A Rational Cosmology: The Non-Existence of Gravitons or Other "Force Particles"

One further fallacy about fields that deserves to be addressed here is the idea that non-contact forces (and thus the field models which apply to them) can be explained by the presence of special types of "particles" which are responsible for the motion of entities in a force field.

Apparently, some physicists have rejected the very possibility of non-contact forces and have instead tried to explain this phenomenon by inventing entities, such as "gravitons," that make direct contact with the entities they are supposed to exert forces on, and thereby result in acceleration.

Cosmologically, this cannot be, as such entities would need to be massless (especially in the case of "gravitons," which would otherwise themselves be quite significantly affected by the force of gravity), and mass is a ubiquitous quality of entities.

Additionally, an entity without mass cannot exert a force, since by Newton's Second Law, a force can only exist where both a mass and an acceleration exist. Furthermore, this notion ignores the far better verified Classical idea of action-reaction pairs.

If the Earth "sends" gravitons toward an approaching spaceship, the gravitons´ pull on the spaceship might explain the force the Earth exerts on it; it would not explain the force the spaceship exerts on the Earth. (Unless the spaceship were to send out an equal and opposite stream of gravitons at the same time as the Earth, wherein the question would arise as to how these two entities were able to coordinate this exchange with such tremendous precision, how their gravitons are made possible in the first place, and whether each entity has an inexhaustible number of gravitons, or whether it spontaneously stops exerting or experiencing gravity once it runs out.)

Far more fundamental notions, belonging both to cosmology and Classical physics, refute the idea of massless "particles" causing non-contact forces, thus rendering the idea false. To add to this, the idea might be declared moot by Occam's Razor, since, as earlier explained, the two entities involved in the action-reaction pair are quite sufficient to account for how forces originate.

The idea of gravitons arose as an implication of a fundamental philosophical error: the view of fields as entities in themselves and the view of field lines as literal "roads" along which particles can travel. Accepting that error, some empiricist-positivist physicists attempted to use it to "explain" non-contact forces as contact phenomena made possible by these "roads" and particles such as gravitons traveling along them. Yet this does not save the view of fields as entities. Rather, in this case, one initial error has led to a second even more mistaken view.

Read other parts of "A Rational Cosmology" by clicking here.