Almost all of modern physics is divorced from actual reality despite claims to the opposite.
The fundamental nature of Reality
Physicists repeatedly claim physics as a description of the very fundamental nature of reality and indeed the literature of physics is replete with ‘fundamental’ constants, forces and principles. We are therefore justified in criticising it on these grounds.
Newton’s gravity
Newton’s theory of gravity is a form of ‘action at a distance’ according to both Newton and Einstein. We are entitled to reject it on these grounds alone.
It cannot explain perihelion precession or eclipse effects (Van Flandern)
Nonsense. Density is a scalar value – it has no direction. All objects fall to Earth at the same rate regardless of density. There is no empirical relationship between density and acceleration. Density has nothing to do with gravitational attraction.
What about mass?
Mass is a scalar value – it has no direction. All objects fall to Earth at the same rate regardless of their mass. There is no empirical relationship between mass and acceleration. Passive gravitational mass has nothing to do with gravitational attraction. Gravity debunked
Newton’s bucket
The experiment of Newton’s bucket is of paramount importance. An absolute frame of reference for acceleration and rotation has not been determined and so ‘all’ physical sciences are without a solid foundation.
Einstein did not solve the problem of Newton’s bucket, but without a frame of reference, velocity, acceleration and hence gravity are undefined. Therefore all downstream theory is invalid.
The science of QM is held to be the most thoroughly tested model of reality that we have and yet it does not describe gravity at all. It cannot cope with a phenomenon that occupies 100% of the known universe.
Quantum physics and linearity
Quantum physics and linearity
Quantum physics describes the world as a linear superposition of ‘states’. Each state is the solution to a linear equation. Therefore expect a linear reality but instead see non-linearity everywhere.
This is grounds enough to reject the entire theory.
Quantum slit detector
Particles are said to behave differently if a ‘detector’ is present. There is no record of an experiment with any ‘detector’ that does not significantly alter the physical processes of the set up.
This is a hoax.
The Shnoll effect
Radioactive decay is described as being of ‘random’ origin but Simon Shnoll showed that rates of decay demonstrated both lunar and seasonal cycles.
This directly contradicts the prevailing quantum explanation.
A swinging pendulum is claimed to prove that the Earth is round and that it is spinning relative to ‘absolute space’. No credible, reproducible instance of this experiment with suitable control can be found.
A ship’s gyroscope will turn to point towards the physical North Pole, not magnetic North.
This behaviour is unexplained by contemporary physics and has no conceivable explanation.
Physics is missing something here.
Flight and Bernoulli’s principle
There is no credible explanation for the phenomenon of flight. Bernoulli’s principle is usually trotted out as the cause but plenty of aeronautical engineers on YouTube explain or demonstrate that this is simply not true.
Another hoax.
Electricity
We are told that electricity is comprised of electrons flowing through a wire but this is contradicted by Richard Feynman, a YouTube video from Veritasium and statements by other physicists.
Geocentrism
There is no well-defined absolute frame of reference for cosmic movement, acceleration or rotation. There is no defined centre to the universe.
Accordingly, no discussion of ‘centrism’ makes any sense whatsoever.
For practical purposes, just choose what seems best.
Flat Earth
Globers can no longer rely upon much of Newtonian physics to support many of their arguments but there is still sufficient evidence to propose a globe Earth as the best solution
Boats disappear below the horizon bottom first, stars appear to rotate around the poles..
Causality
Physics, particularly Newtonian physics uses the language of causality but fails to provide a decent definition of such an idea.
There is no symbol for ‘causality’ in commonly used mathematics and so no means of expressing such a notion.
An idea from Quantum Physics but with no sensible definition or representation in terms of mathematics; there is no ‘indeterminism’ operator.
The idea is, by means of convoluted language, to present ‘randomness’ as a causal mechanism rather than a statistical outcome.
No charge
There is no such thing as ‘charge’. It has never been measured directly, is known only through the electric fields it is said to generate and has no other measurable properties.
It is surplus to requirements and can be replaced with an electromagnetic field construct.
Static electricity
Static electric fields are said to emanate from ‘charge’ and to keep instantaneous synchrony with such charge.
This, by analogy with Newtonian gravity, is ‘action at a distance’ and can similarly be discarded as a credible theory.
Clocks were flown around the Earth. Einstein predicted a time difference owing to speed, Konstantin Meyl claims reduced gravity at altitude as the cause.
Meyl’s calculations gave a closer prediction than Einstein’s.
Energy is not in fact conserved and is relative rather than absolute (Hossenfelder). There is no consistent definition of energy as a physical process. To describe completely different processes (kinetic, thermal..) in the same terms is highly misleading.
Aether physics
The phrase ‘aether physics’ crops up more and more now but that is as far as it gets; a mere repetition of the phrase. This is in response to the failure of relativity but until the intrinsic properties of the aether can be described it isn’t really helping.
Photons
From AI: As a fundamental particle, a photon is generally considered to have no diameter, radius, or fixed “volume” that it occupies, acting in some aspects as a 0-volume point.
How does something ‘act like a 0-volume point’?
Are photons ‘fundamental’ or not?
DNA as a blueprint for life
This is a silly idea refuted by its own description and by lack of experimental evidence. There is not enough information in DNA and no physical mechanism for either translation or transcription.
Mainstream science has no explanation in terms of fundamental physics for the phenomenon of flight. The usual explanation involving Bernoulli’s principle is not fundamental, is irrelevant to this particular problem and is, in any case, not sound science. A better solution is that a vortex system is induced above the wing, thereby creating the necessary low pressure volume needed to provide ‘lift’.
The conventional explanation
The conventional explanation is that the curved profile of the wing somehow results in faster flowing air over the top of the wing and that this inevitably creates a volume of low pressure somehow. The wing moves from high to low pressure and the plane ascends.
So the air that flows over the wing has a longer surface to travel along and gets acceleration due to aerodynamics, running at a higher speed than the air below. In this way, a pressure difference is created between the air above and below the wings generating a lifting force under them that facilitates the aircraft’s suspension in the air. – World Aviation Flight Academy
Nothing in this explanation is credible and none of it has any foundation in either experimental evidence or fundamental theory.
In order for air to accelerate some sort of force is necessary and it is not explained where this force comes from
The explanation ‘gets acceleration due to aerodynamics’ is insufficient
Any explanation that the air moves faster in order to get to the other side in time is not an explanation in terms of basic physics
The two streams do not reach the trailing edge at the same time anyhow
The calculated lift is much less than the observed lift
It is not explained in terms of fundamental theory how high flow rate is causal in the production of low pressure. An association between the two depends upon the specific circumstances
The flow over a wing does not look like this in practice
Aeroplanes can fly upside down
Supersonic aircraft have flat profile wings
Experiments purporting to demonstrate Bernoulli’s principle are hoaxes (see video below)
A solution from vortex physics
Aeronautical engineers are in agreement that ‘lift’ is created via the formation of a low pressure volume above the wings of a plane, but are puzzled as to how this phenomenon should arise in the first place.
Hypothesis: ‘Lift’ is actually created by the formation of vortex structures on the upper side of the wing. The structures are analogous to a tornado, which initially moves air inwards, whence it is then directed upwards, thereby creating a low pressure area by actually removing a volume of air from the central location.
In the case of an aeroplane, the air along the wing is directed towards the wing tips where the vortices are seen to ‘shed’. The vortices keep pace with the wing and the continual transport of air away from the body of the plane towards the wing-tips is what maintains the low pressure volume above the wings and provides the lift.
The general properties of vortices
Vortices are certainly present in flight
Vortices possess self-organising properties
Many smaller structures may merge to form a larger structure
Smaller vortices may remain separate
Vortices are certainly powerful enough to have a measurable effect on flight and engineers spend considerable effort in trying to reduce the degree of drag caused by such
Air is moved inwards at first towards the vortex centre and then longitudinally along the vortex structure
A pressure gradient is always formed with pressure decreasing towards the centre of the vortex
The pressure gradient causes adiabatic cooling of the air towards the centre
This cooling can cause condensation of water vapour and even the formation of ice crystals as is seen in the case of tornadoes
Vortex formation is a ‘least energy’ solution to fluid flow and is therefore the default flow structure in most situations
A vortex layer at the wing surface is an obvious solution to the no-slip boundary condition
A visualisation (above) of the creation of a turbulent vortex layer on the upper surface of a wing.
The idea is that these eddies quickly self-organise into a coherent structure which moves air towards the wing tips and cools the air as it does so. This can be seen in the shot below, where a condensation cloud above the wings indicates the presence of low pressure whilst the transported air is shed as helical vortices from the wing tips, again displaying condensation effects.
The image is taken from the video below which is worth watching in its entirety.
The diffuse clouds above the wings form as the plane increases in speed and a split second later we see the helical shedding from the wing tips. This is supportive of the idea that the wing-tip vortices actually originate from the larger surface area of the wing as a whole.
In the wake of the aeroplane, truly giant vortices are seen. We can ask where the required energy came from to enable these formations; did it really just come from the wing tips disturbing the air flow?
More likely the energy came from the total disturbance caused by the movement of the whole plane. Vortices form at the wing surface, self-organise into larger vortices or filaments, move to the wing tips, are shed in helical form where they re-organise yet again according to climatic conditions and finally form the spectacular formations we see in some of the clips.
The constant adaptation of shape is typical of vortex structures.
Delta wings
Delta wings are not only a different shape as compared to conventional wings, but also have a flatter profile which effectively rules out the Bernoulli principle as a source of lift.
So how do they work?
The vortex structures simply adapt to the local environment, arranging themselves longitudinally along the wings and thereby providing the required lift.
Mainstream lectures
Many lectures by mainstream engineers are available to highlight the problems with conventional explanations.
This post looks at the ‘water engine’ described by Gerald Pollack in his book The Fourth Phase of Water. The explanation from Pollack that the flow is driven by forces within the tube arising from the action of EZ water and ion-pressure is criticised and an alternative hypothesis given which regards the phenomenon as consisting of the entirety of the flow within the container. Such a flow arises from the natural formation of a global electromagnetic field structure which permeates the whole body of fluid and organises individual water molecules into an overall toroidal flow pattern.
Researchers at Pollack’s lab placed a capillary tube into a water bath and found that water began to flow spontaneously through the tube with no obvious driving mechanism. How does this happen?
We found that immersing tubes made of hydrophilic materials into water produces flow through those tubes, similar to blood flow through blood vessels. The driving energy comes from the radiant energy absorbed and stored in the water. Nothing more. Flow may persist undiminished for many hours, even days. Additional incident light brings faster flow. This is not a perpetual motion machine: incident radiant energy drives the flow — in much the same way that it drives vascular flow in plants. And, we have fresh evidence .. that it also assists the heart in driving blood in the cardiovascular system. – Gerald Pollack
A short clip of the actual experiment is to be found here:
Pollack’s hypothesis
After absorbing incident radiant energy, water molecules at the interfacial region break apart (as in the first step of photosynthesis) . The OH− groups coalesce to form the EZ (exclusion zone), a highly ordered, negatively charged zone, forming adjacent to the interface, while the complementary H+ components are released into the core of the tube. The core thereby acquires high positive charge. That positive charge creates a gradient with the uncharged external bath beyond the tube’s exits, driving a flow down the gradient, one way or the other depending on which end dominates
The scheme is shown here in a flared tube which highlights the proton ‘pressure’ gradient, but nevertheless seems to work even if the sides are parallel.
Problems with the EZ explanation
The totality of the flow is not considered, only the local tubular flow. This is important as the water exiting the tube must somehow produce sufficient force to make it all the way round to the input at the other end.
The flow depends upon the continual release of protons from the EZ layer as the layer is built. The EZ layer cannot build indefinitely, but the flow itself is said to continue indefinitely.
The idea of protons being ‘released’ from a strongly charged negative layer suggests that it is the most natural thing in the world for a positively charged particle to move away from a strong negative charge and, moreover, that it has been trying to do so for some time. This is not the case.
Even if protons are ejected somehow from the EZ layer, they are still adjacent to it and still subject to a strong electric field; they should be attracted to such a field.
It is inconsistent to attribute the action of the protons to a repulsive force between themselves whilst ignoring the attractive force between the protons and the EZ layer.
No mechanism is described by means of which infra red light can build hexagonal water.
A slight reformulation of the problem
The problem is described as one of how to describe self-generating flow in a tube but what we actually see is the spontaneous organisation of an entire tank of water into an overall vortex flow which guides the fluid towards the entrance to the tube, along the tube towards the exit and then away from the tube and around the tank to complete the cycle.
A hypothesis based upon vortex physics
The overall flow is to be considered and takes the form of a torus similar to that seen in the image of the apple, above. The water flows through the tube at the centre and upon exiting, flows in an organised fashion around the whole container driven by local electromagnetic forces only which continue to direct flow back into the tube on the left of the picture.
Incoming energy is transduced at each point in the container and amalgamated into the overall toroidal flow which self-organises around the central tube, the ‘core’ of the flow into a dynamic vortex structure.
Flow outside the tube is powered locally by a toroidal electromagnetic field which flows inwards towards the central tube where it forms magneto-electric ring vortices which propagate within the material of the tube itself and whose outer reaches serve to drive the fluid within the tube and help form the exclusion zone.
We need to look at some supporting evidence for this before revisiting it in greater detail. We will show:
Vortex movement is typical in fluids and gases and is associated with electric fields
The movement of water is in the same direction as the electric field movement
The organisation of the electric vortex field precedes the movement of the water molecules
Energy transduces freely between heat, infrared radiation and kinetic vortex movement
A ‘seed’ structure within water can easily propagate throughout a much larger volume
Electric field movement and kinetic movement of matter are synonymous at the atomic scale
A ‘seed’ structure
A bottle of water can be cooled to well below freezing temperature but still remain as a liquid. If the bottle is given a knock or if a crystal of ice is placed in it, the water will rapidly freeze, with the ice formation spreading out rapidly from the nucleation site.
Some ‘signal’ is spreading throughout the liquid and promoting some alternate organisation of the water molecules thereby forming the ice crystals. The signal is an electromagnetic field as there is nothing else on offer. The signal is not pure ‘information’ but a de facto mechanism for restructuring the liquid into a solid.
The hypothesis for the water engine will say that the tube inserted into the tank acts as a ‘seed’ to promote the restructuring of all of the water in the tank by first creating a toroidal electromagnetic field structure and thence the rearrangement of actual molecules to allow for the kinetic motion.
Energy transduction in water vortices
In one experiment described in Gerald’s book: The Fourth Phase of Water, a glass of water is stirred and the temperature is taken before and after. As more energy is added via the stirring, the temperature of the water drops by several degrees. This is counter to most expectations.
The stirring has promoted vortices and this has somehow sequestered heat energy into some fractal vortex field. Water molecules are said to be continually spinning via the movement of their hydrogen ions at least and so this is where the energy must be going.
An electromagnetic vortex field has been formed by the stirring and energy in such fields forms a fractal cascade towards smaller and smaller scales allowing the storage of potentially large amounts of energy.
However, the spinning hydrogen ions and electron shells at the molecular levels have their own local electric fields which cannot exist independently of the global vortex structure. They must be affected (organised) by such a structure and in turn must contribute to it. Kinetic movement and field movement are therefore almost synonymous at this scale.
Tornado formation
Mainstream opinion is that tornado and hurricane formation is solely a kinetic affair, with energy supplied to molecules via heat differences between land and sea casing the molecules to form strong vortex patterns giving rise to structures we observe.
Many advocates of the Electric Universe model, however, are of the opinion that much energy comes from the sun in the form of magnetic flux ropes, solar filaments or electromagnetic Birkeland currents and it is this energy that is responsible for the formation of the phenomena we see.
We can easily accommodate both views if we allow that energy may well come from heat differences and convection but that the vortex streams from the sun are the primary organisers of the rotary structures for the tornadoes. Electromagnetic fields form vortex structures of themselves and organise the kinetic movement of air via electromagnetic forces into actual tornadoes.
Energy accumulates centripetally according to the laws of electromagnetism and a strong vortex ‘radius’ or tornado ‘wall’ forms. Electromagnetic discharge in the form of lightning confirms a link between kinetic motion and electromagnetic field motion.
The vortex patterns of air and electromagnetic fields are identical, the movement of the air following the movement of the field.
The air moves faster towards the vortex radius and, coincident with this, we see a temperature drop and the formation of hailstorms. Heat energy has either been sequestered somewhere or has been transduced into vortex form and is actually driving the accelerating wind vortex.
Helical flow as a response to acoustic waves
Water needs little encouragement to flow in spiral formations, whether it be whirlpools or helices as we can see in the video below.
The energy for the water stream comes from gravity, but a small, barely perceptible impulse causes the water to flow in a striking helical pattern. There is no ‘information’ as such in the sound waves to structure the water this way and so the water itself is self-organizing into a helical flow in response to the stimulus.
Very little extra energy is being introduced into the system, but existing energy is somehow encouraged to organise itself by the stimulus. Classical molecules by themselves cannot behave in this fashion and hence some global ‘field’ is responsible for the regularity.
An alternative model for the atom (Meyl)
Konstantin Meyl describes a gaseous oxygen molecule as having the inner electron shell as having inverted somewhat to appear on the outside of the atom as seen below. Each electron is a pure electromagnetic field structure which rotates both of itself and around the nucleus at the same time.
Liquid state water molecules can be supposed to be similar to this but with the addition of two orbiting hydrogen ions which themselves rotate.
All this rotation amounts to a de facto electromagnetic vortex field and de facto source of energy. Movement of such a field is synonymous now with kinetic movement and needs minimal organisation in order to do something interesting.
Part 2: Respiration of gas from the air – Konstantin Meyl
An alternative model of a photon (Meyl)
The classical photon is a point particle with no volume or mass and so no physical presence in reality. Trying to understand how such an entity is converted to kinetic energy for example is a losing battle and so scientists will simply say that it is so and that energy is conserved somehow.
This is wholly inadequate and a better formulation of a photon comes from Konstantin Meyl who describes it as a pair of leapfrogging electromagnetic field vortices – see video below.
These entities have a physical description in terms of Maxwell’s equations and a ‘frequency’ arising from the leapfrogging motion. They have physical dimensions and a discrete quantum of energy arising from the field motion.
Any such phenomena will interact with another electromagnetic field structure in accordance with the existing laws of electromagnetism.
The hypothesis in detail
A container of water is at ‘rest’ but there is much movement at the molecular level with spinning electron shells, rotating hydrogen ions and some sort of vibration representing ‘heat energy’.
The water is full of electromagnetic vortex energy, but as yet it this consists of only local vortices at the atomic scale with no global organisation.
A hydrophilic capillary tube is placed within the container and as a consequence of its shape and conductive properties, acts as a seed for the propagation of an organisational effect through the water.
The propagation is that of an electromagnetic field and so happens at close to the speed of light. No external input of energy is required at this stage as all that is happening is that the existing electromagnetic field vortices are becoming electromagnetically aligned according to a global vortex pattern.
Rotational field energy which was once random and produced no average kinetic motion is now organised according to a vortex system and is now having additive effects and thereby producing movement in the water system as a whole.
The whole system has become electromagnetically aligned in an instant and in accordance with the laws of electrodynamics. It now starts to initiate kinetic movement in an overall toroidal flow. Movement is now of ‘matter’ and so inertia comes into play but the flow nevertheless seems to start almost immediately and everywhere at once; no portion of water is seen to be ‘pushing’ another in an obvious manner.
The water molecules are aligned in ‘propitiously’ and contain their own internal energy system in the form of rotational field motion. It is this energy that is translated to linear movement of matter at every molecule in the system. We do not therefore have a small volume of water in a capillary tube pushing around large volumes of water in the tank, but instead, a large volume of water organises to move a small but powerful stream into the tube. Guided by the electromagnetic field, all the water in the entire system starts to move under its own energy and all at the same time.
The field is dynamic; it flows towards the tube where energy builds up and adopts the form of a magnetic ring vortex, whereupon it will travel inside the material of the tube itself before discharging at the exit, into the water bath.
The movement of matter is initiated by the electric torus field already formed, with molecules moving in a vortex pattern, towards the opening of the central tube and dutifully queueing up before entering.
The system is working as observed but still some energy is wasted and so a net input of energy is required to sustain permanent flow.
The input energy is in the form of photons as described above. These photons are of various frequencies and whilst some will pass straight through the water to little effect, others will be absorbed by the ambient vortex field and their energy distributed throughout the flow to enhance its strength and integrity.
We now no longer have to describe how electromagnetic wave energy is somehow transduced to the movement of matter as everything is now described as a single electromagnetic vortex field. Photon, molecule and field are now all a single energetic substance and all with a single ‘intent’ which is to amalgamate into the overall self-organising electromagnetic flow.
Pollack mentions that the rate of flow through the capillary tube increases as the diameter of the tube decreases. This may make sense if the mechanism of flow is related to what happens inside the tube but it is also consistent with the above hypothesis. The flow is driven by the entirety of the body of water and is hence independent of the diameter of the tube. A narrower tube will necessarily lead to faster flow in order to transport a comparable amount of water through a narrower channel in the same time interval.
The exclusion zone
In Gerald Pollack’s description, the exclusion zone is caused by a hexagonal water structure and is fundamental as a cause of the flow. In the description above, however, this zone is incidental to the flow and not causal.
An electromagnetic field is the main organisational and motivational element and so it is here that we must look for an explanation.
The capillary tube itself is an ideal conduit for the flow of some sort of ring vortex whether it be electrically aligned with the tube or magnetically aligned. Field movement within the tube doubtless induces field movement within and around the tube and it follows that it is this movement which somehow promotes both the movement of the water and the centripetal accumulation of nano-particles within the tube.
The exact mechanism by which the particles move remains mysterious but several authors point to simple diffusion mechanisms as being sufficient.
Konstantin Meyl
Meyl, in his book Potential vortex vol. 5 gives two hypotheses for the exclusion zone:
The zone contains such a strong negative charge that a layer consisting entirely of electrons is to be considered.
The zone does in fact consist of hexagonally structured hydrogen and oxygen molecules but held together by the magnetic dipole forces arising from spinning electrons.
In neither case is it explained why such structures should arise in the first place and nor is any empirical evidence supplied of the actual existence of a hexagonal structure.
The water engine as a driver for blood flow
The water engine can easily be seen as a primitive circulatory system.
In the interpretation above, the water is not driven centrally by a pump, but instead, incoming energy is transduced directly into kinetic movement at every point in the fluid. The water adopts a toroidal flow pattern without any apparent guide and is driven by the basic laws of physics. This is a highly efficient and reliable mechanism; the circulation does not depend upon a mechanical pump and water will continue to flow as long as there is an energy input.
In the development of a chick embryo, input of infra red energy speeds up the flow and the rounded shape of the egg is ideal for the development of toroidal flow. Blood has been seen to circulate before the heart starts to beat and even before it has developed.
Circulation of the blood begins even before the arterial system has formed and the blood vessels are seen to develop from the existing flow and not the other way around. In other words the flow pre-exists the physical structures that will eventually guide it.
This is good evidence that the whole development is initiated by a toroidal field structure such as happens with the water engine. Energy is transduced and accumulated to form the tissues that will eventually become blood vessels. Vascular morphogenesisThe morphogenesis of capillaries
The basic structure of the flow continues even after the physical blood vessels have formed, with the heart being driven largely by the blood flow and not the other way around: The Heart is not a PumpThe Heart and Circulation
The origins of life
If sunlight should shine on a restricted volume of water then no doubt convection currents would appear and an overall toroidal flow would emerge; even without the central tube to guide the flow this will happen. Incident energy will be transduced and will contribute towards the flow.
We already have energy transduction and accumulation. We already have a self-organising and self-regulating system of continuous toroidal flow of both energy and water. We already have both circulatory system and a primitive metabolism.
If minerals or other particles are caught up in the flow then they are transported inwards towards the vortex centre where the energy is at a maximum and where the possibility of some sort of biological transmutation is greatest. See: Transmutation
Energy supply is continuous and regulated via the vortex principle; material transport is centripetal. These are the initial requirements for the initial construction of a self-replicating cell structure.
Remarks
The hypothesis given above may seem highly unlikely indeed from the point of view of classical physics but from the perspective of vortex physics is pretty much the behaviour of water that we expect.
In classical physics, electric fields are either static or sinusoidal and molecules are incapable of self-organisation. Transmutation of energy is unexplained and fluids require the application of an external force in order to initiate movement. Such a force may be in the form of gravity, pressure or an external electromagnetic field, but none of these is relevant to this experiment.
What we have is an internal energy supply in the form of the rotation of electromagnetic ‘molecules’ which self-organises to produce its own flow around the container via movement at the molecular scale according to local forces only.
The idea that force and matter are separate entities and that the one acts upon the other is a crippling assumption here and needs to be discarded.
‘Movement’ is the result of ‘field interaction’ at every point in space and in this respect is similar to the action of gravity, where the nature of the field results in an inevitable directional acceleration through the field. The mass of an object is irrelevant to the acceleration under gravity which suggests action upon every single molecule or atom almost simultaneously.
Comparison with gravity
The hypothesis above is reminiscent of the hypothesis for the movement of matter by a gravitational field. See: Gravity as an inertial field In both cases movement can be described as ‘inertial’ in nature, with the field operating upon each and every atom at the same time, making the movement independent of any external forces and independent of the volume of matter involved in the movement.
No pressure wave is seen to be pushing the water around and it appears to move spontaneously of its own ‘will’. One way of understanding biological systems is to regard such behaviour as fundamental in the same way that gravity is regarded as fundamental in physics. The difficulties of understanding the mechanism at the molecular level are thereby circumvented and the phenomena of blood flow, morphogenesis, development and energy transport in living systems now have a common basis in physical reality.
Potential vortex, newly discovered properties of the electric field are fundamentally changing our view of the physical world – Konstantin Meyl https://www.meyl.eu/go/indexb830.html
An attempt is made to understand Einstein’s theories of relativity, particularly with respect to the central idea of an inertial frame of reference. Available descriptions are confusing and contradictory with definitions of the basic concepts either ambiguous or absent. Einstein himself voiced similar concerns. Some of Einstein’s fundamental errors are pointed out and alternative ideas proposed. The experimental results that are claimed to be explained by the theory of relativity are insufficient to prove the theory of relativity and in many cases, alternative explanations are available.
