I absolutely love innovation … so when I read in the news today about how hard it is to catch the SpaceX rocket fairing with a net that is installed above a moving ship, and seeing that the failure to catch that nose-cone has happened before, I asked myself … what crazy (but theoretically feasible) solution could be explored in that scenario that no one has talked about yet.

TLDR: Here’s my unsolicited idea:  A custom-built drone that can nudge the fairing in the right direction. It might be a creative and economical solution for the problem.

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Back in school, most of us have learned that Earth’s gravity is a force that pulls objects. But what if gravity is actually a force pushing the space fabric towards Earth’s center of mass?

While staring at a fresh bowl of gelatin, which I filled with a handful of blueberries, I couldn’t help but wonder how the little blue fruits did resemble planets floating around in the cosmos. But since the blueberries were not really floating – they were suspended and fully engulfed by the gelatin – I had to ask myself:

“What if space is really like a really big chunk of gelatin, engulfing planets and every other body of mass in the universe?”

I grew up reading books that explained how Gravity is a force that pulls things, people, air, toward the center of the Earth.  I now question that notion.  As I describe here, my new interpretation is that what we call Gravity is actually a compression force generated by the space fabric that surrounds us… pushing things, compressing them, keeping them relatively in place.  Maybe others have already documented these hypotheses, but since I’m realizing them now for the first time, I thought I’d write this post to document my thoughts, just in case.

This line of thinking might sound completely crazy, absurd, and preposterous but do hear me out as I go out on a limb here.

It is common knowledge that there are 4 fundamental forces of nature: Strong force, Weak force, Electromagnetism, and Gravity. However, little is know about Gravity.  In my opinion,  if space were to behave like gelatin, it would explain Gravity.

First, an observation:

Have you noticed that most large bodies of mass in space are spheres? Leave large rock fragments in space and after 1000s of years, they start to bundle together and form a sphere. So why would that happen? Some force would have to be pushing those objects towards their combined center of mass. Compressing an object with the same amount of force, from all sides, generates spherical shapes over time.  Maybe that’s exactly what the space fabric is doing.

Here’s my hypothesis #1: What if Gravity is what happens when the space fabric compresses bodies of mass, pushing them towards their own center of mass?

Gravity is a weak force, but the bigger the object, the more affected by Gravity that object becomes. That’s because the bigger the object, the more space is pushed aside and compressed to make room for the foreign object to fit in.

Let’s visualize what I call space compression and expansion. Let’s talk about tides. We all know that the Moon proximity to the Earth affects the tides so it shouldn’t be no surprise to know that when the Moon is really close to the Earth, we get the high tides. By getting closer to the Earth, the Moon is really shielding Earth from a lot of the compression effects of the larger space fabric, which reduces the amount of force that pushes the water towards the center of the Earth. As a consequence, we have the high tides because theoretically there is less space compression forces acting on that water (and not more Moon gravitational forces, as popular science claims).  Eventually, when the Moon moves away from that side of the Earth, the space fabric compresses the Earth with stronger force, pushing the water towards the center of the Earth, and back to its standard levels.

The Gelatin bowl analogy also helps with another point: space, just like the gelatin, pushes objects towards each other.  You’ll see that, over time, some blueberries get pulled towards others. Why does that happen? That’s because the gelatin space gets warped by the presence of certain blueberries, which create areas that are more or less dense.  Therefore, allowing some of the other blueberries to be attracted to the less-dense gelatin areas as there is less friction to get there.

Here’s my hypothesis #2: What if Orbits are what happens when expansion/contraction events force an object to move?

I think objects spin around stars just like the wind in hurricanes.  What if the universe is expanding in one direction, but is actually contracting in another direction? That would act similarly to the high/low pressure effect we observe in hurricanes. What if there are areas sandwiched in space where one side has high pressure, and the opposite side has low pressure. Everything in the center would spin, just like a hurricane.

Usually, the eye of a traditional hurricane is an area of tranquility, but in space, all those spinning objects eventually converge towards a central point,  which always seem to be located at the center of a galaxy. All that mass converges to what we call a Black role. So, it looks like a black role is essentially the eye of a galactic hurricane.

So the combination of both the expansion and the contraction of the universe seem to force Galaxies to spin, all while the space fabric is compressing the galaxies toward their own centers of mass, which ends up forming black roles.

Here’s my hypothesis #3: What if space is a malleable fabric similar to our Gelatin analogy, and it can also be compressed?

If you press a blueberry onto the gelatin, deforming its surface, you’ll find out that all the gelatin is still there, but it’s compressed now. The gelatin is trying to compress the blueberry but it doesn’t destroy it because, like Gravity,  that compression force is a very weak force. Same happens if you were to put an orange in the gelatin. However, since a bigger chunk of space is being compressed to give room to the Orange, the force on the Orange’s surface feels slightly stronger – if you were to stand on the surface of that Orange. That would explain things like why gravity on the Moon is lighter than the gravity here on Earth. It’s all about how much space is being compressed to make room for a body of mass. The more compressed is the space fabric around an object, the strong the gravity force becomes.

If we go back to fundamentals of physics, we learned that time equals distance divided by velocity. Given a constant velocity, the more space (i.e. distance) is compressed, the slower time will be perceived. In other words, the stronger the effects of a Gravity force is, the longer time dilation turns out to be, causing one’s perception of time to seem that clocks are running slower.

Picture an accordion.  It doesn’t matter whether it is open or closed, its fabric is still the same; The accordion never changes, but its real length/distance does. When the accordion is compressed, air travels faster from one end to the other. Likewise, if the space fabric is compressed, the fabric is still the same, but its length is reduced, causing time to travel faster.

That goes hand in hand with the famous twin astronauts experiment and I will add to that idea.  In my line of thinking, as the astronaut distances herself/himself from disturbances on the space fabric, the effects of time dilation becomes less easily perceived.  The exception would be if changes to velocity were involved. In that case, the faster the astronaut moves, the more likely he/she would be to be affected by the effects of time dilation.

That creates many implications. First, if the space fabric is densely compressed near very large bodies of mass, it would make sense to travel through that path in order to get to a destination faster, although more energy would need to be used to prevent the space fabric from pushing the spaceship towards the larger body of mass and essentially capture it.

Here’s my hypothesis #4: What if space can be compressed and bent, forming pathways that act as shortcuts?

Maybe the shortest distance between 2 points is not a straight line.

Imagine what would happen if the space fabric could be simultaneously compressed in multiple points, causing the compressed fabric to start looking like a folded sheet of paper, a skate ramp, or a u-shaped tube.   You’ve probably seen this example before.  What if those ends were to meet?  Traveling through that compressed space would get you to your destination faster than if you were traveling through the same space (following its surface) without being affected by any forces.

And a final theory to wrap up this post. Here’s my hypothesis #5: What if spaceships could travel faster by knowing where compressed spaces are located?

It’s unlikely that any spaceship would have enough energy to disrupt the space fabric by itself. However, if this hypothesis is true, the universe is probably full of compressed areas of space fabric, and the knowledge of where those disruptions naturally occur could enable a navigator to plot a travel course that would benefit from as much compressed space as possible, allowing spaceships to travel great distances in short amounts of time. Maybe such space fabric disturbances are the pathways of the universe.

Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that any of my hypotheses are absolutely true and correct, but I do hope you find them amusing, creative, and inspiring. And if you happen to know a theoretical physicist, or two, please do share this post with them for their thoughts.

~ André Lessa