Contents
One - THE WRONG TRACK
The surest way to corrupt a young man is to teach
him to esteem more highly those who think alike than
those who think differently.
NietzscheThis series puts forth, as seen from an engineering perspective, a new explanation of a very old theory. Institutions of higher learning, today, effectively brainwash students with the old outmoded thinking that has become what is called "traditional." Those students who learn the old way of thinking best are the ones who take the honors and are kept on as teachers and professors to pass along their dated thinking to the next class. This situation might be best remedied by refusing to hire anyone to teach who has not first served at least five years in practical work as a professional in his field, competing in our free-enterprise society. But even more is needed if we are to outgrow our desire to be comfortable with "tradition" as opposed to seeking greater truth.
No one is to blame for our lack of foresight in this regard, but now that some of us know better, and some institutions are beginning to take appropriate steps, it is time for the rest to do the same. We must remember that brainwashing each new generation can lead to our eventual extinction because we fail to get off the wrong track.
As of the time of this writing, the way the majority of physicists perceive our universe, in a very brief form, is what follows. This information is given merely to illustrate the complexity of modern physics and should not be memorized.
Matter is made of particles which have wavelike characteristics at times. The two major classifications of elementary particles are "leptons" and "quarks." Leptons are particles with a spin of 1/2 and none of which respond to the strong nuclear force. There are six leptons: the electron, the muon, the tau, and three kinds of neutrinos called the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, and the tau neutrino. Each of these also has an antimatter equivalent. At this time, there are five quarks with a sixth that is anticipated and possibly more to come. The six quarks, which have never been found alone and are still rather hypothetical, come in the following "flavors" called: "up", "down", "strange", "charm", "top", and "bottom." Quarks are always found bound to other quarks or antiquarks. There are still grounds to believe that they do not exist.
There are a multitude of particles called hadrons. These include our very stable proton and less stable neutron (stability here is not like stability inside the core of a massive sun) among others. All hadrons are composite particles, made of quarks. The proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, and the neutron is made of two down quarks and one up quark. These two stable hadrons that are found in the nuclei of atoms, the proton and the neutron, are called nucleons.
To create hadrons, quarks must be glued together with "gluons" and, when gluons clump together, we have "glueballs." Quarks come in primary "colors" because the colors can be mixed to become white. The colors have anticolors as well, and anticolors and colors can be mixed to form composites. Quarks can be glued to antiquarks when gluons and antigluons are used. The theory of color charges is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
Three-quark composites such as protons and neutrons can also be called "baryons." Then there are various "photons" which are part of a theory called quantum electrodynamics (QED). The list of particles, rules, and separate theories continues to grow.
The research used to attempt to find the particles of matter is often performed in giant machines which use magnetic force to accelerate particles to very high velocities so that they can smash into other particles. The particles resulting from these collisions are photographed as they fly through a device called a mass spectrometer, which allows physicists to measure their mass - and there are other techniques and other devices.
At one time, the atom was considered the elementary particle of which all things were composed. There was only one kind of atom. Then it was found that there were many kinds of atoms which arranged themselves into groups called molecules. Later, it was discovered that there are stable subatomic particles which were eventually known to be electrons, protons, and neutrons.
When people began to use the destruction of the nuclei of atoms to find what might be inside, other hadrons (composites) were found. The large number of hadrons that were found meant that current theory was no longer simple. A way was now needed to explain them. So quarks were introduced (not seen - just theorized). Quarks come in pairs and apparently do not occur alone. They are thought to be permanently confined to composite structures (hadrons).
Albert Einstein is famous for the equation E=mc2 (c2 is the same as c times c, which is called c "squared") which equates energy and mass so that we know that they are different forms of the same thing. The electron volt is the measure of mass for small particles since mass and energy are considered the same. An electron volt is a unit of energy equal to that acquired by an electron which passes through a potential difference of one volt. It is also 1.602/1,000,000,000,000 erg, and is sometimes called an "equivalent volt." Since an electron volt is rather small, it is multiplied by a billion to arrive at GeV which means a billion electron volts. One GeV equals .001602 ergs.
Leptons have masses and static charges as follows. Electrons have a mass of about 5.11 x 10-4 GeV (which is 5.11/10,000 GeV) and a charge of minus 1. An electron neutrino has a mass greater than 2 x 10-8 GeV (which is 2/100,000,000 GeV) and no charge. A muon has a mass of 0.106 GeV, and a charge of minus 1. A muon neutrino has a mass greater than 2 x 10-4 GeV, and no charge. A tau has a mass of 1.78 GeV and charge of minus 1. A tau neutrino has a mass greater than 0.035 GeV and no charge.
