Pharis E Williams

Pharis E. Williams
Born	(1941-07-13)July 13, 1941 Missouri, United States
Died	December 11, 2014(2014-12-11) (aged 73)
Residence	Sun City West, AZ, United States
Nationality	USA
Alma mater	University of Colorado (B.S.E.E.); U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (M.S. Physics)
Known for	The Dynamic Theory, Relativity, Special relativity, Gravity, Cosmology, New Energy, Unification
Scientific career
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	U.S. Navy; U.S. Naval Academy; Los Alamos National Laboratory; New Mexico Tech

Pharis Edward Williams (13 July 1941 – 11 December 2014) was an American physicist, naval officer and explosives researcher, known for the Dynamic Theory — an attempt to derive the whole of physics from three generalized laws of thermodynamics in a five-dimensional manifold in which mass density is the fifth dimension.

His claim was unusually strong. Where most unification programmes add structure, Williams argued that the major branches of physics — special and general relativity, Maxwell's electrodynamics, Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics — are subsets of a single thermodynamic framework, obtained by imposing successive restrictive assumptions on it. In his account general relativity emerges when conservation of mass embeds a four-dimensional hypersurface, of exactly Einstein's curvature, within the five-dimensional manifold of space, time and mass.

Williams was not an outsider to institutional science. He spent twenty-four years in the U.S. Navy, taught thermodynamics at the U.S. Naval Academy, worked five years at Los Alamos National Laboratory on shock physics and theoretical nuclear physics, and retired as Associate Director for R&D at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center at New Mexico Tech. After his death, colleagues from Los Alamos and Sandia published a memorial account of his work as a Sandia National Laboratories report.

Biography

Williams grew up in the hills of southern Missouri, where by his colleagues' account he became a voracious reader as a pre-teen and acquired the habit that defined him: when he asked his uncle how something was known, the answer was invariably "Look it up and see what you think." He questioned claims with "Why is that so?" and "What is your evidence for that belief?" for the rest of his life, and was fond of relating Ozark hill philosophy — including a favourite story about a traveller directed to take the wrong fork in the road, discover a log across it, and go back to the fork, which he used as a parable for what physics ought to do with experimental results that do not fit.

He entered the U.S. Navy as an enlisted man in 1959, took a commission through Officer Candidate School, and retired in 1983 at the rank of Lieutenant Commander after twenty-four years, having served in the Vietnam War, aboard several ships and one submarine. He earned a B.S.E.E. from the University of Colorado and an M.S. in Physics from the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, and taught thermodynamics and shipboard engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy. For several years he taught the safety, handling and employment of nuclear weapons at the Navy's Nuclear Weapon Training Center, became involved in weapons design, and was instrumental in design changes that improved the safety of several weapons.

He retired from the Navy while stationed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he spent five years on experimental shock physics and theoretical nuclear physics and hydrodynamics. In 1985 he became Assistant Director at the Center for Explosive Technology Research in Socorro, New Mexico, and subsequently Associate Director for R&D at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center at New Mexico Tech, publishing extensively on the theory and application of non-ideal explosives.

He retired to Sun City West, Arizona, and died on 11 December 2014, aged 73, of mesothelioma.

The "Popcorn" episode

The origin of the Dynamic Theory is a specific incident, and it explains why a thermodynamicist came to doubt the foundations of physics.

While teaching at the Navy's Nuclear Weapon Training Center, Williams set out to satisfy himself that the Navy's published yield figure for a particular weapon was correct — the figure on which operational doctrine for its use and storage rested. Working from first principles with a hand-held calculator, he derived an expected yield of at least 150% of the documented value.

He and his commander escalated the finding, and after prolonged correspondence a meeting was convened in Albuquerque at which a junior "mustang" lieutenant defended his conclusion before senior Navy officials and scientists from all three nuclear weapons laboratories. His colleagues' memorial records the moment: while an opposing scientist held forth at the dais, Williams kept working his calculator, until the senior admiral asked what was so important on that gadget. "Well Admiral," he replied, "if this feller is even 10 percent wrong, we have a bigger problem than I thought."

The Navy subsequently initiated a programme named "Popcorn" to address the problems he had exposed.

Williams drew a general conclusion from it that shaped everything he did afterwards: if the best minds of the Navy and of the weapons laboratories could be wrong about something so fundamental and so consequential, then the basis of physics itself might be faulty — and the place to look was at the foundations rather than at the applications.

The Dynamic Theory

The starting point

Williams observed that physics is divided into branches, each resting on its own set of postulates, and refused to accept that nature shares those divisions. He turned to thermodynamics — a field whose foundations, he noted, had never been seriously challenged — and generalized its laws.

The First Law generalizes conservation of energy for a thermodynamic system. Because the resulting statement contains five terms, five independent equations are needed to solve it, and Williams therefore postulated five dimensions: the three of space, time, and mass density. This is the theory's most distinctive commitment — mass is not a quantity moving through the manifold but a dimension of it.

The Second Law is taken in Carathéodory's form: in the neighbourhood, however close, of any equilibrium state, there exist states unreachable by reversible energy-conservative processes. From this Williams derived the existence of an integrating factor which converts the path-dependent First Law into a path-independent statement about a new system property he called mechanical entropy. He further showed that the same development implies the existence of a limiting velocity — which he identified with c. The constancy of the speed of light thus appears in the Dynamic Theory as a derived result rather than a postulate, the subject of his 1997 paper "Thermodynamic Basis for the Constancy of the Speed of Light".

