A Reappraisal of the Einstein Model

Scientific Paper
Title	A Reappraisal of the Einstein Model
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Rati Ram Sharma
Keywords	Einstein model, Wave quantum unity, Lorentz formulae, constant c, variability of c, aether, Relativity
Published	2009
No. of pages	13

Read the full paper here

Abstract

A wave exists only in its propagating medium but Einstein erred to discard the medium for 'light-wave' and introduce 4-D spacetime continuum. It denied him the chance to address wave-quantum Unity of light and to predict the existence of 'basic substance' to compose all forms of E & m so compellingly demanded by E=mc², otherwise E & m could not interconvert. Unified Theory gives convincing arguments and experimental support for the existence of a real physical medium in space viz. 'sharmon medium' as the all-composing and all-pervading 'basic substance', which propagates light as a Wave-Quantum UNITY. The non-substantive abstract concepts of space & time arise from the perceptions of successive motions & changes in the surrounding objects and cannot fuse into any concrete spacetime continuum. All spacetime continua of 4 to 32 dimensions are non-existent mathematical constructs and theories based on them are unrealistic. Unified Theory explains Michelson-Morley & Sagnac experiments and constancy and invariance to source-observer motion of c, the two axiomatic postulates of Special Relativity, as also the observed variability of light velocity c and superluminality which invalidate Relativity. Lorentz formulae do not describe any natural velocity which varies (like v) with and is invariant (like c) to source-observer motion at the same time. And a real event, viewed by say, 100 differently moving observers cannot undergo 100 different objective alterations at the same time. This makes 'contraction of length' and 'dilation of time' unrealistic. Unified Theory explains Photoelectric Effect and Bending of Light in a Gravitational field. As against Relativity, no particle or energy quantum is massless or sizeless point.

Overview

This paper is a chapter of Rati Ram Sharma's book-length presentation of his Unified Physical Theory (UPT). Where the book's opening chapter set out the two competing "standard models" — Sharma's own and the modern consensus one — this chapter isolates what he calls the Einstein Model: not Einstein's mathematics, but the layer of conceptual assumptions lying beneath it. Sharma's method is to enumerate that model's premises explicitly, then take them one at a time and offer a replacement drawn from his own theory. He is careful to place the Einstein Model in a lineage: it inherits from a Maxwell Model (light is an electromagnetic wave; it propagates in empty space; c = (ε₀μ₀)^−1/2 and is therefore constant) and a Planck Model (radiation is emitted and absorbed in quanta E = hν; the vacuum can in principle be emptied even of thermal radiation). The seed error, on Sharma's account, is Maxwell's, not Einstein's: "the seed idea of a 'wave without its propagating medium' was created by Maxwell, which was later adopted and promoted by Einstein."

The central claim is a metaphysical one with physical consequences. Space and time, Sharma argues, are abstractions distilled from perception — space from the succession "there, here, there", time from the succession "then, now, then" — and two abstractions cannot fuse into a concrete continuum capable of carrying forces and waves. What does exist is a granular material medium, the sharmon medium, composed of a new particle (the sharmon) built in turn from two "micromost" charged elements, the positrino and negatrino, collectively cosminos. Light is then neither wave nor particle but a "Wave-Quantum UNITY" propagated contiguously through this medium. Every effect that Relativity assigns to curved spacetime — bending of starlight, gravitational redshift, frame dragging — is reassigned to the sharmon medium's density, viscosity and local optical constants.

The argument

The three models

Sharma reconstructs the Maxwell Model as four propositions: light is an electromagnetic wave; it needs no real medium; its speed follows from the permittivity and permeability of free space; and since those constants are constant, so is c. The Planck Model adds quantised exchange, E = hν, with the black-body density E = (8πhν³/c³)/(e^hν/kT − 1) curing the ultraviolet catastrophe of the Rayleigh–Jeans law, and — via the Stefan–Boltzmann E_T = σT⁴ — implies that at T = 0 radiation disappears entirely, so that a perfect vacuum is achievable. Einstein then extends Planck: radiation is not only emitted and absorbed but propagated as quanta of energy hν and momentum h/λ, which Sharma reads as a revival of Newton's corpuscular theory.