Quarks have masses and charges as follows. The up quark has a mass of about 0.01 GeV and charge of 2/3. A down quark has a mass of about 0.01 GeV and charge of minus 1/3. A charm quark has a mass of about 1.5 GeV and a charge of 2/3. A strange quark has a mass of 0.15 GeV and charge of minus 1/3. A top quark has a mass of at least 89 GeV (it has not yet been observed) and a charge of 2/3. A bottom quark has a mass of about 5.5 GeV and charge of minus 1/3.
The antiparticles have the same masses but opposite charges. Spin is usually quoted as angular momentum. In actuality, it is not what it seems because one parameter is not understood. Spin is given in units of something called the "Planck unit of action." The Planck unit of action is Planck's constant, h, divided by 2pi. The class of particles called fermions have a spin of one-half of this term. A fermion is a particle that is now considered to be a constituent of matter. If the sum of the electrons, protons, and neutrons that constitute a particle is an odd number, that particle is a fermion and it has a spin of one-half of h/2pi. If that sum is an even number, a particle is gauge boson with a spin of h/2pi. Fermions supposedly interact by exchanging gauge bosons.
Photons, packages of electromagnetic energy, are considered electromagnetic gauge bosons because they supposedly aid in the binding of electrons to nuclei to form atoms.
And then there are gluons, which are needed to glue the quarks together to form hadrons.
There are four forces: electromagnetic, weak, strong, and gravity. But gravity is considered negligible at the level of elementary particles.
On the one hand, we are told that there are three fundamental particles: the up quark, the down quark, and the electron. On the other hand, there is an electron neutrino to finish this family of what is now four particles. And then we are told that, although this family of particles constitute everything in this universe, there are two other families of particles like the first but with less mass which are found by bashing particles together in particle accelerators. And furthermore, every particle already mentioned in this paragraph has an antiparticle twin. I count a total of 24 fundamental particles and this does not include the hadrons which keep on being discovered.
Every time a fundamental particle is created from energy, its antiparticle is also created. When particles and antiparticles meet later on, energy is produced equal to the energy that made them. When an antiparticle is thrown at its twin particle, the energy produced is equal to the energy used to throw the antiparticle plus the energy used to create the two particles. This energy can be in the form of energy as such, or as other particles of "condensed energy."
Leon M. Lederman, one of the best scientists and writers whose work I have read, once said the following (Scientific American - The Laureate's Anthology, Vol. II, "The Upsilon Particle"):
"As accelerator techniques advance, physicists will undoubtedly continue to discover new subatomic entities. The proliferation will raise deep, unsettling questions. Are the kinds of quark limited in number? If there are six, why not 12? If there are 12, why not 24? And if the number of kinds of quark is large, does it make sense to call the quarks elementary? The history of science suggests that the proliferation of physical entities is a sign the entities are not elementary. The chemists of 19th century reduced the apparently infinite variety of chemical substances to some 36 elements which escalated over the years to more than 100. As indivisible, ultimate constituents of matter the chemical elements simply proved to be too many. In the 1930's it was discovered that all elements were made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. After World War II, these particles were joined by dozens of others: pions, kaons, lambda particles and so on. Again there were too many. Then it seemed that all of these could be reduced to three quarks. Now experiments indicate that a fourth and fifth quark exist. Are they also too many? Will simpler structures from which quarks are made soon be proposed? Is it possible that there are no elementary particles at all, that every entity in nature has constituent parts? Or will the ultimate simplicity that most physicists believe in, be lodged in the mathematical groups that order the particles rather than in truly elementary objects?"
It appeared to me in early 1965, that something had gone wrong in physics. Science is supposed to make things simpler. The more complicated a solution is, the less likely it is to be correct - unless it is the only solution one has at the time. As I looked at science then, it appeared that the trouble was in our view of the basics. Our scientific thought originally evolved with our innate "feeling" that matter is solid. This feeling goes back to a time before we could even think of ourselves as human. Today we know that matter is made of moving things that are so far apart that only the light waves from them create the illusion of solidity. But we have never let go of this feeling that matter is solid.
This feeling led us to think in terms of particles when we began to take matter apart and to analyze light. And, at the same time, space was considered to be a vacuum - by our feelings. If matter were obviously solid, then absence of matter was vacuum, nothingness. This is elementary to our gut feeling.
