Stony Brook’s High-Pressure Laboratory Collaborations with French Scientists

For more than a half century, my colleagues and I in the Stony Brook High Pressure Laboratory have profited from collaborations with French scientists in their laboratories in Orsay, Paris, Toulouse, Lille, Lyon, Strasbourg and Rennes. These interactions have included postdoctoral appointments of French colleagues in our laboratory as well as two année sabbatique by me;in 1983-84, in the Laboratoire de Géophysique et Géodynamique Interne at the Université Paris XI in Orsay and in 2020-2003 in the Laboratoire des Méchanismes et Transfert en Géologie at the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. The objective of this report is to relate this history and to illustrate the scientific advances which resulted from these collaborations.

Not Relying on the Newton Gravitational Constant Gives More Accurate Gravitational Predictions

The Newton gravitational constant is considered a cornerstone of modern gravity theory. Newton did not invent or use the gravity constant;it was invented in 1873, about the same time as it became standard to use the kilogram mass definition. We will claim that G is just a term needed to correct the incomplete kilogram definition so to be able to make gravity predictions. But there is another way;namely, to directly use a more complete mass definition, something that in recent years has been introduced as collision-time and a corresponding energy called collision-length. The collision-length is quantum gravitational energy. We will clearly demonstrate that by working with mass and energy based on these new concepts, rather than kilogram and the gravitational constant, one can significantly reduce the uncertainty in most gravity predictions.

Planck Units Measured Totally Independently of Big G

In this paper, we show how one can find the Planck units without any knowledge of Newton’s gravitational constant, by mainly focusing on the use of a Cavendish apparatus to accomplish this. This is in strong contrast to the assumption that one needs to know G in order to find the Planck units. The work strongly supports the idea that gravity is directly linked to the Planck scale, as suggested by several quantum gravity theories. We further demonstrate that there is no need for the Planck constant in observable gravity phenomena despite quantization, and we also suggest that standard physics uses two different mass definitions without acknowledging them directly. The quantization in gravity is linked to the Planck length and Planck time, which again is linked to what we can call the number of Planck mass events. That is, quantization in gravity is not only a hypothesis, but something we can currently and actually detect and measure.