The Theory of Gravitation

The Theory of Gravitation

Author	Sorin Cezar Cosofret
Published	2007
Publisher	Editura Elkadot
Pages	106
ISBN	978-9738840720

The Theory of Gravitation (2007) is a book by the Romanian researcher Sorin Cezar Cosofret, published at Iaşi by Editura Elkadot. It sets out what he calls the theory of planetary vortexes — an account in which the solar system is not a set of bodies moving through empty space under mutual attraction, but a set of bodies moving through a real, moving interplanetary medium which acts on them.

Its most unusual feature is its modesty about what it is attacking. Cosofret states at the outset that the theory is:

not intended as a negation of the Newton's theory of gravitation, but as its complement.

— Sorin Cezar Cosofret, The Theory of Gravitation

The proposal

The argument begins with an observation about what Newtonian celestial mechanics assumes. It:

describes the movement of celestial bodies which constitutes the solar system (planets, comets, asteroids) as in a vacuum, in a completely void, matter less space.

— Sorin Cezar Cosofret, The Theory of Gravitation

That idealisation was reasonable in 1687 and is now known to be false in detail: the space between the planets contains solar wind, dust, plasma and field. Cosofret's move is to ask what follows if that medium is not merely present but in global motion — a vortex.

The consequence is that a planet is subject to two interactions rather than one: the familiar Sun–planet attraction, and an additional interaction between the interplanetary environment and the body moving through it. The second appears in the equations as a corrective term.

The nature of the corrective term

The character of that term is the theory's most carefully stated point, and it is easy to misread. Cosofret specifies that the correction:

refers to the nature (density) of the celestial body, and we may not apply this corrective term to a fundamental interaction.

— Sorin Cezar Cosofret, The Theory of Gravitation

In other words the extra force depends on what the body is made of — its density — and is therefore explicitly not offered as a modification of gravity itself. It is an environmental force, of the same general kind as drag or buoyancy, which acts alongside gravitation without altering it.

This matters more than it may appear. A gravitational theory in which the force depends on composition would collide immediately with the Eötvös and Dicke experiments, which constrain any such dependence to extraordinary precision, and with the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass — a topic Cosofret takes up directly in the book's third chapter. By locating the density dependence in a separate, non-gravitational interaction, he keeps the equivalence principle intact and confines his correction to bodies actually moving through the medium.

The cost is the corresponding empirical burden: a composition-dependent force acting on planets and comets must be small enough to have escaped notice in the very precise ephemerides of solar-system dynamics, yet large enough to do the explanatory work the book asks of it.

What the book covers

At 106 pages the book is compact but wide-ranging, and its contents show where Cosofret thinks a moving medium earns its keep.

• Motion of the planets — the general equation of motion in the vortex theory, motion in a central force field, the law of forces and the structure of the field, and an explicit comparison with Newtonian theory covering the advance of the perihelion. Cosofret estimates a constant of the theory from perihelion measurements, and treats orbital periods, perturbed motion and the differential equation of the trajectory.
• Cometary motion — the fragmentation of comets, the formation of cometary tails, the acceleration of particles in Type I tails, the formation of meteor streams, and the shapes of cometary orbits. This is the theory's most natural territory: comets are low-density bodies with enormous surface area, exactly the case where an interaction with a medium should be most visible, and cometary tails are already understood to be shaped by the solar wind.
• Comparison with other theories of gravitation — the deflection of photons in gravitational fields, redshifting in intense fields, motion with a variable gravitational constant, and the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. These are the classical tests, and any theory touching gravitation must face them.
• Other effects — a notably ambitious chapter covering the motion of bodies of variable density, planetary expansion and the reconstruction of the Earth, rotational motion within galaxies, the formation of the solar system, the persistence and stability of rotation, the appearance of cosmic rotation, the anisotropy of cosmic rays, the Pioneer 10 and 11 acceleration anomaly, and the virial theorem and dark matter.
• Mathematical addendum — the general equations of motion, the structure of the field, the equations of the vortex nucleus, the determination of the perihelion advance, and Kelvin's circulation theorem.

The appeal to Kelvin's circulation theorem is worth noting: it places the work in real fluid dynamics rather than in metaphor, and it is the theorem that governs whether a vortex, once formed, persists.

The Cartesian inheritance

Vortex gravitation has a long and specific history. René Descartes proposed in 1644 that space is a plenum filled with subtle matter, and that planets are carried around the Sun in a great whirlpool rather than pulled by a force acting across a void. It was the dominant cosmology of the later seventeenth century, and Newton took it seriously enough to devote much of Book II of the Principia to dismantling it, arguing that vortex motion could not reproduce Kepler's laws.

Newton's refutation was decisive and vortices left mainstream physics. What Cosofret revives is not Descartes' cosmology but his instinct — that action across empty space is unsatisfactory, and that a real intervening medium should do real work. His concession to Newton is substantial: rather than replacing the inverse-square law with vortex circulation, as Descartes did, he keeps Newton's law and adds the medium as a correction on top of it.

Related work on this wiki

The book belongs to the tradition of mechanical explanations of gravitation documented here — the conviction that gravity, or at least the motions attributed to it, should have a physical cause in a medium rather than being action at a distance or pure geometry.

• Georges-Louis Le Sage proposed the other great mechanical account: gravity as the residual push of an omnidirectional corpuscular flux that bodies screen from one another. Le Sage and Cosofret represent the two available mechanical strategies — push from a particle flux, and drag or entrainment by a moving medium.
• The Particle Model of Bob de Hilster and David de Hilster continues the Le Sage line on this wiki, as did Tom Van Flandern's gravitational-shielding arguments and Quirino Majorana's absorption experiments.
• Cosofret's chapter on planetary expansion and the reconstruction of the Earth connects to Expansion Tectonics and the work of Neal Adams — an unusual point of contact, since Cosofret arrives at an expanding Earth from celestial mechanics rather than from geology.
• His treatment of galactic rotation and the virial theorem addresses the observations normally taken as evidence for dark matter, a question also pursued at Dark Energy.

Assessment

The book's strengths are its restraint and its specificity. Cosofret does not claim to overthrow Newton, and he does not claim his corrective term is gravitational — a discipline that spares him the equivalence-principle objection which sinks many composition-dependent proposals. He derives an equation of motion, estimates his constant from perihelion data, and applies the result to a definite list of phenomena, several of which are genuine open problems.

The reservations are equally clear. The work was self-published by a small Romanian house and, by the author's own account on his website, was refused by the journals; it has attracted no published examination, and no independent worker has checked the derivations or the fit to the perihelion data. Where the theory's claims are strongest — cometary tails, the Pioneer anomaly — conventional explanations also exist, and the book's reach across planetary motion, comets, galaxies, cosmic rays, Earth expansion and dark matter in 106 pages necessarily means that no one of them is treated at the length a specialist would demand.

Cosofret's broader position, set out on his site, is that the foundations of modern physics are so weak that they can be overturned by simple and inexpensive experiments — a stance that has kept him outside the journals and that this book, his most technical, was written to support.

See also

• Sorin Cezar Cosofret
• Georges-Louis Le Sage
• Particle Model
• Expansion Tectonics
• Gravity
• Aether
• Category: Gravity

Links to Purchase Book

• Editura Elkadot
• Table of contents at the author's site