Inertial frames of reference
The idea of an inertial reference frame is key to Einstein’s theories of relativity, both ‘special’ and ‘general’. It follows that:
If we can’t understand inertial frames of reference then we can’t understand relativity
If a text doesn’t explain inertial frames properly then it hasn’t explained relativity
If reference frames have no consistent, unambiguous definition then relativity is likewise undefined
We take Wikipedia as a respected source of information on this and try to understand the main ideas.
What is a ‘frame of reference’?
In physics and astronomy, a frame of reference (or reference frame) is an abstract coordinate system, whose origin, orientation, and scale have been specified in physical space. It is based on a set of reference points, defined as geometric points whose position is identified both mathematically (with numerical coordinate values) and physically (signalled by conventional markers). – Wikipedia
So a frame of reference is just a coordinate system and as such we can use it to define such a thing as ‘position’. If we now integrate the concept of ‘time’ somehow, we can define the change of position over time and call it ‘movement’ or ‘velocity’.
‘Velocity’ is the rate of change in position respect to a specified coordinate system and agreed time metric.
Likewise we can define the concept of ‘acceleration’ as the rate of change in velocity with respect to a specific coordinate system and agreed time metric.
Coordinate systems (frames of reference) are described as frameworks for the specification of position, velocity and acceleration and that is all.
Conversely, if we are to describe such things as position, velocity and acceleration, then the framework with respect to which they are defined is deserving of the term ‘frame of reference’.
To reiterate: All position and movement is defined with respect to frame of reference (coordinate system).
A first inconsistency?
In the same paragraph, Wikipedia goes on to say:
An important special case is that of an inertial reference frame, a stationary or uniformly moving frame. – Wikipedia
Ouch!
What is a ‘stationary or uniformly moving frame’? Such uniform movement (or otherwise) is only defined with respect to some coordinate system (reference frame), but which one?
We are talking here about the movement of a reference frame itself, not objects within it. Such a movement is nevertheless ‘movement’ and hence must be measured in some coordinate system in order to have any meaning at all. The moving framework cannot be described with reference to itself (it would always be stationary!) and so some other ‘higher’ or ‘universal'(?) framework is assumed here but not explicitly stated.
I would suggest that the reason such a framework is not discussed is because the eventual aim is to give justification to the idea, from Einstein, that no coordinate system is preferred over any other; everything is ‘relative’.
What is an inertial frame of reference?
The abstract idea of a frame of reference was introduced above, but Wikipedia has a whole separate entry now on the definition of a specifically ‘inertial’ frame of reference:
An inertial reference frame is a frame of reference in which Newton’s first law of motion holds true without any corrections. This means that an object either remains at rest or continues to move with constant velocity in a straight line unless an external force acts on it. In such a frame, there are no fictitious or pseudo forces required to explain the motion of objects. – Wikipedia
Compare with the first definition above, where an inertial reference frame is described as a “stationary or uniformly moving frame”.
The first definition is in terms of coordinates, of position, distance, velocity and acceleration (change of velocity over time) but the second is in terms of Newton’s laws of physical motion.
These two concepts are worlds apart and should never, ever, be assigned to the same terminology. There is no concept of ‘force’ within a coordinate system, nor of an ‘object’, ‘inertia’ or even ‘mass’; these are separate entities that need their own definitions.
Note that the first definition of an inertial frame contains no mention of the word ‘inertia’ – and so why refer to it as ‘inertial’? This tends to conflate the idea of inertia with that of acceleration. They are obviously different entities but later descriptions of relativity require that they be effectively the same thing, and so describing a stationary frame as ‘inertial’ makes it a practical certainty that such a conclusion should eventually be reached.
Again, from the same article in Wikipedia:
Inertial reference frames are either at rest or move with constant velocity relative to one another. – Wikipedia
What does this mean? Two possibilities:
This is a definition. Inertial frames are now defined as those that are at rest relative to one another
This is a theoretical consequence of the definition in terms of Newton’s first law.
In all likelihood, the second possibility is intended, but it needs some justification. The attempt here is to define the basis of special or general relativity and so accuracy is required.
What does sit mean to: “move with a constant velocity relative to one another“? Remember that velocity is always defined with respect to the elements of a coordinate system and so the relevant coordinate system here should be specified. We can guess here that each coordinate system is to be regarded as an element of the other but this has the consequence that each system ultimately contains a reference to itself!
If the only qualifications of an inertial system are those to do with relative velocity, then why are they described as ‘inertial’?
This is a perfect example of definition creep which seems ubiquitous in attempts to describe relativity. Descriptions start off talking about velocity and acceleration, i.e. events within a pure coordinate system, but soon turn to forces and inertia and after a while the reader becomes hypnotised into believing the central tenets of the theory with no real justification at all.
Special relativity
From the Wikipedia entry on special relativity:
In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory of the relationship between space and time. In Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, the theory is presented as being based on just two postulates:
The laws of physics are invariant (identical) in all inertial frames of reference (that is, frames of reference with no acceleration). This is known as the principle of relativity.
The speed of light in vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of light source or observer. This is known as the principle of light constancy, or the principle of light speed invariance.
Read again: “The laws of physics are invariant (identical) in all inertial frames of reference (that is, frames of reference with no acceleration).“
So we are now describing inertial frames as those with no acceleration again. Fine, but acceleration with respect to what exactly? If this question cannot be answered then there is no acceptable definition of special relativity.
Note that this definition of inertial frames is both convenient and necessary here, as if we accept the alternative definition of a frame of reference where Newton’s law holds true then we have something like: “The laws of physics are invariant (identical) in all frames of reference where Newton’s first law holds“. This is not entirely vacuous but note that it cuts out the idea of acceleration altogether and if all we are concerned about is Newton’s law then we get: “Newton’s first law holds in all frames of reference where Newton’s first law holds“. This is vacuous now and nothing of any meaning has been said about Newton’s law, gravity or acceleration.
From the same Wikipedia article:
In relativity theory, ‘proper acceleration’ is the physical acceleration (i.e., measurable acceleration as by an accelerometer) experienced by an object. It is thus acceleration relative to a free-fall, or inertial, observer who is momentarily at rest relative to the object being measured.
And there you have it! The transformation is complete! We have moved seamlessly from a definition of acceleration that everybody understands to one that is convenient for the theory of relativity.
Accelerometers do not measure acceleration in the conventional sense of the word but instead record the displacement of a weight owing to either inertial or gravitational forces.
We started with ‘acceleration’ meaning a change of velocity within a specific coordinate system and ended up with a definition in terms of forces, inertia and gravitational attraction. We have now seemingly described inertial reference frames without the need of velocity or position, or in other words, without any of the qualities that identify a reference frame as a coordinate system.
A non-accelerating frame has become synonymous with a force-free frame simply by linguistic trickery.
Einstein’s concerns
This conflation of ‘inertial’, ‘non-accelerating’, ‘force free’ and ‘Newtonian’ has not gone unnoticed:
All frames of reference with zero acceleration are in a state of constant rectilinear motion (straight-line motion) with respect to one another. In such a frame, an object with zero net force acting on it, is perceived to move with a constant velocity, or, equivalently, Newton’s first law of motion holds. – Wikipedia
What is meant by ‘zero acceleration’ in the above?
If you do not have an absolute frame of reference then how can you ever say that something is moving with constant velocity (zero acceleration)? You clearly can’t and so they are trying to define constant velocity as relative to other frames that are also moving with constant velocity relative to each other. This is gibberish.
Einstein himself was aware of the problem:
The weakness of the principle of inertia lies in this, that it involves an argument in a circle: a mass moves without acceleration if it is sufficiently far from other bodies; we know that it is sufficiently far from other bodies only by the fact that it moves without acceleration.
— Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity, p. 58
Zero acceleration is now defined, not with reference to a coordinate system but by the lack of gravitational attraction from other bodies.
Example: Two falling weights
Inertial reference frames are either at rest or move with constant velocity relative to one another. – Wikipedia
As an example consider two astronauts positioned a thousand miles above the Earth, a hundred miles apart and falling freely towards the plant’s surface.
A stationary observer at the surface will see these astronauts accelerating with respect to himself and also with respect to each other as they converge. Furthermore, the astronauts see themselves as accelerating towards each other and towards the Earth.
By the discussion above, we cannot have all of these as being stationary within inertial frames at the same time – so which ones are inertial and which ones are not? How do we tell?
Which of these bodies is moving ‘without acceleration‘? Physicists will no doubt say: “The freely falling bodies are in an inertial frame because they experience no force and Newton’s first law holds”, but the question was about acceleration and replying in terms of forces like this pretty much assumes the conclusion that Einstein was trying to reach.
Why is all this happening?
Newton’s theory of gravitation is based upon the ideas of mass, gravity, force, inertia and acceleration. However, whilst it is clear that there is some relationship between these quantities, it isn’t quite clear precisely what this is and nor is there any basic mechanism described for the phenomenon of either inertia or gravitational attraction.
Einstein has seen this and conceived the idea that inertia and gravity are one and the same thing but viewed according to different coordinate systems. The acceleration caused by gravity is now nothing more than the acceleration of a body perceived according to an accelerating frame of reference, nothing more and nothing less.
Einstein has thereby obviated the need to describe a mechanism for gravity by simply relabelling it as ‘acceleration’. He has declined to provide a physical mechanism for gravity and instead reframed it a, very simply, a change in position relative to something else! An observation (measurement) has been elevated to the status of a physical law.
The equivalence principle
A version of the equivalence principle consistent with special relativity was introduced by Albert Einstein in 1907, when he observed that identical physical laws are observed in two systems, one subject to a constant gravitational field causing acceleration and the other subject to constant acceleration, like a rocket far from any gravitational field. Since the physical laws are the same, Einstein assumed the gravitational field and the acceleration were “physically equivalent”. – Wikipedia
Einstein stated this hypothesis by saying he would:
“…assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system.”
— Einstein, 1907
This is obviously two big mistakes rolled into one short phrase.
First, Albert refers to an “acceleration of the reference system“, but again we can ask: “With respect to what?”
Second, the phrase “complete physical equivalence” is surely a massive overreach? The text above claims that Einstein: “observed that identical physical laws are observed in two systems.. like a rocket far from any gravitational field.”. Really? How did he observe this? A complete characterisation of the laws of physics is not available at the present and was not available in 1907. There is therefore no way of testing for complete physical equivalence. This is a meaningless phrase.
The available laws at the time were Newton’s laws of gravity and since these were proving to be inadequate, alternatives should have been considered. Instead what has happened is that Einstein has tried to ‘fix’ the paradoxes of Newton by the simple means of equating all acceleration with gravitational acceleration. By this means he can do without any explanation for a physical mechanism of gravity and just say that it is ‘acceleration of the reference system’.
We can say that no additional physics is being proposed here, merely the same Newtonian laws but described from different perspectives. Indeed, the proposed equivalence of acceleration and gravity actually stifles further enquiry into the topic as there is nothing further to research, with any further anomaly resulting in attempted explanations by manipulation of the reference system only.
Out of necessity now, Einstein will go on to explain the laws of physics purely in terms of outlandish frames of reference, resulting in the concept of 4-dimensional curved space time with shrinking lengths and clocks that run a different rates.
A model of the fundamental nature of space and time has arisen purely from considerations of gravity and acceleration, and much of that mere conjecture. It is no surprise then that the new theory says nothing about the forces of electromagnetism and is unlikely to do so for the foreseeable future.
The gravitational field
The conflation of a gravitational field with mere acceleration effectively rules out the investigation of any characteristic of a gravitational field that is not relevant to acceleration; the theoretical framework is simply not able to express such properties.
Gravitation is now synonymous with acceleration and has no other function than to move objects and no other measurable or theoretical properties other than those pertaining to with acceleration.
This is clear bunk. We have, in a gravitational field, several properties which are likely to have effects other than pure acceleration:
A diminishing of strength according to an inverse square law
A divergence of the ‘field lines’
A reduction of curvature of the isobars according to an inverse square law
Some fine grained structure arising from the atomic structure of the Earth
A directional accelerative propensity towards the Earth
An aligning effect on a ship’s gyroscopic compass
A mechanism for inertia
Some other global structure aside from a simple ‘sink’ (e.g. a vortex structure)
Something to explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury
Some of these are already measurable and others may be measurable in the future or calculable from other measurables. To say that they don’t exist or aren’t relevant is positively deranged and for a theoretical framework which rules these out to survive for a whole century is just inexplicable.
Gravitational attraction is not just acceleration, there is a mechanism producing such an acceleration which needs explaining. Indeed, acceleration itself is not a mechanism but the resultant effect of such a mechanism, whatever that may be.
Example: elevator gravity
An example below from the Wikipedia entry on General relativity:
According to general relativity, objects in a gravitational field behave similarly to objects within an accelerating enclosure. For example, an observer will see a ball fall the same way in a rocket (left) as it does on Earth (right), provided that the acceleration of the rocket is equal to 9.8 m/s2 (the acceleration due to gravity on the surface of the Earth). – Wikipedia
So now objects in a gravitational field only behave similarly to objects within an accelerating enclosure, whereas before, the laws of physics were identical.
What is an accelerating enclosure accelerating relative to? If the rocket is at the surface of the Earth then it does not need to accelerate as the effects are already there from the gravitational field.
We are intended to imagine the rocket in space far away from any gravitational field. However, there is no such place in the universe and so no such experiment has been performed and never will be performed.
We have, from the same article:
..it is impossible to decide, by mapping the trajectory of bodies such as a dropped ball, whether the room is stationary in a gravitational field and the ball accelerating, or in free space aboard a rocket that is accelerating at a rate equal to that of the gravitational field versus the ball which upon release has nil acceleration.
This is pure conjecture. This is a thought experiment, the result has been assumed and a theory has been developed with no empirical data or foundational definitions.
There is no such thing as ‘free space’, the whole of space is permeated by a gravitational field. What is the meaning of: “stationary in a gravitational field“? Again, another use of the word ‘stationary’ without reference to a well-defined coordinate system.
What is the solution?
We can go on like this almost indefinitely but the fundamental problem always remains which is the lack of a well-defined coordinate system in which these events take place. Without this we have no way of defining acceleration or even velocity and since the whole point of the Theory of Relativity is to describe gravitational effects in terms such metrics, it can be regarded as a failure.
It is all very well to criticise something, but such comments will simply fall upon deaf ears unless some sort of alternative is at least suggested.
The ‘Inertial Field Theory’ (IFT)
The post: Gravity as an inertial field outlines an idea that gravity is in fact an ‘accelerating’ inertial field with mechanisms and characteristics of itself that explain the local movement of matter in the cosmos.
Consider that:
A gravitational field has fine grained structure on the scale of the atom
A horizontal component is present
The local structure provides for inertial effects
An accelerative component provides for gravitational attraction via ‘movement’ of the inertial mechanism
The accelerative component derives from the global structure whether it be purely radial or vortex-like in nature
The idea of a ‘uniform’ gravitational field is probably bunk
We can now describe a plausible and at least consistent foundation for a theory of gravitation and provide answers for Einstein’s thought experiments.
What is an ‘inertial frame’?
If a gravitational field has both horizontal and vertical components that are roughly isotropic then we may use this as as the basis of an actual physical coordinate system. The system is uniform only locally and theoretically varies from point to point across the whole universe.
This aspect of the gravitational field is insensitive to ‘uniform’ motion of matter but has a certain accelerative resistance thereby providing for both inertia and gravitational acceleration.
The gravitational field has a fine grained structure of a certain scale and this may be used as a basis for a metric of length and hence velocity and thereby acceleration. We therefore have a coordinate system that is:
Highly local – not global
‘Absolute’ in a sense as opposed to arbitrary or relative
Defined by characteristic physical processes, whatever they may be
Responsible for both defining and implementing the laws of gravity and inertia
Free-falling objects move according to local field conditions only and can be said to be following an ‘inertially straight’ path. This is not a geodesic in space-time as there is no need to suppose a distinct space-time as separate from the local field. This is not necessarily the shortest distance between any two points but is a path determined by local field interaction at every point on the path.
Free falling objects in close proximity form an equivalence class of objects which may be said to be in ‘uniform motion’ relative to each other. Their velocities are all constant relative to the local inertial field and constant relative to each other by definition.
There is no need for an abstract coordinate system anywhere as the idea, maybe surprisingly, doesn’t make any sense. Physical objects are moved around by physical field phenomena and that is all. Any idea of a metric must come from emergent properties of the field characteristics itself. In stark contrast to Einstein’s approach where coordinates and ‘space’ are ‘fundamental’, we have a system where the physical gravitational field is the fundamental and any coordinate or metric is defined in terms of local field characteristics or their effect on ‘matter’.
The field forms an inward spiralling vortex system around the Earth where the rotation at the Earth’s surface is synchronous with the Earth’s rotation, thereby forming a ‘gravitational-inertial layer’ at the surface of the Earth which provides for laboratory conditions. Almost all experiments performed by physicists have been within this layer, thereby giving the impression that such conditions are representative of the cosmos as a whole and that all discoveries have been ‘fundamental’ and universal. The Michelson-Morley experiment was performed within this layer.
The horizontal components of the field give rise to inertia and centrifugal forces. Objects at the Earth’s surface can be said to be accelerating upwards relative to the Earth’s gravitational field, where such acceleration is relative to the downward accelerative component of the (physical) gravitational field.
Any experiment carried out in a free-falling rocket is nevertheless within a gravitational field somewhere and this field provides a physical reference frame for measurements, movement, acceleration and the behaviour of rotating bodies.
What would Einstein say?
I think Albert would approve, he was obviously trying to:
Remove the need for a global coordinate system
Define physical laws locally
Somehow unify gravity, inertia and acceleration
Explain the Michelson-Morley result
Explain rotational motion and centrifugal forces
Come to terms with his own discomfort with the foundational ideas
Unification of inertial and gravitational fields
The gravitational and inertial fields are different components of the same field:
Even in generally-covariant reformulations of these older theories, there will be an inertial field and a gravitational field existing side by side. The unification of these two fields into one inertio-gravitational field that splits differently into inertial and gravitational components in different coordinate systems (not necessarily associated with observers in different states of motion) is one of Einstein’s central achievements with general relativity – Michel Janssen
The motivation is good but the unnecessary introduction of different coordinate systems spoils the idea. The accelerative effect of the gravitational field is always present even if it is not measured. If an observer is freely falling towards Earth, they will not experience any accelerative effect from the gravitational field as they are moving along with the field acceleration. However, there must be some sort of mechanism producing this effect and that physical mechanism is not going to disappear just because the observer is moving along with it.
One idea might be that it is the radial convergence of the gravitational field lines towards the planet which produce such acceleration, in which case an observer can accelerate all they like towards the Earth but the field lines have their own ontology within the theoretical framework and are not going to vanish just because they are being ignored.
Another idea is that it is the ‘curvature’ of the field which produces such acceleration. This curvature diminishes with the inverse square of the distance from the Earth and so can be thought of as producing less acceleration the further out in orbit we are.
Some texts talk about a ‘uniform gravitational field’ in an attempt to simplify the ideas of special relativity, but if either of the above two hypotheses are true then there is no such thing as a ‘uniform gravitational field’, since the acceleration comes from phenomena that derive directly from the radial or curved nature of the field. Try to think that the centripetal effect of a tornado has nothing to do with the rotational nature of the wind! Try to simplify to a flat tornado!
The removal of a global frame of reference
After the development of General Relativity, Einstein wrote:
Why were another seven years required for the construction of the general theory of relativity? The main reason lies in the fact that it is not so easy to free oneself from the idea that co-ordinates must have an immediate metrical meaning
(Einstein, 1949, p. 67).
Einstein failed to do this:
As we will see .., the coordinates that Einstein actually used in his accounts of the twins and the bucket in the 1910s have essentially the same status as those in special relativity. They still have direct metrical significance and still identify and individuate space-time points uniquely. – Michel Janssen
The scheme that Einstein settled upon was to identify ‘space-time’ as representing a global and somewhat ‘absolute’ reference frame but at the same time to allow such a coordinate system to have a curved geometry and to allow such curvature to be produced by some physical (although unspecified) process involving something called ‘mass’.
Thinking about this in a quiet place, we realise that this is just a rephrasing of all the ambiguities and double-speak that plagued the early formulations of special relativity.
Properly handling accelerating frames does require some care, however. The difference between special and general relativity is that (1) In special relativity, all velocities are relative, but acceleration is absolute. (2) In general relativity, all motion is relative, whether inertial, accelerating, or rotating. To accommodate this difference, general relativity uses curved spacetime.
— Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity, p. 58
The idea is ostensibly to use a coordinate system (reference frame) as a basis for defining acceleration as before, but the coupling of ‘mass’ to the geometry of space-time performs the same linguistic trickery as before and effectively re-defines an inertial frame by its propensity to accelerate an object. This is just a rehash of Newton’s force = mass x acceleration but with ‘Force’ replaced by ‘space-time curvature‘, ‘mass’ replaced with ‘the propensity to curve space-time‘ and acceleration with ‘movement caused by space-time curvature‘.
Again, no new physics has been produced and all we are left with is a more complicated way of looking at Newtonian gravitation.
Moreover, the formulation of acceleration as being something like the natural propensity of a mass to move through space-time effectively removes the need to provide any other explanation for such a phenomenon. A physical law is replaced with a ‘natural propensity‘. This is not a new physics but a way of avoiding doing any physics at all!
Example: a geo-stationary space station
Imagine a geo-stationary space station hovering above a laboratory on Earth. The relative velocity of the laboratory and station is zero. There is no relative movement, so are they both in the same inertial frame of reference or not?
Although there is no obvious relative acceleration I think that most physicists would say that they are in different inertial frames and the reason given would be that the station is in free-fall whereas the laboratory is not.
So although frames of reference are theoretically defined in terms of spatial acceleration, none of this really matters when it comes to actual examples and we find again that inertial frames are described in terms of what physicists imagine is happening in physical space.
How do we know that an orbiting station is in free-fall when it has no relative movement let alone acceleration? How do we know that conditions at the surface are different? Not by any observed acceleration between the laboratories that is for sure, but by the overall geometry of the situation and observed difference of behaviours of masses within each room.
Such behaviours are clearly independent of each other and decoupled from any relative acceleration that may exist between the laboratories. Experiments within each room unfold according to the local field conditions within that room and that is all. What does the idea of variable reference frames of reference add to all of this?
Special relativity as an engineering model
Special relativity is defined in the absence of gravity. For practical applications, it is a suitable model whenever gravity can be neglected. – Wikipedia
There is no place in the universe that is without gravity and so we can disregard special relativity as a reliable representation of actual reality. It is not a law of physics, it is not a law of nature and it is not a fundamental principle. It is at best a collection of useful rules of thumb that can be used to address specific physical problems.
As a theoretical framework it is riddled with ambiguities and deficiencies as we have seen and in particular it has failed to define either gravity or acceleration.
Even the idea that it can be used to perform useful calculations where gravity is negligible is surely a joke? How do we know if we can ignore gravity when gravity has not even been defined properly? The equivalence principle says that gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration and is therefore, along with acceleration, effectively unmeasurable and undefinable. We are therefore left asking: “What it is exactly, that can be neglected?”.
General relativity is no better and suffers the same fundamental problem which is that of defining acceleration, gravity, inertia, frames of reference and a global coordinate system.
Attempts to identify gravitational attraction with pure acceleration have failed and at the same time effectively prevent any further enquiry into the nature of the gravitational field, having given the impression that the problem has already been solved in terms of bendy space-time.
The Michelson-Morley experiment
It turns out that light is measured as having the same speed travelling with the Earth’s rotation or against it. This was a surprise at the time and is said to be the motivation behind the development of special relativity.
So how did Einstein solve the problem? Put simply, he just declared the result to be a fundamental principle of physics and manipulated everything else to fit the result that he wanted.
From the definition of special relativity:
2. The speed of light in vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of light source or observer. This is known as the principle of light constancy, or the principle of light speed invariance.
This is just garbage, just a crude forcing of the result that was required based upon one experimental result only.
There is no such thing as an inert and empty vacuum as normally conceived since all areas of space are permeated by a gravitational-inertial field. Moreover, since it is precisely these fields that are of relevance here, this should be explicitly acknowledged rather than brushed under the carpet as ‘vacuum’.
One consideration is that the gravitational field at the surface of the Earth rotates with the Earth thereby providing a stable reference frame for the movement of both mass and light. However, the formulation of gravity as synonymous with acceleration effectively excludes this hypothesis from the model and leaves us bereft of any other means of explaining the experimental result apart from declaring a new principle of nature.
A principle is declared and not just for the local conditions in the Earthly laboratory, but for the whole of space everywhere and at all times!
Experimental evidence
Aficionados are adamant that there are many experiments that confirm the truth of the theories of relativity, to great precision. However, closer examination reveals things to be a little more complicated.
The precession of Mercury
The orbit of Mercury is elliptical, but the axes of such an ellipse are not static and rotate over time. This is contrary to the assumed action of a simply radial Newtonian force and needs some explanation.
The ‘solution’ from General relativity is to assume that gravitational effects do not propagate instantly through the space-time framework but do so at a finite speed: the speed of gravity: Wikipedia This allows calculations to be made that seem to explain the motion of the planet.
Note that again the term ‘space-time’ has moved from defining a mere coordinate system to becoming a complete, all-pervasive physical entity which is causal in directing events at a cosmic scale. It is responsible for moving around ‘mass’ through physical space and is in turn responsive to the presence of such mass, thereby altering its curvature.. in order to move such a mass!
John Wheeler summarises:
Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move – John Wheeler
This should be a massive red flag. The language of causation is used but the causal chain is circular! How do you preserve your own sanity with such an attitude? How does the ‘telling’ happen? What is the mechanism please? How does anything happen at all?
Returning to the precession of Mercury, we need to do some actual calculations within the framework of general relativity in order to prove our point. It turns out that the calculations for the altered orbital were actually performed within the framework of parameterised post Newtonian formalism (Wikipedia).
This framework is in Newtonian in spirit, Newtonian in name and uses the very Newtonian concepts of:
Newtonian gravitational potential
Momentum
Angular momentum
Gravitational potential energy
Kinetic energy
Parameterised post Newtonian formalism is therefore a de facto extension of Newtonian physics. The Wiki post tries to squirm out of this by claiming that is a Newtonian approximation to general relativity, but if all of the computation requires Newtonian type quantities within a Newtonian framework, then what has been gained by calling it General Relativity?
