Day: August 25, 2011

mesmerizing

Tom Waits + Cookie Monster – God’s Away On Business

I’ve been spending almost all my time in Seattle preparing Tony’s things for Burning Man, packing while he’s at work, sifting through the dusty gear and left over supplies tucked away into the storage closet from last year. Now that his stuff has been put in a van, it’s time to look at my own things again.

Re-pack suitcase. Re-pack laptop bag. Double-check camping box. Double-check shelf-stable food box. Freezer-test fruit juice bottle-sicles. Charge all the things! (camera battery, cell-phone, ipod, laptop). Empty the camera card. Get a bag of ice, a hairbrush from the pet store, some bag clips, some terrible road snacks. Pretend I feel ready. Eat all the perishables out of the fridge. Eat some ice-cream for luck. Do all possible laundry. Pack extra batteries. Swap out the purse for the pocket-belt. Fill ipod with new music. Mend Tony’s band jacket. Print out my Burner Map. Download and print Rockstar Librarian’s 2011 Burning Man Music Guide v2.0.

Unilateral phase detractors and lunar flange retro-encabulators.

Dark matter may be an illusion caused by gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum.

If matter and antimatter are gravitationally repulsive, then it would mean that the virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that exist for a limited time in the quantum vacuum are “gravitational dipoles.” That is, each pair forms a system in which the virtual particle has a positive gravitational charge, while the virtual antiparticle has a negative gravitational charge. In this scenario, the quantum vacuum contains many virtual gravitational dipoles, taking the form of a dipolar fluid.

“We can consider our universe as a union of two mutually interacting entities,” Hajdukovic said. “The first entity is our `normal’ matter (hence we do not assume the existence of dark matter and dark energy), immersed in the second entity, the quantum vacuum, considered as a sea of different kinds of virtual dipoles, including gravitational dipoles.”

He goes on to explain that the virtual gravitational dipoles in the quantum vacuum can be gravitationally polarized by the baryonic matter in nearby massive stars and galaxies. When the virtual dipoles align, they produce an additional gravitational field that can combine with the gravitational field produced by stars and galaxies. As such, the gravitationally polarized quantum vacuum could produce the same “speeding up” effect on the rotational curves of galaxies as either hypothetical dark matter or a modified law of gravity.