The twelve premises of the Einstein Model

The chapter's organising device is a list of twelve conceptual commitments (a)–(l): no real medium in space; no absolute motion or reference frame; a 4-D continuum that carries fields, forces and waves; propagation as quanta; constancy and invariance of c under both uniform and non-uniform source–observer motion; c as the upper limit of natural velocities; masslessness of photon, graviton, gluon and neutrino; point-like structurelessness of electron, proton and neutron; length contraction and time dilation; gravitational curvature of the continuum; the equivalence principle; and E = mc². Sections 4.1 through 4.14 answer these in order.

The sharmon medium

Sharma assigns his medium explicit numbers rather than leaving it qualitative — the paper's most distinctive feature. A cosmino has diameter 1.6 × 10⁻³³ cm, mass 2.596 × 10⁻⁴⁸ g, charge ±1.37 × 10⁻³⁰ esu and spin ½; a sharmon is a neutral pair of mass 5.192 × 10⁻⁴⁸ g with spin 0 or 1. The medium's number density is ~10¹⁵ cm⁻³, mass density 0.519 × 10⁻³³ g cm⁻³, rigidity 4.68 × 10⁻¹² and viscosity 0.57 × 10⁻²² dyne s cm⁻². The mean inter-sharmon distance, ~10⁻⁵ cm, is compared with mean free paths in ordinary gases (hydrogen 1.12 × 10⁻⁵ cm, oxygen 0.64 × 10⁻⁵ cm), which lets Sharma treat the medium as a kinetic gas approximating a "kinetic continuum" — dense enough in effect to leave no truly empty space, and so to rule out the absolute vacuum the Planck Model permitted. Experimental warrant is taken from the ether-drift literature, particularly James DeMeo's review and Dayton Miller's persistent non-null result ("After considering all the possible sources of error, there always remained a positive effect").

Wave-quantum unity

Propagation works by relay, not transport. An emitted energy quantum raises a nearby 0-spin sharmon to the 1-spin state — this, not the source, is the wave's true "origin". Each excited sharmon passes the quantum to its neighbour and drops back to spin 0; the last one delivers the energy to the target, the "terminus". The 1-spin sharmon is still called a "photon" by convention, but Sharma denies the conventional photon exists: since an emitter's spin does not fall by one nor an absorber's rise by one, what crosses the gap is the energy carried by 0-spin sharmons, not a spin-1 object. The travelling unit is a pulse one wavelength long, and a wavefront is a great many such pulses. Because both origin and terminus lie in the medium, c is automatically independent of source motion (creative beginning) and of observer motion (vanishing end) — which is Sharma's derivation of Einstein's two postulates from a mechanism rather than an axiom, and simultaneously his account of the Michelson–Morley and Sagnac results. He is emphatic that explaining the postulates does not validate the theory built on them. The medium is also the absolute reference frame that Einstein's premise (b) denies.

Variable light speed and the Lorentz formulae

Because ε₀ and μ₀ belong to the sharmon medium rather than to nothing, local variations in the medium change them and hence change c. Sharma applies this to the Wang–Kuzmich–Dogariu caesium-cell experiment: against L/c = 0.2 ns for L = 6 cm, the observed 62 ns lead gives (n_g − 1) = −310, a group index of −309 and group velocity −c/309 — superluminal behaviour that he says damages special relativity and quantum theory but not causality. The Lorentz transformation is rejected on a kinematic-category argument: c is invariant to source–observer motion while a material v is not, so no single formula can legitimately give the two the same status, and "the velocity of no real object can vary (like v) with, and also be invariant (like c) to, the source-observer motion at the same time." The reductio offered is that one object viewed by a hundred differently moving observers cannot undergo a hundred different objective contractions at once.

