Plato and Me

When I stated this blog in 2014, my first couple of posts introduced me, a retired electrical engineer, and the subject matter I hoped to cover, which is the connection between physics and consciousness and how it leads to solutions to nature’s greatest puzzles. Since I’m not trained as a philosopher. It has taken me this long to realize that some of the metaphysical concepts I covered in my third post are very close to Plato’s theory of forms or theory of ideas. I find that his approach is different from mine but reaches some of the same conclusions, and it’s enlightening to look at the subject from both viewpoints. That’s what I’ll try to show in this post, but first I have to say that I think it’s pretty exciting to be exploring the same ground that Plato did 2400 years ago, especially since we seem to agree in important ways.

Physics Q&A #5. Why Is Gravity So Weak?

I spend a lot of time on this blog explaining a physical spacetime model and the underlying metaphysics. In this series of posts, each entry poses a physics question for the spacetime model, along with the answer.

Physics Question #5. Why is gravity so weak? Gravity between spacetime points is actually quite strong, but points where elementary fermions are located are gravitationally decoupled from the overall spacetime by the ratio of the particle's mass to the Planck mass—22 orders of magnitude in the case of the electron. This makes gravity a very weak force for matter.

Our spacetime model adopts a harmonic oscillator model for a stationary electron. In this model, the underlying point's creation time is modulated sinusoidally at frequency ω where, from quantum mechanics, ω = mc²/Ñ. Thus, the wave function includes a phase difference between the local time at a particle point and the global time of the universe, which is the local time at every point that does not contain a particle. It is because the particle is out of phase with spacetime as a whole for most of the time that gravity is so weak for particles.