Geoffrey Hunter

Geoffrey Hunter
Born	(1934-04-23)April 23, 1934 Cadishead, near Manchester, England
Died	December 4, 2008(2008-12-04) (aged 74)
Residence	Toronto, Canada
Nationality	British-Canadian
Known for	The photon as a soliton ("wavicle"); the exact one-electron model of molecular structure; criticism of the B(3) field
Scientific career
Fields	Quantum chemistry, foundations of quantum physics, theory of computation
Institutions	Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto

Geoffrey Hunter (23 April 1934 – 4 December 2008) was a British-Canadian quantum chemist, Associate Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at York University in Toronto. His work falls into two parts that he pursued in parallel for more than twenty years: an orthodox and well-regarded programme in quantum chemistry, and a heterodox physical model of the photon as a finite, localised soliton wave — a model from which he claimed a physical explanation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

He was also, with his York colleague Stanley Jeffers, a co-editor of the Vigier symposium volumes, and one of the more forceful critics of the B(3) field proposed by Myron W Evans — a dispute in which he and Jeffers ended up on opposite sides.

Life

Hunter was born on 23 April 1934 at 48 Allenby Road in Cadishead, a suburb of Manchester, the only child of Wilfrid Hunter and Mary Fazackerley Hunter. He served two years in the British air force as a photographer, an occupation that became a lifelong interest, and was a graduate student at Manchester University from 1961 to 1964.

He spent his academic career at York University in Toronto. In July 1971 he married Susan Prokopenko; they were together for thirty-seven years and travelled widely. He kept bees on his acreage in Caledon, a habit acquired helping an uncle in Wales, and played Chopin on a Yamaha C7 grand piano.

His interest in science continued undiminished to the end: in the last weeks of his life he wrote a critique of John Moffat's book Reinventing Gravity. He died suddenly of a heart attack on 4 December 2008, aged 74.

The photon as a soliton

The work for which Hunter is best known here began in 1985 and produced a mathematical model of the photon as a solitary (soliton) wave of finite size and definite shape — against the conventional treatment of the photon as a point-like quantum with no internal structure.

In "Photons and Neutrinos as Electromagnetic Solitons" (1989), written with R. L. P. Wadlinger, photons and neutrinos are modelled as oscillatory states of the electromagnetic field confined within a local domain whose motion is governed by Maxwell's equations. The size and shape of that domain are fixed by the relativistic principle of causality: the interval between events inside it must be timelike. Hunter called these localised waves "wavicles".

The solutions are eigenstates of intrinsic (spin) angular momentum with eigenvalue k, an integer or half-integer, and they possess helicity. For k = 1 they correspond to left- and right-circularly polarised light; for half-integer k, to the neutrino and antineutrino.

For circularly polarised light the photon-soliton is an egg-shaped circular ellipsoid of length λ (the wavelength) and cross-sectional diameter λ/π — so that its circumference is itself λ. Hunter held that the size, shape and internal intensity distribution of this object are confirmed by several independent experimental measurements and phenomena.

The claim he drew from it is the striking one. Because the photon has a real extension, its momentum h/λ is distributed over its length λ, so the product of the momentum and the position of that momentum is always h. On this account the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is explained physically — as a consequence of the photon's finite size rather than as an irreducible feature of measurement. Hunter described the result as "the Bohr model of Einstein's photon".

Quantum chemistry

Alongside this, Hunter worked in mainstream quantum chemistry and wrote the textbook Introductory Quantum Chemistry. His research concerned the factorisation of a wavefunction into conditional and marginal factors — in effect the Born–Oppenheimer separation of nuclear from electronic motion without the Born–Oppenheimer approximation — and from this the exact one-electron model of molecular structure.

The B(3) field controversy

Myron W Evans' proposal that a circularly polarised electromagnetic field carries a longitudinal magnetic component, the B(3) field, was among the most disputed claims in electrodynamics in the 1990s. Hunter was one of its sharpest critics, and the episode is a good illustration of how contested this literature is internally.

In "The B(3) Field Controversy" (2000) he takes up a paradox raised against B(3) by E Comay together with the repudiation of that paradox by Evans and Stanley Jeffers, and examines and assesses both sets of arguments. In "The Fundamental Flaw in the Theory of the B(3) Magnetic Field" (2000) he states his own verdict in the title.

Two things are worth noting about this. First, Hunter contributed to The Enigmatic Photon, the book series in which the B(3) theory was developed — he engaged with the proposal from inside rather than dismissing it from a distance. Second, his colleague Jeffers was on the other side of the argument, and both men co-edited the same Vigier symposium volumes. Disagreement of this kind, conducted in print between collaborators, is the normal condition of this field rather than an aberration.

Gravity experiment with the de Hilsters

In 2007 Hunter collaborated with Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster on "Gravity Experiment 1". The paper observes that the Newtonian and Einsteinian equations for gravity both describe the path a body takes in a gravitational field without supplying a mechanism for the movement, and describes an experiment intended to test for the existence of the graviton, using concepts introduced by the Argentine physicist Ricardo Carezani.

Computing and music

Hunter's interests extended well beyond chemistry. Working with the Ferranti Atlas computer as a graduate student at Manchester (1961–64), followed by years of frustration with Fortran on IBM mainframes, led him from 1975 to study the theory of computation. His conclusion was that Turing machine processes require dynamic memory allocation, whereas finite automaton processes can have their memory allocated before execution begins — a distinction he argued has implications for the design of computers and programming languages that most widely used systems fail to reflect. He regarded the Unisys ClearPath MCP systems, built on the nested block structure originating in Algol 60, as the exception.

He applied the same analytical habit to music. After discarding the minor second as a dissonant interval he concluded that there are exactly ten triads and ten tetrads, and planned to set out this systematic theory of harmony in a book to be called Harmonic Notes.

Papers on this wiki

• 1989 — "Photons and Neutrinos as Electromagnetic Solitons"
• 2000 — "The B(3) Field Controversy" (read in full)
• 2000 — "The Fundamental Flaw in the Theory of the B(3) Magnetic Field"
• 2007 — "Gravity Experiment 1", with Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster

Books

• 2008 — "Quantum Chemistry: Wave Mechanics Applied to Atoms and Molecules"
• 2002 — "Gravitation and Cosmology: From the Hubble Radius to the Planck Scale (Fundamental Theories of Physics)"
• 2002 — "The Enigmatic Photon - Volume 4: New Directions"
• 1998 — "Causality and Locality in Modern Physics (Fundamental Theories of Physics)"
• 1998 — "The Present Status of the Quantum Theory of Light (Fundamental Theories of Physics)"

See also

• Stanley Jeffers — York colleague, co-editor, and opponent in the B(3) dispute
• Myron W Evans — originator of the B(3) field
• E Comay — whose paradox against B(3) Hunter assessed
• Jean-Pierre Vigier
• Light
• Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster — collaborators on the 2007 gravity experiment