The idea that effects travel through Einstein space-time at the speed of gravity (speed of light) is a MacGuffin employed to distract and give validation to the fashionable theory of the day. We could just as well have said that Newton’s gravity propagates at the speed of light and come up with exactly the same results using exactly the same post Newtonian formalism.
Once again, the theory of relativity is just a more complicated way of doing the same Newtonian physics.
The theory of general relativity is still not well-defined and so no amount of accurate predictions can confirm such a theory as: there is no theory!
Why have things gone so wrong?
Reading back through the post it is evident that the same themes crop up time and time again and that the same basic mistakes are responsible for leading the aspiring theorist astray. Einstein himself started off with good intentions but still thought in the same basic patterns and so ended up in the same blind alleys.
The mistakes arise from a few fundamental assumptions which seemed fine at the time but have proved to be crippling in the development of a consistent cosmology:
Error 1: Physics is downstream of mathematics
Almost all physicists believe this, but it just isn’t true. The idea of a reference frame upon which to hang physical events started out fine but we ended up with a space-time that was physical, curved, dynamic and ultimately causative. This seems inevitable in hindsight as physical reality must always somehow reference such a system in order to travel in a straight line for example and so the coordinate system ends up partaking of physical reality even if only passively.
The solution is to take observed physical events as the basis for a science and any apparent order in the form of a consistent coordinate system to be regarded as emergent from these observations.
Error 2: The world is not ‘Newtonian’
The Newtonian world consists of ‘objects’ moving around in space that is empty apart from a few gravitational forces emanating from those objects themselves. A ‘separation’ is built into reality of space, distance, force and object. Forces emanate from ‘matter’, matter takes prime place in the causal chain and matter is somehow aware of a separate coordinate system. Each element of reality is subject to different laws.
In terms of a solution from field physics, the cosmos consists solely of field interactions at every point in the cosmos, with matter, mass and forces constituting observable and measurable effects which, by virtue of their salience, attain an undeserved prominence in our cosmology. To regard such emergent effects as ‘fundamental’ will clearly result in failure.
Error 3: The innate properties of objects
Mass and inertia are held to be ‘innate’ properties of matter and this distortion percolates down even into relativity. The idea should be considered that both are emergent properties arising from the interaction between matter and field structures, rather than immutable properties of matter itself. This becomes evident in John Wheeler’s statement above where mass and space-time curvature are obviously precisely the same thing, but he can’t quite bring himself to say so for some reason.
Nobody regards ‘friction’ for example as an innate property of matter and so so why regard ‘inertia’ as an innate property of matter?
Error 4: Locality bias
The idea that an experimental result in a laboratory is somehow representative of physics at all points in the universe for all time is a clear bias.
Error 5: The fixation on causality
This is another Newtonian concept, that events proceed in a ‘causal’ chain from some original cause (Big Bang) to the complexity we see at the present. In reality, the entire cosmos evolves as a whole and any perceived ‘events’ are merely emergent and observable effects of such an evolution. To describe such events as ‘fundamental’ and such causal chains as controlled by ‘fundamental’ laws is misleading and again crippling in the formulation of a consistent cosmology.
As an example, consider Wheeler’s statement that “Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move“. It is evident from this that matter and spacetime move in concert with each other and are effectively synonymous, but the conceptualisation of the two as fundamentally different entities necessitates some sort of physical coupling and the abstract idea of ‘causality’ has been roped in as yet another MacGuffin to cement over the cracks, with no mention of an actual physical mechanism. Such a thing is not thought necessary because the abstract idea of ‘causality’ is so readily accepted.
Error 6: Inability to assimilate an existing paradigm
An alternative to ‘causality’ had already been discovered in the form of the Navier-Stokes equations governing the flow of fluids and gases. Here, there are no separate objects as such to exert forces upon each other, and no distinct ‘events’ to delineate causality. Instead fluids and gases are treated as a continuum whose behaviour is in accordance with a set of partial differential equations. This is as about as far from intuitive as we can get, but nevertheless avoids all of the problems we are seeing. Reality evolves at each point in the continuum according to certain rules and that is all that happens. Any perceived order within the resulting activity is not a fundamental law but an emergent effect only.
Error 7: The Laws of physics are not ‘reality’ and are not fundamental
The laws of physics belong in the right hand column below. They are twice removed from reality and take the form of abstract mathematical equations constructed in order to explain a finite number of measurements derived from a limited number of physical processes. They are not fundamental in any way, shape or form.
Contrast this self-evident truth with the attitude of physicists who are prone to declaring almost any new theory going as ‘fundamental’. Note that Einstein’s framework for relativity started off as merely an abstract coordinate system but quickly morphed into an actual physical process that shaped the entire universe by its causative properties.
Error 8: Linguistic overloading of the term ‘straight line’
The term ‘straight line’ can have several meanings:
Geometrically straight – with reference to a coordinate system
Inertially straight – the unimpeded path of a mass through space
Electromagnetically straight – the path of a light beam
There is no reason that these should all be the same and no evidence that they are. Newton’s 2nd law is the assertion that 1 and 2 are equivalent but without reference to a specific coordinate system. Einstein was so keen on the idea that all 3 were equivalent that he allowed for a curved geometry in order that it be so. The reality is that neither mass nor light are moving through space along a coordinate system but instead moving through a gravitational field and driven only by local physical processes.
Energy conservation
The conservation of energy is widely held to be a fundamental principle of nature (of course it is!) However:
Energy as an abstract quantity is poorly defined
Many physicists will admit that it is not in fact conserved
Energy is frame-dependent in relativity and hence not absolute
In Newtonian physics it is relative to a reference frame which is fixed but undefined
No mechanism is provided for the transmutation of energy from one type to another
Consider two objects in space:
For example, if two objects are attracting each other in space through their gravitational field, the attraction force accelerates the objects, increasing their velocity, which converts their potential energy (gravity) into kinetic energy. – Wikipedia
We need a reference frame to describe acceleration, so imagine yourself as object A whilst object B accelerates towards you. You don’t feel yourself accelerating and you don’t perceive yourself as having potential energy or of converting it to kinetic energy. This immediately adds an asymmetry to the situation.
This is fine from the point of view of gravity and acceleration, but the claim here is that there is now some energy conversion, some physical process, happening at one place but not the other. Even this may be considered valid, but an observer at B will imagine the same situation but this time with the energy conversion happening at A. There is a disagreement as to what actual physical processes are taking place.
The doctrine of relativity will be fine with the velocity and acceleration disappearing at one observer as this is all frame dependent, but if the transmutation of potential to kinetic energy consists of some actual physical process then we are forced to concede that this physical process only ever happens in the other guy’s framework. This sounds like nonsense and so it probably is.
Physicists don’t notice this happening as they have no physical definition of ‘energy’ or energy ‘conversion’ and so have no requirement to say why it only seems to happen to somebody else. However, we do not need to specify a mechanism in order to suppose that one might exist, and that if it does exist, then it must exist in some ‘absolute’ sense if energy is to be transmuted.
To see what sort of mechanism might be in play we note that kinetic energy is really just velocity squared and ‘potential’ is just the position in a gravitational field. The conversion of potential to kinetic energy is now equivalent to that of a mass acquiring velocity within a gravitational field.
This is now an identical argument to the one above concerning acceleration under a gravitational field. There must be some mechanism by which this happens and it must be in effect locally to make objects move. It must therefore be in effect even in the rest frame of the observer, i.e. even when the observer appears to himself to be not accelerating.
The theory of relativity, then, seeks to explain away all mechanisms which may be dependent upon acceleration by simply pretending that they don’t exist or at least will vanish in an appropriate reference frame. This has the effect of limiting, rather than expanding, the number of phenomena that can be explained by such a theory.
Rotational movement
Newton put some water in a bucket, spun it on a rope and watched the water climb the sides of the bucket. He then spent decades arguing with Ernst Mach as to why this should happen, but without satisfactory resolution.
Einstein described what he thought was an equivalent situation but with a globe spinning in space:
Following Einstein’s (1914, pp. 1031–1032) lead, [..] we consider a globe, held together by non-gravitational forces, rotating with respect to the fixed stars, [..] In this case, the centrifugal forces, rather than giving the surface of the water in the bucket its tell-tale concave shape, make the globe bulge out at its equator. – Michel Janssen
Ouch! There is a big assumption here which is that centrifugal forces exist at the cosmic scale in the same way that they do in a laboratory within a strong gravitational field at the Earth’s surface . Observational evidence, however, shows that the bulge of a planet is not uniquely determined by its size, mass and rate of rotation. Our sun, for example has almost no bulge at the equator whilst our moon has a noticeable bulge but little rotation.
Gravitational fields are thought to have some inertial component even by Einstein and so it should be considered that the inertia experienced by Newton’s water could possibly arise from the fact that it is being dragged trough the inertial field of the Earth’s gravity and that it is this inertial drag that gives rise to the centrifugal forces causing the water to climb the sides of the bucket. The water may have its own gravitational field but the Earth’s field dominates the experiment whilst the bucket spins within it.
The situation of a planet in space is completely different. The Earth is not spinning within a strong enclosing field, but its own field spins with it and again dominates proceedings. There is no reason at all to suppose that centrifugal forces will arise during this situation and no reason to connect the rate of spin with an equatorial bulge.
The whole system forms a spinning vortex field and the resulting activity conforms to the laws and patterns of vortex physics.; see the barred galaxy depicted below. The field spirals inwards in a manner similar to a hurricane before stabilising at a fixed radius, within which solid-body rotation occurs.
In the system of the Earth, the planet engages in solid body rotation whilst the gravitational field spirals inwards. A zero-slip condition at the surface gives us the inertial framework we are familiar with and easily explains the Michelson-Morley results if we allow that the propagation of light is not through empty ‘space’ but through the gravitational field itself.
Any equatorial bulge is determined by the dynamics of the vortex system as a whole.
E = mc2
By now, this equation can simply be treated as a joke!
There is no physical definition of ‘energy’ and no direct way of measuring it, merely inferences made from an as yet unproven and undefined theory. There is only a circular definition of mass and again, no consistent method of measuring it (The gravitational ‘constant’). The E in the equation does not mean what most people think and is something called Einstein’s ‘rest energy’; the ‘m’ here is similarly a ‘rest mass’. These are novel, imaginary quantities arising as artefacts of the theoretical framework.
These are quantities derived from a theory which is rooted in:
Considerations of imaginary experiments whose outcomes were invented
An arbitrary decision to set the speed of light to constant with insufficient experimental evidence
Goal-oriented attempts to eliminate any physical differences between acceleration and gravity
A failure to define acceleration, gravity or mass
In popular imagination, the energy described in this equation is real energy that is somehow bound up in the structure of an atom and can be somehow harnessed for the purposes of atomic energy or bombs. However, note that none of the foundational elements of the theory or any of the equations have anything at all do do with the structure of an atom. How then can the theory say anything at all about the energy contained in such an object?
Practical examples of E = mc2
Wikipedia gives some ‘practical examples’ in support of the mass-energy equivalence:
A spring acquires extra mass when it is compressed
A weight acquires extra mass when heated
A spinning ball has greater mass than when it is not spinning
We should expect, given the iconic status of the equation, that they have done due diligence, checked the sources and provided good references to support their claims.
The language used suggests that these experiments have actually been performed and the results measured, however, no citations are given and a quick AI search can find no actual experimental results in support of a single one of these claims!
In addition, the same article contains the following statement:
The “gadget”-style bomb used in the Trinity test and the bombing of Nagasaki had an explosive yield equivalent to 21 kt of TNT. About 1 kg of the approximately 6.15 kg of plutonium in each of these bombs fissioned into lighter elements totaling almost exactly one gram less, after cooling. The electromagnetic radiation and kinetic energy released in this explosion carried the missing gram of mass. – Wikipedia
The language suggests that they actually performed the experiment, that they actually measured the mass and energy of the end results of an atomic bomb explosion!
Accurate measurements of such quantities are clearly impossible. The reference supplied gives an estimated ‘yield’ of 21 kt, but to within an accuracy of 10% only! (Malik) This is not the impression given by the Wikipedia article. To cite this experiment as evidence of the mass-energy equivalence is wholly dishonest.
We still have no experimental evidence for the famous equation.
The constancy of the speed of light
Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light c with respect to any inertial frame of reference is a constant and is independent of the motion of the light source. – Wikipedia
.. and..
The speed of light is the same for all observers, no matter their relative velocity. It is the upper limit for the speed at which information, matter, or energy can travel through space. – Wikipedia
These both seem like massive overreach given the experimental evidence or lack thereof.
Alternative hypotheses should be sought.
Alternative hypothesis: The ideas described as the Inertial Field Theory (Gravity as an inertial field) are correct and should be explored as possible explanations for the various effects purporting to support Einstein’s proposal.
This theory proposes that gravity is an accelerating moving inertial field which adopts a vortex structure in space and centres upon the Earth. Both matter and light move within this field even in a vacuum and the movements of both are affected by local field conditions. In the case of matter, the field imbues objects with both inertia and gravitational mass, and in the case of light, the speed and direction are very possibly altered.
Laboratory conditions: This field rotates along with our planet and thus there exists a thin layer at the surface of the Earth where a stable field condition provides the laboratory conditions that we are familiar with and within which almost all experiments are performed. The field is roughly isotropic as far as inertia is concerned and ‘accelerates’ towards the Earth to provide gravity. If a beam of light travels the same speed in all directions within any laboratory, then this is not surprising. The light uses the gravitational field as a ‘carrier medium’ and will inherit the velocity of such a field. This is the Michelson-Morley experiment.
The solar system: The stars are said to move according to the precession of the Earth’s axis, but the planets are not seen to do the same, which implies that the whole of the solar system is rotating and tilting along with the Earth’s axis. This is consistent with the notion that the solar system is the centre of a giant cosmic vortex and is undergoing ‘solid body’ rotation similar to that of the centre of barred galaxies (see image below).
The gravity of the solar system therefore forms its own ‘inertial frame’ (literally now) and all movement of matter and light will be in relation to this roughly isotropic field.
Deep space: A free falling laboratory in deep space is not moving relative to any gravitational field, being dragged along by it, and so we expect the speed of light to be constant in all directions.
Gravitational lensing: Light is said to bend around massive objects and this surely implies some sort of interaction between light and a gravitational field. There is therefore some physical process at work as a result of this interaction and it is this which needs a thorough investigation. Simply saying ‘the light is bending because space is curved‘ is again avoiding the question and discouraging further inquiry. Light has a physical ‘nature’ and so does gravity and to investigate these is the duty of the physicist.
No surprise: In all the cases above, we expect light to travel the same speed in each direction, but not for the reasons stated by Einstein but for other, more prosaic considerations, which are specific to the local conditions and arise from some, as yet, unspecified laws of physics that control the interaction between light and gravity.
Geo-stationary orbit: This is more interesting. A geostationary space station is moving at speed transversely to the radial field lines of the gravitational field but is stationary with respect to the radius and thus is subject to an inward accelerating flux of such a field. What do we expect light to do in this situation? Will we see the same speed in each direction? Has anybody measured this?
According to Einstein, the speed of light will be the same again.. because he has declared it to be so! However, the mechanics of the situation are different here and so why should we not expect a different outcome? This does not seem unreasonable.
Summary
This is obviously a real mess, with the whole theory having flawed foundations, undefined terms and insufficient empirical evidence to support the claims. In particular the idea of an ‘inertial frame of reference’ is ambiguous at the very least. This is unforgivable since inertial frames of reference lie at the very heart of the theoretical framework and without them there is simply no theory.
Einstein failed to show that gravity is equivalent to acceleration and failed to justify the constancy of the speed of light in any meaningful way.
We have:
No properly defined coordinate system
Velocity and acceleration are therefore undefined
‘Mass’ is ultimately undefined
No new physics
No mechanisms described
Ambiguous terms
Definition creep
Conclusions drawn from ‘thought experiments’
In addition, if we look for empirical evidence we find:
Exaggerated claims made from little evidence
Too much weight placed upon Michelson-Morley experiment
Failure to consider alternative solutions
Failure to explain the precession of Mercury
Failure to explain or even define rotary motion (Newton’s bucket)
Conclusion: Gravitational fields exist and act via a specific mechanism but the central idea of Einstein is to explain away the effects of gravity by rephrasing it as simply ‘acceleration’, thereby removing any need to describe the mechanism.
The other idea, to simply declare the speed of light to be constant, similarly circumvents the need to describe any physical process by which this might happen. No new physics has been proposed, merely some arbitrary restrictions on how we may interpret measurements.
These are fundamentally flawed ideas and hence the theory can never, ever, amount to anything useful.
The ‘gravitational constant’ is measured via the Cavendish apparatus shown right. Some metal balls are mounted on a torsion balance and attempts to measure the attractive force between them are made. Calculations are performed and the result is the value of the Newtonian gravitational constant.
Many questions arise:
What is really being measured here?
What is being calculated?
Why is it not constant over time?
What do gravity and mass have to do with this?
Why do even simple equations seem confusing and self-referential?
What is mass anyhow?
Problems in general
The notion of gravity is usually thought of as connected to one or more of:
Objects falling to Earth
Objects having ‘weight’
Planets orbiting stars etc.
These are all thought of as involving the same phenomenon (gravity) but they are all different processes with potentially different causes and it is wrong to lump them all together prior to actual proof that they all have the same root cause.
Note that the Cavendish experiment involves none of these mechanisms:
Nothing falls to Earth
The weight of the balls is irrelevant
Nothing orbits in free-fall
Moreover, the experiment takes place within the gravitational field of the Earth and relies upon it for correct functioning but the nature of the field itself is not thought relevant to the results. The apparatus is sometimes shielded from magnetic fields via a Faraday cage, but the Earth’s gravity cannot be blocked out.
The gravitational attraction between the weights is very small compared with the Earth’s attraction, and this in turn actually varies at different places on the planet.
This is bad technique. Imagine you want to place two ping pong balls on the surface of a still pond to see if they are attracted by surface tension. You don’t have a still pond and so you try using a slow flowing stream and just subtract off the speed of the flow to compensate. Effects from the water flow in and around the balls simply outweighs the effect you are trying to measure.
More problems arise from the theoretical model used to make the calculations.
What is ‘mass’?
Newtonian physics actually defines three types of mass which all have their action via different mechanisms but are all assumed to have the same numerical value:
Inertial mass: This is the resistance of an object to being moved
Active gravitational mass: This is the mass which is assumed to create a gravitational field
Passive gravitational mass: This is the mass that responds to a gravitational field by accelerating downwards
We can add a fourth type of mass for ‘clarity’:
Weight mass: This is the mass that depresses the mechanism of a scales to give a reading for the weight of the object within a specific gravitational field
The weight mass is generally treated as being synonymous with the passive gravitational mass but:
All objects fall to the Earth with the same acceleration which means that the passive gravitational mass is effectively unmeasurable: Gravity debunked
An object placed upon scales is not accelerating towards the planet and so the passive gravitational mass may not be said to be involved
If there is no acceleration then the inertial mass cannot be said to be involved. Therefore, we need a new type of mass
All these masses are treated as if they are the same thing and are invariably referred to as ‘mass’. This linguistic trick allows continual switching between the masses without the need for justification and without the reader noticing what is happening.
Until the masses are proven to be equivalent, this is a dishonest practice.
Mass as an ‘intrinsic property’ of matter
Mass is often described as ‘an intrinsic property of matter’. This is highly deceptive.
This description lends weight to the idea of mass (4 types) as somehow ‘invariant’ or maybe ‘constant’. This in turn makes the idea of a gravitational constant seem more likely.
The assertion is that both ‘mass’ and big G are fundamental properties of Nature, that their values are constant and that, as a consequence, there is something there to be measured. The big problem is that the measurement of these quantities varies in both time and space.
This suggests to the unbiased mind that the underlying quantities are varying, but the scientists will have none of it and insist that the problem is with the measurement techniques. The language used implicitly suggests that there is something invariant to be measured and that if any measurement is contrary to this then it is the measurement that is at fault.
This is not science. We require that theory emerges from measurement and that verification of the theory proceed from further measurements. What we have, however is that a theory has been proposed and that measurements do not agree and so they are explained away by measurement ‘error’.
Measurements are not errors, they are the foundations of science.
A fundamental constant of Nature?
An AI engine tells me:
The universal gravitational constant ((G)) does not vary; its value is a fundamental constant of nature. However, the measurements of (G) show significant variation, a result of experimental uncertainty and the immense difficulty in accurately measuring the constant due to gravity’s weakness.
No. Absolutely not true.
All we have is measurements. A theory is not automatically ‘true’ by itself but relies upon measurements.
The assertion is that something called a ‘Fundamental Constant of Nature’ exists but is somehow unmeasurable! If we can’t measure it then how do we know that it exists in any sense at all? If attempts to measure it give different results then how can we say that it is a constant? Where is the evidence for this?
Big G is not a fundamental of nature and is not even a fundamental of the measurement system as it cannot be measured directly and must be calculated from other ‘measurables’. It may be regarded as a fundamental of Newtonian theory, but if this is at odds with Reality then what is the point of the theory?
The idea that there is ‘something out there to be measured‘ lends a strong bias to scientific thought, but this really is an illusion. The reality is that all we have is a set of measurements and everything else is merely an interpretation of those measurements.
Now scientists have found that the measured G values oscillate over time like a sine wave with a period of 5.9 years. It’s not G itself that is varying by this much, they propose, but more likely something else is affecting the measurements.
Also:
Once a surprising 5.9-year periodicity is taken into account, most laboratory measurements of G are consistent
Or: “Once the variations are adjusted for, the value appears constant”. Well, yes, I guess so .. but why the variation in the first place?
Scientists have started to think that variations in gravity may somehow be connected to ‘inertia’.
It’s not G itself that is varying by this much, they propose, but more likely something else is affecting the measurements.
As a clue to what this “something else” is, the scientists note that the 5.9-year oscillatory period of the measured G values correlates almost perfectly with the 5.9-year oscillatory period of Earth’s rotation rate, as determined by recent Length of Day (LOD) measurements. Although the scientists do not claim to know what causes the G/LOD correlation, they cautiously suggest that the “least unlikely” explanation may involve circulating currents in the Earth’s core. The changing currents may modify Earth’s rotational inertia, affecting LOD, and be accompanied by density variations, affecting G. – Zyga
As the data shows, the length of each day varies slightly, with some days slightly longer and some days slightly shorter than others. The LOD variation is a measure of the speed of Earth’s rotation, and the scientists in the current study found that its periodic oscillation aligns almost exactly with the G oscillations. – Holme et al.
The equation for big G
The value of the gravitational constant is calculated by a version of the Cavendish experiment which consists of metal spheres on rotating frames. As the spheres become closer to each other a small force of attraction is detected between them and the gravitational constant is calculated from the resulting force.
The formula for the force between two masses is given as:
Where:
is the gravitational constant is the force between the masses and are the masses is the distance between the masses
We can rearrange to get G in terms of Force and mass:
Note that the type of mass to be used is never specified, thereby ‘forcing’ on us the unproven assertion that they are all interchangeable.
Within this framework, mass is not absolute and not an innate property of matter, but a result of interaction between matter and the inertial field. One consequence of this is that if there is a change in the nature of the inertial field then there will be a change in mass and consequently a change in the calculated value for G.
This way of looking at things makes it clear that the different types of mass arise not from different ‘properties’ of matter but from the different forms of interaction with the inertial field:
Passive gravitational mass: This is unmeasurable and therefore does not exist for practical purposes. Downward acceleration is caused by the acceleration of an inertial field and is independent of anything called ‘mass’.
Active gravitational mass: This is an oversimplified representation of the total inertial field associated with an object. It has an attractive (accelerative) component but also a static inertial component.
Inertial mass: This is the result of an object’s interaction with the ambient inertial field and arises from attempts to accelerate an object relative to the field. This perceived mass will change if the inertial field changes. In all laboratory experiments on Earth, the ambient inertial field is the Earth’s gravitational field. This means that if the Earth’s gravitational field were to change in a particular way, then the measured inertial mass of all objects at the Earth’s surface will also change.
Weight mass: Weight arises from attempts to move an object upwards, against the downward acceleration of the inertial field. The measured weight is a combination of the magnitude of the downward acceleration of the field and the inertial resistance to any attempt to move objects against such acceleration. For a fixed object, the measured weight will vary according to either changes in the downward acceleration or changes in the inertial resistance of the field.
Note that according to the Newtonian formulation, ‘weight’ and ‘inertia’ are different phenomena, but in the context of an inertial field, they are actually identical once the acceleration has been factored out.
To see this, imagine trying to establish the weight of something in a freely falling lift. The object is weightless until an ‘upward’ acceleration is applied to the scales whereupon the ‘weight’ of the object is immediately apparent. But this ‘weight’ is now synonymous with what might be called ‘inertial resistance’. In other words, the inertial mass is identical to the weight mass.
The equivalence principle
“The equivalence principle is the hypothesis that the observed equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass is a consequence of nature.” – Wikipedia
It is necessary in Newtonian theory to make this hypothesis. The two types of masses are both said to be innate properties of matter and there is no way of measuring the gravitational mass. Once this hypothesis is made, the rest of the theory can proceed.
With the Inertial Field Theory we can say that there is no need for a passive gravitational mass but we can say that the behaviour of a weight on a spring is identical to that of a weight undergoing acceleration against the inertial field. This is an equivalence that arises as a direct theoretical consequence and needs no additional hypothesis. To rephrase, here the principle derives from the theory and not the theory from the principle.
“... in a gravitational field the acceleration of a test particle is independent of its properties, including its rest mass.” – Wikipedia
The illusion of mass arises from the interaction between matter and an inertial field. There is no such measurable quantity as ‘rest mass’, which is why it plays no part in acceleration. Moreover, if the field itself can be said to be ‘accelerating’, then the test particle is, ipso facto, at rest with respect to the field.
“… in a uniform gravitational field all objects, regardless of their composition, fall with precisely the same acceleration.” – Wikipedia
If the field is visualised as accelerating then all objects maintain their position with respect to the field.