Gravitation without curvature

Since sharmons have non-zero mass, a photon made of them simply falls. Light grazing a body of mass M and radius R spends t = 2R/c near it and drops s = ½gt² = 2GM/c², giving a deflection θ = 2GM/Dc² — Einstein's original 1911 value, with Sharma noting the later revision to 4GM/Dc² and asserting his theory can also provide the factor of two. Gravity Probe A's maser redshift is recovered as (U₂ − U₁)/c². Gravity Probe B is handled by reinterpretation rather than by prediction: a sharmon 1.6 × 10⁻³³ cm across passes through the densest solid, so the medium is present inside the probe's vacuum; the geodetic effect becomes curvature of the medium and frame dragging becomes "sharmon medium drag" from viscosity, which the experiment cannot distinguish from the relativistic effect. The LAGEOS laser-ranging result — orbits dragged some 2 m per year, 99% of the relativistic prediction within 10% error — receives the same treatment. Finally, section 4.14 gives cosmino inventories for the particle spectrum (electron and positron 3.94 × 10¹⁷ sharmons, muon 3.6 × 10²², and so on for the quarks), concluding that nothing is either massless or a point — with the Super-Kamiokande neutrino-oscillation mass of ~0.1 eV cited as support.

Assessment

What is genuinely attractive here is the refusal to leave the medium as a word. Many aether papers assert a substrate and stop; Sharma commits to a diameter, a mass, a charge, a number density, a viscosity and a rigidity, and then uses those numbers — the mean-free-path comparison with hydrogen and oxygen is a real argument, and the identification of ε₀ and μ₀ as properties of the medium rather than of nothing gives the constancy of c a mechanical rather than axiomatic footing. The relay account of propagation is also more than rhetoric: it makes the source-independence and observer-independence of c consequences of where the wave begins and ends rather than postulates, which is exactly the explanatory move a rival to Relativity ought to attempt. The spin bookkeeping objection — that emitters do not lose one unit of spin nor absorbers gain one — is a concrete, checkable criticism of the conventional photon rather than a vague complaint.

The difficulties are substantial. Most of the numerical structure is asserted rather than derived: nowhere does the chapter show where 2.596 × 10⁻⁴⁸ g, or the viscosity 0.57 × 10⁻²², or the cosmino counts of the quarks come from, so a reader cannot tell whether these are outputs of a theory or inputs chosen to fit. This matters most where the medium is claimed to be innocuous: a substance with non-zero rigidity and viscosity filling all space is precisely what nineteenth-century aether theory foundered on, and the paper does not calculate the drag on planetary motion that its own quoted viscosity would imply — it argues only that sharmons are small enough to pass between atoms, which is a different point. The light-bending derivation is a Newtonian ballistic calculation that yields the pre-general-relativistic value; that it lands on 2GM/Dc² is a problem, not a success, because the 1919 eclipse and every subsequent measurement — including VLBI radio deflection at the 0.02% level and the Cassini Shapiro-delay test — favour the doubled value. Saying the theory "also can provide for this increase" without providing it leaves the paper's single quantitative confrontation with observation unresolved. Similarly, the Gravity Probe B and LAGEOS discussions are reinterpretations after the fact: because sharmon-medium drag is asserted to be numerically identical to frame dragging, it makes no distinguishing prediction, and a mechanism that can only ever agree with the result it is explaining earns no evidential credit. The variable-c section leans on the Wang et al. anomalous-dispersion experiment, whose negative group index is standard, well-understood pulse reshaping in a gain medium and involves no superluminal signal — it does not bear the weight placed on it. Finally, the "hundred observers, hundred contractions" argument targets a naive reading of relativity in which contraction is an objective alteration of the object; the standard reading treats it as a frame-relative statement about simultaneity conventions, and the paper does not engage that reading. There is also a tension the chapter does not resolve: Sharma denies the photon yet retains E = hν − w unchanged for the photoelectric effect, so the mechanism is replaced while every testable consequence stays the same — which is candid, but concedes that the two accounts are here observationally identical.

See also

• Rati Ram Sharma
• Aether
• Relativity
• Speed of Light
• Length Contraction
• Time Dilation
• Lorentz Transformation
• Michelson-Morley Experiment
• Sagnac Effect
• Dayton C Miller
• Quantum mechanics
• Gravitomagnetism