The Long Arc of Light and Gravity

By: Greg Poole*
Industrial Tests, Inc. Rocklin, CA, USA
*Corresponding author: Greg Poole, Industrial Tests, Inc. Rocklin, CA, USA, E-Mail: greg@indtest.com
Received: July 31, 2019; Accepted: August 06, 2019; Published: August 15, 2019

Introduction
In his book, Isaac Newton visualized a cannon on top of a very high mountain [1]. If there were no forces of gravitation or air resistance, the cannonball fired by the cannon should follow a straight line away from Earth in the direction that it was fired. If a gravitational force acts on the cannonball, it will follow a different path depending on its initial velocity. If the speed is
low, it will simply fall back on Earth. It starts moving up and forward, at some inclination to the ground. The further it flies, the slower the ascent is-and finally, it starts descending, moving now downwards and finally hitting the ground again. If you could trace its path, it would be a curve called a trajectory in the shape of a parabola. Any object moving in such a way is in
projectile motion.

Instead of a cannon ball, we will perform an identical thought experiment replacing the slow-moving cannon ball with a highspeed photon torpedo. A photon torpedo will behave in the same manner even though it is traveling at the speed of light. Only one force acts on a photon projectile-the electromagnetic field force-generated by the Earth’s electromagnetic and electrostatic field. Air resistance is omitted in our calculations as most of the distance that the photon travels through space is in a vacuum. In my diagram of the photon cannonade or light, I draw one downward vector and denote it “gravity”, which is simply a centripetal acceleration. If there was any other force acting on the body, then-by projectile motion definition-it would not be a projectile. Light is thus a stream of photon projectiles in motion; derived from electromagnetic radiation and
bent by an electromagnetic force.

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