Obtaining the measurements for Big G
The equations for calculating the gravitational constant are not complicated, but they are confusing, largely because they are highly ambiguous with regards to the type of mass to be calculated.
The equation for big G is:
But which masses are we to use?
Passive gravitational mass: This is unmeasurable, irrelevant and non-existent for practical purposes.
Active gravitational mass: This can be calculated from the results of a Cavendish Experiment but only once we have ascertained the value for G! To see this, try using two identical masses and rearranging the above equation to get:
So to calculate the value of G we need to calculate a gravitational mass but in order to get a value for this we need to already know Big G!
This is clear nonsense, but texts on the subject just ignore it. They will just say that we need a value for mass and proceed to calculate it some other way. The Equivalence Principle is invoked in order to use a different fundamental quantity as the ‘m’ in the equation for the gravitational constant.
Mass as weight: An object is weighed on Earth and the value is divided by the measured gravitational acceleration at that location on Earth and this is used as a definition of ‘mass’. The acceleration varies over the globe and this method in any case introduces a new variable into the calculations. We are trying to measure the attractive force between two masses: why bring the Earth’s gravity into the equation?
Inertial mass: The inertial mass can be calculated without knowledge of G or the Earth’s gravitational acceleration. An attempt is made to move the mass by applying a known force and the acceleration is measured as a result. The mass is then calculated from Newton’s F=ma as:
Calculating Big G
Congratulations on getting this far. The point is to write down a formula for G using only those quantities that have been explicitly measured. Text books and science websites will use ‘m’ for mass all over the place to give the impression that the calculations have something to do with ‘mass’ but as we have seen above, this quantity is never directly measurable.
Substituting for mass in the definition of Big G we get:
Where:
is the force measured by the Cavendish balance is the distance between the Cavendish weights are the forces applied to the weights to measure inertia are the resulting accelerations
So what did we actually measure?
We pulled some weights around with springs and then put them in a Cavendish torsion balance. We the applied a magic formula to calculate a value G which we then declared to be fundamental and constant and something to do with gravity.
All experiments were performed close to the surface of the Earth and so within the variable gravitational (inertial) field of the planet.
The actual ‘measurables’ of the system were:
Acceleration, i.e. distance and time
Force, i.e. the deformation of a mechanical spring or torsion of a wire
Everything else is conjecture.
If everything is calculated from the measurables, then these measurables may be said to be the fundamentals of the theoretical system and other quantities such as mass or gravitational constants are best described as ‘derived quantities’ of the theory. If the theory changes then so do the values of the derived variables, but not the measurements themselves. The measurements are immutable, not the derived values.
So what did we prove?
Goodness knows!
We most certainly did not prove that the value of G is constant, as experiments showed that it varied according to a 5.9 year cycle.
Statements along the lines of “The constant is still constant but we need to measure it better” are just wishful thinking. Where is the proof of constancy to be found if not in the measurements?
The calculated value of G is some sort of summary of the state of the inertial field at the Earth’s surface and how it affects the movement of objects. It probably has little to do with any innate property of matter.
The idea that this calculated and variable value represents some fundamental constant of nature is surely misplaced,
Why does the constant vary?
It varies because some of the inputs to the equation vary. Either the force between the spheres in the Cavendish apparatus changed (easily verifiable surely?) or the inertial masses of the spheres have changed.
The most likely explanation seems the latter. Inertia, according to the Inertial Field Theory (IFT), is partly a function of the inertial component of the gravitational field and it is this that appears to change on a 5.9 year cycle. In Newtonian theory, inertia is (as with almost everything else), an innate property of matter and therefore cannot change, but inertia, in the IFT is down to interaction between the weight and the Earths gravitational field.
The gravitational field of the Earth is an extension of the matter which comprises the Earth (Gravity as an inertial field) and hence rotates with it. It follows therefore that variations in day length should be associated with variations in inertia and hence also with a variable gravitational constant.
The variations in the rotational speed of our planet arise from naturel variations in the enclosing vortex structure and probably defy any attempts at theoretical prediction. Just observe a vortex in a river and note that it is fundamentally stable but with slight perturbations in speed and position as it absorbs energy from the surrounding flow. The Earths gravitational field is very likely similar to this. Perturbations may seem cyclic and at a 5.9 year cycle but this may very well change in even the near future.
Criticisms of the Cavendish experiment
Criticisms have already been made but it cannot do any harm to collect them together as a summary of the situation.
The Cavendish apparatus is intended to measure the strength of gravitational attraction between two metal spheres. The effect is expected to be small relative to the effects from the Earth’s gravitational field, but all experiments are performed within this field with the hope that the experimental results are somehow unaffected by the ambient conditions. The ambient conditions are known to be variable.
In addition to this the whole of Newtonian theory adopts a confused attitude to inertia, gravity and mass. Inertia and gravitational attraction are said to be two different phenomena and to both derive from their own innate property of matter, i.e. that of ‘mass’. The two masses are held to be different properties to start with and to achieve their effects by presumably different, although unspecified, mechanisms. However, they are also assumed to have the same numerical value as each other and are inevitably treated as if they were precisely the same thing.
The problem, though, is that these ideas when taken as a whole are not supported by experimental results. We should get consistent and constant measurements if mass is an intrinsic property of matter, but we don’t.
The experiment tries to measure a weak gravitational effect within a larger and more variable gravitational field. It plays mix ‘n’ match with different types of mass with no theoretical justification and it gets the wrong answer.
The claim that we weigh less at the equator because of centrifugal force is not supported by empirical data. Natural variations of the gravitational field owing to variations in planet density are sufficient to account for the differences in weight. The equatorial bulge is sufficient to account for differences in weight across latitude. The results are consistent with the idea of the Earth creating its own spinning frame of reference relative to which, the planet itself is actually stationary.
The data
I asked an AI engine to give me the values of gravitational acceleration across the globe.
So the variation between poles and equator is the difference between 9.832 and 9.780 which is 0.052 m/s².
I now asked for typical variations across a single latitude
So the difference in gravitational strength between the poles and equator is less than that for the planet as a whole and is equal to the variation across a single latitude. This variation then may not be attributed to a spinning Earth without further evidence.
Equatorial bulge
I now asked the engine to summarise the variation in gravitational field strength according to the bulge of the equator alone.
So to get from the stronger gravity at the poles to the weaker gravity at the equator we take the pole value of 9.832 and multiply by 0.9933 to get the value of 9.766. The difference between these two values is 9.832 minus 9.766 which is 0.066 m/s², that is to say, an even bigger difference than actually measured. There is no need for any additional adjustment to be made here; everything is explained by bulge alone.
Too many variables?
We have a measured variation of 0.05 – 0.07 m/s², across the globe, along lines of latitude and from equator to pole. W have theoretical variations of 0.05 predicted from crustal variations, centrifugal forces and equatorial bulge.
Sometimes a measurement is attributed to crustal variation, sometimes to equatorial bulge and sometimes to centrifugal force, seemingly dependent upon the argument to be made at the time.
This is no way to do science. There are too many variables to be resolved in a few ad hoc experiments and certainly, in the data above, no chance of sensibly interpreting any single measurement or attributing any single cause with any degree of certainty.
Centrifugal force?
The variations in weight at the poles and equator is adequately explained by the bulge of the planet at the equator. There is no need to bring centrifugal force into the equation as there is simply no requirement for it given the data.
If the calculations and measurements above are correct then additional adjustments for centrifugal force will in fact give incorrect results. This suggests that centrifugal forces at the planetary scale are not merely irrelevant but perhaps even non-existent.
A rotating frame of reference
Experiments demonstrating the existence of centrifugal force are all small scale affairs and performed in laboratories within the Earth’s magnetic field, whether at the surface of the Earth or in freefall nearby. The effects seen can therefore be explained by the action of objects moving through an ‘inertial field’ as explained here: Gravity as an inertial field
It is far from obvious, however, that the phenomena of rotation, Coriolis forces and centrifugal forces can simply be transferred from a laboratory to the scale of a planet within a solar system. If scientists claim that they can, then this must be rigorously demonstrated with data and arguments that are somewhat more reliable than the ones presented above.
Attempts to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth by means of a Foucault pendulum are no more rigorous and no more conclusive than those described above: Gravity as an inertial field
If the Earth’s inertial field rotates along with its mass, then there is no centrifugal force to alter the weight of an object at the equator. This is entirely consistent with the above data and even supported by it.
Gravity is a ‘field of inertia’ that accelerates towards the Earth and forms a frame of reference for the kinetic behaviour of all solid objects. Objects moving with the acceleration are in free-fall and experience equal inertial resistance in all directions, implying that the field is somewhat isotropic in this respect.
The field near the Earth’s surface accelerates towards the Earth and rotates around with it thereby providing a local inertial frame of reference that both accelerates towards the ground and moves with the surface. Dropped objects will fall ‘vertically’ as a consequence; they are moving vertically with respect to the (rotating) gravitational field and hence with the ground.
No appeal can be made to either linear or angular momentum as as fundamentals of this framework – they need to be ‘derived from’ the framework not ‘added to’ it.
The mass of the Earth is stationary within this inertial framework which takes upon the aspect of a cosmic vortex within the larger vortex of the sun’s gravitational field.
If there happen to be perturbations in the vortex field then these are transferred to the Earth and will account for the variations in day length (20 mins a day with Venus!). No ‘force’ is needed here to move an entire planet, merely a modulation of the gravitational field which necessarily influences the whole planet regardless of its ‘mass’ (another Newtonian concept).
The atmosphere of the Earth is not dragged around by friction as some claim but is actually stationary (on average) relative to the inertial field at the surface of the planet. Atmospheric pressure is created by the inward acceleration of the vortex as a whole; the ‘vortex principle’. The gravitational field at the surface of the planet provides a frame of reference which is stationary with respect to the surface and the whole weather system operates within this frame of reference.
The centripetal nature of the vortex accounts for the spherical shape of the sun which shows no no significant equatorial bulge.
Gravitational acceleration of objects is merely the behaviour of such objects that are stationary with respect to the accelerating inertial field. Geo-stationary objects are actually accelerating upwards with respect to the inertial field.
Objects acquire inertia according to local field conditions only and so the rotational speed of the Earth around the sun is irrelevant, as is the speed of the sun through space and the properties of distant galaxies.
The field at the Earth’s surface provides an inertial frame of reference. The water in Newton’s bucket rotates with respect to this frame and the effect needs no further explanation.
The field is electromagnetic in nature and permeates all matter. Matter itself consists of electromagnetic field modulations. Inertia arises from the interaction between the two fields and consists of a sort of ‘field drag’.
Imagine that, as a force is applied to a stationary object, the movement of matter interacts with the gravitational field to produce some sort of eddy currents. This ‘electromagnetic friction’ opposes the movement initially but once the currents are established, they will tend to persist and serve to preserve the constant velocity of the object with respect to the field. This is interpreted as ‘momentum’ in classical physics; it will take another force to slow the object down. Momentum, velocity and kinetic energy are all relative to the local field conditions.
Conversely, if a gravity field accelerates past (through) an object, then electromagnetic eddies are formed and the object is dragged along with the field in a manner somewhat analogous to a river dragging a boat or maybe a sponge, downstream.
The concept of absolute space is not particularly useful in this respect as all free movement is relative to the local gravitational field. Konstantin Meyl goes further and claims, with good reasons, that the local field conditions also determine length, time, the speed of light and even geometry.
Q; What happens outside of a gravitational field? A: There is no such place.
Each planet of the solar system is at the centre of a gravitational vortex, with interaction with neighbouring or enclosing vortices being complex and according to the laws of electrodynamics. We should expect, from the point of view of Newton’s gravity, to see odd relationships between the planetary orbits and to suspect the existence of hidden (‘dark’?) energies influencing heavenly bodies.
Our atmosphere remains in a thin layer around the planet owing to gravitational attraction, but how does it maintain an identical rotational speed and why are there not 1000 mile an hour winds at the equator?
The most common explanation from AI searches and physics forums is that the atmosphere is dragged around by friction with the Earth’s surface. This is not credible and is contradicted by everyday observations and common sense.
Some explanations describe a non-slip condition at the Earth’s surface surmounted by a shear layer rising away from the surface, but weather balloons rise vertically and con-trails can be seen stationary above us for many minutes; there is no shear layer.
Others say that, over the millennia, the whole atmosphere has acquired sufficient angular momentum to spin with the Earth, and will maintain such synchrony in the future. There are many problems with this:
The air does not maintain synchrony with the Earth’s surface. Cyclonic structures are the norm, with the wind travelling both slower and faster than, the spin of the Earth, and from both west to east and east to west. Moreover, we see wind travelling north to south and vice versa. In all these cases, the wind is not moved by friction with the surface, but by the laws of aerodynamics.
The eye of a hurricane moves at relatively slow speeds (10-15 mph) with respect to the surface of the Earth. This speed is determined by the dynamics of the hurricane as a whole and not by local friction between the air and the surface, so the hurricane as a whole is somehow attuned to, or cognizant of, the rotational speed of the ground. We have winds with huge speeds in most of the hurricane with parts blowing with the rotation and others against the rotation. Is it really credible, amongst this mayhem, that friction with the ground somehow stabilises the whole system to move approximately in alignment with the Earth’s rotation? Surface friction is clearly irrelevant to most of the cyclone.
A vast amount of kinetic energy is surely lost in storms and converted to heat but after the storm is over, the wind is seen to be travelling in synchrony with the surface again; there is no need for a millennium of readjustment to take place for this to happen.
The (moderate) wind outside my window has abated to leave a remarkably still garden. I did not see a slow return to normality caused by shear stress. How does the air know what ‘stillness’ is? There appears to be some atmospheric frame of reference to which all air returns whenever it is not being pushed around by other pieces of air. What is this frame of reference?
A few mild gusts and eddies now appear in my garden. The air is being pushed around locally by neighbouring masses of air. I see the air move the trees a bit, but I don’t see the trees moving the air at all. The eddies die down, but not because of friction with the ground. The kinetic energy of the eddies has been dissipated by friction within the airflow itself which, depleted of such energy, has then become motionless relative to some local frame of reference. The air ‘knows’ its place.
The solution
The gravitational field of the Earth forms a roughly isotropic field of inertia at the surface of the planet which acts as a frame of reference for all physical laws and all observable activity.
The field accelerates towards the ground, giving rise to gravitational acceleration, weight and atmospheric pressure. If we factor out the acceleration, then the field gives rise to the same inertial resistance in all directions. The vertical (accelerative) component of the field drops off with the inverse square of the distance, but there is also an inertial component which exists both in the vertical and horizontal directions.
The field rotates with the Earth at all latitudes and so the air moves locally as if there were no rotation, as if the Earth were stationary.
Newton’s bucket
In the case of Newton’s bucket, the water will be dragged around to form a dip in the middle but when the bucket stops rotating, the water will settle down to a level surface. Once again there is a sense of a (local) ‘frame of reference’. A rotating solid object will rotate indefinitely owing to conservation of momentum, but fluids and gases behave differently in an inertial field as inertial drag, having a vortex nature, will promote eddies in the molecules of fluid or gas which will lead to internal friction and eventual stabilisation with respect to the frame of reference.
Coriolis forces
The above hypothesis makes quite a powerful prediction which is that there are no such things as Coriolis forces at the planetary scale.
This idea came both as a surprise and shock whilst writing the article and needs addressing. Scientists are adamant that the behaviour of gases, fluids and solid objects are affected by Coriolis forces that deflect the motion objects from a straight line relative to the surface of the Earth and cause pendulums to swing in a plane relative to the ‘fixed stars’.
We need at least to account for:
The claimed Coriolis forces affecting the weather
The motion of a Foucault pendulum
A ball thrown in a rotating room will appear to follow a curved path because it is really moving in a straight line relative to an inertial frame of reference which seems to follow the rotation of the Earth. However, if such a frame of reference really does rotate with the Earth, then any projectile or stream of air at the surface of the Earth will travel in a straight line where ‘straight’ is, by definition, aligned with the Earth’s rotation.
This is said not to happen, with both streams of air and large pendulums claimed to align, not with the Earth’s rotation but with some other frame of reference, either an ‘absolute’ frame (mechanism not supplied) or with respect to the ‘distant stars’ (mechanism not supplied).
The Earth’s gravitational field seems locally almost identical at each point on the surface, but we cannot rule out that there may be slight variations in the horizontal component that may vary slightly across latitudes and be responsible for meaningful variations in movement over long distances or time intervals.
Before thinking about this, however, we need to check what sort of variations we are required to explain.
Coriolis forces and the weather
A Coriolis force is assumed to arise from the phenomenon of ‘momentum’ which in turn is a derivative of inertia and if the whole gravitational field is stationary with respect to the Earth’s rotation, then ‘inertia’ is also aligned with the surface movement.
I made some attempt to find out if there really are such things as a Coriolis forces affecting the weather, but got bogged down in circular arguments, ‘arguments from assumption’ and downright contradictions.
I asked AI to explain whether Coriolis forces really did affect the weather. The answers look like they are drawn straight from discussions on physics chat forums.
Cyclones (low-pressure systems) rotate counter clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. This rotation is not due to wind patterns alone—it directly results from the Coriolis effect acting on large-scale air movements.
But there are cyclones near the equator and both clockwise and anti-clockwise systems exist in the northern hemisphere.
The Coriolis effect is necessary to explain the direction of rotation; without it, wind would flow directly from high to low pressure.
This is just not true. Stir a cup of tea and you will create a vortex. The pressure gradient goes from high at the periphery to low at the centre but the flow of water is almost at right angles to the pressure gradient and never along it. The same is true of cyclonic structures in the atmosphere.
Trade winds blow from the northeast in the Northern Hemisphere and the southeast in the Southern Hemisphere—again, due to Coriolis deflection.
They may well do this but where is the proof that is is caused by Coriolis forces?
Jet streams—fast-moving air currents high in the atmosphere—also follow curved paths influenced by the Coriolis effect.
Again, we would like some sort of argument to show that the Coriois effect is causal here. An air current cannot just be influenced to follow a curved path; the air either side of it must have somewhere to go to and wherever it goes to must also move the air somewhere else to make room for the new air. The system is organised globally as a series of vortices, this being a necessity for the preservation of topological continuity. The vortex structure dominates the flow patterns and it will be hard to discern or quantify any Coriolis influences within this pattern, particularly when the vortices go round the ‘wrong’ way.
Rotating tank experiments simulate Earth’s rotation and show how fluids (like air or water) develop spiral motion due to Coriolis-like forces.
Yes, but these are rotating tanks within a stationary frame of reference (gravitational field). The whole point of the above arguments is that the Earth’s inertial field rotates of itself, is stationary with respect to the surface of the Earth and therefore not rotating at all for the purposes of laboratory experiments.
The statement “Rotating tank experiments simulate Earth’s rotation” pretty much assumes the thing that is to be proved, which is that small scale experiments can be scaled up to the size of the Earth; they can’t. However, it isn’t the scale that is the problem but the nature of the gravitational field; it cannot act both as a reference frame for laboratory experiments and for the whole planet itself at the same time.
These experiments reproduce cyclonic patterns similar to those in Earth’s atmosphere.
Yes, but cyclonic patterns are produced by the laws of fluid flow and need no rotational impulse to get started; just try preventing water forming vortices and see how far you get.
Major ocean currents (e.g., the Gulf Stream, the Kuroshio Current) follow curved paths and rotate in large gyres consistent with Coriolis deflection.
The movement of ocean currents are very heavily influenced by the shape of the land masses, convection currents and the laws of fluid dynamics.
The Coriolis force is described mathematically in the equations of motion for rotating systems (e.g., the Navier-Stokes equations).
This is theory, not observational evidence, and the whole point of the argument on this post is that the theory is inapplicable, as the Earth is evidently not a ‘rotating frame of reference’, but a ‘stationary frame that rotates’ (within the solar system).
Reminder: Classical theory has yet to explain just what a ‘rotating system’ is rotating relative to; ‘absolute space’ doesn’t really suffice as a get-out clause any more.
Foucault’s pendulum
The rotating plane of swing of a Foucault pendulum is often cited as a triumph of scientific achievement and is claimed to prove:
That the Earth is round
That the Earth is rotating
That the Earth is rotating at a specific rate
That the Earth is rotating with respect to some fixed frame of reference
That the laws of Newtonian physics hold
A single experiment clearly cannot prove all these things at once.
Furthermore, from the Wikipedia article and associated Talk tab, we have:
No pendulum has been seen to complete a single revolution in a single day
A pendulum at the equator is claimed to not rotate at all but this experiment has never been performed
An experiment at the South Pole initially showed the Earth rotating the wrong way round: [link]
A second experiment gave a rotational period of 12 hours instead of 24
Further experiments achieved a rotational period of 24 hours ± 50 minutes
Results deemed to be incorrect were discarded and ‘refinements’ (unspecified) made to ‘improve’ the results
Experiments appear to be ‘goal oriented’
The results they are aiming for assume a spherical Earth, but the Earth is ‘oblate’
The only data claiming to be accurate at other latitudes comes from Foucault himself and he can hardly be said to be impartial.
Only a single latitude was attempted
The swing of the weight is heavily influenced by air currents and initial conditions
An attempt to reproduce Foucault’s experiment demonstrated an initial planar swing degenerating to an elliptical pattern after only an hour
No pendulum will swing all day without ‘help’
There is no quality control on the manufacture of the equipment and one pendulum simply snapped and fell to the ground
A pendulum at the equator would provide a good control but nobody has tried this
A series of precise and reproducible experiments using the same equipment at multiple latitudes is required but never even attempted
Publicly displayed pendulums are made to knock down skittles (see image above) which allows the possibility of controlling the precession to some degree
We frequently see theoretical predictions masquerading as experimental results. For example: “A Foucault pendulum at 30° south latitude, viewed from above by an earthbound observer, rotates counter clockwise 360° in two days.” How do you know this if it has never happened?
“Heike Kamerlingh Onnes performed precise experiments and developed a fuller theory of the Foucault pendulum for his doctoral thesis (1879). He observed the pendulum to go over from linear to elliptic oscillation in an hour. By a perturbation analysis, he showed that geometrical imperfection of the system or elasticity of the support wire may cause a beat between two horizontal modes of oscillation.” – Wikipedia
The plane of swing is affected by an eclipse
The amplitude of swing is affected by an eclipse
The eclipse effect is ridiculed on the Talk page but without further explanation
The ‘fixed frame of reference’ with respect to which the pendulum is assumed to maintain its plane of swing is never clearly identified, nor any mechanism by which a pendulum might interact with it.
Conclusions from experimental evidence of Coriolis forces
The arguments for Coriolis forces at the planetary scale and the scant evidence from Foucault pendulum experiments are insufficient to support the historic claims made for them and at the same time do not contradict the idea of a gravitational field acting as an inertial frame of reference which is stationary with respect to the surface of the Earth.
Gravity as an electromagnetic field
The nature of the field can be largely derived from everyday observations as above, but we can consider the idea that it is in fact an emergent property of an electromagnetic field and equivalent to the sum of all the magnetic dipoles of all the spinning charge comprising the planet. This will provide further insights.
If this is true then the gravitational field is continuous with all the atomic charge fields and hence its movement must necessarily be continuous with the rotation of the Earth. Such a field will have complex, fine grained structure and although diminishing according to radius in the manner of a Newtonian field, will not consist of a simple radial field but will have meaningful horizontal components which give rise to inertia.
Konstantin Meyl posits such a field with his Theory of Objectivity and allows for nothing else existing in reality apart from such a field. A ‘field’ in physics is described by differential equations and obeys the Locality Principle, meaning there is no action at a distance and that all behaviour is determined completely by strictly local field interaction.
It follows from this that the behaviour of water in a spinning bucket is determined solely by local (gravitational) field conditions and is unrelated to any influence from the distant stars or from any such thing as ‘absolute space’. There is no provision within the field equations for any external influence and no need for an independent frame of reference as the field itself provides its own reference frame which is usually of a toroidal geometry.
Newton claims that a body will move in a straight line unless acted upon by a force, but singularly fails to define what is meant by a straight line. From the perspective of a field theory then, we can now invert this proposition and actually define an ‘inertial trajectory’ as that of an ‘unimpeded solid object in an inertial field’. So even geometry is now defined by an observation as opposed to an abstraction.
This formulation has the added attraction that it defines things in terms of observable and hence measurable reality, with no need for the assumption of superfluous variables or entities. Passive gravitational mass is not measurable and the assumption of an ‘absolute’ frame of reference is not only unprovable, but now necessitates an additional explanation as to how such a reference frame should influence physical reality.
A further advantage of the adoption of the description of reality in terms of a single field structure is that it narrows down the possibilities, thereby restricting speculation and discouraging the unrestrained invention of novel and often inconsistent mechanisms.
A complex gravitational field
If we accept the general idea of a field model then there is no such thing as an absolute frame of reference and there is no such thing as action at a distance. All influences are via local field conditions only and so a pendulum is moving with respect to a frame of reference created by the gravitational field itself.
The gravitational field can be seen as an extension of the electromagnetic field of all the matter in the planet and as such will rotate with the Earth and will obey the laws of electromagnetism, which are complex, asymmetric, non-linear. The underlying equations are nothing like the simple radial field of Newtonian gravity but will produce something like a radial field on large scales thereby giving the illusion of something much simpler.
The temptation to imagine these laws operating within some Euclidean space should be resisted. The field at the surface of the Earth operates within the much larger vortex structure of the Earth’s sphere of influence and it is this larger vortex that actually determines the global geometry and no doubt contributes to the local field conditions at the surface.
A self-consistent paradigm
From one point of view, if a pendulum has an apparent deviation from the ‘straight’, then it is subject to some acceleration. However, if we define ‘straight’ as the path actually taken, then no ‘real’ acceleration takes place. ‘Physical straight’ and ‘geometric straight’ are now quite different concepts. Acceleration is ‘the action of an inertial field‘ as opposed to ‘a change in motion‘.
This makes perfect sense and leads to an improved and self-consistent science.
Newtonian and other theories claim matter, mass, distance, position and time as ‘fundamentals’ of the framework, but mass is unmeasurable, the idea of a straight line is undefined, time is ambiguous and even the idea of ‘position’ is unclear (position with respect to what, exactly?). In all cases, quantities are assumed to be relative to some absolute framework that can never be directly measured and is merely imagined.
