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Hello all! So recently I have come up with some little theories about physics, mainly gravity, inertia, energy, and stuff like that. They have made some sense to me, and I have given them some pretty serious thought. Now, unlike some people on these forums in the past, *cough* I shall not be stating that I believe these are in any way true. These are just some things I came up with I found interesting and thought I might share. I sadly have no mathematical backing to either of these theories I have. I'd love to hear any positive or negative feedback on this stuff, after all, I love being fed.(failed pun)

Now the first one I have is a more recent one of mine that I think makes more sense than the other one. Basically, I realized that with almost any potential energy, some force is involved, trying to convert that potential energy to kinetic energy among other kinds of energy. For example, gravity is a force that essentially attempts to covert the potential energy of say, a ball above the ground, to kinetic energy. Same goes with a spring, the force it creates is one that attempts to convert the potential energy stored within to a kinetic energy.

Now, if you begin to stretch this observation a bit, things like chemical energy involve atomic forces that try to convert potential chemical energy into things such as thermal energy, electrical energy, etc. Now we'll stretch this even further. Say two objects with a different velocity collide. Some of this kinetic energy will transfer. How does this happen? Well, a force was involved. So if what I have observed is correct, this would suggest that there is a potential energy creating a force that tries to transfer potential energy from one of the objects to the other. How would this work? Well, this potential energy would be an energy that has the potential to be transferred to the other object. See, I told you we would stretch stuff a bit.

Now, I'd like to mention equilibrium, and how this transfer of kinetic energy and gravity might have a relationship. So say we had the energy in those two objects, when they collided, there was a potential to transfer the energy between the objects such that an equilibrium would be reached. This equilibrium is actually demonstrated by a real situation (I lied when I said I had no mathematical proof ) in that the kinetic energy of the two balls combined will be the same before and after the collision, according to the law of conservation of momentum, and in an ideal situation where energy was not lost as heat. The energy within each object compared to the total amount of energy would be proportional to the object's mass.

So if the different objects have different amounts of energy, how was an equilibrium reached? Well, heat is a great example of how this works. Two objects may be of the same temperature, and at equilibrium, yet have different amounts of thermal energy because they have different masses. And of course, the reason this potential energy would transfer in order to reach an equilibrium is much similar to the way thermal energy transfers to reach an equilibrium.

So now I'll try to make this explain gravity. Say you have two objects, for example you and earth, both have gravity acting upon each other. You pull on the earth with your own gravity (just like yo mama) and likewise the earth's gravity implies a force on you. Now, this force suggests that there is a potential energy here trying to, as I have talked about, reach an equilibrium, and it does so by implying a force on the objects. Hence, gravity.

Now this also implies another thing, and that is that potential energy is an energy of relativity. That is, differences in position of objects relative to one another. Now, how this causes kinetic energy to be transferred via object collisions is beyond me. Perhaps it has to due with the situation of the electrons of the atoms of the objects getting closer together, and the electrons being closer together upsets this equilibrium somehow, creating a force? Not sure.

Holy windburgers, been typing this for a bit, so tomorrow when I get time, I'll edit in a download to a wordpad document I wrote a long time back regarding IMO, a less accurate and much older theory that also describes energy, gravity and such.

Once again, I'd love to hear all feedback on this, positive or negative, heck, I'd rather know I was wrong than to have the responsibility of being the person that came up with a reasonable physics theory.

If you've actually read this far, my intense appreciation goes to you. Intense in that it might... Well... Not sure :/

wrote responses starting from your second paragraph :3

1) Energy thing: Yes! potential energy is defined as F=-dU/dx (where F(x) is force, U(x) is PE)

2) I wouldn't say potential energy is transferred, but the system definitely tries to minimize potential energy.

3) This isn't true! Inelastic collisions preserve momentum but not kinetic energy, and I believe that assuming the law of conservation of momentum, you can get any energy after a collision. (this is because momentum is a vector, and long story short, 2=5-3=6-4=7-5, etc, so you get the same value while having wildly different velocities)

4) Sounds reasonable to me! But solids are complicated, so it definitely could be wrong. So you have each particle with m1*v1^2=m2*v2^2 (Note: this is kinetic energy, which works fine if each collision is instantaneous and completely elastic, meaning the particles are never compressed, so no potential energy is imparted!) Then you have v2=v1*sqrt(m1/m2). The expected velocity of a particle is sqrt(2*k*T/m) (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltzmann_distribution#Typical_speeds), so we would assert that v2=sqrt(2*k*T/m2)=v1*sqrt(m1/m2)=sqrt(2*k*T/m1 * m1/m2), which is true!

Wow, cool, I thought that was going to come out false. I'm too lazy to work on proving it for every single possibility in the density function, but at least the expected/mean velocity comes out right!

5) I'm not sure about reaching an equilibrium - an equilibrium between forces or between potential energies? Actually, since F=-dU/dx, we can define U2=U1+C and still have dU1/dx=-F, so without careful definition, the value of the potential energy function is meaningless, just its shape and differences between values at different points is important.





Related to potential energy but not so related to this thread is this program I wrote: http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/effective-potential-energy-orbital-mechanics/1193648656

what's graphed is something called the effective potential energy curve. Basically, you can write the energy of the system in terms of U(r)+KE=E, where U(r) is the standard gravitational potential energy curve (-GMm/r), and KE is the kinetic energy of the particle. If you separate the kinetic energy into terms of radial and tangential components, you can find a nice equation for the tangential KE because of the conservation of angular momentum, in terms of r. call this L(r), then let U'(r)=U(r)+L(r), so we have U'(r)+m/2 (Vr)^2=E, where Vr is the radial velocity. so then dU'/dr * dr/dt = -m Vr * dVr/dt. dr/dt is just Vr, so they cancel out, and we're left with -(dU'(r)/dr)=m d^2(r)/dt^2, which is exactly an energy conservation statement! (m d^2(r)/dt^2 is the radial acceleration/"force", and U'(r) is the potential energy function of this force)

[edit]
note that this is then easy to interpret. When U' is at its absolute minimum there is a circular orbit, because the radial acceleration is zero. As the system's energy gets larger, you get a smaller minimal radius and a larger maximum radius (the dot on the graph has to stay below the total energy), and once the energy is greater than zero, the particle will keep moving away forever, so you have an unbounded orbit!

We need to call...

Wow Neuro Fuzzy! Completely epic post! Very interested to find that some of those equations came out to be true! I could not be more pleased. I'll have to read your post a time or two more in detail to comprehend some of the stuff you wrote.

And about that equilibrium, not quite sure whether it is between forces or potential energy, probably potential energy, but my observations seem to show the properties of some sort of equilibrium trying to be reached.