newton – The Library of Atlantis

Interpreting Newton’s Second Law

Abstract

The proposed structure for theoretical physics posits that ‘Reality’ is subject to measurement and interpretation through a mathematical framework. It argues that fundamental concepts like force, mass, and acceleration are not inherent aspects of Reality but rather theoretical constructs derived from measurements.

Using Newton’s second law as a case study, the text contends that defining force involves a mere mathematical relationship and not an empirical law governing Reality.

This perspective criticises the traditional approach to physics, advocating for a foundational system of measurement to enhance understanding, rather than relying on assumed fundamental qualities that may misguide scientific inquiry.

A proposed structure for theoretical physics

We assume that there is something called ‘Reality’ which we wish to investigate (left column).

We make various measurements to get a limited but objective representation of at least some of the characteristics of the aforementioned Reality (middle column).

The measurements are then interpreted via a theoretical system of a usually mathematical nature in an attempt to delineate quantitative relationships between the various elements (column on the right).

Relationships between the elements confer some sort of ‘understanding’ and such an understanding can be used to formulate new hypotheses and to make quantitative predictions with the regard to further experimental outcomes, that is to say, measurements.

We do not make predictions concerning Reality directly as the only apparatus we have at our disposal is a set of measurement protocols. We therefore make predictions concerning these measurement outcomes under various conditions and then check for consistency via the theoretical framework.

Theoretical physics therefore consists of just this: taking measurements and interpreting them via theory.

We can see that all the properties that we think of as ‘fundamental’ parts of Reality (mass, force, time etc.) are not actually part of Reality at all, but abstract elements within a theoretical framework which are only made apparent via the interpretations of various measurement protocols. We never directly observe ‘time’ for example.

It is obvious in this diagram that force, mass and acceleration are all theoretical elements with well-defined numerical relationships.

This all seems fairly straightforward but seems to have escaped the attention of physicists.

Example: Newton’s second Law

As an example, we can look at Newton’s second Law of motion, which claims to relate a force applied to an object to the product of its mass and acceleration:

Force = Mass x Acceleration

What does this equation actually mean?

Newton’s equation as a ‘definition’

If we use the theoretical framework described above, then this equation appears to be a straightforward definition of a theoretical element called ‘force’ whose numerical value is obtained by multiplying together the numerical values for mass and acceleration (both also theoretical elements derived from measurements).

This is noted by Wikipedia:

Newton’s second law is sometimes presented as a definition of force, i.e., a force is that which exists when an inertial observer sees a body accelerating. – Wikipedia

The phrase ‘sometimes presented‘ seems somewhat dismissive and suggests that the authors do not entirely approve.

The phrase ‘a force is that which exists’ suggests that they are conflating characteristics of Reality with theoretical elements. If Newton’s equation is really a definition then the ‘force’ mentioned is a mathematical construct derived from mass and acceleration and therefore has a speculative relationship with Reality. Theoretical constructs do not ‘exist’ in the everyday meaning of the word.

This is sometimes regarded as a potential tautology – acceleration implies force, force implies acceleration. – Wikipedia

No, a definition is not a tautology. We assume here that we already have well-defined constructs called ‘mass’ and ‘acceleration’ and want to create a third theoretical construct called ‘force’ which is simply the product of the two.

This is fine. The thing called ‘force’ is now simply mathematical shorthand for the product of mass and acceleration and may be used in place of such a product wherever it may appear.

Force and acceleration are two elements of a theoretical system connected by the (usually constant) multiplier of ‘mass’. This is common in mathematical frameworks and should not be considered an anomaly in any way.

Is this a ‘law’?

No, a definition most certainly is not a ‘law’. It is a definition, it defines a single new element of a theoretical framework in terms of already existing elements.

From this point of view, the equation doesn’t really say anything at all about the theoretical framework or about physical Reality. It is just some shorthand mathematical notation, a mathematical convenience which adds nothing to our understanding of either the theoretical framework or physical reality.

Newton’s law as a restricting influence on scientific enquiry

The following passage from Wikipedia references one of the Feynman Lectures on Physics and needs to be taken seriously:

Newton’s second law has also been regarded as setting out a research program for physics, establishing that important goals of the subject are to identify the forces present in nature and to catalogue the constituents of matter. – Wikipedia

Yes, indeed. The law focuses on the relationship between the acceleration of a mass and the ‘magnitude’ of external influences, formulating such influences as ‘forces’ no matter what their origin or nature.

