Technol Rep Tohoku Univ: GENERATION OF ANTI-GRAVITY ...

Pitt physicist offers spin on a universal
theory
Beyond the rim of mainstream physics, a professor offers his ideas on matter
and the nature of the universe
Monday, April 06, 1998
By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
Astrophysicists are abuzz this spring over observations of distant exploding stars
that suggest the expansion of the universe is picking up speed.
It's a new twist on an old question: Will
the expansion of the universe that began
in the Big Bang 15 billion years ago
continue forever, eventually stop under
the tug of gravity, or even reverse itself
in a Big Crunch?
Evidence that the expansion actually is
accelerating, first announced in January
by an international team of astronomers,
is still preliminary and hotly debated. Physicist Ernest Sternglass (Bill Wade
But it raises the intriguing possibility Post-Gazette)
that some strange force may be at work -
some sort of anti-gravity, or what Albert Einstein called the cosmological constant.
Physicist Ernest Sternglass, on the other hand, offers his own spin - literally - to the
question. The universe, he suggests, is not only expanding but rotating. If the
expansion is accelerating, it's due to nothing more than plain old centrifugal force.
"It's just inertial force," said Sternglass, 74, an emeritus professor of radiological
physics at the University of Pittsburgh, "the same kind of force that keeps the
moon from falling down." It's the same force that makes his grandchildren hold on
tight as they twirl on a park merry-go-round.
The rotating universe will continue to expand until the force of gravity balances the
inertial forces, resulting in a stable cosmos.
This view, which Sternglass explains in his book, "Before the Big Bang,"