"Things the universe is made of" requires me to think of the universe as an object comprised of other objects, which is too much to ask.
I probably thought I understood a lot of things until I got to this post. Here I'm being asked to put aside what I understand so that you can insert your own ideas in place of my own. Most of what I think I know collides with what you're telling me.
Religious experiences? Alien encounters? These inspire ideas on defeating gravity?
In that case let me just screw my own brain back in and answer: no. Usually, for things to make sense they have to rely on universals (like what gravity actually is) vs personal experience (such as what it means to any one person).
Among the phenomena of the universe are countless intangibles. One of them is this force that acts upon mass which we call gravity. It's so immutable that we treat it as a law. We say so because we understand its immutability. Anything that would suggest that's it's not wouldn't make sense. Or, conversely stated, the things that make sense are those which are intuitive to us as physical properties, such as gravity, or which can be rationally explained in the counter-intuitive cases by abstractions that at least follow other laws intuitive to us, which do not violate the principles of math or science.
Aqueous Id,
Long ago I read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you read the book, you will remember that the answer to everything is 42. They had to "build" the earth to find out what the actual question was. I remember reading: the question is what is 6x8? The answer to that is 56, which doesn't equal 42. I thought: "that doesn't make any sense!" BINGO!!!:shrug:
Where ever I got my ideas from doesn't matter. I just wanted to contribute something that would help ease human suffering. My motives were honorable. I wanted to know how a gravity propulsion drive, from the point of view of physics, worked. I asked for help from God, from aliens, and from anything else among that might exist, that was also good, and something gave me answers, and ideas, lots of them.
Let's talk about physics. If we take the stress-energy tensor out of the Einstein equations, then we are left with the space-time curvature caused by the Cosmological constant. So what physical evidence do we have that the Cosmological constant is even relevant to nature? Well,
Hubble's Law seems to fit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law said:
Hubble's law (Lemaître's Law) is the name for the astronomical observation in physical cosmology that: (1) all objects observed in deep space (interstellar space) are found to have a doppler shift observable relative velocity to Earth, and to each other; and (2) that this doppler-shift-measured velocity, of various galaxies receding from the Earth, is proportional to their distance from the Earth and all other interstellar bodies.
I made the association that Hubble's law refers to Doppler shift. Then I looked at the Cosmological constant and I read,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant said:
The cosmological constant has the same effect as an intrinsic energy density of the vacuum, ρvac (and an associated pressure)... A positive vacuum energy density resulting from a cosmological constant implies a negative pressure, and vice versa. If the energy density is positive, the associated negative pressure will drive an accelerated expansion of empty space. (See dark energy and cosmic inflation for details.).
Hubble shift is a linear frequency shift that, according to the Einstein equation, is associated with the intrinsic energy density of the vacuum. So I thought, linear frequency shift ... Hubble's law ... Cosmological constant ... positive vacuum energy makes space expand, pushes galaxies apart. Too bad Doppler shift is only an effect of other things like vacuum energy and gravitational redshift. Too bad we can't generate redshift. Then it occurred to me: why can't we? I can emit almost any frequency in the visible spectrum using light emitting diodes. I can manufacture light emitting diodes on a Galium Aluminum Arsenide wafer. It would be relatively ease to make 64 LED's as an 8x8 group of LED's on a wafer. I could squeeze as many groups of 64 LED's on a wafer as there was available space. With the proper electronic circuitry and software, could I emit 64 different frequency and make it look like a redshift or a blueshift? If I could, then I could perform an experiment. This experiment asks the following question: Can a frequency shift (made of 64 individual frequencies) increase or decrease the intrinsic energy of the vacuum? If it could, then I would have a way to make the Cosmological constant of the universe deviate from its naturally occurring value. If I could cause the Cosmological constant $$\Lambda$$ to get very large and positive, then I could make space expand much faster than it does naturally. If I could make $$\Lambda$$ large and negative, I could make space contract.
Is there a good reason not to try the experiment?