To use a field construct as a reference frame, however, leads to a self-consistent theory consisting of a theoretical equation for the behaviour of the field and a set of measurements taken from actual reality.
Free movement (free-fall) is that which takes place according to the laws of an inertial frame and is driven by such a frame. A straight line is that followed by a free falling object. The parabolic path taken by a thrown object is inertially straight but geometrically curved because the observer is continually accelerating against the inertial field. The laws of geometry and movement are those of a local electromagnetic field shaped by an enclosing vortex structure.
Applied forces can ‘accelerate’ objects against against the inertial frame. Geometric movement is that which is determined by relative distances, where such distances are themselves determined by the intensity of the field. Geometry itself is determined by the field structure and ‘mass’ is a simplified way of quantifying a vortex; a single metric for a complex structure.
Movement and acceleration are now described in terms of actual physical processes as opposed to deriving from an abstract geometry that resides in some other-worldly realm of ideal forms.
Newton’s first law
A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless it is acted upon by a force.
The weakness of the law is now easily seen. The concepts of ‘straight line’ and ‘constant speed’ are ill-defined and so the law makes no sense.
To define these concepts we need some frame of reference by which to compare ‘speed’ or ‘straight’ and no such frames have been adequately described. Newton advocated for some ‘absolute’ frame of reference whilst Mach preferred to compare the local motion of objects to the distant or ‘fixed’ stars, but neither of these is really satisfactory from a practical point of view since neither reference frame is available for direct measurement. Both are simply ‘terminology’ without any real meaning.
As for empirical verification, we can try to find an experiment demonstrating the truth of the First Law; we can look for an object travelling though space in a straight line forever, but no such experiment exists. All objects in space are observed to travel in curved orbits of some sort and all are therefore inferred (from the first law) to be subject to the ‘force’ of gravity.
The reasoning is circular and the idea of an object travelling in a straight line, free from force, is redundant, since no such thing can ever occur in a universe permeated by gravitational fields.
The frame of reference must be the local gravitational field itself; this is by now ‘obvious’.
The Tamarack mines experiment
A wire was measured at the surface of the Earth and again at the bottom of some mineshafts where it was found to be considerably shorter. The reason given by Meyl is that the horizontal component of the magnetic field grows stronger for a small distance towards the centre of the Earth and it is this phenomenon that literally shrinks the wire by manipulation of the physical geometry.
Gravity is therefore more complex than a simple radial field emanating from the centre of a mass.
The sun is said to have very little equatorial bulge despite its large size and gaseous composition and rotates at different speeds according to latitude. This seems at odds with classical physics but makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of vortex physics.
The sun is the centre of a rotating gravitational field and the surface of the sun is continuous with such a field. The field accelerates inwards and forms one ‘radius’ at the surface and possibly another at the chromosphere. The shape of the sun is determined by the overall configuration of such a vortex which obeys the laws of electrodynamics. Meyl gives a description of an electron as being stabilised by the weight of the whole universe compressing inwards and points out that the sphere is the most stable shape that could possibly result from this.
The same no doubt holds for larger objects and the sun, being gaseous and hence more easily shaped by a gravitational field than a solid planet, ends up being more spherical instead of less.
The gravitational field of the sun rotates with the surface and hence forms a stationary inertial frame of reference with respect to the surface, as with the Earth. There is a big difference here, however, which is that there is no solid body rotation on the sun but a differential rotation that varies with latitude. The question then arises: “What is the behaviour of a Foucault pendulum at the surface of the sun?”. Exercise for the reader!
The Moon and Jupiter
Jupiter has a fast spin and a large equatorial bulge and so this bulge is attributed to the rapid spin. However, the moon has a large equatorial bulge but no spin and so the bulge is attributed to something else other than the spin. The sun has a large mass and size and significant spin but no equatorial bulge but nobody understands this. An obvious inference is that the equatorial bulge is simply unrelated to the mass or spin of the planet in question.
Variation in day length of the Earth and Venus
The rotational speeds of both the Earth and Venus vary from day to day, with the day length of Venus varying by up to 20 minutes. How does this happen?
One explanation is that there is an exchange of angular momentum between the interior of the planets and their surface. In other words, molten iron sloshes around and alters the rate of spin as an ice skater might do by changing her moment of inertia. This is hardly credible, it would mean the transference of angular momentum by mechanical means which would surely lead to all sorts of stresses in the crust of the planets, with tidal waves and earthquakes being an inevitable consequence?
It must be the case that the planets are affected in every single atom at the same time and this implies an inertial field. Each planet is at the centre of an extended gravitational vortex with the vortex having slight fluctuations of rotational speed. Again, this sort of thing is visible in the eddies in river currents. This requires some explanation in Newtonian physics but is to be regarded as default behaviour in vortex systems.
‘Oumuamua
‘Oumuamua and other objects are observed to accelerate away from the sun, apparently against the (Newtonian) gravitational field and various hypotheses are put forward to explain this. A better way to proceed might be to consider a more complex version of the gravitational field as described above and a more complex form of interaction than merely ‘attraction’. It has already been hypothesised that gases may interact differently to solids in a gravitational field and we may be seeing, with these objects, a different form of behaviour again.
Many of these visitors to our solar system have the appearance of energetic field vortices akin to a ball lightning phenomenon. A spinning vortex of pure electric field accumulates energy and matter continually according to the vortex principle and propels itself through space in a manner similar to a smoke ring. Once close to the sun, the dynamic electromagnetic field structure interacts strongly with the gravitational field of the sun and the resulting forces now dominate the movement of the ‘object’. The local gravitational field conditions and the dynamic field structure of the object itself will both contribute towards the movement and again, an analogy with ball lightning is appropriate.
These objects use their internal electrodynamics as an ‘engine’ to drag themselves through a gravitational field. Energy is dissipated in the form of light and matter but they are, nevertheless, at the centre of a larger vortex structure and will continue to accumulate energy as they move through the cosmos. If they did not continually ‘refuel’, then how are there any of them left in the universe?
How do these objects arise in the first place? They arise as spontaneous concentrations of vortex ‘energy’ much the same way that a local vortex may form in a flowing river from the spontaneous confluence of global currents.
Very likely many unidentified aerial phenomena are of this nature and will exhibit complex behaviour in the vortex wake of an aeroplane.
The Michelson Morley experiment
In the Michelson Morley experiment, two perpendicular beams of light were found to travel at the same speed despite the rotation of the Earth and its orbit around the sun. This result is consistent with the idea that the gravitational field at the surface of the Earth is not only inertially stationary with respect to the Earth but also forms a locally isotropic reference field for electromagnetic propagation.
This isn’t too far fetched. A gravitational field is hypothesised to be essentially electromagnetic in nature and photons are some sort of propagating electromagnetic field. The gravitational field therefore acts as a sort of carrier wave for the photons which adjust their speed according to the local environment.
If this is true then gravitational lensing effects are to be expected and these are indeed observed. The gravity in these effects is not acting as an inertial field upon ‘mass’ but as an electromagnetic ‘medium’ which determines the speed of propagation of the photons.
The Lense-Thirring effect
The Lense-Thirring effect is usually described in terms of general relativistic ‘frame dragging’ where a rotating body such as the Earth will ‘drag’ some space-time around with it (how?), thereby affecting the movement of objects and the propagation of light.
This can obviously be reformulated in terms of a pure vortex structure where both Earth and its inertial (gravitational) field rotate as a single body and give us the effects described. In terms of Newtonian or Einsteinian physics, the Earth has angular momentum because of its rotation and this is no doubt the instigator of the dragging. However but the frame of reference with respect to which the rotation is defined is never specified and so we ought not to be assuming that it exists.
We are not therefore able to say with any certainty that it is the frame that is being ‘dragged’, but only that the inertial field and surface movement are continuous with each other. The two move as a whole and it is quite wrong to attribute cause to one or the other when there is no need to do so and no evidence for such a phenomenon.
Summary
An alternative way of thinking about gravity has been described, first in layman’s language and derived from simple everyday observations and experience.
Next, a hypothesis for a gravitational field based upon an electromagnetic field has been shown to be consistent with the theory and to provide additional insights.
Thirdly, multiple known ‘anomalies’ which are incompatible with classical theory are given plausible explanations with respect to this new theory.
The idea of Coriolis forces at the planet’s surface is contested and the evidence from pendulum experiments found to be insufficient to prove anything either way.
The local gravitational field has horizontal components as well as radial and forms a defining frame of reference for the local movement of matter and indeed the propagation of light.
The formulation of gravity as a ‘force’ that acts upon the gravitational mass of an object is not supported by experimental observation and leads to theoretical absurdities. The ideas of force, mass, acceleration and even ‘movement’ are ill-defined, vague and not experimentally verifiable.
This post points out the anomalies, the redundancy of the concept of gravitational mass and the inadequacy of Newtonian theory even as a practical measurement system. An alternative way of looking at gravity is proposed which is intuitively superior, theoretically consistent, computationally identical to Newton’s theory, eliminates superfluous variables and provides for a definition of ‘movement’ (and hence ‘acceleration’) as being relative to the local gravitational field.
The narrative
The accepted mechanism of Newtonian gravity is that all objects possess an intrinsic property called ‘gravitational mass’ and that the Earth’s gravity acts upon that mass to produce a ‘force’ which pulls the object downwards. The more mass, the greater the force, which means that one object having twice the mass of another will experience twice the downward force. This downward force results in an acceleration of the object towards the Earth.
All objects fall with the same acceleration
There seems to be experimental evidence that all objects released above the Earth’s surface will fall to the ground with the same acceleration regardless of their presumed mass and that any difference in their speeds is down to air resistance only. Wikipedia
Since all objects in these experiments behave identically regardless of their (gravitational) mass, we cannot deduce anything at all concerning the mass of an object by observing the acceleration of that object in a gravitational field.
We cannot empirically verify the relationship between gravitational mass and downward acceleration because there is no measurable relationship.
This is unarguable.
Theoretical concerns and ‘inertial mass’
Newtonian theory now suggests that there exists another type of mass, an ‘inertial’ mass which ‘resists’ the hypothetical downward force from gravity in exact proportion to such a force. This is the explanation as to why all objects fall with the same acceleration despite having different masses; the inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same and so they both cancel each other out: NASA
From NASA: “(The theoretical) mass of the object does not affect the motion“
Mass is irrelevant according to both theory and experiment
So according to theory, the acceleration is constant and independent of mass. Moreover, according to experimental findings, the acceleration is constant and hence independent of mass.
We therefore have a theory of gravitational mass that has not been verified by experiment and where such experimental verification is actually ruled out by the theory itself!
Therefore, there is not and cannot be, any meaningful discussion of the effects of something called ‘gravitational mass’, because there are no such directly observable effects and nor can such effects be inferred from theory.
Gravitational mass cannot be said to ‘exist’ in any meaningful sense of the word and it follows that the gravitational ‘force’ that is said to be associated with it cannot be said to exist in any meaningful sense of the word.
The downwards acceleration cannot be said to be caused by a ‘force’ and cannot be said to be connected to such a thing as gravitational mass.
The uselessness of Newton’s second law in this respect
The NASA paper gives Newton’s second law of motion as somehow describing the motion of a free falling object:
force = mass x acceleration
This looks more like a definition of something called a ‘force’ than an equation telling us how an object moves, but we can rearrange it to look like this:
acceleration = force / mass
But the NASA paper concludes: “The mass, size, and shape of the object are not a factor in describing the motion of the object“.
We have a nice looking equation, but what use is it? In order to calculate the acceleration we need first to know both the force and the mass. However:
The mass cannot be determined empirically (see above)
There is no way to directly measure the ‘force’ on a free falling object
The acceleration has been empirically determined to be the same for each object
The Newtonian system is formulated around the idea of mass and force as fundamentals and wants to use these as a basis from which to try to calculate secondary quantities such as acceleration. The force and mass are assumed to be the ’cause’ of the acceleration.
However, the only quantity here that is directly measurable is that of acceleration and so why not take this as a fundamental of the system and derive the other quantities from it? The problem is that the acceleration is constant, which means that if this is the only thing that we can measure then there is no chance of deducing anything at all concerning the other quantities and no way to verify Newton’s laws as applying to falling objects.
The ambiguities of Newton’s first law
Newton’s first law from Wikipedia: “A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless it is acted upon by a force.”
This is where the problem lies.
It is simply decreed without justification or precise definitions that if a body is accelerating, then there must be a force acting upon that body. A free falling object is therefore assumed to have a force acting upon it and so even though no force is felt and no force is measurable, a force must be conjured from thin air; the result is the ‘gravitational force’.
Moreover, what does it mean to say that a body ‘remains at rest’? At rest with respect to what exactly? Any object at the Earths surface is said to be rotating with the Earth at thousands of miles per hour and is moving through space at even greater speeds. No object that is observed to be at rest with respect to the Earth’s surface can be honestly said to be ‘at rest’ and so what does the term mean? What is meant by ‘motion in a straight line’ under these circumstances?
What is ‘position’?
There seems to be an implicit assumption that the physical world is superimposed upon some Cartesian grid which serves as a reference frame for position and hence velocity and acceleration, but no such construct has been shown to exist or to be empirically measurable and therefore deserves no place in a theoretical model of the physical world.
Other theoreticians imagine that ‘position’ can somehow be measured with respect to the distant stars and galaxies, but at the same time say that these do not have fixed position and are in fact moving away from us at ever increasing speeds.
Consider what happens when an object is ‘dropped’ in a free falling space station, it doesn’t move with respect to the observer and so cannot be seen to have any forces acting upon it. Advocates of Newton will say that it does have forces upon it and that these are causing it to accelerate towards the Earth. However, the astronauts will not feel any forces upon themselves, cannot measure such forces, cannot directly measure their own acceleration, will not be able to relate any movement (there is no observed movement) of the object to the mass (mass is unmeasurable) of the object.
The astronauts will therefore not observe, and cannot measure any force upon the object. We have a ‘measurement system’ where literally none of the required variables can actually be measured.
A system of measurement?
Newtonian gravity as a description of physical reality seems totally inadequate, but what about regarding it merely as a System of Measurement, i.e. a system of well defined measurement techniques and equations to be used to solve practical engineering problems?
Wikipedia defines a System of Measurement thus: “A system of units of measurement, also known as a system of units or system of measurement, is a collection of units of measurement and rules relating them to each other. Systems of historically been important, regulated and defined for the purposes of science and commerce.”
This sounds like a good idea but the problem with the theory of gravity in this regard is that the fundamental ‘measurable’ of the system is the acceleration of the object and not the mass or force. In fact, both the mass and force are shown above to be unmeasurable and irrelevant to the equation of motion.
The acceleration is not just the fundamental measurable of the system, but the only measurable of the system. An equation of motion in a uniform gravitational field reduces to:
acceleration = g (a constant)
No masses or forces are needed here.
If the gravitational field is variable, the the equation remains the same but with a variable value for ‘g’. Moreover, the value for ‘g’ will be determined by first measuring the acceleration of a free-falling object and inferring ‘g’ from the acceleration and not the other way around.
As far as our system of measurement goes, we only need acceleration as a measurable, with both mass and force being secondary (derived/imaginary) quantities.
An argument for the irrelevance of mass
I forget where this idea comes from:
Consider two apples of equal weight falling towards the ground. They fall at the same acceleration. Move them closer together so that they touch and nothing changes. Now glue them together so that they become one large object of twice the volume/weight/mass. Nothing changes and they continue to fall at the same rate; the amount of ‘matter’ present is irrelevant and the acceleration is always the same.
A field of acceleration?
The results so far suggest that the Earth is surrounded by something we might call a field of acceleration, which causes untethered objects to move towards it with a fixed acceleration.
We can think of an analogy with a river which moves objects downstream regardless of their size or weight. No floating object feels that it is being dragged and none feel a ‘force’ pulling them along. However attempts to pull an object against the stream will certainly require the application of force.
The force needed to pull an object up or down the stream is the force needed to overcome the drag produced by the water and will be the same as the force needed to pull it left or right towards a bank. To rephrase, the force is needed to change the velocity of the object relative to the local flow of the water.
We can therefore consider that the force needed to accelerate an object in a gravitational field is proportional to the attempt to move it relative to the local gravitational ‘flow’.
A gravitational field can be thought of as flowing inwards towards the Earth from space and increasing in its accelerative potential as it nears the Earth’s surface according to an inverse square law. It will ‘drag’ any object towards the Earth in accordance with the local field value of at that point.
Problems solved so far
All problems are solved already.
There is no requirement to create a fictitious quantity called ‘gravitational mass’ only to have it cancel out in the math.
The constant acceleration near the surface of the Earth is regarded as a fundamental of the physical theory and of the system of measurement. Moreover, it is in fact measurable!
Experiments performed in a space station or falling lift are now explained naturally without having to find a balance of complex forces in order to explain a floating object. All objects including the observers are in a force-free space and this is evident by the fact that objects simply float around in mid air.
Acceleration and movement are described relative to local field conditions only. There is no need for a Cartesian grid at the base of physical reality and no need to take into account the movement of distant galaxies. Objects move according to the local gravitational field and any deviation from this movement requires the application of a ‘force’ and so a modified version of Newton’s Law is easily formulated:
“A body remains at a constant speed relative to the local field, unless it is acted upon by a force.”
The phenomenon of ‘weight’ is explained by a scales having to drag or push an object upwards against the local (downward) field flow. The phenomenon of inertia is explained similarly by ‘field drag’; the object is being accelerated against the local field and a force is required. We would expect that in a space station or falling elevator, it would be equally difficult to drag objects in any direction, but it would be nice to see some verification of this.
The equality of inertial and gravitational mass implies that the field is somehow isotropic; it is as much effort to drag the object sideways as it is to drag it upwards (prevent it falling downwards). Compare with dragging an object through a river.
If a deformable float is dragged through a river, it deforms, whereas if it is simply allowed to float downstream, it maintains its form. Similarly, if a balloon full of water is allowed to fall freely in a gravitational field, it maintains its shape, but attempts to accelerate it against the field flow by hanging it from a string or pulling it along a friction-free surface, will cause visible deformation.
We feel heavy because every part of us struggles to move upwards against the constant downward acceleration of gravity. Astronauts in space, however, are moving with the local field flow and hence feel no weight; they are weightless.
An overall vortex structure
The field can be thought of as having an overall spherical vortex structure which intensifies towards the Earth according to the familiar inverse square law. Imagine water flowing down a sink hole to get a picture. The intensity of the field is proportional to the acceleration of matter which increases towards the Earth in the same way that a twig might increase in speed as it flows towards the whirlpool centre.
The intensity of the field is at a maximum at the Earth’s surface and then reduces in a linear fashion towards the centre of the Earth to become zero at the centre. This is the same pattern as the vortex flow in a tornado. The field is rotating at the Earth’s surface at a rate of 360° per day and this ensures that objects released above the surface fall directly downwards and do not drag behind the planet’s rotation. Again, a constant acceleration is maintained relative to the field.
‘Field movement’ and ‘acceleration’ are towards the Earth but intensity diminishes towards the centre of the planet so there is no infinite accumulation of ‘field substance’ at the centre. This may seem odd, but compare with the almost universally accepted explanation of a gravitational field which is continuously ’emitted’, with no explanation of how such emission takes place or how an infinite ‘source’ of such a stuff could exist. Moreover, the field is assumed to somehow move outwards whilst pulling objects back inwards by influencing their unmeasurable (non-existent) ‘gravitational mass’.
The understanding of ‘field movement’ is by analogy with a water wave in which the wave itself appears to move in a particular direction with a particular speed, but no linear movement of the water itself is present. The wave ‘moves’ but nothing really goes anywhere and so there is no need for a ‘source’ of such a field and no infinite sink needed to dispose of the excess.
Variable day length
The length of an Earth day varies on timespans of only a few days (Wikipedia). The day length on Venus can vary by up to 20 minutes. Explanations are in the form of either external forces generated by the other planets or internal forces arising from the motion of liquid metal in the planet’s core. In neither case is it explained how such forces can act upon a whole planet at once without causing catastrophic deformation of the crust and consequent earthquakes.
The problem, then is in attributing the variable rotation speed to things called ‘forces’. Given the hypothesis outlined above, we can now consider that the variable rotation arises from variations in the behaviour Earth’s gravitational field itself and it is this field and these variations which affect the rotational speed of our planet.
Gravity pulls objects directly downwards, towards the centre of the Earth, and not at an angle determined by the rotational speed. If we forget about momentum for a moment (too Newtonian), this implies that the Earth’s gravitational field is rotating along with the surface of the Earth and is continuous with it. We could actually say that it is this gravitational field that is ‘causing’ the Earth to rotate, or maybe that the field preserves the constant rotational acceleration in the same way as it preserves the constant linear acceleration of a falling apple.
If we try to explain the variable rotation in terms of ‘forces’, we need huge forces to move the whole planet. However, an explanation in terms of an acceleration field is, by its very nature, independent of the mass of the planet and arises simply from the dynamics of vortex flow. To get a visual picture, watch some eddies in a stream and observe how their local activity fluctuates slightly in response to both the proximity of other eddies and global changes in the flow as a whole.
In classical physics, gravity, energy and matter are all separate entities and the theory of physics is all about describing how these entities somehow affect each other in a meaningful way. In the vortex physics of Konstatin Meyl, however, even electrons and other fundamental particles are formulated as simple field vortices with energy, matter and mass being emergent properties of the underlying field, the same way that a water vortex is not a separate entity of itself, but a manifestation of the underlying properties of water.
The Earth’s gravitational field, then, spirals inwards from the cosmos and at the Earths surface, fine grained structure appears which is interpreted as ‘matter’. This matter is not separate from the field but ‘is’ the field and the rotation of the Earth is not ’caused by’ the field but is synonymous with it. The persistence of rotation arises from the properties of the field and is formulated as ‘angular momentum’ in classical mechanics.
What is ‘momentum’?
The accelerates objects downwards towards the Earth’s surface because the ‘field movement’ or accelerational component of the field is at right angles to the Earth’s surface and moves along with it. The horizontal component of such a field is zero with respect to the Earth’s surface.
A thrown object will maintain a constant speed relative to the Earth’s surface will therefore maintain a constant horizontal speed and this is interpreted as momentum in classical mechanics. Momentum, mass and inertia are therefore not intrinsic properties of a moving mass but illusions created by the interaction between the ambient gravitational field and the field structure of the object itself.
No Cartesian grid?
There is no underlying Cartesian grid to physical reality; all movement and acceleration are with reference to the local field conditions. There is no need to hypothesise some independent entity called ‘space’ and no need to hypothesise any absolute metrics of distance or even time as all of these are not fundamentals of reality but measurement artefacts that are dependent upon both local field conditions and the precise mechanism of measurement.
‘Distance’ is the length of a ruler, a physical object. Such a length will vary according to ambient field strength (Tamarack mines experiment) and so the distance metric will necessarily vary. The overwhelming desire for an invariant form of ‘length’ in the form of an invisible entity called ‘space’ or even ‘aether’ has caused physicists to assume the existence of such a thing with no proof and to the detriment of scientific progress.
Mach’s principle
How does an object ‘know’ when it is rotating? What is its frame of reference and how do centrifugal forces arise?
The frame of reference is the ambient gravitational field and acceleration is relative to this field as in all cases. The illusion of centrifugal force arises from movement against the local gravitational flow, just as with a falling object.
Gravity as an electromagnetic field
The idea that gravity is in fact an electromagnetic field has been floated by several people including proponents of the Electric Universe model and German physicist Konstantin Meyl.
Meyl gives a modified version of Maxwell’s equations to describe the field as the cumulative average of all of the magnetic dipoles of all of the fundamental particles which constitute the body of the Earth and any object within its ambit. Calculations are given in his book “Scalar Waves: A first Tesla physics textbook for engineers” which give quantitative support to this hypothesis.
What is interesting is that descriptions from Meyl based upon a theory at the atomic level, seem entirely consistent with the model described presented above. The laws of physics are the same at all scales of reality and so careful interpretations of macro phenomena can lead to valid hypotheses concerning reality at the atomic level.
A brief note on causality
Newton’s first law: “A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless it is acted upon by a force.”
Note the implication here of causality; a force is causing a body to change its customary motion and if a body is changing its motion then there must be a force acting upon it.
How do we test this? How do we quantify the forces and accelerations?
Newton’s second law in mathematical notation:
force = mass x acceleration or acceleration = force / mass
Note the lack of any sort of causality. We just have mathematical equality in equations where manipulation is according to the laws of mathematics and not the laws of causation. The equations can be reversed left to right and divided either side and the ‘meaning’ remains the same.
There is no symbol for ’causes’ in classical physics, but the equations are always interpreted as somehow encapsulating causality. We therefore have a theoretical framework that is incapable of expressing one of the main ideas of its own inception.
This inevitably leads to confusion. How can we ever prove that it is a force which is causing the motion as opposed to the acceleration of a mass which is causing an apparent force? If a force and acceleration are always co-present then in what sense can one said to be ‘causing’ the other?’. If we can get by with a mathematical framework that does not include the idea of causation, then why did we need such an idea in the first place?
Newton has chosen to essentially invent the concept of a force as being somehow ‘causative’ (of a change in movement) in the Universe but he could just as well have decided that ‘acceleration’ was a fundamental property of objects near a mass and that such an acceleration, if opposed, would lead to a measurable force. The mathematical theoretical framework, containing no concept of causality, cannot possibly refute this idea and so we are completely justified in conceiving of a universe where ‘acceleration’ is primal and (inertial) ‘forces’ are a secondary epiphenomenon.
Summary
The idea of Newtonian gravity as arising from a ‘force’ exerted upon a gravitational mass has been shown to be nothing more than an intellectual conjuring trick, with the mass itself acting as the MacGuffin, a beguiling distraction which has nothing to do with the mechanics of the trick itself and is, in this case, not measurable, not observable and not computationally relevant.
A new way of thinking about a gravitational field has been described which:
Eliminates the anomalies of the Newtonian system
Has no surplus variables
Has no theoretically unmeasurable quantities
Is computationally identical to Newton’s system
.. and is therefore consistent with existing experimental results
Is less confusing to think about
Is consistent with the idea of gravity as an electromagnetic field
Is consistent with the bottom-up theory of Meyl
Is consistent with the thought experiments of Einstein
Relies upon local field conditions only
Requires no imaginary Cartesian grid
Defines ‘movement’ relative to the local field
Has been derived from observations at the macro scale
This post suggests an overall toroidal topology for the universe and tries to introduce a most important idea which is that the physical measure of distance is dependent upon (gravitational) field strength (Boscovich, Meyl) and is therefore a function of whereabouts the measurement is made in the universe.