From this respect, the only interesting aspect of gravity is that it constitutes a ‘force’ when influencing ‘matter’. The nature of gravity itself and the actual mechanism by which it affects objects are not addressed by Newton’s equation. Gravity itself is now referred to as The Gravitational Force and takes upon a theoretical status identical to that of pulling an object along with a piece of string.

The setting out of research goals therefore has the advantage of focusing attention in one particular direction, but subsequent labelling of forces as ‘fundamental’ and of gravity in particular as one of the ‘four fundamental forces of reality’ do not in any way help our understanding.

By identifying these concepts as ‘fundamental’ scientists are actually discouraging further investigation, for if gravity is fundamental then there can be no underlying mechanism and any such a notion will surely be labelled as pseudo-scientific.

How can there be any proof at all of the ‘fundamental’ nature of gravity if its nature is unknown?

Do forces cause acceleration?

No! Both forces and acceleration are elements of a mathematical theoretical framework. Abstract theoretical elements are not part of Reality and therefore cannot cause anything to happen in the real world.

Force = Mass x Acceleration

There is no causation symbol within Newton’s equation or within theoretical physics in general.

This means that causality cannot be defined within such a framework and so cannot be discussed or quantified.

Note that theoretical physicists have gotten by perfectly well for hundreds of years without any causality notation which implies that such a thing is not strictly necessary.

The idea of causality comes from philosophers who themselves can provide no coherent definition.

A system of measurements

If we are to calculate a theoretical value for force from Newton’s equation we must first obtain theoretical values for both mass and acceleration. We therefore need a consistent System of Measurement.

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 measurement have historically been important, regulated and defined for the purposes of science and commerce. Instances in use include the International System of Units or SI (the modern form of the metric system), the British imperial system, and the United States customary system. – Wikipedia

A system of measurement is used to define the fundamental quantities of the theoretical framework such as time, distance mass etc.

Each physical quantity will be measured via a well-defined measurement protocol to ascertain a numerical value which will then be used to perform calculations within the mathematical framework.

As an example, we could define the mass of an object as the numerical readout of a triple-beam balance of a precise and specific manufacturing specification which compares our object against a specific reference mass.

Important: This will precisely define the quantity called ‘mass’ which will be used in our theoretical system.

This is the system used by commerce and is the only sane way to proceed with a theoretical system, but unfortunately is not the approach adopted by most texts on physics.

If I order a kilogram of an expensive substance from you then we must surely have some documented agreement as to what constitutes a kilogram. We cannot each claim we have a better method of measuring the same quantity, we must define a kilogram as the outcome of a mutually agreed measurement protocol.

The ‘traditional’ approach

In the sane and logical approach outlined above, theoretical quantities are obtained initially as the outcome of a specific measurement protocol and then further theoretical quantities (e.g. force) are determined by calculations performed within a mathematical framework.

The outcomes of the measurement protocols can be said to constitute the fundamentals of the theoretical system with all other quantities being ultimately derived from these fundamentals.

However, reading educational texts on physics, we find that a completely different approach is adopted.

Here we find that mass, distance, force, gravity etc. are all declared somewhat arbitrarily to be fundamentals of reality. The idea is that they exist independently of any measurement protocol and it is the job of the scientist to somehow find out what they are by devising ever more accurate instruments and techniques.

Mass is regarded as a fundamental quality to be measured in its own right instead of being defined as the outcome of an existing and well-defined measurement protocol.

There are many problems with this approach:

How do we know when we have obtained the correct measurement?
How do we choose between different measurement protocols?
How do we know that these quantities are ‘fundamental’?
None of these fundamental properties of reality can actually be measured directly but emerge as calculated results from measurement outcomes. They are therefore really theoretical quantities anyhow.

We are left with the situation where different instruments might give different measurements for the same quantity and we have no way of deciding which one is best or even defining what ‘best’ actually means.

This is wholly inadequate.

The gravitational constant

As an example of the absurdity of this approach consider the case of the Gravitational Constant. The value of this constant is seen to change in a cyclic fashion over the years and even to change on a daily basis and according to location.

The response of the mainstream is to declare that the constant itself cannot be changing but that there must be some problem with the measuring technique. This is absurd; the only empirical knowledge we have of the supposed constant is a set of measurement outcomes and so if those outcomes suggest variability, then variability is what we must conclude.

