There was almost no doubt that Stewart would jump onto this topic with a smile on his face - and there appears to be a pretty convincing cross-connection between sunspots and planetary tidal forces (not just Jupiter but others as well) locked into some kind of a cosmic slow dance, as he mentions on his site.
And the dark-matter input also sounds logical, due to the gammas. Yet the calculation of the intensity of tidal forces, as felt by the sun is miniscule - almost nothing, at least on paper as far as the gravitational component. Thus - the problem is that these two phenomena taken together implies an extreme amplification factor or similar reactive connection between dark matter and gravity - intense focusing, as if small variation in gravity would magnify dark matter by a very large ratio. How does that happen? That part does not seem to follow from the suspected properties of dark matter. and gravitational "lensing" requires galaxy-level mass, millions of solar mass, not a few puny planets. Yet all of this does seem to fit into a hypothesis about gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum which is by nature catalytic in the same way that a small magnet will align a large piece of iron. http://phys.org/news/2011-08-dark-illusion-quantum-vacuum.html . but, catch-22, and you may have noticed that if dark matter does not "really" exist but the phenomena attributed to dark matter are more easily explained by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum, then we simply call this effect "dark energy" instead :-) From: ChemE Stewart Agreed, physicists are just a little slow... http://darkmattersalot.com/2013/05/04/caught-in-the-quantum-crossfire/ Terry Blanton wrote: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/f61d3edfee30