The overall topology considered is that of a torus (below) and the behaviour is that of a continually flowing electromagnetic field as described by Konstantin Meyl. The flow is according to the laws of electromagnetism and itself takes the form of a dynamic vortex structure.
Electromagnetic field movement is continuous and therefore takes on the form of a torus as being the only structure capable of sustaining such a flow. Any other attempt at a continuous flowing vector field ends up having a discontinuity somewhere; see the Hairy Ball Theorem of topology: Wikipedia
The universe consists solely of a flowing electromagnetic field which determines the topology and since the field naturally forms a torus, the depiction of the universe as a torus is justified from this consideration alone.
There is only the Field
There is a strong temptation to imagine an electromagnetic field taking on a toroidal shape embedded within a Cartesian grid system which determines distance and angles, but the task here is to consider that it is the field itself that determines both topology and metric.
The field is not embedded in anything at all; there is no distance metric as separate from that which is physically measured, there is no such thing as ‘space’ that is separate from the field and no such thing as ’empty’ space.
All that is measurable is an electromagnetic field and anything that is not part of such a field is not part of the measurable universe and therefore cannot be said to ‘exist’ in any meaningful way.
The idea of a separate ‘ideal’ universe with nice tidy geometry is just a fantasy.
The electromagnetic field is the entirety of the universe and takes on a toroidal form and therefore the universe is toroidal in overall topology, i.e. the shape of the universe is determined by its contents and is not independent of them.
Physical ‘distance’
If we are not embedded in a Cartesian grid system then how is distance defined?
There is surely only one option; we define it from the physical matter of the universe as this is all that is available to us.
Construct some sort of yardstick and declare it to be one Cosmic Unit (CU) long. Imagine it to be the width of one of the grid squares in the above image and try to think what happens as it is moved around the universe.
Field strength is inversely proportional to the size of the square, with smaller squares having greater field strength. Length is determined by field strength with a stronger field compressing distance accordingly and as a natural consequence, ‘shrinking’ the yardstick to maintain proportion with the grid squares.
As our measurement instrument is moved towards the centre of the torus, the atoms are compressed and the stick physically shrinks, whereas if it moves outwards towards the periphery, then it and all the surrounding physical matter will expand.
To reiterate: all we have as a measurement tool is our physical-matter yardstick. This is our fundamental reference and any idea that it is somehow measuring something else more absolute called ‘length’ is just a hallucination.
All we have available in physics is our observations of physical events, and any relation to an underlying geometric model is mere inference. The theory of physics should start with observations and not with an assumed Cartesian framework with an already existing metric and 3-d geometry.
Is the universe expanding?
Now we are an observer within a toroidal universe and are looking around trying to make sense of things. Some parts of the universe seem to be expanding relative to us and even moving away from us whilst others appear to be contracting or spiralling inwards.
However, if we move to the periphery, where things seem to be expanding, then we will ourselves, expand with the toroidal geometry and find that our home planet is now shrinking relative to us even though we thought it to be constant in size when we were living there.
Moreover, in our expanded state, we find ourselves spiralling inwards much to our surprise and realise that the apparent expansion of the universe as seen from Earth was merely an illusion owing to the fact that our Earthly system is now seemingly shrinking and moving away from the outer reaches of space. This made it seem to us at the time that the universe was actually expanding away from us.
Parts of the universe are therefore expanding relative to us and others are shrinking, but the inhabitants of those parts are unaware of this and presumably imagine themselves to be somewhere near the centre and in an absolute frame of reference.
So is the universe expanding?
Relative to what? There is no absolute measure of distance apart from a yardstick which adapts its size to local conditions and within the universe itself, no perceivable ‘edge’ or defined outer boundary and so the question really doesn’t make much sense.
But .. geometry?
In the diagram below, the triangle on the left has equal sides and equal angles. The sides are each 3 Cosmic Units long as measured with one CU rulers (shown).
The triangle on the right has its base in an area of increased (gravitational) field strength (maybe from a local sun) and so the metre rulers have shrunk. This means that it still measures 3x3x3 CU, but the angles have changed.
Local distances are determined by field strength which leads to a modified geometry. So geometry itself is determined by field conditions and is no longer ‘absolute’.
This is important when calculating the distance to other stars and galaxies. Cosmologists assume some an invariant Euclidean geometry to the universe but this doesn’t hold here and the stars may be much ‘nearer’ than we think.
As a spaceship exits our solar system, the field strength diminishes and the ship expands accordingly to a great degree. Vast ‘distances’ are covered in a very small time.
Platonic forms
Anyone wants to argue that metre rulers are always a metre long needs to think how to prove this. What is your control? What do you measure a metre against if not some other local physical object or waveform?
The whole idea of an abstract and invariant metric is unprovable. Distances are determined by the size of physical objects and these vary according to field strength .
Field strength varies slightly everywhere and as a consequence there is no such thing as a perfect circle or square anywhere in the universe, no such thing as a Platonic form in actual reality or even the expression of such.
Constants such as Pi exist only in an imaginary realm of perfect geometry.
Physical (real) geometry is determined by the laws of field physics and if something looks a bit like a cube it is because of the local laws of physics and not because of the laws of mathematics. The (approximate) cube is a perfect expression of the field equations and not an imperfect expression of a Platonic form.
Black holes
Take a look again at the overall topology and consider that within this structure lie smaller more local structures which are interpreted as stars, galaxies and black holes.
Now depending where you are on the torus you may see half the galaxy heading towards the central singularity and infer a great force emanating from the core and sucking everything in, or you may see a great outrush of matter pouring from an assumed ‘white hole’.
None of these assumptions are any good here and all that is happening is that matter is moving in an inevitable path as determined by the dynamic topology. Matter does not ‘collapse’ in a black hole but merely shrinks accordingly and will expand again when out comes out the other side.
Gravity
Such behaviour near a planet or star gives rise to the phenomenon known as gravity, which again is assumed to somehow ’emanate’ from the star and suck things towards it. Nobody has seen gravity emanate however and so it is permissible to think of it as an inward spiralling of the field geometry.
This isn’t too outrageous a statement and is comparable to Einstein’s bendy space idea except here we have no need for a separation between space and matter and all is a pleasing unity.
Einstein’s spacetime
“Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.” – John Archibald Wheeler
Here we have a superfluity of ‘stuffs’ that is common in mainstream physics. How do spacetime and matter communicate with each other in such a fashion and where are the laws governing such an interaction? How is it proved that spacetime and matter are really separate entities? What are the innate properties of ‘spacetime’ that allow it to be manipulated in such a way and how does it ‘move’ matter?
More pertinently we can ask: “What does it mean that space is ‘curved’ and with respect to what exactly?” The whole idea of ‘curvature’ seems to assume the existence of some sort of Cartesian reference grid as separate from the curved space.
Progress has not been made and all that has happened is that the conceptually difficult part has been moved from one place to another in the hope that nobody will notice.
If matter and geometry are so closely linked, we can consider that they are really both manifestations of some other underlying phenomenon and that such a phenomenon is now seen to be an electromagnetic vortex field.
Gravitational lensing
The phenomenon of light bending its way past a massive body now needs almost no explanation.
The gravitational field of a star is no longer to be regarded as a force or even a distortion in spacetime but simply the centre of a field vortex.
The field strength closer to a star will be greater than the strength slightly further away and so lengths ‘increase’ further away from the star. A photon is a finite size in vortex physics and so contracts nearer the star and expands further away. Translation: it follows a curved path.
Space is not bent as there is no such thing as space to be bent, only a toroidal field creating a toroidal geometry.
Earth-sun orbital anomaly
The Earth is said to orbit the sun but the position of the sun is not fixed, being displaced by a distance of over a million kilometres by the gravitational fields of the Earth and other planets. Despite this, the gravitational pull on the Earth from the sun seems to be always towards the sun at the present and never where it was a few minutes ago. (Van Flandern)
Some have interpreted this as the gravitational field from the sun travelling at many time the speed of light in order to reach the Earth in time but nobody has seen a gravitational field ‘travel’ or ‘radiate’ from the sun and in any case better explanations are now available.
There is no unlimited gravity that emanates from the sun but instead the sun and planets move in a coordinated fashion according to an ever changing vortex geometry and as such it cannot be considered that the sun is ‘causal’ in moving the planets or that Saturn is ‘causal’ in moving the sun.
The sun is positioned at the centre of the most powerful vortex and it is this vortex that has the most influence on the solar system as a whole, thereby creating many correlations between the movements of the planets and the position of the sun. However, this in no way implies that the sun itself is the origin of such movements.
The whole arrangement moves as a whole and according to the laws of vortex physics. The sun is moved by the vortex as is Saturn and the Earth itself and any perceived influence of one body directly upon another is merely an illusion.
In addition to this mechanism, we now should concede that photons are travelling from the sun within a geometric vortex and will move accordingly. The idea that light always travels in a straight line through space is now meaningless as there is no such thing as Euclidean space and therefore no such thing as a straight line.
Instead, we have photons moving through a vortex system and whatever location of origin, will impact the Earth in a direction determined by the vagaries of their whole path taken from the sun through the intervening vortex field.
If you want to try and guess their origin from the direction they approach Earth, then .. “Good luck!”. This is like trying to locate the source of a river by standing at the estuary.
The mechanism
How does all ‘matter’ shrink in a strong gravitational field?
In Meyl’s vortex physics, all matter is made from an agglomeration of electrons and an electron is just a stable field vortex with electrical spin and a magnetic dipole. Put such a thing inside a magneto-gravitational field and the radius of the spin reduces so the radius of the electron reduces and all matter then shrinks.
Evidence?
Tamarack mines experiment A long piece of wire was dropped down a mine shaft and it was found to be shrunk by a significant amount, the implication being that it is the increase in strength of the magnetic component of the Earth’s gravitational field that is responsible.
Hafele – Keating experiment Clocks in aeroplanes run at different rates depending upon whether they are travelling East to West or West to East.
The origins
This scheme makes the idea of a Big Bang radiating all the energy and matter in the universe both unlikely and unnecessary.
We don’t know how things ‘started’ or even if there was a ‘start’, but if the general movement is from periphery to centre, opposite to conventional thinking, then it would make sense to think about the origins in a similar manner.
Field ‘energy’ originates as a vortex somehow and immediately starts to spiral inwards. The energy density increases and smaller vortices arise near the centre which will form smaller and smaller vortices in a fractal pattern.
These smaller vortices form galaxies, stars and single atoms that order, with the smaller structures arising from the larger and not the other way around.
The smallest vortices stabilise around the size of an electron and matter has materialised from a pure electromagnetic field. The creation of matter continues throughout the lifespan of the universe an there is no upper limit on the total mass.
It may seem that the universe needs to be exceedingly large at the outset in order to contain enough energy to materialise such matter and that the sheer volume required is enough to counter the argument. This is not the case, however, as there is no objective ‘size’ to the universe at all and all subsequent ‘expansion’ can as easily thought of as being inward expansion as outward.
There is no real expansion, creation or loss, but instead an increasing complexity of vortex structure arising from the inward concentration of field movement.
A Theory of Objectivity
How on earth do we do any science when distances keep changing and we have not even a consistent way of measuring the passage of time?
Meyl has the answer which he calls his Theory of Objectivity. A transformation is made from local coordinates to global, calculation is made in this new objective framework and the answer is transformed back into local coordinates.
There are no fundamental constants and hence no fine tuning of the universe is necessary. Most fundamental constants come from the need to translate between the different ‘stuffs’ and energies of contemporary physics. Once these are reduced to a single set of equations, the problem disappears.
This never happened
The elementary particles
In the chart below, Konstantin Meyl shows the measured masses (relative to the mass of the electron) of the elementary particles and compares them with the values he has calculated from his own field equations.
The correlation is striking and cannot be coincidence.
“Scalar Waves: a first Tesla physics textbook for engineers” – Konstantin Meyl
The periodic table
In this next chart, again from Meyl, the measured radii of the elements from the periodic table are compared with values calculated from the more fundamental field equations. No other informational input is necessary.
The values show precise correspondence at the start of each new electron shell and drift apart slightly as the complexity of calculation necessitates simplification by series truncation.
“Scalar Waves: a first Tesla physics textbook for engineers” – Konstantin Meyl
Avogadro’s number
Avogadro’s Law: “Equal volumes of all gases, at the same temperature and pressure, have the same number of molecules.” – Wikipedia
Avogadro constant: “The Avogadro number is an exact number equal to the number of constituent particles in one ‘mole’ of any substance” – Wikipedia
Simplification: “The same number of molecules take up the same amount of space” (Each molecule is the same size?)
Fixed by decree: “In its 26th Conference, the BIPM adopted a different approach: effective 20 May 2019, it defined the Avogadro constant NA as the exact value 6.02214076×1023 mol−1” – Wikipedia
There is no sensible explanation for this within mainstream physics. The value of the constant cannot be calculated directly from any fundamental theory of gases and so they just decree that the number itself is a fundamental constant of physics, thereby discouraging any attempts to investigate the matter, removing the need for any proposed mechanism and obviating the need for any more measurements of the value as it is already established as a fixed element of the system!
An explanation of the constant and a derivation from Meyl
The obvious inference from measurements is that the molecules are spaced out evenly throughout the volume, being surrounded by some ‘sphere of influence’ which keeps them apart and which provides resistance to compression via repulsive forces. These forces nevertheless allow the molecules to move around (diffusion and flow) with a little resistance (friction).
The only forces worth considering here are electromagnetic in nature and so we need some sort of field structure that creates such a sphere around an atomic nucleus. The field will be some arrangement of electrically negative vortices which are attracted to the nucleus but repel other such structures.
A credible description of the gaseous state of matter
The extra energy in the gas state has caused the eight electrons of the n=2 shell of the Oxygen atom to come out of their usual concentric orbitals to form an eight-fold ring around the outside of the nucleus. The reduced field strength at this distance from the centre has caused the electrons to expand suddenly to many times their original volume.
The electrons stick together via magnetic dipole forces but repel other negatively charged elements. The electrons rotate of themselves and rotate as a ring and this represents a means of energy storage and energy transfer. A cross-sectional view from the north pole is shown but in reality the whole shape is that of a peeled orange with an overall spherical shape comprised of eight segments which are the electrons.
Whatever the original size of the molecule, the volume is now dominated by the size of the expanded electron shell and this is the same for each atom at least. Something similar must be happening with compound molecules.
Gas pressure and Avogadro laws are now explained along with the critical (as opposed to continuous) change from liquid to gas.
Gravitational constant
“About a dozen measurements of Newton’s gravitational constant, G, since 1962 have yielded values that differ by far more than their reported random plus systematic errors. We find that these values for G are oscillatory in nature, with a period of P = 5.899 +/- 0.062 year, an amplitude of (1.619 +/- 0.103) x 10^{-14} m^3 kg^{-1} s^{-2}, and mean-value crossings in 1994 and 1997.” – Anderson et. al.
So not only do measurements vary but they vary with a certain pattern which actually correlates with the varying rotational speed of the Earth:
“Of other recently reported results, to the best of our knowledge, the only measurement with the same period and phase is the Length of Day ” – ibid
Most sources will say that there is and can be no variation at all in the gravitational constant simply because it is declared as a fundamental constant of nature. Any apparent discrepancies in the value must therefore be caused by problems with the measurement method:
“However, we do not suggest that G is actually varying by this much, this quickly, but instead that something in the measurement process varies” – ibid
One possibility mentioned by Anderson et. al. is that the whole process is some how affected by the Earth’s magnetic field:
“Least unlikely, perhaps, are currents in the Earth’s fluid core that change both its moment of inertia (affecting LOD) and the circumstances in which the Earth-based experiments measure G. In this case, there might be correlations with terrestrial magnetic field measurements.” – ibid
Variations in measurements of the gravitational constant – Speake, Quinn
Gravity as an emergent effect of magnetic dipoles
Many scientists including Konstantin Meyl and adherents of the Electric Universe Model have suggested that gravity is really just an average of the electromagnetic fields arising from the constituent atoms of matter.
The field arises from the sum of the magnetic fields of a random assortment of atoms and will consequently become much stronger if the atoms are aligned and regularly spaced such as in a bar magnet.
Meyl gives arguments for the masses of the elementary particles (see above) and calibrates them with respect to the mass of an electron, obtaining very good agreement with experimental results.
So gravity is not fundamental but arising from magnetic fields, with the cumulative effect in macro sized lumps of matter dependent upon the precise arrangement of atoms and possibly the presence of other electromagnetic fields.
The mass of an electron according to Meyl is not fundamental but depends upon the speed of light.
How is the gravitational constant measured?
Good question. The papers cited above merely say that the constant has been ‘measured’ by several different teams. This gives the impression that you can buy a device to wave in the air and get a reading in both metric and imperial units if you are lucky.
This is not the case and what is measured is rotating balls or falling weights, with the gravitational constant somehow inferred from such measurements.
The only physical measurement we ever see in real life is the displacement of a visual marker on some instrument or other, whether it be the hands on a clock or glowing digits on an electronic device. Everything else is an artefact of the model.
To say that the gravitational constant is ‘measured’ is highly misleading; it is interpreted from measurements and according to a theoretical framework. Now if your theoretical framework has this value defined as ‘constant’ and it turns out to be variable then you are already in a bit of a mess.
What is ‘mass’?
There is no consistent definition of ‘mass’. It is held to be fundamental (of course!) and is described as an ‘innate’ property of matter, but the only existing definitions are contradictory and circular.
“Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementary particles, theoretically with the same amount of matter, have nonetheless different masses.” – Wikipedia
Oops! Mass is not related to the quantity of matter!
If mass is not related to the quantity of matter and we have no other definition apart from a collection of purported measurement techniques, then how can it be ‘intrinsic’?
“Mass in modern physics has multiple definitions which are conceptually distinct, but physically equivalent. Mass can be experimentally defined as a measure of the body’s inertia, meaning the resistance to acceleration (change of velocity) when a net force is applied. The object’s mass also determines the strength of its gravitational attraction to other bodies.” – ibid
But it is already established that the strength of gravitational attraction is dependent upon the gravitational constant, not just the mass.
We find that mass is defined by various measurement techniques:
Resistance to acceleration (inertia)
Strength of gravitational attraction to other bodies
Power to attract other bodies by its own gravity
These are emphatically not physically equivalent unless shown to be so by experiment and theory. Just saying it is so does not make it so.
Note that all these definitions are by measurement of something other than mass itself. The mass, which is presumed fundamental and declared ‘intrinsic’, is actually a theoretically inferred value from other (measurable) quantities.
Moreover, the strength of gravitational attraction (mass) depends upon the gravitational constant and this has been shown to vary, or at least has not been shown to be constant.
In addition to this we find that calculations of the gravitational constant itself all depend upon knowing the precise values of the masses involved. Therefore: Gravity depends upon mass and mass is defined with respect to gravity.
This is circular self-referential nonsense!
Inertia as mass
The addition of inertia as a definition of mass does not help. This just adds an extra quantity that needs defining, measuring and somehow integrating into an already shaky framework.
How can this be achieved if inertia is absolute but other forms of mass vary? What is the theoretical mechanism that describes how the inertial mass is the same as the gravitational? In what sense then are they ‘equivalent’?
Inertial mass is measured by the force needed to produce an acceleration on an object. It therefore needs an acceleration in order to be manifest and yet at the same time is said to be an ‘innate property of matter‘.
How is this conclusion reached if the mass is never measured with respect to a body at uniform speed? How do we know that the mass of such an object persists at the measured value and what does this even mean?
An analogy with dynamic friction
If this seems like sophistry, first consider the phenomenon of ‘friction’. We have a good analogy as nobody knows how it works and the property of dynamic friction is only measured in moving objects. The frictional properties of stationary objects are different to that of those in motion and both are dependent upon the interaction between the objects.
Nobody thinks that friction is an innate property of any material but varies with speed and depends upon the relationship between the two surfaces. Dynamic friction is only present when motion is involved and disappears when motion ceases. Nobody asks “Where has it gone?” because it is not assumed to be an immutable property of matter.
Lenz’s law
A magnet dropped down a copper pipe will travel much slower than if the pipe were not there according to Lenz’s law.
What has happened to all the mass? If mass is intrinsic then there is some other (magnetic) force acting upon the magnet to oppose the motion. No magnetic field was present in the copper pipe before the motion started and the field of the magnet is not sufficient by itself to produce the slowing down. The force did not exist prior to the experiment and disappeared after it ended. The new property was actually created by the experiment itself.
Again, nobody would think that this retarding force is an intrinsic property of matter, so how can they be so certain as to claim that ‘mass’ is such a property?
If, as suggested above, the gravitational force arises from the electromagnetic field interaction between the field of an object and the field of the Earth then the above considerations are pertinent. The current formulation of the mass of an object as only dependent upon the object itself, however, effectively rules out any investigation of such phenomena.
An empirical definition?
“Mass can be experimentally defined as a measure of the body’s inertia, meaning the resistance to acceleration (change of velocity) when a net force is applied. ” – Wikipedia
This is as confused as a definition can be.
If all that is measured is a resistance to acceleration then that is all that may be deduced. An ‘intrinsic property’ may not be inferred and there should be no automatic conclusion of a similar effect in different gravitational fields.
“The object’s mass (i.e. resistance to acceleration) also determines the strength of its gravitational attraction to other bodies.” How does this work exactly? How can this be deduced? Do we assume that a material with a high frictional coefficient also has the power to attract other objects? No, of course not.
We have several different measurement techniques measuring several different quantities and the claim is that they are all ultimately measuring the same thing, that they are ‘physically equivalent‘. But how can this be justified?
A measurement is just a measurement and a concept just a concept. The concept of mass is just a concept as it can never be measured directly It can be deduced only by the application of external forces and the measurement of movement followed by an interpretation made according to a specific theoretical model.
So two different results are obtained from two different measurement techniques, interpreted according to two conceptually different theoretical frameworks and are then declared to be “physically equivalent“! No. Theoretically equivalent, maybe, but ‘physically‘? No, the phrase has no meaning.
If inertia is simply owing to the quantity of matter present then it cannot possibly be related to mass, according the initial quote from Wikipedia!
Time
There appears to be no consistent definition of time as an independent physical variable.
The rate of a swinging pendulum depends upon gravity and so will change with variations in the gravitational constant and will vary according to its location on the Earth’s surface.
The rate of atomic clocks varies even with two clocks in the same building. They will run at different speeds during an eclipse and even differ according to their alignment with respect to the Earth’s magnetic field. See diagram below.
Meyl: Scalar waves..
Distance
In the Tamarack mine experiment a long piece of wire was lowered into a mine shaft and found to have shrunk considerably. See: Tamarack mines experiment The explanation from Meyl is that a horizontal component of the Earth’s magnetic field increases towards the centre of the Earth and this is responsible for shortening the wire.
The Hafele – Keating experiment showed the opposite effect when distances were measured in a plane flying at altitude; distance was stretched out instead of shrunk.
A simple measure of distance is therefore subject to interpretation and such interpretation will vary according to the model involved.
Attempts to measure distance by wavelengths of light are subject to Doppler shift and again are not direct measurements at all but interpretations filtered through some theoretical framework.
π
Surely the ratio of a circle’s radius to its circumference is a fixed and fundamental constant of the universe?
Alas, no. Pi is a constant in Euclidean geometry but the experiments above suggest that the physical world does not follow the rules.
In the field theory of Meyl, physical length is determined by field strength and so the apparent geometry of the real world is also a reflection of field strength and this is unlikely to give rise to a Euclidean geometry.
There is no proof that the physical world is super-imposed upon a Cartesian grid; all we have are some sort of physical measurements and the Mine experiment shows that our measuring tools do not follow the rules of traditional geometry if gravitational fields are involved.
If we take a long piece of string out into space and measure the radius as we go, we expect to find that the circumference of a circle orbiting the Earth is 2πr but both Meyl’s theory and the Hafele-Keating experiment suggest otherwise.
Geometry is therefore a function of field strength and this will vary continuously through space. The existence of a perfect circle or square in physical space is highly unlikely but the space in which we live is approximately Euclidean over small distances and so nobody has noticed.
Dark Matter
The invention of Dark Matter and Dark Energy with no direct evidence whatsoever of their existence is surely one of the greatest embarrassments of modern science. They have assumed this ‘stuff’ to comprise over 95% of the known universe simply because they have an incorrect model of gravity.
Konstantin Meyl proposes that in addition to gravity there is the possibility of resonant neutrino attraction between individual galaxies and stars to help resolve the matter.
We can note here that if you have no stable concept of time nor distance and have declared gravitational forces to be constant when they are measurably variable and unrelated to the amount of matter, then you are already in Big Trouble.
The speed of light
The speed of light is declared to be a fundamental constant within the framework of Einstein’s relativity. What this means is that whatever speed you manage to measure for light it must necessarily come to the same value. If it appears to be a different value then it is something else that has varied.
‘Speed’ is calculated as distance per unit time but as explained above, there is no consistent definition of either distance or time and so if the speed of light is different from its decreed value then scientists are free now to blame variations in either time or distance according to their whim.
In Rupert Sheldrake’s TED talk: “The science delusion”, he mentions that that the speed of light slowed down by about 20 km/s between 1928 and 1945 before resuming its approved value. The response of the standards authorities was to simply re-define the length of the metre in terms of the speed of light so as to correct for the difference, thereby confirming that distance is no longer a fundamental quantity of physics.
The units of the gravitational constant
The gravitational constant is equal to approximately 6.67×10−11 metres cubed per kilogram per second squared i.e. 6.67×10−11 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2
We will merely note here that not one of metres, kilograms or seconds has a stable definition and yet they are all assumed to combine together to give a constant value!
The vortex physics of Konstantin Meyl
The vortex physics of Konstantin Meyl contains a single vector differential equation with one ‘constant’ only which he calls ‘c’, by analogy with the speed of light, and which in his framework is the speed of field propagation. There are no other variables within the system with which to compare this value and so ‘c’ may be set to unity without any loss of information.