The scientists are suggesting that there is some aspect of reality that they ‘know’ is constant despite all empirical evidence to the contrary.

The only solution that the scientists can come up with now is to keep altering the measurement techniques until they get the answer that they want!

Goal oriented science at work.

Wikipedia on forces

We described Newton’s second law above as a definition within a mathematical theoretical framework and found that this was reasonable and theoretically consistent.

We introduced the idea of a System of Measurement to define the initial values of a theoretical calculation.

However, if a beginner were to attempt to understand physics by reading standard texts, neither of these ideas are explained and the result is a horrific mess of ill-defined or nonsensical ideas, circular arguments, a general lack of structure to the framework and repeated conflation of Reality and theory

Wikipedia explains Newton’s Law thus:

The change of motion of an object is proportional to the force impressed; and is made in the direction of the straight line in which the force is impressed. – Wikipedia

Ok, but what is a force?

In physics, a force is an action that can cause an object to change its velocity or its shape, or to resist other forces, or to cause changes of pressure in a fluid. In mechanics, force makes ideas like pushing or pulling mathematically precise. – Wikipedia

A force is described as an action but an action is not defined
The action can cause a change which means that it may not!
We seek precision but a force is defined in terms of something less precise than itself
A vague definition cannot make anything mathematically precise
Mathematics is part of the theoretical realm but forces are described as in the physical realm
Some forces are described as ‘fictitious’!
In order to quantify the magnitude of a force we need to measure it and so we need a well-defined measurement protocol, but none is supplied
The language of causality is used but the concept never defined

The claim is made that a force is a Real Entity capable of causing Real Effects in the Real World. The claim is that the effects are ‘proportional to the force’ but this is like saying that flavour is ‘proportional to the apple’. Just nonsense.

A force will have an effect proportional to its numerical magnitude, but this is either a theoretical construct or a measurement result and not a physical process.

Because the magnitude and direction of a force are both important, force is a vector quantity (force vector). The SI unit of force is the newton (N), and force is often represented by the symbol F.

Force is a ‘vector quantity’ and requires arbitrary units to be quantified. This is an admission that a force is a mathematical theoretical construct and not an element of physical Reality.

The International System of Units

The newton is the unit of force in the International System of Units. Expressed in terms of SI base units, it is 1 kg⋅m/s2, the force that accelerates a mass of one kilogram at one metre per second squared. – Wikipedia

So despite physicists trying to explain that ‘forces’ are some fundamental aspect of physical reality, we find that for practical purposes, they are best expressed as simple numerical values obtained by multiplying mass by acceleration.

Newton’s famous equation is exposed, not as some wonderful insight expressing a fundamental Law of Nature, but a simple convenience equation which can be used to economise on ink.

Force = Mass x Acceleration

We were sold the idea that a ‘force’ existed somewhat independently of mass and acceleration, that we could somehow measure it empirically in order to verify the truth of Newton’s Law.

As it turns out, however, such empiric verification is neither necessary nor possible as the definition of force is completely dependent upon mass and acceleration, with the consequence that it will always be true by definition.

If an equation is always true by definition then it cannot be saying anything about Reality.

Summary

This is the sort of confused, hand-waving nonsense from physicists to which we are now becoming accustomed. They so much want to believe that they are uncovering the fundamental secrets of the Universe that all reason has abandoned them.

Newton’s Law is merely a definition, not a Law
The Law has little to do with Reality, being merely theoretical
Forces are not ‘fundamental’ and not even ‘real’
The definition of a force depends entirely upon measurements of mass and acceleration and is not independent of them
The fundamentals of a theoretical system do not necessarily indicate a fundamental entity of physical reality
The entire of physics should be founded upon a well-defined measurement system and not upon the imagination of physicists
A simple theoretical definition such as this contributes nothing to our understanding of the Real World

Is Acceleration Absolute? Debunking Physics Myths

Abstract

The discussion centres on the distinction between motion and acceleration in the context of relativity. While motion is deemed relative, dependent on a frame of reference, acceleration is asserted to be absolute due to the involvement of forces.

However, this perspective is challenged, as the absence of a universally recognised frame of reference makes defining absolute acceleration problematic.

The term ‘absolute acceleration’ has nothing to do with acceleration as normally conceived, leading to confusion in terminology and the theory of physics itself.

