A Particle-Tied Aether: Indications of a Deeper Foundation for Physics and Relativity
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | A Particle-Tied Aether: Indications of a Deeper Foundation for Physics and Relativity |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Miles F Osmaston |
| Keywords | aether, Quantum electrodynamics, Special Relativity, particle physics |
| Published | 2000 |
| No. of pages | 11 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
This contribution is primarily about the transmission of transverse electromagnetic (TEM) waves, our principal source of physical information. Relativity, as its name implies, seeks to describe relationships between entities in various circumstances but doesn't illuminate the nature of those entities, a gap that quantum electrodynamics and particle physics try to fill. A variety of well-observed phenomena, to be outlined below, appear inconsistent with this currently accepted framework of physics. It will be shown that these phenomena indicate the need for a physics framework that admits the occurrence of TEM-wave transmission effects, a factor explicitly denied in the conceptual basis of Special Relativity (SR). To help with these matters, a continuum (aether) theory (CT) of physical nature is outlined in which particles are special, rather (but finitely) concentrated, mainly-rotational forms of disturbance of the continuum. Particle random motions imply random motion of the aether, and this affects the propagation of TEM waves by it. Under this proposal particles are "made" of aether (originally a suggestion of Larmor, 1894), and the Michelson-Morley result is satisfied. The relativity principle, that nothing can exceed the local velocity of TEM waves, will be firmly retained but regarded as only strictly applicable at the smallest scale of physical nature - that of the local aether....
Overview
Miles F. Osmaston, a geologist by training, presented this paper at Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory VII (Imperial College, September 2000); it appeared in the Late Papers volume edited by Michael C Duffy. It is a condensed statement of his Continuum Theory (CT), which he had been developing since the 1950s and had presented in fuller form at PIRT V.
The central move is to allow the propagating medium itself to be in random motion. Osmaston's complaint is that Albert Einstein discarded the Aether because the Michelson–Morley experiment found no systematic drift, "neglect[ing] to consider that the aether might be in random motion." Once the aether is granted random velocities driven by the thermal motions of the particles embedded in it, a family of cumulative transmission effects follows: a redshift that grows with path length, a very fine-grained scattering, a broadening of spectral lines, and a thermal noise background. Osmaston offers these as physical replacements for cosmic expansion, for the Cosmic Microwave Background as a Big Bang relic, and for several relativistic effects, while explicitly keeping the relativity principle — nothing exceeds the local wave speed — but restricting it to the smallest scale, that of the local aether.
The argument
The aether and its particles
The aether is proposed as "an all-pervading compressible superfluid of electric charge," its compressibility deriving from the mutual repulsion of its own charge. Spatial differences in aether density are therefore differences in charge density, and generate pressure differences that tend to smooth them out. Shear (transverse) waves are carried not by a static rigidity — impossible in a superfluid — but dynamically: the transverse displacement of charge associated with the wave's E-vector induces an electromagnetic field in the surrounding aether, and that field stores the restoring energy. This, Osmaston argues, at last supplies a vehicle for Maxwell's dielectric displacement current.
Particles are "special, rather (but finitely) concentrated, mainly-rotational forms of disturbance of the continuum" — a revival of Larmor's 1894 suggestion that particles are made of aether. Charge is a local concentration or depletion of aether density: on a negative-polarity aether, Electron cores are concentrations and Positron cores depletions. Taking the limiting case in which the aether density falls just to zero in a positron core, and using the effective maximum particle size from electron–positron scattering, Osmaston puts the normal aether density at "at least 3.1 × 1029 coulombs/cm3." Because that density is enormous, all ordinary phenomena involve only tiny fractional modulations of it.
Aether has no mass property of its own — otherwise centrifugal effects would tear the rotational configurations apart — but a particle's aether motions generate the gravitational force that is the evidence of its mass. On this scheme the Neutron has a configuration with no net excess or deficit of aether but which still gravitates, while the Neutrino embodies rotational energy without even that. E = mc2 is retained in restricted form: particle aether motions measure mass, but the converse — that all energy, notably TEM-wave energy, behaves as mass — is "expressly excluded." Wave–particle duality is therefore abandoned, with quantization relocated into stability criteria of the source and receiver rather than the wave; Osmaston expects this, together with the finite size of charged particles, to remove the need for renormalization in Quantum Electrodynamics. A further consequence is that a massive particle needs finite volume to exist, which puts a floor under compression — "Big Bang cosmology is based on the lack of such a perceived limit."
Phenomena said to require a medium
Stellar aberration. Bradley's velocity triangle gives tan−1(v/c), special relativity sin−1(v/c); at the Earth's 30 km/s the two differ by only about 10−7 arcsecond out of 20.6, so they cannot be distinguished. But Osmaston argues that a relativistic treatment, depending only on relative source–observer velocity, should also produce aberration for the transversely moving component of a spectroscopic binary, which would make such binaries "scoot to and fro across the sky." With a transmitting medium the transverse-velocity gradient for a binary lies near the far end of the path, so the observer simply receives rays that were not emitted towards him, and little displacement is seen (his Figure 2 gives αobs ≈ (y/w)tan−1(v/c)).