The whole of physics is described via a single equation which means there are no separate ‘stuffs’ needing adaptation or calibration to one to another and hence no fundamental constants are needed.
Moreover, since there is only one equation, there is not only no need for translation from one set of units to another, but no possibility of any extra units arising and so never any need for constants, ever; there is simply no place for them in the theoretical framework.
Fine tuning?
Nope. There are no constants and therefore nothing to fine tune.
The fine tuning argument has been used to advocate for intelligent design on the grounds that the precise values of the constants we see cannot have arisen by accident whilst atheists prefer to think that the constants are different in an infinite number of different universes, with only the single universe that we inhabit being lucky enough to have the right values.
We now see that the idea of fine-tuned constants arises from an inadequate model of physics and that all those fascinating debates are just a waste of time. Either side could have paused to think that contemporary physics is incomplete and that this is what necessitates the introduction of all these new constants.
References
“Scalar Waves: a first Tesla physics textbook for engineers” – Konstantin Meyl
The sun is the centre of a giant cosmic energy vortex. Field energy spirals inwards and condenses at the centre to produce the hydrogen ball described by astronomers. All energy is supplied from the outside and input energy equals output energy. The nuclear reactor described by mainstream science leads to too many anomalies.
Several odd but well documented characteristics of the sun need explanation:
The sun maintains a spherical shape despite rapid rotation
The hottest part of the sun is outside of the sun (coronal heating problem)
Comets can accelerate away from the sun
There is no bow wave as the sun moves through space
Solar output has been fairly constant over several billion years
The atomic composition is consistent with transmutation of elements
Hypothesis
The sun is not to be considered as a stand-alone object that is burning its own fuel and radiating the resulting energy into space, but as part of a much larger system of energy taking on the form of a vortex and with the sun at the centre as an integral part of that vortex.
Electromagnetic field energy spirals inwards towards the sun where it can materialise as matter, first as electrons and then hydrogen, with further elements produced by transmutation.
Much of the energy will be manifest as photons or other energetic particles which will then radiate outwards as ‘sunlight’. A constant supply of energy means that the sun is not getting any bigger or smaller on average, thereby providing a stable platform for life to evolve and flourish over the millennia.
Vortex physics
The diagram, taken from Konstantin Meyl’s book Vortex Physics shows the general structure of a vortex whether it be composed of water, air or an electromagnetic field. Intensity is zero at the centre, increases to a maximum at the vortex radius and thereafter drops off towards infinity.
Shown is how the velocity of, for example air in a tornado, will vary according to distance from the vortex centre. Rotational movement within the vortex radius is described by Meyl as increasing linearly as shown; this is identical to the rotation of a solid body.
Compare this with this description of the sun: “The radiative interior exhibits solid-body rotation” – Wikipedia
Cosmologists have simply missed the idea that energy can come from outside the sun and as a consequence imagine that all the complex behaviour they see around the sun comes not from local causes but from complex activity inside of the star itself. ‘Stellar dynamos’ are thought to exist which wind up some electrical energy and beam it outside of the sun:
“The geometry and width of the tachocline are thought to play an important role in models of the stellar dynamos by winding up the weaker poloidal field to create a much stronger toroidal field” – Wikipedia
Maybe, but how did these dynamos come into existence and what powers them? Each answer begs another question.
The laws of electromagnetism favour the appearance of toroidal vortex structures at all scales from that of the electron up to that of an entire galaxy and this is all the explanation that is needed to understand the general structure of the cosmos.
The Coronal Heating Problem
“The coronal heating problem in solar physics relates to the question of why the temperature of the Sun’s corona is millions of kelvins greater than the thousands of kelvins of the surface” – Wikipedia
This is simply not surprising from the point of view of vortex physics; they are describing a ‘heat vortex’. Energy is spiralling inwards from the solar system and continues to intensify until its inward movement is balanced by the outward radial ‘pressure’ of the energy from the centre.
A vortex radius is formed and is measured as a heat-energy maximum.
“The high temperatures require energy to be carried from the solar interior to the corona by non-thermal processes, because the second law of thermodynamics prevents heat from flowing directly from the solar photosphere (surface), which is at about 5800K, to the much hotter corona at about 1 to 3 MK (parts of the corona can even reach 10MK).” – Wikipedia
This is the problem then. The second law of thermodynamics is said to ‘prevent’ heat flowing from cold to hot, but everywhere in vortex systems we see precisely the opposite, i.e. an organised flow of energy or matter from low intensity to high.
Consider the huge amounts of energy present at the centre of a hurricane. The spiral activity begins many miles from the centre of the structure itself, moving slowly at first but increasing in speed as the radius of movement decreases. The wind reaches its maximum velocity at the visible vortex radius, the ‘wall’ of the hurricane.
The energy for the spiral did not ‘build up’ all of its own accord. It did not come out of nothing, it was guided inwards from the environs by the vortex structure. We are not seeing the usual radiative (dissipative) flow of energy mandated by the laws of thermodynamics but an inward moving compression of energy.
The heliosphere
The image below left is the expected shape of the sun’s heliosphere as it moves through space. The sun is imagined as a solid body that cleaves its way through a cluttered medium forming a distinctive bow wave of space debris and having a heliosphere that it not spherical but deformed by some sort of cosmic viscosity.
The image on the right shows the model derived from measurements. The heliosphere is nearly spherical without deformity and the whole moves with space instead of through it. The sun is not pushing its way through the interstellar medium but flowing along with it or even pulled by it.
This is because the whole vortex system is not separate from the interstellar medium but instead arises from movements within it it. It is one and the same thing as space itself and moves in complete harmony with it.
The heliosphere is not maintained by the sun but the sun by the heliosphere and the heliosphere by its own wider environment.
The solar constant is a measure of the power output of the sun, the irradiance. Naively one might expect that since the sun was created billions of years ago and has been burning up ever since, that the irradiance would diminish over time. However:
” The solar constant is an average of a varying value. In the past 400 years it has varied less than 0.2 percent. Billions of years ago, it was significantly lower.” – Wikipedia
So the irradiance is increasing over time. This is open to interpretation but is certainly not inconsistent with the idea that the sun is receiving energy from the cosmos and then radiating it back out to the solar system.
‘Oumuamua
‘Oumuamua is an odd comet-like object that accelerated towards the sun, looped around it and then accelerated away again. In other words its orbit was not entirely governed by conventional gravitational laws. Hypotheses have been put forward as to how this might happen but the matter is far from settled:
“Further, it exhibited non‑gravitational acceleration, potentially due to outgassing or a push from solar radiation pressure.” – Wikipedia
Comets are said to have an exceptionally low density of about half a gram per cubic centimetre. One possibility then is that comets are largely electrical phenomena whose movements are governed more by the ambient electromagnetic field than the ‘gravitational’.
An electrical vortex itself moving in the strong vortex field near the sun is capable of quite complex behaviour. It is quite conceivable that such an entity could interact with the ambient field in such a way as to accelerate away from the sun, against the gravitational gradient. It is even conceivable that it could absorb energy from such a field in order to power itself and even to transmute some of that energy to matter and thus expand in size.
Maintenance of spherical aspect
“The Sun is a near-perfect sphere with an oblateness estimated at 9 millionths, which means that its polar diameter differs from its equatorial diameter by only 10 kilometres” – Wikipedia
Wow! This is not just a spinning mass of gas held in place by gravity. It just isn’t. The sun is largely an electrical phenomenon and is shaped by electromagnetic forces.
If the sun were a spinning mass of hydrogen then we would expect to see a large swelling at the equator much as is the case in the rather solid Earth and other planets.
What we are seeing is the small centre of a much larger vortex structure; the heliosphere. Electromagnetic field activity spirals inwards and organises itself into a turbulent sphere of field energy.
Energy is concentrated at the centre and it is here that we can expect some of that energy to materialise as electrons or hydrogen ions. Maybe the small bulge at the equator is indicative of the amount of matter that is created; in other words the ‘mass’ of the sun.
Transmutation of elements
Wikipedia gives the elemental composition of the sun as follows:
Hydrogen: 73.46%
Helium: 24.85%
Oxygen: 0.77%
Carbon: 0.29%
Iron: 0.16%
Neon: 0.12%
Nitrogen: 0.09%
Silicon: 0.07%
Magnesium: 0.05%
Sulphur: 0.04%
So there is an abundance of the most simplest elements and the others are largely those elements described by Louis Kervran as being capable of transmutation (even within biological systems) from the simpler ones.
The simplest interpretation then is that energy enters the Sun and the field conditions thus created are propitious for first, the materialisation into the simplest form of matter and second for the transmutation of these elements into more complex atoms.
There is therefore no need to assume a Big Bang in which all matter was created at once, rather matter is in a continual cycle of creation and transmutation, sometimes to other elements and sometimes back to photons to be radiated outwards into the solar system as light.
The rotation rate of the Earth is not constant and sometimes varies over the course of a day:
“Not only the minimums of the Earth’s rotation show connections with the solar activity period, but also, as Currie (1973) showed, the rotation rate of the Earth actually correlates with the solar activity!” – Attila Grandpierre
Grandpierre notes that sometimes the change in solar activity comes first and at others it is the Earth’s variations that seem to initiate activity in the sun!
“Trying to understand what do these coincidences mean, it is important to note, that within the third time-range of coincidences in 1969-1971, at first the Earth produced the jump in 1969 (Le Mouel, Gire, Madden, 1985), and the Sun followed it only afterwards, in late 1971! In a time-linear causal sequence this circumstance would involve that the Earth was more sensitive to the global conditions of solar system at that time, and that the core changes of the Earth induced changes in the solar core! This circumstance points to a mutuality in the core-core interactions, since it seems to be clear that at other occasions the Sun was the initiator of correspondence.”
To be considered though is that the initial cause of all these phenomena is a surge in activity of the solar energy field. Sun-Earth connections exist in the form of large electromagnetic filaments (Thunderbolts Project) which can accumulate energy from the cosmic field and transmit it to both Sun and Earth, making it seem that one or other of these bodies is the origin of the effect, depending upon where the effect is first observed.
Slight digression
The idea of matter and thence mass appeared quite early on in scientific thought and were followed closely by the idea of a gravitational force that emanated from the observed matter and exerted an effect upon distant masses.
So matter is considered primal in terms of causality; it is matter that gives rise to force fields and not the other way around. Things that are visible and tangible are given a special place in this ideology despite all evidence to the contrary.
This way of thinking has is not approved of either by Einstein or even Newton himself, both decrying the idea of action at a distance as not worthy of consideration. However, despite advocating field physics in the form of General Relativity, scientists still persist in thinking according to the old patterns, often whilst pretending otherwise.
Gravity
So the sun is at the centre of a cosmic (electromagnetic) field vortex which spirals inwards and gives rise to the warm shiny ‘object’ we see.
Purely geometric considerations mean that the field strength varies with the inverse square of the distance from the vortex centre, becoming stronger nearer to that centre.
Note that the inverse square law of gravity is always expressed as weakening as the distance increases which only serves to give the (erroneous) impression that the field is somehow ‘broadcast’ outwards from the massive object, that some insubstantial energy is radiating i.e. moving away from the source.
Now according to Meyl (Scalar Waves: A First Tesla Physics Handbook) a strengthening field gives rise to a contraction of matter and hence a smaller distance (rulers literally shrink) and a weakening field gives the opposite: Tamarack mines experiment. A planet orbiting the sun then will expand slightly on the night-time side and distances here are slightly longer.
The size of the Earth on its outer side then is larger in accordance with a square law and a circular orbit is therefore the default mode of movement. This has nothing to do with any sort of force acting at a distance. This is like trying to drive a car whose wheels on the left have been made slightly larger than the ones on the right. A steering wheel is not necessary to drive in a circle.
This arrangement will behave, because of the inverse square aspect, in a similar fashion to the assumed gravitational force of Newton although nothing of the sort is going on. Comets are therefore free to move according to local field conditions and are not so constrained in their paths as previously imagined. In the case of the Earth we can add some velocity and inertia to recover the elliptic orbit we are familiar with.
Superimposed upon this system are variations caused by genuine gravitational effects produced by the Earth itself and whatever ‘matter’ there is in the Sun. Attempts to calculate the mass of the sun from the perceived effects of its gravitational field are therefore fraught with risk as most of those effects are not in fact gravitational in nature.
A genuine gravitational effect does exist and is undoubtedly what we measure at the surface of the Earth, but according to the above, this is just not the same mechanism as happens with respect to the Earth moving in the field of the Sun. They have similar measurable effects and the presence of the inverse square effect gives the impression that they are the same phenomenon.
The Sun’s field is not the same as the Earth’s; it isn’t ‘gravity’!
The science of physics has a good quantitative agreement with a wide range of experimental data, but as noted by David Bohm, falls short of an even half-comprehensible description of the nature of reality.
This page lists but a few quirks, anomalies and shortfalls of contemporary physics, some of which have bothered me for years and others that have only recently become apparent. All of these are clarified by the Theory of Objectivity from Konstantin Meyl in his book: “Scalar waves: a first Tesla physics textbook”.
The kinetic theory of gases
Quantum wave function nonsense
Covalent bonding
Too many ‘stuffs’ and fundamental constants
What is ‘heat’?
What is ‘time’?
Proton radius puzzle
Avogadro’s number
Electric charge is a redundant concept
‘Mass’ and ‘energy’ are not fundamental to physics
The kinetic theory of gases
Mainstream science posits that the molecules in a gas are whizzing around all over the place and bouncing off each other and that this is responsible for the phenomena of Heat and Pressure. The vibration of specks of dust in sunlight (Brownian motion) is said to be caused by this.
Molecules are conceived as having finite size, hard boundaries and bounciness. They move around in an otherwise empty vacuum and can somehow transmute energy from infra-red radiation to kinetic energy and back again. None of this is true as usual but physicists prefer to not think about it too much.
Heat (temperature) and pressure are described as almost synonymous with speed of motion of molecules and equations from Einstein give some credence to this.
Ok, but how do molecules fly around in a liquid such as water and what about solids? Steel or quartz for example will certainly get hot but the molecules are not flying around but maintain a regular lattice structure. How is temperature then independent of pressure?
If I hold a cup of hot coffee, the molecules bounce around the liquid, make the cup molecules vibrate and then somehow convert the vibrations to infra red radiation so that the heat can be felt at a distance. The heat makes the molecules in my hand whizz around but not so much that it disrupts cellular activity.
I think this is nonsense and Konstantin Meyl and Gerald Pollack at least are in agreement with this.
This is important, as descriptions of DNA construction for example rely upon the random movement of molecules to drive the replication process and if none of this is true then they need to rethink. Similar concerns apply to the functioning of ion channels; diagrams and animations show molecules randomly hurling themselves at the channels and being selected on a statistical basis to achieve the required balance. The equations seem to work but that does not mean that the mechanism is correct.
Further reading: “The Fourth Phase of Water” – Gerald Pollack
What is heat? (Meyl)
Atoms are complicated vortex structures within electromagnetic fields and the ‘vortex radius’ is what is taken to be the size of the atom.
The vortex structure theoretically extends to infinity and so the ‘space’ between atoms is not empty but consists of an extended field structure which serves to keep atoms at a distance from each other and is the basis of ‘pressure’.
A photon of light or infra-red is a sort of linear vortex that can roll up into a spherical vortex at any time or become absorbed into an existing atomic vortex. In this way, gases, liquids and solids can absorb arbitrary amounts of energy, there is no ‘quantum’ of energy needed.
As vortices increase their energy they can expand meaning the liquid or solid may also expand owing to increased repulsive forces. This stored energy is latent heat. Heat transfer is by vortex gains and losses as field energy moves from one vortex to the next.
Vortices can ‘oscillate’, they can expand and contract rhythmically. Whole domains of the substance can vibrate in synchrony and form large areas of coherent oscillations. In gases and liquids this can give rise to Brownian motion.
This is not the same as the kinetic theory if gases where long distance movement of molecules is assumed. Vortex may account for Brownian motors if they exist but not suitable as an explanation for ion channel function or the DNA replication cartoons.
Measured temperature is ‘rate’ of heat loss and is via vortex losses. Stirring water reputedly makes it cooler which means that although there is greater energy stored, it is losing energy more slowly as the vortices somehow retain the energy on a semi-permanent basis. Again, energy is stored as a field structure and not as the kinetic energy described by mainstream physics.
Shining light into a liquid may have a similar effect if a single wavelength causes coherent oscillations on a macro scale and retains the extra energy instead of dissipating it.
High energy vortices can lose energy in the form of quanta which can unroll into photons and be measured as infra-red radiation. The point here is that matter, energy, light, vortices are all the same substance; there is no need to wonder how kinetic energy can be converted to a photon for example.
Meyl uses the term ‘heat’ to describe the amplitude of vortex oscillation and the term ‘temperature’ to refer to the frequency of oscillation. The two are quite different.
A spinning vortex can absorb a photon of a particular frequency but emit one of a different frequency (and energy), thereby acting as a transducer. This is used in biological systems according to quantum physicists.
Further reading: “Scalar waves: a first Tesla physics textbook” – Konstantin Meyl
Covalent bonding
Shown is the covalent bonding between Carbon and Hydrogen atoms to form a larger molecule. Each atom ‘shares’ an electron with the other and those electrons share a common orbit pair.
A electron is claimed to be a small particle that orbits a nucleus according to an attractive force pulling it inwards balanced by centrifugal force pushing it outwards, much like planets and gravity.
This may seem to be plausible until you try to imagine the electrons ‘orbiting’. How do they move? What keeps them to their orbits? How can an electron be in two orbits at the same time? The elephant in the room: In what way does a shared orbit constitute a ‘bond’? – How is a mutually attractive force created in this way?
A supposed explanation arises from quantum mechanics whereby an electron has no defined position, does not move around an orbit and isn’t really a particle.
An electron ‘cloud’ exists and part of it is shared with another atom but it isn’t ‘real’ and is only a distribution of probabilities until measured. But of this is so then again: How is an attractive force generated from a theoretical probability field?
The model proposed by Konstantin Meyl is much simpler, requires no shared orbits, weak atomic forces or quantum probability fields, Atoms are described by electromagnetic vortices having enclosing electron shells of spinning electric fields. The spinning field creates a magnetic dipole and atoms will stick together attracted by their dipole fields. The negatively charged electron fields will repel each other to maintain a distance between the atoms and give them a characteristic size and ‘shape’. Atomic structure: MeylThe atom
No forces are needed apart from electromagnetism and Meyl makes quantitative predictions about the size of atoms which agree with experimental evidence.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
The laws of thermodynamics are based upon the notion that atoms are a bit like billiard balls, bouncing around all over the place at random and that, left to themselves, they will eventually spread out all over the universe in a uniform ‘heat death’ with no real energy left and no possibility of organising themselves into a coherent structure.
They are, at best, hypotheses and not laws by any stretch of the imagination. They are in any case refuted by the field equations of Konstantin Meyl and by observations of actual reality.
“One of the simplest (formulations of the second law) is the Clausius statement, that heat does not spontaneously pass from a colder to a hotter body.” – Wikipedia
Meyl proposes a simple experiment whereby two metal spheres are placed near to each other, one being warm and one being hot. A parabolic mirror behind the warm sphere will focus the radiated heat towards the hotter sphere which immediately refutes the postulate. Random heat fluctuations have become directed and structured by a simple geometric arrangement of matter.
Complaints will be made that this arrangement is somehow ‘cheating’ but it seems allowed by the definitions from Wikipedia:
“Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.” – Clausius
“It is impossible for a self-acting machine, unaided by any external agency, to convey heat from one body to another at a higher temperature.” – Kelvin
Entropy
The second law is closely related to the concept of entropy as a measure of disorder which is said to increase with time, with the Universe becoming increasingly disordered and chaotic as time proceeds. If this were to be true then it would mean that if we look back in time, the Universe would appear more and more orderly, with everything perfectly arranged somehow just after the big bang and slowly deteriorating ever since.
This is contradicted by mainstream theory that sees galaxies and stars constructed out of almost nothing and life emerging from ‘soup’. Living things become more complex whilst the orbits of the planets synchronise via the phenomenon of resonance.
The Laws of Thermodynamics seem reasonable according to the billiard ball model so the observations we make should lead us to question that model. The Newtonian view of the Universe is essentially one of a flat featureless space inhabited by rather dull objects whose main interaction is via the radial forces of gravity. It is hard to imagine matter organising itself under these circumstances.
So the model is wrong and the theories of Meyl should be considered. Space is filled with a living and energetic field which has ‘movement’ built into it. Basic matter consists of forces that are ‘moving’, ‘spinning’ and are long range attractive but short range repulsive. Magnetic type forces and electrical forces act at right angles to each other and the natural and inevitable result is the formation of complex vortex structures with built in ‘energy’.
With this being the fundamental fabric of Reality there is little chance of anything fizzling out to any sort of heat death, the main characteristics are going to be continual cycles of movement, change, creation, organisation and reorganisation.
All movement is controlled by the Laws of Physics and there is no ‘randomness’ here, no true ‘disorder’.
Scientists tried measuring the radius of the proton but get a different answer depending upon which element or isotope they use as the source of the protons. One obvious inference is that the proton is a different size within each element.
Konstantin Meyl has a model of an atom which is a bit like a bunch of nested soap bubbles (electron shells). The outer bubble is always the same size (fixed by the speed of light) and everything else squashes up to fit within the nesting arrangement. So in particular, a proton will shrink according to the number of electron shells or the type of particle eg muon) that sits in there adjacent to it.
Avogadro’s law
Avogadro’s law states that “equal volumes of all gases, at the same temperature and pressure, have the same number of molecules.”
Another way of writing this is “The same number of molecules of each gas has the same volume”. Or, setting the number of molecules (atoms) to one: “All atoms are the same size”.
So if the size of an atom is the radius of the outer electron shell, then everything else must be squashed up inside. This is consistent with the atomic model of Konstantin Meyl: Atomic structure: Meyl
The idea of electrical charge is surplus to requirements as far as the field physics of Konstantin Meyl is concerned. It is only a theoretical ‘convenience’ in classical physics and even there is an unnecessary distraction as to what is actually happening.
Objects possessing an electrical charge are said to attract or repel other charged objects by virtue of a static electrical field emanating from that charge which in turn affects the charge on the other objects. The charges are attracted and somehow drag their host ‘matter’ along with them. See: Static electricity
We know that charge exists by the field it creates and we can measure the strength of that field by the effect it has on other charges. So we don’t measure the charge directly, only via the field it has ‘created’. We don’t ever see the charge or the creation of the field.
The effect of one charged particle on another is only ever observed when the particles are a distance apart so that the two charges never interact with each other directly and always use a field to somehow transmit the effect over a distance.
A particle, charged or otherwise is never really acting in accordance with another distant object but only as a consequence of local field conditions. Moreover, the substance of the ‘object’ itself does not seem to be of any relevance to any of these interactions with ‘matter’ itself seeming to exist merely as a vehicle for ‘charge,’ with ‘charge’ acting as a sort of intermediary to justify the presence of a field.
This is all starting to sound very circular and we should be starting to think that if charge and matter don’t really do anything within our theoretical framework then they shouldn’t really be there at all and all that is required is some rules for an electromagnetic field theory.
The whole thing is sounding like ‘sticky-plaster’ science whereby, one by one, concepts have been added to an existing framework as and when required, or as is fashionable.
How did this come about?
‘Charge’, as a ‘property’ of the familiar ‘matter’ was sufficiently ‘matter-like’ for the existing materialists to stomach and certainly something is needed to explain the observed effects. This new ‘property’ of matter (charge) seems to have effects at remote distances so it must somehow be responsible for creating a force-field.
Better to have ditched the idea of ‘matter’ and gone straight for a field theory.
Electrical torsion fields stabilise into spherical vortices which have the impression of solidity via their stability and propensity to bounce off each other owing to the repulsive forces generated by a field-negative vortex radius.
Mass
The concept of ‘mass’ is similarly redundant and attempts to define it just result in a confused mess. Newtonian physics has three types of mass which are all the same somehow, whilst relativity tries to define mass as the degree to which space is bent by an object but also at the same time as the degree to which an object will accelerate when placed in space that was bent by the some other object.
Mass is not coincident with matter but a property of it somehow in Newtonian physics and in relativity it is some complex interaction between objects and ‘space’ which is itself somewhat undefined.
Mass cannot be measured directly but can only be calculated from it’s imagined gravitational effect on other masses or from the gravitational effects exerted upon it by those other masses.
Mass is therefore a theoretical construct derived from observations and measurements made concerning other quantities. The concept of a ‘field’ is necessary to explain the behaviour of objects in space but not mass or charge.
The idea that there is something that is radiating gravity out into space is fanciful nonsense and at odds with observations. See: The nature of gravityNewton’s gravity
Energy
The idea of energy is even more confused. There are units to quantify it but, as with charge and mass, there is no way of measuring it directly and it must be calculated from other quantities.
The principle of conservation of energy lies at the heart of physics for many: “The law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant; it is said to be conserved over time” – Wikipedia
But according to other physicists there is no such thing as ‘absolute’ energy and nor is it conserved: [video].
To see this in a simple way, imagine you are out in space and I fly past in a spaceship. I am travelling fast relative to you and so have great kinetic energy. Now imagine you turn on your rocket engines and catch up with me We are now stationary relative to each other, stationary relative to local ‘space’ and therefore have no kinetic energy – so where did the energy go to?
Something which has no absolute value surely cannot be ‘conserved’ in any sensible way.
Potential energy
Energy is said to be of different ‘types’: kinetic, potential, gravitational, heat, chemical electrical etc. It is said to transmute from one sort to another and be conserved along the way, but what is it that is ‘conserved’ exactly? If energy is always of one specific ‘type’ or another then what exactly is ‘energy’ itself? Why is the same word used for lots of different things?
If I hold an apple 10 feet above the ground it will have a certain quantity of potential energy and if I move it to 100 feet above the ground it will have considerably more potential energy. However, if I now move it all the way to the neutral point between the Earth and the moon it suddenly has no potential energy at all – so again, where did the energy go?
The concept of energy is a useful tool under specific circumstances but it is not absolute, not conserved, not directly measurable. It is not ‘a thing’ and therefore cannot be considered fundamental in any sense.