Ultimately, the argument suggests that reference frames are abstract constructs that do not effectively contribute to our understanding of physical reality or its phenomena.

An alternative scheme is suggested which describes motion and acceleration as physical processes rather than coordinate phenomena.

Motivation

I asked an AI engine: “If all motion is relative then does it follow that all acceleration is relative?”

The answer is a load of gobbledygook nonsense but is well referenced and does in fact reflect the opinions of many contemporary physicists:

AI response:

“While the principle of relativity dictates that motion is relative (you can only measure speed and direction relative to another object), acceleration is absolute.

Because acceleration involves forces and changes in velocity, it is not relative. You can always tell if you are accelerating without needing to look outside your frame of reference.

Here is the breakdown of why this distinction exists:

Inertial Frames: When an object is moving at a constant velocity (or is completely still), it is in an inertial frame. Within this frame, the laws of physics work the same, and there is no physical experiment you can do to determine your absolute speed.
Non-Inertial Frames: When an object accelerates (whether speeding up, slowing down, or changing direction), it enters a non-inertial frame. In this state, “fictitious forces” appear. For example, if you are in a car that slams on the brakes, you feel a force pushing you forward, even though no outside force is physically touching your body.

Because of these physical forces, absolute acceleration can be measured locally (for example, using an accelerometer) without comparing your movement to any external object or coordinate system.

Does any of this sound at all reasonable?

All the responses by the engine can be found in texts on relativity and seem to be accepted as accurate representations of Reality even though they make no sense whatsoever.

Motion is relative but acceleration is absolute?

“While the principle of relativity dictates that motion is relative (you can only measure speed and direction relative to another object), acceleration is absolute”

Acceleration is commonly defined as a change in velocity with respect to time, so if we have no definition of absolute motion it naturally follows that we have no definition of absolute acceleration.

“Because acceleration involves forces and changes in velocity, it is not relative. “

If acceleration involves changes in velocity and velocity is relative then acceleration must also be relative. If three objects are floating in space and are drawn together by gravity then they are all accelerating relative to each other but none of the accelerations can be said to be ‘absolute’.

“Because acceleration involves forces..” No! Acceleration is defined as a change in velocity with respect to time. This is a definition dependent solely upon the coordinate system. ‘Forces’ have nothing to do with the definition and the application of a force to an object does not suddenly make the acceleration ‘absolute’.

“You can always tell if you are accelerating without needing to look outside your frame of reference. ” Again: No! Acceleration as normally defined is purely a function of the frame of reference (a coordinate system); a different frame of reference would lead to a different measure of acceleration. If the acceleration is accepted as ‘absolute’ then the frame of reference must also be regarded as ‘absolute’ and so we should ask what it means to ‘look outside your frame of reference‘.

If acceleration is purely a coordinate phenomenon then an ‘absolute’ acceleration implies the existence of an ‘absolute’ coordinate system. However, no such thing exists.

Newton’s bucket experiment

Newton half filled a bucket with water and spun it on the end of a rope to see the water form a whirlpool and climb the sides of the bucket. The behaviour of the water can be explained in terms of inertia, acceleration and centrifugal forces but all of these require the a priori definition of a coordinate system for their unambiguous description.

Now since acceleration, and by extension, rotary motion are said to be absolute, we need to find an absolute frame of reference with respect to which they can be defined.

No such absolute frame of reference has been delineated by physicists and so we are left without an unambiguous definition of acceleration.

The distant stars..

A first try at defining a coordinate system was with respect to the ‘fixed stars’ but with the realisation that the stars were not fixed this was changed to the ‘distant stars’.

Physicists still rely on this concept today as a sort of sticky-plaster mechanism to hold everything together but a change of terminology doesn’t solve the problem.

The distant stars are moving away from us at great speeds and are accelerating all the time at different rates and in different directions. Any attempt to define a coordinate system with reference to this is palpable nonsense.

Imagine floating alone in deep space, how can you tell if you are stationary or moving at 1000 k.p.h.?

No absolute frame of reference

To summarise then: There is no consistent definition of anything that might be described as an absolute frame of reference or coordinate system within which we might delineate coordinate phenomena such as motion, rotational motion or acceleration as ‘absolute’ in any meaningful sense of the word.

The folklore of physics uses these terms all the time, but if we are to be precise, none of them has been ascribed an unambiguous meaning and so the whole of cosmology, in particular, has little relationship to actual reality.

