Thinking Differently About Force

Let us being by clarifying what 'understanding' means.
Understanding what something 'really' is can be difficult, because, 'understanding' is being comfortable with a certain level of atomicity (because, as far as we know, 'indivisible' is not a real word).

Now, it may come as a shock that we just (1998) realized our universe is expanding. This begs the question, what is causing this? Presumably, some 'dark energy' is involved, but really this is a blanket term. There are many terms like this that we cannot detect, and it seems that a possible answer is that we are just not thinking about the world in the right way to understand this phenomena. What I wish to discuss in this post are some possibilities of what a 'force' actually is; when I say this, I mean that I will attempt to describe it as little as possible in terms of its behavior and instead postulate on cause.

To begin, I would like to point out one idea. If one were to read Nagel's What is it like to be a Bat? one would possibly agree that, in general, if we have no way of directly experiencing (sensing) a certain phenomena, then it may just be impossible to ever (fully) comprehend a given phenomena. A bit simpler would be to say that because our understanding seems to be based upon relating new information to that we already know, we would then have no construct for interpreting knowledge that was outside of our experience. What of Imagination? Well, our imaginations seem to be limited to the five-sense world, and anything outside of this, well, cannot be imagined! Or, possibly, it can be imagined within our limited model.

Enough of this though. With this in mind, we will still speculate.

Anything we analyze, we must realize that we are only viewing its observable behavior. Thus, we base causality on the causality of the observable world. Also, note that we may have to use incorrect sounding linguistics (i.e. bad grammar & definitions), because, after all, we are describing things that don't make sense to us, so it makes sense that our sentences will come out wacky!

Without further ado...

This first idea comes from the fact that causality may in fact be two-way. Thus, as we normally believe cause -> effect, then, if we create an effect, does this imply the cause? Maybe we need invert our thinking to think of masses as 'intangibles' and forces as tangibles.

One theme within nature (at least as we are led to believe) is symmetry, and is demonstrated in many laws. Thus, let us take F = MA. A force on a mass causes an acceleration. Now, let us think outside the box for a moment, and think, what if we were to simply have an accelerating mass, would this 'cause' a force? Now, the obvious reply is 'No', but it would imply that a force has been applied. But in general, these 'forces' such as gravity and such are coming out of thin air! We only detect them by the way they interact with masses. We feel like gravity is our best friend, but we can't, say, detect 'gravity waves' like we can detect light. So the moving masses are what are creating force. This may seem obvious; instead, imagine a bat and ball, and say you hit the ball with the bat, and the ball accelerates. F = MA; now, assume that somehow we have a ball that is simply accelerating--is it possible that it is creating a force in the world? What if we imagine a 'force' as a tangible thing (i.e. ball), and a 'mass' as the intangible thing. (i.e. the former mysterious force).

When we think F=MA, we say 'an acceleration' on a mass. But what really is an acceleration? Let's try to use our imagination to picture 'an acceleration' as the 'ball' and the mass as 'the mysterious force'; its a difficult exercise, because how can we imagine a force as a tangible object? Well, if we simply use the force's behavior to describe it, then we could imagine it as an expanding line in a given direction with a given thickness. Now, if we begin to imagine this inverted world, we see it is a huge network -- a web, of conflicting forces. Imagine gravity as many forces-- directed lines-- that are pointing downward into the planet. Now, we make all our 'masses' in the regular sense invisible. When we look out into our new spiderweb world, we only see millions of lines going in every direction.

Now, lets say our eyes had the ability to see only the spiderweb world, and not the massful world we normally see. Then, just imagine what sorts of things we might surmise!

Lets take, for example, the gravitational attraction of a mass. Then, in our world it would be common to see millions of lines pointing inwards in a spherelike manner (i.e. where a mass -invisible to us- was) so we may create a rule that forces usually are inwardly directed, in a spherelike manner, around a point. We would have no idea that it was a mass causing this!

We would not say that there is a cause of forces (we never say what is the cause of mass), but just describe their directional behaviors and magnitudes. How different the world would be! Maybe we could even associate a color spectrum with different magnitudes, so we would see only see a huge colorful web!

How can we apply this technique of 'different thinking' to terms such as dark energy?