Ives and Stilwell. Osmaston points out that ten months before their famous canal-ray result, Herbert E Ives and Stilwell published work on interference patterns in gravity waves on a pool of mercury in which the FitzGerald contraction, the Larmor–Lorentz clock-rate change and the Fresnel convection coefficient all appeared — but with c replaced by the speed of gravity waves on mercury. He concludes that "there is nothing special about the velocity of light in these formulations so long as there is a transmitting medium."
Relativistic mass increase. Osmaston notes that Cherenkov radiation, whose cone angle measures μv/c for a particle above threshold v > c/μ in a medium of refractive index μ, shows that a particle's field can only be superimposed on its environment at speed c/μ. That finite superposition rate, he argues, already makes fast particles hard to accelerate or deflect, so at least part of what is attributed to mass increase is a field-coupling effect. He therefore takes mass as fixed at its rest value with kinetic energy a non-linear function of v2, and suggests that extended muon lifetimes may reflect the same "insulating" effect of high velocity against decay-triggering aether perturbations rather than Time Dilation.
Daylight sky brightness. Airborne astronavigation measurements at 5–12 km showed brightness distributions that Rayleigh scattering could not reproduce, with excesses towards both the Sun and the antisolar point, growing with altitude. Osmaston's unpublished 1950s work attributed these to deflection scattering by random aether motion, and he extends the account to the gegenschein.
The four transmission effects
Osmaston distinguishes non-random aether velocities (giving aberration plus an "aberration-related", AR, redshift), random aether velocities, and random density variation.
- RTV redshift. Random transverse velocities displace successive parts of a wave-train, and these displacements "always stretch the wave-train; there is no balancing process to shorten it." The growth is multiplicative, λd = λ0eRd. For a Maxwell–Boltzmann gas of neutral particles he states R ∝ T√(n/m). He identifies the effect with the unexplained result of Sadeh, Knowles and Au (Science 161, 1968), whose caesium-clock comparison over up to 1500 km of ground-level path implies a rate of about 1.75 × 10−20 per cm in standard air near 290 K. Extrapolating to intergalactic hydrogen at 2.75 K and ρ = 10−28 g cm−3, he reports a predicted H0 = 59.6 km/s/Mpc. Crucially, since source and receiver were not separating, the "lost" ticks are accounted for by the active lengthening of the propagation route.
- RTV (deflection) scattering. Earlier deflection-scattering models of the cosmic redshift failed because they blurred astronomical images; Osmaston's individual deflections are of order 10−13 arcsecond, far below any resolution, so imagery survives while the source is dimmed — "adding to the impression of distance."
- RLV line-broadening. Random longitudinal velocities stretch and compress the waves in a balanced way, so line-width variance grows linearly and r.m.s. width as the square root of distance. Redshift therefore progressively outstrips broadening. He suggests some line widths attributed to stellar rotation are really this effect.
- Thermal noise. Random aether density modulation radiates weakly; this is offered as the origin of the CMB, with 2.75 K "the characteristic thermodynamic equilibrium temperature of intergalactic space," its blackbody form arising from the large effective optical depth over cosmic paths.
Astronomical support
The solar limb redshift — rising from below the general-relativistic 636 m/s equivalent over the central disc to about twice it at the limb, and varying steeply with line-formation depth — is attributed to increasing path length through the solar atmosphere. He connects it to the Pioneer-6 superior conjunction observation of a carrier redshift reaching ~11 m/s equivalent, together with the concurrent spectral broadening, which he reads as the RLV dispersion that CT uniquely ties to RTV redshift; the absence of a matching pulse delay is expected, since RTV redshift changes wavelength but not transit time. White dwarfs with too-small redshifts, the spectral-type-dependent stellar K-effect (over 100 km/s apparent recession for Wolf–Rayet binary components), and Holmberg's 1961 Virgo result that Sc galaxies average 1670 km/s against 990 km/s for E types are all offered as intrinsic-redshift evidence, with Halton Arp's catalogue as the larger database. Removing intrinsic redshifts from cluster members reduces the virial demand for Dark Matter.
Quasars and Mach's principle
Osmaston adds gravitational communication at speed c. In orbits this makes the pull correspond to a slightly earlier separation, producing perihelion advance; he credits Paul Gerber (1898) with a result formally identical to Einstein's 1916 value, and argues that Roseveare's two objections both presuppose mass-bearing light and so do not apply within CT. Applied to Mach's Principle in the manner of Sciama and Amitabha Ghosh, finite gravitational propagation limits the volume of the universe that can contribute inertial reaction — the higher the velocity, the smaller that volume. A rapidly rotating body therefore feels the full gravitational pull of its interior but a much-reduced centrifugal reaction, so superluminal rotational velocities become possible without disruption. This is his Quasar model: a transverse velocity of 5.8c gives an aberration angle of 80.2° and a redshift of 4.89, matching the highest then-known quasar redshift, and the observed dearth of quasars above z = 5 becomes an attenuation effect. The Lyman-α forest is relocated to shear-induced shells around the object. Since a particle needs room for its aether configuration, further compression annihilates mass with enormous energy release and the gravity disappears too — "contrary to current black hole models."