The Third Law states that the entropy of a system is constant when the integrating denominator is zero.

What is derived from it

Applying the three laws and then imposing successive restrictive assumptions, Williams claimed to obtain:

• three-dimensional thermodynamics;
• Einstein's special relativity, and a five-dimensional generalization of it;
• Maxwell's equations, and expanded Maxwell equations for five-dimensional manifolds;
• Newtonian mechanics for low-velocity systems;
• four- and five-dimensional quantum conditions for isentropic systems;
• the non-singular potential, photons and quantum mechanics;
• general relativity — given conservation of mass, a four-dimensional hypersurface is embedded in the five-dimensional manifold with a curvature given by Einstein's field equations.

He left the non-isentropic case unexplored, and his colleagues noted this as the open frontier of the theory.

The non-singular potential

The most concrete product of the theory is a modified electrostatic potential — the non-singular or neo-Coulomb potential — which introduces a length λ characteristic of each particle.

Its behaviour is the point of interest. Beyond about 10λ the neo-Coulomb force is virtually indistinguishable from the ordinary Coulomb force, so nothing is disturbed at ordinary separations. At exactly r = λ the force is identically zero, where the Coulomb force is climbing toward infinity. Below λ the force becomes attractive, and tends to zero as r → 0. The Coulomb singularity is thereby removed — a genuinely attractive feature, since the divergence of the point-charge potential is one of the oldest embarrassments in electrodynamics.

From this single modification Williams derived a model of the atom (two unlike particles at atomic separations), the weak force (two unlike particles at nuclear separations), and the strong force (three particles). Taking λ_p ≈ 1 fermi for the proton and λ_e ≈ 10^-3 fermi for the electron, consistent with electron–electron scattering data, he showed that below about 10 fermi the forces on proton and electron become strongly asymmetric — an explicit violation of Newton's third law, which he noted rather than concealed.

Publications and reception

Williams set the theory out in The Dynamic Theory - A New View of Space-Time-Matter (2011) and gave a personal account of his career and its frustrations in Physics - Against the Odds (2008). His papers appeared in Entropy, in Apeiron, in AIP conference proceedings, and in the proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance.

After his death, four colleagues — James O. Shannon of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Warren R. Maines of Sandia National Laboratories, David Mathes and Paul Murad — published "Memorial and Thoughts of a Man with Great Ideas — Pharis Williams" as Sandia report SAND2015-2901C. It is both an obituary and a technical exposition, and it is the best single source on the Dynamic Theory. Its authors put the challenge in Williams's own terms: whether physics should accept that its branches stand apart because different scientists developed them across centuries, or whether they can be derived from a simple set of fundamental concepts.

The Dynamic Theory has not been taken up by mainstream physics. It is a substantial and internally worked-out programme by a credentialed physicist with a national-laboratory career, but it has not been independently developed, and the derivations that would have to be checked to assess it are long. Its most testable element is the non-singular potential, whose predicted departure from Coulomb behaviour at sub-fermi separations is in principle open to experiment.

Abstracts

• 2013 - "Fifth Force" (Read in full)
• 2012 - "Gravity" (Read in full)
• 2012 - "Physical Time" (Read in full)
• 2011 - "Absolutes and Confusion or Absolute Confusion" (Read in full)
• 2009 - "Fusion for Earth and Space" (Read in full)
• 2008 - "New Time Dependent Gravity Displays Dark Matter and Dark Energy Effects" (Read in full) — Apeiron V15 N3
• 2007 - "Alternate Communications for Space Travel" — AIP Conference Proceedings 880
• 2007 - "Compact Reactor" (Read in full) — also AIP Conference Proceedings 880
• 2005 - "Poincare, Einstein and the Aether ? 100 Years Later" (Read in full)
• 2001 - "[[Energy and Entropy as the Fundaments of Theoretical Physics

Entropy]]" (Read in full) — Entropy

• 2001 - "Mechanical Entropy and its Implications" (Read in full) — Entropy
• 2001 - "[[Using the Hubble Telescope to Determine the Split of a Cosmological

Object's Redshift in its Gravitational and Distance Parts]]" (Read in full) — Apeiron V8 N2

• 1997 - "Thermodynamic Basis for the Constancy of the Speed of Light"
• 1994 - "Electric Propulsion/Antigravity"
• 1981 - "The Arrow of Time in the Dynamic Theory" (Read in full)

Books

• 2011 - "The Dynamic Theory - A New View of Space-Time-Matter" — ISBN 978-0615447117
• 2008 - "Physics - Against the Odds"

Media

• 2012 - Physical Time (Video Lecture)
• 2012 - Gravity (Video Lecture)

See also

• Variable speed of light — Williams derived the constancy of c rather than postulating it
• Natural Philosophy Alliance
• Apeiron

References

• J. O. Shannon, W. R. Maines, D. Mathes and P. Murad, "Memorial and Thoughts of a Man with Great Ideas — Pharis Williams", Sandia National Laboratories, SAND2015-2901C: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1248828
• P. E. Williams, The Dynamic Theory — A New View of Space-Time-Matter (2011), ISBN 978-0615447117
• Obituary, Legacy (December 2014)