Inertial frames

From the AI summary: “When an object is moving at a constant velocity (or is completely still), it is in an inertial frame. Within this frame, the laws of physics work the same, and there is no physical experiment you can do to determine your absolute speed.”

Since no coordinate system has been established by which to define velocity:

There is no such scientific concept as “constant velocity“
There is no such scientific concept as “completely still“
There is no definition of an “inertial frame”
There is no “absolute speed” to be determined
The laws of physics are undefined

Non-inertial frames

From the AI summary: “When an object accelerates (whether speeding up, slowing down, or changing direction), it enters a non-inertial frame. In this state, “fictitious forces” appear. For example, if you are in a car that slams on the brakes, you feel a force pushing you forward, even though no outside force is physically touching your body.”

We have seen that there is no consistently defined absolute frame of reference with respect to which acceleration can be defined. Therefore:

There is no consistent definition of acceleration. Ergo..
There is no consistent definition of an inertial frame

We were told that “.. acceleration involves forces and changes in velocity“. However, the above now downplays the existence of such forces to “fictitious forces“.

These presumably are not ‘real’ but nevertheless seem to have some impact upon physical reality and seem essential for explaining the motion of physical bodies. Why is gravity deemed a ‘real’ force and yet centrifugal force considered to be ‘fictitious’?

Reference frames are imaginary measuring tools; there is no ‘entering an inertial frame‘ as inertial frames are not real.

Absolute acceleration

“Because of these physical forces, absolute acceleration can be measured locally (for example, using an accelerometer) without comparing your movement to any external object or coordinate system.”

‘Absolute acceleration‘ as derived from coordinate measurements has not been defined and so there is nothing here to be measured either with or without an accelerometer.

Relative acceleration is defined relative to another object but cannot be measured by an accelerometer.

Moreover, it has been conceded that the physical forces may be fictitious forces and these, again, are undefined. How does one determine if a force is fictitious or not? Presumably we look to see if it causes absolute acceleration – but such a thing is undefined!

Note that gravity will not be detected as absolute acceleration but a (fictitious) centrifugal force will. Go figure!

General relativity

Einstein’s theory of special relativity treated all motion as relative and tried to formulate acceleration as a coordinate phenomenon, but encountered all the problems we read about above: Einstein’s relativity vs. actual reality

The theory of general relativity, however, defines proper acceleration as “that which is measured by an accelerometer”.

Wow!

So a form of acceleration has been defined which has nothing to do with the change of velocity with respect to time. The term is ‘proper acceleration‘ and the word ‘acceleration’ is presumably retained to give the impression that this is somehow the same phenomenon as coordinate acceleration but viewed from a different perspective.

This is deceptive. The two phenomena are only the same if we accept Newton’s law:

force = mass x acceleration

.. the problem being that acceleration is undefined, force may be fictitious and gravitational mass is unmeasurable: Gravity debunked

(fictitious force) = (unmeasurable mass) x (undefined acceleration)

Proper acceleration is local only

Proper/local/absolute acceleration is measured locally by an accelerometer and has nothing to do with speed, distance, coordinate systems or orbitals.

Imagine you are interested in cosmology for some reason and you want to explain the orbitals of the planets. You cannot install an accelerometer on a distant planet and so must deduce its acceleration by observing its ‘movement‘ and ‘change of movement over time‘. In other words you must revert to the original concepts of velocity and acceleration as coordinate phenomena.

Proper acceleration is a useless concept here. Moreover, all coordinate measurements are relative to the planet Earth and so are not in any way to be considered ‘absolute’.

An example

An observer at the Earth’s surface sees two astronauts spaced some distance apart but falling towards the planet from a great height.

The observer measures positive proper acceleration at the surface of the planet but considers himself to be stationary.

Both astronauts measure zero proper acceleration and so do not consider themselves to be accelerating in an absolute sense. However, both astronauts consider that the other is accelerating towards them whilst at the same time the Earth also appears to be accelerating rapidly nearer.

In terms of coordinate physics, the Earthly observer measures both astronauts as accelerating towards the Earth and towards each other.

We see that coordinate acceleration and proper acceleration have very little to do with each other and a body can possess either one of these without the other. The use of the same word, ‘acceleration’ for both phenomena is clearly misleading.

