In today’s post I hopefully resolve a problem I encountered in my last post. In the post I showed that if you rotate two neighboring pairs of grazing rings in opposite directions around a common axis, you can explain how elementary particles of energy can reflect (and cause them to rotate around each other. However, at the end of the post I noted that this model didn’t explain how the shared trajectory could bend: a feature required for my overall model to make sense.
So, I knew that my last post wasn’t the whole solution, but I had confidence that I could solve the problem of no bending. My guess was that the dots don’t necessarily graze at the halfway point of two reflections. Today I can reveal that this guess probably wasn’t correct. Rather, the bending is caused by a tilt of the grazing ring in the opposite direction to that which causes the helical reflection pattern shown in my last post.
The rotating 3D model below should illustrate the concept quite intuitively. In the model you see the upper red curve of linear paths consisting of reflections always in the same direction, where all of the reflection paths are located on the same two-dimensional plane. Conversely, the lower curved path consists of zig-zagged reflections, where the only time the dots are at the same plane as the upper red curve is at the grazing points, marked by green cylinders.
Okay, perhaps the model is only fully intuitive to me, but hopefully you can still get the basic idea of bending (or curving) reflection from the illustration.
So next, you might wonder, how can both of these models be true at the same time? Well, there is no reason why one couldn’t combine these two types of reflections. Indeed, I’ve been thinking for a long time that something vaguely like this should take place. However, before I had the grazing rings, there was no way for me to come up with this model.
And finally, I’ll repeat the often-raised question: “Is this the full solution?” This time I’ll quote Oasis and say definitely maybe. Only checking the mathematics will I know for sure whether it is or it isn’t. All I can say is that I’m feeling more and more confident as the days go by.
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