The Book “Gravitation” by Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John A. Wheeler

If you are a graduate student of the gravitational physics, you will most likely be using the book “Gravitation” as the class material. The instructor or the professor can choose different text books but in all likelihood this will be the book of their choice. This book prepares the future physicists who will practice the profession of performing the research or teaching gravitational physics for the future generation. Due to the sheer size of the volume of the book, it is not easy to sift through all the materials and get to the necessary information. You can easily get intimidated by the shear amount of the information presented in the book. What is written in the book is considered an accurate presentation of the up to date knowledge regarding the solution(s) of general relativity.

Now let’s open the page 991 of the book and pay attention to the equation (36.19a). The newer version of the book may have different equation number but this is from the version printed in 1970. There are other chapters dealing with this equation but this page has the most details.

What the equation (36.29a) presented in the book is from the weak field approximation of general relativity for a slowly rotating source which is very close to a planetary solar system. As you can see, there is the Newtonian gravity and then the dipole gravity (dj) plus the quadrupole moment (Ijk). If there was a general relativistic solution for the solar system, this equation must be it.

In the 1970 version of the book, regarding the (gravitational) dipole moment, it says [if he chooses the origin of coordinate carefully, he can make dj=0].


This is how the gravitational dipole moment was thrown out in general relativity. The reasons we have “gravitomagnetism: the modified version of Maxwell’s equation for gravity” is because they dropped this gravitational dipole moment term long time ago. You may say “but that term has no physical meaning since the beginning of general relativity and regarded as such”.

It doesn’t matter how long “wrong” has been wrong. It is still wrong. A false can not become a truth just because it has been false for a long time or mistaken to be truth by many.

If this term were really zero and had no physical meaning, the Lense-Thirring force should also have been zero also because they are from the same origin. But the Lense-Thirring forces are not zero and have been known as such.

This was also the reason people have suspected that general relativity may fail because it doesn’t have the solution for rotating stellar objects. The dark matter problem couldn’t be solved with general relativity because they tossed out this dipole term very long time ago and no one has challenged such an interpretation.

What we are witnessing here is an apocalyptic revelation. And the deadly attempt to hide the mistake. This may be the human nature Einstein may have been referring to about the "infinity of human stupidity".

The gigantic jigsaw puzzle was solved by one stone, one stroke of a pen.

This dipole gravity is a totally new force of the nature. Considering that there are only four known forces in physics, the importance of it can not be under estimated.

Why have the early investigators missed the dipole gravity?

According to the Newtonian mechanics, there is no permanent displacement of the center of mass relative to the origin of the coordinate system. You can always shift the origin of the coordinate system in such a way that such a displacement can be removed. In fact, there is no such concept as the displacement of the center of mass in Newtonian gravity at all.

The question here would be, should general relativity honor the conclusion of the old Newtonian mechanics? The answer is no, it doesn’t have to. The reason is because general relativity may contain information that can be valid only if the new mechanical principle is applied.

The more fundamental reason is because general relativity may contain a new paradigm of physics which can be thrown away easily if the old mechanical principle is imposed mindlessly onto the new theory of physics, which is exactly what happened.

In fact, the phenomenon of the dynamical center of mass shift should have been raised as an important issue of a physical anomaly as soon as special relativity was published, because the rotation of the conical or hemispherical rotor generates an unexpected type of dynamical shift of the center of mass not known in Newtonian mechanics. If this issue had been studied and examined in depth prior to the publication of general relativity, the adaptation of dipole gravity would have been easy and painless. But unfortunately this didn’t happen.

At the first cursory look, special relativity didn’t look like violating the Newtonian mechanical principle. But as we can see directly from the example of the rotating hemispherical rotor, the Newtonian mechanical principle breaks down immediately because the object in rotation shifts its effective center of mass without being pushed in the direction of the shift of the center of mass in direct violation of the first law of the Newtonian mechanics.

The end of the old era of physics happened with the publication of special relativity, yet it was not recognized by the people. And this trend continued even after the publication of general relativity.

Now it is easy to see that the time has come to organize all these messy contradictions and physical anomalies and make a brave and gigantic conclusion.

The Newtonian mechanics was not complete. There are cases that the center of mass of an object can change without the external force that makes the shift of the center of mass.
This also means that there are cases that a body can get acceleration without the due propulsion force in the direction of the shift of the center of mass. The discussion on this subject has been published in the first paper of dipole gravity.

This paradigm shift will nicely fit the revival of dipole gravity and the modification of the Newtonian mechanics. This is the physics of the next civilization that will be valid for thousands of years to come.