Proposed tests
Three are named: repeat the Sadeh caesium-clock experiment over a ground-level path; determine aether polarity and charge density by looking for deflection of a polarized laser beam passing between long charged capacitor plates in vacuo (Figure 4); and repeat the Pioneer-6 corona measurements with a simultaneous pulse-delay check.
Assessment
This is an unusually disciplined aether paper. Osmaston keeps the relativity principle rather than discarding it, states what his theory excludes (mass-bearing light, wave–particle duality, continuous mass variation), ties several predictions together so that they must be observed jointly, and closes with three concrete falsifiable experiments including a cost estimate. The insistence that RTV redshift, RLV line-broadening and deflection scattering must all appear together, in a fixed initial ratio R/D2, is a genuinely diagnostic structure of the kind most tired-light proposals lack. His diagnosis of why earlier scattering models of the cosmic redshift failed — image blurring — is correct, and confronting it directly is to his credit.
Several of the paper's numbers check out exactly. The aberration formulas do differ by about 10−7 arcsecond at v/c = 10−4 (tan θ − sin θ ≈ θ3/2 = 5 × 10−13 rad ≈ 1.0 × 10−7 arcsec), and 20.6 arcsec is right for 30 km/s. The Cherenkov description is correct: cos θ = c/(μv), threshold v > c/μ. The solar figure is right: GM☉/R☉c = 636 m/s. The quasar arithmetic is right too: arctan(5.8) = 80.2°, and √(1 + 5.82) − 1 = 4.886, matching the quoted 4.89. The aether charge density is at least self-consistent — 3.1 × 1029 C/cm3 corresponds to one electron charge inside a sphere of radius about 5 × 10−19 m, which is the right order for the scattering bound he invokes.
The Hubble extrapolation, however, does not survive checking, and it is the paper's single most load-bearing number. Taking his own scaling law R ∝ T√(n/m) and his own inputs — 1.75 × 10−20 cm−1 in standard air at 290 K (n = 2.53 × 1019 cm−3, m = 4.81 × 10−23 g), scaled to atomic hydrogen at 2.75 K and 10−28 g cm−3 (n = 6.0 × 10−5 cm−3) — the ratio of the two T√(n/m) factors is 1.28 × 1013, giving RIG = 1.37 × 10−33 cm−1 and hence H0 = Rc ≈ 0.0013 km/s/Mpc. That is smaller than the quoted 59.6 by a factor of about 4.7 × 104. Reaching 59.6 from the stated air value would require an intergalactic density of order 0.2 g cm−3, which is absurd. Something unstated is supplying four to five orders of magnitude — most plausibly the "factor of at least 1036" ionization enhancement mentioned earlier in the paper, since he assumes the intergalactic hydrogen is "ionized to the same low degree" as air but never gives that degree or shows the calculation. If so, the ionization factor, not the transverse-velocity mechanism, is doing the quantitative work, and it is a free parameter: Osmaston himself says the result "could be sustained down at least to 10−38 g cm−3," a ten-order-of-magnitude latitude in the input. A prediction with that much slack does not constrain H0. The Hubble Constant agreement, as presented, is not checkable from the paper.
Two other steps are asserted rather than argued. The binary-star aberration objection rests on a misstatement of relativity: aberration in special relativity depends on the observer's velocity at the moment of reception, not on the source's velocity at emission, and the absence of "scooting" binaries has been understood as consistent with the theory since the nineteenth century. The claimed anomaly is therefore not an anomaly, and the medium is not needed to remove it. Likewise the treatment of relativistic mass writes the kinetic energy as ½mv2(1 − v2/c2)−½, which is not the relativistic expression — that is (γ − 1)mc2, and the two differ already at order v4/c2. The critique is aimed at a formula relativity does not use.
The muon suggestion also runs into a measurement the paper does not name: lifetime dilation is observed not only for cosmic-ray muons in air but for muons circulating in the CERN storage ring at γ ≈ 29.3, in ultra-high vacuum where the "ubiquitous aether perturbations" invoked as decay triggers would be at their most uniform, and the dilation factor agrees with γ to about one part in a thousand. An "insulation" mechanism would have to reproduce that number, not merely its sign. Finally, the RTV redshift as described stretches wavelength while leaving transit time unaffected — which is exactly what makes it fail against the observed (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves, a time-domain measurement rather than a wavelength one. Osmaston, writing in 2000, does not address it.
None of this is fatal to the framework as a research programme, and the three proposed experiments remain the right response — particularly the Sadeh repeat, which is cheap and decisive. But as the paper stands, the cosmological claim rests on an extrapolation whose arithmetic cannot be reproduced from the numbers given.