Moreover, there is still no ‘absolute’ frame of reference by which to make measurements, no way to describe rotational movement, no way to distinguish ‘fictitious’ from ‘real’ forces and hence no way to determine if Newton’s laws actually hold.

Velocity

From the AI response: “When an object is moving at a constant velocity (or is completely still), it is in an inertial frame..”

What is meant by “constant velocity” here or “completely still”? It has already been claimed that all velocity is relative and so these terms have no meaning.

From AI: “.. Within this frame, the laws of physics work the same, and there is no physical experiment you can do to determine your absolute speed“

But you have no ‘absolute speed‘ according to relativity and so there is nothing here to be determined.

We are told that “the laws of physics work the same” but what is meant by “the laws of physics“? Does this just mean Newton’s laws or some absolute set of laws that have yet to be described? It is evident from the above that Newton’s laws depend upon some absolute coordinate system which has yet to be determined and so the phrase “the laws of physics” is technically meaningless.

Einstein’s reference frames

I asked an AI engine again: “Do Einstein’s reference frames have any causal influence upon physical processes?”

The reply:

“No. Einstein’s reference frames do not have any causal influence upon physical processes.

“In physics, a reference frame is a mathematical coordinate system used by an observer to measure positions, times, velocities. It is a tool for bookkeeping, not a physical object or a field.

No physical interactions: A reference frame cannot push, pull, transfer energy, or exert forces on particles.
The Principle of Relativity: Einstein’s core postulate states that the laws of physics are exactly the same in all inertial frames. Physical processes unfold due local interactions (like fields and forces), completely independent of how an observer chooses to look at them.

Response to AI

So a reference frame is is a mathematical abstraction and has no causal effect upon physical reality. It delineates no physical process and therefore adds no extra knowledge to any theory of physics. It takes no active (causal) part in any theory of physics and does not enhance the theory in any conceivable way. The study of reference frames is therefore an irrelevance to the study of the real world.

Physical processes unfold due to local interactions only, irrespective of the relative speed of an observer and this means irrespective of the choice of reference frame.

We are told: “In physics, a reference frame is a mathematical coordinate system used by an observer to measure positions, times, velocities. It is a tool for bookkeeping, not a physical object or a field.”

The questions then arises that if a reference frame is not a physical object then how, exactly, is it used by an observer to make measurements? What are the physical processes involved by which a measurement can be made?

If we measure distance, for example by stretching out a tape measure, then something physical has happened and the measured ‘distance’ is the outcome of such a physical process. However, a reference frame is not part of the physical world and cannot partake of it in any way. It follows that no physical measurements can be made via such an abstract construct and we are forced to conclude that reference frames are imaginary artefacts and completely useless from a practical point of view.

We can try thinking that measurements within a reference frame are something like the shadows on the back of Plato’s cave, which is to say they are representative of what s going on outside the cave and yet are not outside the cave. However, we still need light from outside the cave to illuminate the interior and thereby create the shadows. There is no parallel for this with reference frames and reality; physical events do not cast a shadow upon a cave-like reference frame.

What is Relativity?

In attempting to read texts on the subject of relativity we find that a great deal of effort is expended in explaining how physical reality appears from the point of view of different reference frames. Coordinates are converted from one reference frame to another via the famous Lorentz Transformation and a new theory of physics is claimed by the scientists.

After a while, theory is accepted as fact and Reference Frames are somehow accepted as genuinely representative of actual Reality.

However, as the AI engine has already explained:

“Physical processes unfold due local interactions (like fields and forces), completely independent of how an observer chooses to look at them.”

This is surely the single most important insight from the mechanical summariser, that physical processes (and hence the Laws of Physics) are independent of any frame of reference, coordinate system or any movement of an observer.

You cannot create an extra law of physics merely by moving at a different speed. You cannot influence physical processes by simply changing the reference system.

The study of coordinate systems is therefore independent of the study of physical processes and has nothing to do with actual reality. All downstream theories are similarly divorced from reality and are simply the meaningless fantasies of theoretical physicists.

These include:

Length contraction
Time dilation
Twin paradoxes
Black holes and big bangs
Length, velocity and acceleration as coordinate phenomena
Gravity as a coordinate phenomenon
Bendy space-time
Space-time
Time (!)

These are all abstractions in coordinate-space which as we have seen, somewhat surprisingly, is unable to provide unambiguous descriptions of even the simplest of concepts such as velocity and acceleration.