So when an experiment was made to discover whether or not the ether existed, we knew that if there were an ether, it must be a static medium through which matter moved, an innate medium that transmitted light in a wave form. We told ether what it must be - and when it did not register as a static fluid, when we knew that matter was particulate, we realized the results of this experiment obviously indicated that there is no ether. And, truly, there is no ether of the type we had decided it must be.
So today, we know there is no ether, but light is known to travel as a wave at least part of the time, and radio people still use ether to work with their field of expertise because ether theory works for them even if scientists say it does not exist. Even scientists today, knowing that the term "ether" is politically unattractive, use double talk with terms such as "vacuum force", "stresses in space" (How can there be stresses in nothingness?), etc. Physicists talk of particles behaving like waves part of the time and like particles the other part of the time (How can a wave exist without a translating medium?). Quantum mechanics talks about wave functions which take the place of particles. But there is no medium for the wave function? Doubletalk? I think so.
What if there is actually something in what we call empty space? What if it does not behave as we specified it should? Is it worth a look to see if a hypothetical substance might explain our current dilemma in physics? I thought so in the 1960s. At that time most of the experimental evidence supported such a theory. Now the evidence appears to be even more conclusive.
First I waited, knowing that something so fundamental as this self-imposed glitch in our thinking would right itself soon and those more involved in mainstream physics would find this theory. I was so busy simply surviving up until now that I had no time to publish the theory anyway. And who could believe that simple, obvious clues, such as the fact that the "spin" of an electron is precisely half of Planck's constant divided by two pi, could be ignored for so long.
Then, a few years later, I discovered that this "new" theory was an old theory - in fact, at least 5,000 years old. Perhaps it was no longer as well illustrated and specific as I was able to show it, but it was very old, and much had been lost with the passage of time and the influence of bookburners.
Aside from the paradoxes, gaps, and excessive complexity of modern particle theory, we have quantum paradoxes, the puzzle of the current cosmological constant not agreeing with the supposed age of the universe, and other difficulties. The old theory, when applied to most of these problems, causes them to become proofs for the theory rather than obstacles. Truly, the old theory is the unifying concept that we need today.
It is certainly very unlikely that the solutions found here are the final anwers. There are certain experiments that have been done which have results that Mart and I have not yet been able to explain. We are hoping that current efforts will be redirected by the fact that most of the current scientific puzzles can be explained by this old theory. When these efforts are redirected, those involved should be able to arrive at the answers necessary to correctly explain that which has not yet been explained.
The old theory combined with our "new" equations, unlike the blind alley of current thinking, is simple, elegant, and to the point. Its equations are essentially the same as those found in Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It does not conflict with Quantum theory, but tends to explain it better while showing that "God does not play dice with the universe."
In the past, when I attempted to approach physicists with this theory, they refused to listen long enough to be shown what it really was. Perhaps, the time was not right. In any case, it is likely to be an emotional issue to most, even today when we are supposed to be more objective and open-minded. Frankly, it is very doubtful that anyone in the mainstream of scientific thought will condescend to believe such a simple and obvious theory - especially one that is put forward by people who were never specialists but, rather, interpreters and overseers of specialists.
The theory in this book is simple enough for its fundamentals to be taught in grade school, and its math and physics understood by kids in high school. Although I hope that some contemporary scientist reads this who will not take offense at the simple language and the care taken to bring understanding to as many people as possible, I am not holding my breath. For this reason, this book is for the educated lay person. I hope you folks can comprehend the somewhat earthshaking philosphical implications (which we have not spelled out) as well as the factual content of this theory which is much older than any of us.
Truth in science can be defined as the working
hypothesis best suited to open the way to the
next better one.
Konrad Lorenz
Since edition one was published: According to two articles in Infinite Energy (see Bibliography in the Series Index), in 1914 Sagnac performed an experiment similar to that of Michelson & Morley with a couple of new twists. He proved the existence of ether which seemed to be "entrained" with the earth's rotation. The experiment was essentially suppressed by the very numerous proponents of relativity, and Einstein ignored both the experiment and the experimenter. Several experimenters have confirmed Sagnac's work using the same or similar means and have increased the accuracy of his work by many magnitudes. Their work was also suppressed. Today, aerospace engineers use the "Sagnac Effect" in our latest navigation systems while most mainstream physicists are not even cognizant of the fact that Sagnac ever existed.
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