Photon absorption
Heat transfer is said to happen via various mechanisms including the following: A photon of light will fly close to an atom and the energy will be absorbed by an orbiting electron. The electron will make a discrete jump from one orbital to another with the difference in energy levels matching the energy of the original photon. The photon disappears from the universe.
Questions:
How close does the photon need to go and why?
Where does the photon go to after being absorbed?
How is one form of energy converted to another? What is the mechanism?
What if the photon has too much energy for the orbit? Where does this extra energy go to?
What if the energy of a photon does not precisely match any electron orbital? Does it simply pass through the material?
What does it mean to say a photon has ‘energy’?
What laws of physics control this procedure?
Electromagnetic radiation such as light is described by a wave equation and that is all. There is nothing in the equation to say how this wave turns into the ‘velocity’ of a nearby electron or how the wave itself might disappear. Similarly the orbital of an electron is described in terms of atomic forces (or now in terms of a probability cloud) and there is nothing in these laws that say how a probability cloud can be enhanced by, or absorb, a portion of electromagnetic field.
If I drop an apple to the ground, it does not deplete, or cause to vanish, the gravitational field that drew it there; so why should an electron cause a magnetic field to vanish? Where are the laws of physics that describe this?
This phenomenon and others are always described in terms of energy transfer instead of the basic equations of electromagnetism or gravity.
What is Energy?
We therefore have a physics that consists of a set of seemingly incompatible equations for electromagnetism, gravity, atomic forces etc. each providing a ‘law’ for a different physical ‘stuff’ and these are all somehow glued together by the concept of ‘energy’ and the conservation of energy. A set of fundamental constants allows for the theoretical conversion of different measurement units but there seems to be no description of how different energies are converted to each other or even what ‘energy’ consists of.
How does a magnet lift a weight off the Earth? Do we use the laws of gravity or the laws of magnetism? Both laws are clearly in play but are separate theories with neither theory compatible with the other. The two are somehow welded together via some fundamental constant, but where is the theory describing how this fundamental constant acquired the value that it did?
Think again of letting an apple fall to the ground. The increase in speed seems reasonable as we have equations relating the force of gravity to the acceleration and mass of the apple – but try to think of this in terms of energy conservation and the math gets easier but the understanding gets harder! The apple falls by having its potential energy converted to kinetic energy! How? What process performs this magical alchemy? Are the two energies the same thing or not? Why does it need ‘converting’?
The idea of energy seems to work for practical purposes but as an aid to actually understanding what is going on it is really just a sleight of hand technique, a universal wallpaper to cover the cracks in the plaster veneer that is theoretical physics.
Quantum wave function
At the heart of quantum physics is the Schrödinger wave equation. This describes ‘matter’ as a continuous wave function in a physical ‘field’ but physicist were still stuck on the idea of matter as consisting of particles and so they interpreted a perfectly good theoretical construct accordingly.
A wave is just a wave but it seems now universallyaccepted that the wave function represents a probability function who’s value at any point is the probability of finding a particle at that particular position in space. We therefore have both particles and field quantities described by the same construct. Fair enough, maybe, as long as it is recognised that this is just a theoretical construct.
However, it seems to be commonly accepted now by many people that the wave function is a ‘real’ thing and that the particle ‘exists’ as both a wave and particle at the same time, that it exists in several places at once and that it is brought into physical being by a physical ‘collapse’ of such a function. We even have people saying that the act of collapsing is instrumental in the creation of consciousness.
And all this this despite the obvious facts that:
Nobody has directly measured such a function and nor can they can ever do so
The mechanism of collapse is not described
Such a collapse would violate the principle of causality (spooky action at a distance)
It is not related what is meant by something being two different things at once, existing in two different places at the same time or being alive and dead at the same time. This is just linguistic trickery.
There is no description of how a probability function turns into ‘matter’
A probability function is a mathematical construct and was never posited to correspond to anything real, it was just a means of describing the aggregated output of multiple events. The quantum physicists have put the idea of randomness at the heart of physics. They have, without justification, created the notion of a random process at the heart of reality, thereby destroying any hope of a deterministic description of the universe.
‘Randomness’ in mathematics is a description of an outcome, not the means of generating that outcome. However this is what it seems we are asked to believe, that a completely fictitious process with no defined mechanism and unfettered by any sensible or realistic laws, is in fact at the root cause of everything that happens in the Universe.
This is surely a complete abrogation of all intellectual acuity.
We have no direct way of measuring time and the best we can do is to count the number of oscillations of an atomic clock and declare the result to be representative of elapsed time. A big problem with this is the following chart taken from Meyl’s book: “Scalar Waves..”, which shows that two atomic clocks in the same room but oriented differently will keep very good time with each other – except during an eclipse!
We do not therefore have a direct way of measuring time independently from all the other variables of physics such as length, energy frequency etc. All we have of Reality is a collection of observations of instrument readings and from this we induce various quantities according to a theoretical model.
‘Time’ is no different and the exact nature this ‘entity’ will depend upon the model used to interpret the measurements.
Try to imagine that time were to ‘speed up’ and all the workings of the universe, including our perceptions were to speed up accordingly. In this case we simply would not notice what had happened and would carry on regardless. What then is the purpose of ‘time’?
Too many ‘stuffs’
The basic problem here is that there are far too many fundamental ‘stuffs’ in physics, too many basic ‘entities’ such as matter, charge, energy etc., too many different ‘forces’ (gravity, electric, magnetic..) and no single unified theory. Each of these entities needs some constants to enable integration into the system but these constants have also been declared ‘fundamental’ as they must, since they connect together ‘fundamental’ quantities.
The declaration of everything as fundamental and irreducible obviates the necessity for further research and so physics as it is currently formulated can never progress in this regard.
Thinking that mere ‘artefacts’ (theoretical constructs) of the system really represent ‘real’ entities further confuses the issue and leads to speculations that are beyond absurd.
The Theory of Objectivity from Konstantin Meyl assumes only one type of ‘stuff’ and that is a Field quantity of electromagnetic nature; everything else is an emergent property of that field and no fundamental constants are needed.
Fundamental particles are calculated as field vortices and their sizes and weights can be calculated directly with no additional information. See: Atomic structure: Meyl
Gravity is an emergent property of the field and so are mass and charge; there is no need for these extra concepts and no need for hand-waving arguments to show how the one might affect the other.
The case of the photon lifting an electron to a higher orbit is a good example. A photon is a ripple in the field structure but so is an electron or a whole atom a more complex vortex structure in the same medium. Both obey the same laws of physics.
Imagine a ripple in a river encountering a whirlpool and becoming absorbed by it. The whole activity happens according to the laws of fluid dynamics and there is no need to suppose an intermediary of ‘energy’ conservation to explain the phenomenon. There is no transmutation between electricity, energy and matter as everything is made of the same ‘stuff’; all we witness is water behaving according to the fundamental laws of water.
In this case, nobody imagines that the ripple is made of a different fundamental substance to the whirlpool and nobody seeks to add a new law to the lexicon of physics. It is acknowledged that the laws of fluids should either suffice or be discarded.
A larger, more vigorous whirlpool will have a greater effect, a greater persistence and this can be quantified (simplified) as ‘energy’ but that doesn’t mean that there is a separate substance called ‘energy’ or that it is conserved. A vortex has a certain identity’ or character of its own and will demonstrate distinctive and repeatable behaviour which can no doubt be studied in its own right, but it is still made of water and must ultimately obey the same laws as the rest of the river.
Certain behaviours will appear random and difficult to predict but that doesn’t mean that there exists a fundamental uncertainty concerning rivers and there is absolutely no need to invent an infinite number of alternative rivers in order to ‘explain away’ any constants that might arise as simple artefacts of the theory.
We are hearing often now that the electromagnetic force is many times greater than the gravitational force and that therefore the dominant force in nature is the electromagnetic. This assertion is then used to support the notion of the Electric Universe or even Flat Earth. The initial assertion is nonsense and so to draw conclusions from it is not valid.
Gravity and electromagnetism in classical physics are completely different entities and are expressed in different units. They are incommensurate quantities and cannot be compared to each other.
The idea of expressing them both as the same thing, a force, is a sleight of hand which makes for good practical physics but obscures the fact that they are different entities with different mechanisms.
The idea that the one is stronger than the other comes from the choice of units used and the fundamental constants that enable the transformation of the one into the other.
The Gravitational force between two objects depends upon the masses of the two objects and the distance between them and is calculated via the formula shown.
The ‘units’ of gravitational force are therefore ‘mass squared divided by distance squared multiplied by the gravitational constant G‘.
The absolute value of the force will depend upon choice of units for both mass (kilogram, pounds or ounces) and distance (metre, mile, Angstrom) and also the value of the constant G.
Electrostatic force is determined by the amount of charge on the objects together with the distance between them and a completely different constant ‘k’. The units of electrostatic attraction are therefore charge squared divided by distance squared multiplied by a constant, ‘k’.
The absolute values of each force again depends upon the choice of all units involved with the values constants k and G being chosen, not entirely arbitrarily, but with specific reference to each other in order that two different quantities with completely different mechanisms may both be expressed via the same vocabulary (‘force’) and may attain comparable values in order that physical comparisons should make sense.
A toy magnet will stick to a fridge whilst it is very close or touching but will fall to the ground due to gravity as soon as it moves even a short distance away from the metal. Try lifting a granite boulder against gravity with even a large magnet and you will fail.
The practical strength of the two fields therefore depends upon specific circumstances and the numbers used depends upon the units chosen.
The idea of a ‘force’ in physics is a clever artifice to enable comparison between two qualitatively different entities. The comparison is possible because of a shared behaviour (attraction); the construct of a force allows description of behaviour to be studied as separate from mechanism. One could go go further and say that it allows behaviour to be studied as if it were a mechanism.
The fact that this is even possible is indicative of some sort of unity between gravity and electromagnetism. It may seem natural that a magnetic force could cancel out an electrostatic or gravitational force .. but why? Nobody imagines that the colour blue for example could cancel out an E minor chord or, for that matter, an avocado pear. Frequencies do not cancel out vegetables so why should it be possible for mass and charge?
The eventual answer is that there is a unified field of an electromagnetic nature that in certain circumstances can manifest as the force we call gravity. The field is as described by Konstantin Meyl in his book ‘Scalar Waves – a first Tesla physics handbook’. meyl.eu
The confusion of electromagnetism and gravity has arisen partly because of the physical scale of human beings. If we were the size of galaxies we probably wouldn’t worry too much about electric or subatomic forces and if we were the size of an atom we would probably not care about, or even notice, the force of gravity.
The effects of gravity became apparent long before electromagnetic field theory and so the assumption of gravitational force was taken to be fundamental and as arising from something even more fundamental namely the idea of ‘matter’. Both of these however are emergent properties of the Universal Field and humanity will prefer to cling to that which is familiar for some time yet: Does gravity exist?
Summary
To say that electromagnetism stronger than gravity is equivalent to saying that charge is stronger than mass, i.e. it is nonsense.
The idea of gravity as consisting of attractive forces emanating objects with ‘mass’ is easy enough to understand but leads to problems as explained in a paper by Tom Van Flandern. Anomalies can be resolved by thinking about gravity in a slightly different way and by analogy with the flow of water in a river.
Key anomaly
The Earth is said to orbit the sun but the position of the sun is not fixed – it is displaced by a distance of over a million kilometres by the gravitational fields of the Earth and other planets. Despite this, the gravitational pull on the Earth seems to be always towards the sun at the present and never where it was a few minutes ago,
From Tom Van Flandern
Some scientists are expecting that the gravitational field of the sun will radiate out from the sun at the speed of light. It takes 8.3 minutes for the light to travel from the Sun to the Earth and so the light we see always comes from a position where the sun was 8.3 minutes ago. It is expected then that we should always experience on Earth a gravitational pull that was generated 8.3 minutes in the past.
This gravity vector travels towards us and will exert a pull towards the place from which it was created 8.3 minutes ago. This never happens and the pull is always towards the ‘present’ position of the sun thereby giving the impression that the gravitational field has travelled almost instantaneously from the sun to the Earth.
“Standard experimental techniques exist to determine the propagation speed of forces. When we apply these techniques to gravity, they all yield propagation speeds too great to measure, substantially faster than lightspeed.” – Van Flandern
Newton’s law: “Every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centres. Separated objects attract and are attracted as if all their mass were concentrated at their centres.” – Wikipedia
Newton did not like this: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.” – Newton 1692 – Wikipedia
Tom Van Flandern: “The most amazing thing I was taught as a graduate student of celestial mechanics at Yale in the 1960s was that all gravitational interactions between bodies in all dynamical systems had to be taken as instantaneous. This seemed unacceptable.. “
Confusing, certainly, but acceptable nevertheless if viewed from a slightly different viewpoint. Gravitational interactions are not actually between bodies at all but between a body and its local gravitational field even according to Newton. The interaction is in fact instantaneous but is local rather than distant; there is no need for it to ‘travel’ Moreover, cause can be said to flow from the force to the body and not the other way around.
There is no need to suppose that the bodies ‘know’ about each other, only that they are both subject to some sort of coordinated influence that will tend to move them closer together.
There is equally no need to assume that the force is caused by either object, only that it exists and has certain properties, will form certain patterns. Superfluous assumptions lead to confusion.
Such a cause is never observed directly and nor is a distant influence of one body upon another. Neither of these assumptions is necessary to make effective predictions about how the bodies will behave.
All we really observe is two objects coming together according to certain ‘laws’. The inverse square law is easily observed but the dependence upon mass is problematic.
Mass is never observed and is only ever measured by the degree to which attraction occurs and so strictly speaking we have no such thing as ‘mass’, only observed acceleration of objects towards each other.
Objects falling to the ground will accelerate towards the Earth at a rate that is independent of their mass.
Mass is merely a computational convenience. The idea of ‘force’ likewise is a fictitious construct to mediate between gravity, inertia, electromagnetism and mechanics.
A water vortex analogy. The substance of water is analogous to an all pervasive ‘field’ in space that influences the motion of the planets and stars, In the image, right, nobody imagines that it is the vortex that is causing its own little whirlpool, rather that it is the global vortex activity that gives rise to the sink at its own centre..
Similarly, the galactic centre is not creating and directing its own spiral arms via gravity, instead all the matter in the galaxy moves according to local field forces that organise the solar systems and have a tendency spiral inwards much as the water in the whirlpool.
Similar forces organise our solar system and will concentrate energy towards the sun where it is converted to photons and ejected at the speed of light to form sunshine. The Sun will therefore never run out as it is an energy transducer rather than a big bonfire.
In the image above the vortex is happy to conform with the general flow of the river and flow hither and thither with the rest of the stream. The centre of the vortex will not usually be out of step with the main vortex as it is caused by the vortex and part of it.
Similarly our sun will not be out of step with the gravitational fields of its own planets as its movements are determined by them, It has no motive force of its own.
If the water were to encounter an obstacle such as a rock, there would be an adaptive change to the vortex shape and its internal forces and this change would in due course lead to and altered trajectory of the vortex centre. The change would take some time to have an effect and this time would depend upon the precise evolution of the vortex geometry. Effects spiral inwards.
With no external influences, the flow would move in stereotypical patterns that would, after some investigation, be amenable to scientific description, with stories of forces and inertia being sufficient to make quantitative predictions. Big vortices have a large ‘mass’ and hence ‘momentum’ and this allows them to push smaller vortices out of the way but in reality this is due to the large field forces surrounding the vortex as opposed to any innate property of the vortex centre itself.
The motion of a speck of dust on the surface of the water can be described with a radial and a tangential component and this can be interpreted as free movement (inertia) around the orbital with some sort of ‘force’ pulling the speck (mass) towards the centre of the spiral. What is observed however is motion, not forces.
Similar considerations then apply to our solar system. Space is permeated by a ‘living’ field which influences all the celestial bodies and is ultimately responsible for their movement and indeed creation. It is not the case that the stars are sending out radiative fields to pull other bodies towards them; the Universal Field instead oversees all cosmological organisation.
Is space really permeated by an infinite unseen force field? Well this is what Newtonian theory says and most people seem content to think so.
Is it really the case that a weak disembodied force can influence the movement of the sun or entire galaxy? See answer above.
If the force is not radiative then what is the inverse square law? See the image of the whirlpool. Energy spirals inwards here and forces become stronger towards the centre. The inverse square law is solely a consequence of geometry whatever the nature of the actual force
What would happen if there were an explosion on the Sun? This is similar to what would happen if a firework were tossed into a water vortex. The vortex field would be disturbed and the effect would propagate outwards from the centre at a speed we call the speed of sound in water. This is analogous to speed-of-light effects propagating out from the sun. This is not, however, the same as the sun radiating out gravity waves on a daily basis to keep the Earth in orbit.
Just because some gravitational effects propagate out from the Sun it doesn’t mean all of them do. The formulation of a gravitational field supposedly emanating from mass together with the inverse square law has caused scientists to attribute all of the effects they see as being caused by the same radiative force called gravity all coming from a centralised source.
Laws are formulated under this assumption and because they seem to make good predictions they are then accepted as some fundamental truth.
Does a Gravitational Field Continuously Regenerate, or is it “Frozen?” The field does not need to regenerate as it is not produced by anything let alone the sun. It is self-generating and operates according to its own laws with the inverse square law being a simplified observation of something that happens near planets. The field is in a constant state of ‘movement’, it contains its own ‘energy’.
What is this ‘Law’ you speak of? The field equation of Konstantin Meyl.
What is fundamental? The field equation is fundamental. This is analogous to the field equations that describe the flow in water: the Navier-Stokes equations.
What is not fundamental? Everything else; everything that happens that we actually observe. Ripples travel through a whirlpool with some consistency but this doesn’t mean that they form a separate fundamental entity called ‘photons’ or whatever; they are an emergent phenomenon dependent upon the underlying properties of water.
Two small sticks move closer together on a pond via a resonant ripple effect. They are both emitting gravity waves which attract each other? No! This is just an illusion; it is the water, the substrate, that is causal here, not an inert bit of wood. Planets do not attract each other it is just that space moves them together.
What is the field ‘like’? The field is dynamic version of Maxwell’s equations where electricity and magnetism are merely different aspects of the same thing. Constant movement of the field makes it ‘alive’ and enables propagation of emergent effects such as light. Other effects contribute to the concept of ‘energy’ which again is not fundamental but a way of expressing observations of specific patterns in field movements.
How does light propagate? As ripples moving across a pond may traverse a water vortex so is light merely a modulation of the ambient field and so will its trajectory be determined by that field. The field itself is the substrate for field modulations.
“There is only the Field” – Meyl
Ripples will follow a vortex and move at the speed of light (sound) within that vortex and as a consequence its speed is added to that of the vortex moving through space. Two vortices moving towards each other may therefore view light in the opposite vortex as moving faster than Einstein’s ‘c’.
Where does the energy come from to move massive objects? All objects are just manifestations of the Field themselves and will operate according to local field conditions. There is no matter or even mass as distinct from field configurations and so no need for any transfer of ‘energy’ between different type of fundamental stuff.
An object in a gravitation field is moving under its own ‘steam’ . The local field is propagating according to local conditions. Propagation is on a point by point basis and each point has no concept of the total ‘mass’ of the object. This makes it obvious that the acceleration under gravity is independent of the mass of the object.
Precession of the equinox. The Earth is said to undergo ‘precession’, to rotate in the sky in synchrony with the Pleiades star cluster, Sirius and the whole of our Solar System. The whole cycle takes about 26,000 years. Nobody believes that all these bodies are somehow dragging each other around by means of a radiative force. [video]
What is happening is that all these ‘masses’ are caught up in the same galactic helical field vortex which spans several light years and is responsible for the rotation of all bodies within its sphere of influence.
To try to imagine this as a collection of radiative forces is just too difficult but to picture it as a giant eddy current in a flowing galactic ‘river’ gives a nice idea of what is going on.
Newton’s concerns: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.”
Newton’s basic view of the Universe, which is reinforced by his mathematical theories, is therefore one where a collection of solid objects called ‘matter’ float about in an all pervading ‘vacuum’ that by definition has no properties or useful qualities of its own.
This world view pretty much rules out the development of any theory of gravity acceptable to Newton himself!
Matter is regarded as basic and fundamental but again has no ‘qualities’ as such and needs additional properties such as ‘mass’ and ‘charge’ to somehow allow it to interact with the rest of the universe. The rest of the universe meaning other chunks of matter separated by a lifeless vacuum.
The idea of gravity is an embryonic field theory but Newton was trying to graft it on to a system already overloaded with unnecessary concepts. He was trying at the same time to regard matter and space as being at the heart of reality whilst denying them the possibility of distant communication.
He needed to discard these ideas and start from scratch with Field Theory as fundamental and to then add matter and space back in as being subservient to the field, as emerging from it rather than somehow creating it.
General Relativity. Einstein was on the right track with the idea of an all pervasive universal field but in the rubber sheet concept (right), space and matter are still fundamentally different concepts and the idea of a force arises from the interaction between two such different ‘stuffs’.
“Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move” – J.A, Wheeler
This is circular and mind-bending with causality being shifted from pillar to post and back. Moreover, it doesn’t say how these things communicate with each other. In our example, the Sun would be the cause of a large dimple in space-time, with movement of the Sun registering as further deformations of the field which propagate at light speed.
This doesn’t help our case as no light speed propagation is observed and the data suggests ‘synchrony’ of Sun and Earth rather than distant ‘influence’.
Einstein was still bewitched by the illusion of ‘matter’ as being solid, real, fundamental and indeed causal in somehow orchestrating cosmic events.
Imagine the diagram above but without the mass. We do not need the mass itself as we can easily detect its ‘presence’ by the distortion of space with which it is now synonymous. No mass ‘moves’ as now the rubber sheet itself is endowed with the properties which will cause movement of the dimple i.e. movement within the field itself. Movement which is consistent with the observed laws of physics.
David Bohm, like everybody else, saw separate objects moving around independently of each other and yet at the same time seemingly in step to produce what he called the Explicate Order. Since inanimate objects are not normally capable of organising themselves there must be an unseen Implicate Order responsible for these patterns. [page]
The Implicate Order then is the field equation of Meyl (above) and the Explicate Order is everything else that we see and measure, from the movement of galaxies to the double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics.
The equation specifies the evolution of the field at every point in space and time with field propagation at light-speeds giving the impression of conventional causality.
This evolution, it is to be stressed, is local and confined to an infinitesimally small point, meaning there is no influence from one point to another over any distance at all, even a trillionth of an an angstrom; there is no granularity to reality.
Global order is maintained by a finite propagation speed with the solutions to the equation leading to the large scale patterns we observe, as with the water vortex.
This is the seeming paradox of field equations, that the rules are strictly local but the solutions global. The Implicate order is not a global plan but a local description of field properties, whilst the Explicate Order is the emergent patterns that we actually observe and measure and have mistaken for the Fundamental Laws of Nature.
The Law of Gravitation from Isaac Newton is described as consisting of a force-field that emanates from an object by virtue of its mass and affects other objects at a distance by virtue of their mass. Newton himself was not at all happy with the idea of action at a distance. Konstantin Meyl fixes the problem.
According to Wikipedia, the modern formulation of Newtons Law of Gravitational attraction is as follows:
“Every point mass attracts every single other point mass by a force acting along the line intersecting both points. The force is proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them” – Wikipedia
So each object in the universe is having an effect on other objects, possibly a great distance away. There is no mechanical connection but the idea of something called a ‘force’ has been introduced to make the whole thing seem more plausible.
Newton formalised this and produced a workable theory which was vindicated by experiment, but he wasn’t happy with the implications:
“That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.” – Newton 1692 – Wikipedia
Good man!
The formulation of this ‘influence’ as stated above gives the idea that there is some sort of connection between two distant objects and each is having a causal influence on the other across a space of possibly millions of miles. This impression is so strong that it is given a name, ‘gravity’, and physicists adopt it as a real entity.
Years later, Newton was to write: “I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena and I feign no hypotheses…. It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies.” – Newton 1917 Wikipedia
Newton now accepts that gravity itself as an existing phenomenon and is instrumental in the movement of all celestial bodies. The problem of action at a distance has been circumvented by framing gravity itself and not the distant object, as the causal factor, the prime mover.
Progress has been made; the thing causing an object to move around is now not a mass many miles away, but the strength and direction of a local ‘field quantity’. The immediate cause is not distant but but proximal. This marks the start of a move away from material or mechanical action and towards a field physics where abstract field interactions are paramount.
The modern formulation places the particles of distant mass as doing the attracting, as being the first link in a causal chain acting through gravity as a mediator. Newton, however, could find nothing that could be the cause of gravity and so merely had to accept its existence.
In the paragraph quoted above, Newton doesn’t even describe it as a ‘force’ but only says that it accounts for the motions of the objects.
So what is it that causes the gravitational field? In the field physics of Konstantin Meyl, the field is ever present and evolves according to the field equations of the Theory of Objectivity. There is no ‘mass’ needed to account for the source of the field, no mass for the field to act upon and the motion is not described as being caused by a ‘force’
There are no ‘objects’ in the theory of Meyl and no ‘matter’ exists as distinct from the field. Instead, what we call ‘atoms’ consists of stable states of field vortices which combine together to form molecules and again to form objects, humans and planets.
There is no separation between field and matter and so no need to describe mechanisms by which one may affect the other. Matter and Field are continuous with each other, made of the same ‘stuff’ and subject to the same laws.
The idea of causation as usually conceived, depends upon some sort of separation, some distinction between discrete objects so that an effect or influence may pass from one to the other, possibly via some intermediary such as gravity. This results in a proliferation of concepts, influences and ‘stuffs’ such as gravity, mass (three types no less!), charge, magnetic force, inertia, energy, the permittivity of space etc.
With Meyl’s theory, the field develops according to the field equation at every point in the universe and the emergent patterns are what we perceive as reality. In practice this means that various patterns are formed (eg planets) which result in a concentrated field strength that diminishes with distance and it is this that appears to act as as some sort of ‘force’ field by virtue of the effect that it has on other field variations (other planets, falling apples, human beings).
There is no real matter, mass or forces, merely the illusion of such. The moving together of two ‘objects’ is not by gravity or any action at a distance but by the interaction of the field with itself.
‘Causes’ as such do not travel all over the place but field changes propagate at the speed of light giving the impression of separation and causality whereas in actuality, everything develops as an undivided whole but according to local field conditions only.
