HI Peter,
Its good to hear from you again my friend.
I am having trouble with your scenario, specifically, having the rim acheive the speed of light.
Its the old E=MC*2 that keeps me from accepting that this scenario is even plausible.
The rim can never achieve the speed of light due to this famous equation, for it would have to have infinite mass and infinite energy to come even close.
My present understandng is that your wheel would have to take up the whole universe, not to mention all of the energy in it also.
But an analogy can be made by using a spiral galaxy with the outer rim of the stars moving within the boundaries of Einsteins formula.
Now here is were I believe there is another problem.
Dr. Vera Rubin discovered a big discrepancy with the rotational speeds of stars orbiting their host galaxy, the stars are not moving the way our physics predict that they should be moving.
Her results showing and plotting the rotational curves can not be dismissed.
The implications are that either we need to modify our physics at the grand scale of galaxies or, that we are missing part of the picture.
I find it very interesting that we had to modify our physics at the micro scale of particle physics, why not at large scales also?
instead of reviewing our science and present Newtonian and Relativistic laws and principles, our science has instead refused to admit that something is amiss with our current understanding, and they have opted to instead make up stuff like dark matter and Dark energy to explain our observations.
To have to make something up like dark matter seems to me like its a huge leap of logic made up in order to explain our observations.
Another point that I find confusing is that gravity can affect photons either thru the bending of light such as in gravitational lensing (warping of spacetime) which was predicted by Einstein and confirmed thru observations, or the gravitational redshifting of light.
My present understanding is that a photon has no mass yet gravity can affect it by warping the space near a massive object. the light simply follows the curved space time created by the gravitational mass.
since the speed of light squared, is used in his famous equation and, gravity exists everwhere and, it can bend light or redshift it, why isnt gravity included in the relativistic formula?
It seems that we really dont have a grasp of what gravity really is made up of, and we still do not understand its full cumulative effects at the giant scale of the Universe. until we can solve gravity completely by detecting gravitons or gravity waves or particles, How can science jump to conclusions?
I would love to be able to grasp this whole realtivity problem with gravity bieng a big part of this problem.
I am no scientist but my intuition tells me something is wrong or missing.
again this may just be my limited knowledge of relativity
Dennis