All size is relative

This very short refutation of the Theory of Relativity comes from a comment somewhere on YouTube but I forget where:

Imagine two astronauts moving apart in space with each observing the other to be getting smaller. Einstein claims that they really are getting smaller and that actual (not apparent) size is now observer dependent. Einstein writes pages of barely comprehensible equations; gets Nobel prize.

Some solutions

Clearly something has gone very wrong and attempts to solve the problems created by coordinates by inventing even more coordinates have not helped.

Einstein is credited as having said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them“, but even this appears not to be true; he didn’t say it.

Instead of looking for some absolute and yet mythical coordinate system we should consider the local gravitational field as a reference for movement and acceleration.

We can consider that it has two main components:

A radial, accelerative component
An isotropic inertial component

Explained here: Gravity as an inertial field

The following consequences follow naturally:

There is no place in the Universe without such a field
A gravitational field is a physical entity and not a coordinate system
Velocity is now relative to such a field and can be thought of as a physical process consisting of interaction between matter and field
Velocity relative to the field is unmeasurable with contemporary instruments but that does not mean it does not exist as a physical process
Acceleration and inertia are physical processes consisting of of interaction between matter and field
The gravitational field varies continuously throughout the universe which makes a description via a coordinate system somewhat irrelevant
Reference frames may exist in special cases in limited areas of the cosmos, e.g. in a laboratory at the Earth’s surface
Newton’s bucket spins within the gravitational field at the surface of the Earth and it is this field which confers ‘inertia’ upon the water
Inertial and gravitational forces are in no way ‘fundamental’ but arise as a result of the interaction of field and matter
Local inertial frames of reference are derived from the physical properties of the field rather than the other way around
Coordinate systems are not causal in any way shape or form
Physical processes unfold independently of the frame of reference and so may be considered to be ‘absolute’
Physical processes replace coordinate systems as a description of physical reality

A beginner’s guide to science denial

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)

Gravity debunked

Density as an alternative

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.

Gravity as an inertial field

Einstein’s relativity

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.

Einstein’s relativity vs. actual reality

Quantum physics and gravity

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 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.

The Shnoll Effect

Foucault’s pendulum

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.

This is a hoax.

https://library-of-atlantis.com/2025/10/30/gravity-as-an-inertial-field/

The behaviour of a ship’s compass

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.

Is causality ‘fundamental’ or not?

The causality illusion

Indeterminacy

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.

Static electricity

Do atoms exist?

The definitions of atoms according to Classical and Quantum Physics differ in a fundamental way. They cannot both be true at the same time.

The atomic structure as described by Konstantin Meyl is superior to both.

Classical ‘atoms’ do not exist.

Atomic structure: Meyl

Hafele Keating experiment

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.

Hafele – Keating experiment

Energy conservation

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.

DNA: an unfeasible coding system

The DNA delusion

The heart is not a pump

There is insufficient energy to pump the blood around the body and the blood consistently moves from low to high pressure.

This is not just unexplained by biology but has no conceivable explanation from contemporary physics.

The Heart is not a Pump

Gravity as an inertial field

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.

Newton’s theory of gravity does not even have a consistent System of Measurements:
https://library-of-atlantis.com/2025/09/24/gravity-debunked/

An idea for a non-Cartesian geometry for the Universe as a whole:
https://library-of-atlantis.com/2025/06/13/a-vortex-topology-for-the-universe/

The Earth’s atmosphere

The problem

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.

Tamarack mines experiment

The gravity field of the sun

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.

Gravity debunked

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

The nature of gravity

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,

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.

Related pages:

References:

The Speed of Gravity – What the Experiments Say
Author: Tom Van Flandern
https://www.intalek.com/Index/Projects/Research/TheSpeedofGravity-WhattheExperimentsSay.htm

The speed of gravity: A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmbaqmX016M

Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation

Precession is one of the biggest failures in the mainstream gravity only model! What is it hiding? – See the Pattern
https://youtu.be/-oPE3l5E8uk

The website of Konstantin Meyl: http://meyl.eu

Newton’s gravity

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.

Related pages:

References:

Scalar Waves – Konstantin Meyl
https://avalonlibrary.net/Nikola_Tesla/Books/Meyl%20-%20Scalar%20Waves%20(First%20Tesla%20Physics%20Textbook).pdf

The website of Konstantin Meyl: http://meyl.eu

Newton’s law of universal gravitation – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation