fundamentally based on "nit-picky word games" and upon the
interesting concepts which they sometimes will unexpectedly reveal to a
perceptive "seer." These games are its very lifeblood.)

I was familiar with the "gauge field" particle-exchange model of the three
forces (maybe four, if gravitons exist?) Populations of virtual particles
let the attracting/repelling realworld particles reach out and interact
with each other. However, I never encountered the idea that mass-flow can
substitute for a Newtonian force between two repelling objects. I guess
it seems true in hindsight, since that's how a hovering rocket manages to
stay suspended high above the ground.

If the "exchange particles" only flow in one direction, then ignoring the
obvious gravitational attraction, there is no bi-directional interaction
between our two planets. The bullets keep the planets apart, but they do
not constitute a forcelike interaction. The repulsive force between the
planets is zero. Yet there they hover, refusing to fall together, yet not
touching. One is slowly shrinking and the other is growing, and energy is
simultaneously flowing across the gap between them.

Why does this hurt my brain so much?

So there! Airplanes can TOO hover above the ground without having any
force-pair keeping the plane and earth apart! Toldja so! Nyaaaa!

:)

((((((((((((((((((((( ( ( ( ( (O) ) ) ) ) )))))))))))))))))))))
William J. Beaty SCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb@eskimo.com http://www.amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits science projects, tesla, weird science
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