William R Hohenberger

William R. Hohenberger
Born	(1946-11-13) November 13, 1946 Northwest Ohio, United States
Residence	Fort Myers, FL, United States
Nationality	USA
Known for	The Aether Fractal Plenum, twist-loop fractal structures, the Dodecahedron Quark Ball, stellar air and liquid light, Earth expansion by aether inflow
Scientific career
Fields	Engineering, Philosophy, Writing

William R. Hohenberger (born 13 November 1946) is an American engineer, poet and independent theorist who has developed a geometric and fractal theory of the aether, from which he claims to calculate the masses of the electron, proton and neutron together with the fine structure constant, Planck's length and the golden ratio Φ.

Born in northwest Ohio and holding an engineering degree, he describes himself as a philosopher of the heart and the mind. That phrase is not decoration: his work divides between a structural programme, in which matter is built from the geometry of a fractal medium, and a perceptual one, in which the world we see is an illusion of the mind and the real world must be reached by imagination. He regards the two as a single argument.

The Aether Fractal Plenum

Hohenberger's central construct is the Aether Fractal Plenum. His statement of it is deliberately ecumenical — an attempt to gather the competing dissident accounts of the medium under one description:

The various philosophies of the physics of aether can and must be integrated for there is only one real truth. Aether, whether it is called cosmic lattice, quantum foam or the neutrino sea, is a multi-dimensional, multi-generational, hyper-dynamic fractal, which can be thought of as both a fixed lattice and a dynamic fluid, and which is always in constant motion.

— W. R. Hohenberger, The Structure of Aether and the Mechanics of the Electromagnetic Wave Spectrum (2009)

Two features distinguish it from the classical aether. It is fractal — structured at every scale, not a uniform continuum — and it is generational, producing different classes of particle at successive levels of organisation.

From it follow a set of positions on what things are:

• All energy pre-exists within the aether as waves, particles, matter or fields, and these are interchangeable.
• Quarks are charge segments of an electromagnetic wave — four-dimensionally shaped, combining spatially to form "saturated" particles.
• Electrons are created in the second generation of electromagnetic waves; protons and neutrons in the third.
• The electromagnetic spectrum ends at Planck's frequency.
• Waves are three-dimensional structures with both transverse components (the electric and magnetic fields) and a longitudinal one — their propagation speed. A longitudinal component is denied by standard electromagnetism and is a recurring claim in the literature catalogued here.
• Fields are distortions in the circular structures of the aether, not entities in their own right.

His methodological commitment is stated flatly: "All phenomena can and must be explained as mechanical variations in form and structure" of the aethereal sea.

Structures and the calculation of constants

The programme's ambition is to make geometry do the work of numbers — to derive the constants of nature from the shapes the plenum can adopt rather than measuring them.

The machinery is drawn from named fractal constructions: Sierpinski's Triangle and Pascal's Fractal, which he unifies; twist-loop fractals; hexagonal fractals; the Octahedral Hexagonal Fractal; the Dodecahedron Quark Ball; and a Phi Pyramid. In The First Priniciples of Aether (2011) he assembles these into what he calls a Periodic Table of fractals — a catalogue of the forms available within the plenum.

From that catalogue he claims to calculate:

• the masses of the electron, proton and neutron;
• the fine structure constant α;
• Planck's length;
• the golden ratio Φ, derived in The Structure of Aether and a Structural Method for Calculating Phi and Planck's Length (2010) from an octahedral model of the tetrahedral fine structure of aether, reconciled with a Seven Twist-Loop Fractal model;
• the electron radius and Schwarzschild radius, integrated along parameters set by Sierpinski's Triangle and Pascal's Fractal.

The appeal of such a programme is plain: a constant that can be derived from a structure is explained, where a constant that must be measured is merely recorded. This is the same instinct that drives the structural theories of Don Briddell and Thomas N Lockyer on this wiki.

Stellar air, liquid light, and the expanding Earth

Alongside the technical papers Hohenberger writes a frankly visionary version of the same physics, in which the aether is stellar air and matter is liquid light:

All the space between the stars and the planets is filled with a single universal substance, the stellar air. The objects of our physical world are made from compressed and condensed stellar air, or liquid light. The stellar air can be seen as a luminous fog and the liquid light can be seen as structures of crystal.

— W. R. Hohenberger, A Unified Vision of the Universe (2008)

This yields a mechanism that connects him directly to another strand of this wiki. Gravity is the inflow of stellar air: the medium flows through our bodies and into the Earth, producing the sensation of weight — and on arrival it turns into mass, by a process he calls nuclear pro-fusion, so that the Earth grows and expands and its continents drift apart.

An expanding Earth driven by the conversion of an inflowing medium into matter is a mechanism for exactly the phenomenon argued from geological evidence at Expansion Tectonics and by Neal Adams — reached here from aether physics rather than from the fit of the continents. He also places a black hole at the centre of every galaxy, star and planet, encased in a ball of nuclear fire, and holds the physical universe to expand within a "heavenly universe" that is finite and eternal.

Perception, mind, and the two worlds

The second half of Hohenberger's work concerns the observer, and it is the half that explains why he writes as he does.

His claim is that the world we perceive is an illusion constructed within the mind, and that the real world — made of "the transcendent energies of the dark and the light" — is reachable only through imagination. He invokes Plato's shadows on the cave wall explicitly, and argues the case from the physiology and psychology of vision: objects possess no colour; colour is a property of the perceiving mind, not of the thing perceived. Analyses of colour perception, holography and virtual reality are marshalled to show that human sensory experience is a representation rather than a replication.

The methodological consequence, set out in The Effects of Human Perception & the Human Mind on Building a New Paradigm for Physics (2008), is that physics cannot be reformed until physicists recognise that their observations are data about the observer as much as about the world. He grounds this on "the absolute necessity of cause and effect, through the 'a priori' existence of substance, structure, mechanism and process" — a premise that rules out, as a matter of method, both acausal quantum mechanics and any universe without a material substrate.

He carries the argument further than most would. In An Explanation for the Mechanisms that Cause Near-Death and Out of Body Experiences (2010) he holds that human beings have two bodies, the physical and the metaphysical, and that the metaphysical body and the soul can exist outside the physical one — offering this as an explanation of near-death and out-of-body experience. His 1992 book Perceptions: A Symphony of Words sets out a theory of the human mind, an organised word-structure for language, an account of the psychological origins of the I Ching and the Qabala, and definitions of good and evil, closing with a poem.

Readers will divide sharply here, and the division is worth naming plainly: the same commitment to a fully mechanical, cause-and-effect universe that drives the aether work also leads him into metaphysics and scriptural decoding that most physical scientists — including most dissident ones — will not follow.

Convergence with other researchers on this wiki

Hohenberger's most interesting contribution may be his last. His 2013 paper Integrating Vector Particle Physics with the Dodecahedron Quark Ball and the Octahedral Hexagonal Fractal is an explicit attempt to unify three independently developed structural theories, all three of them documented here:

• Thomas N Lockyer's Vector Particle Physics and its Electron Cube — a model that reproduces the proton mass to within 3.5 parts per million and the neutron mass to within 0.4 ppm;
• Don Briddell's Field Structure Theory, in which particles are loops, twists and knots in a plenum, organised by a Sierpinski hierarchy;
• his own Dodecahedron Quark Ball and Octahedral Hexagonal Fractal.

He defines the sine–sine, sine–cosine and sine²–cosine² functions of the electric and magnetic fields of a wave, and uses them to seek a common structural platform for the internal structure of the electron, testing the Electron Cube and the Octahedral Hexagonal Fractal both for the internal structure of the electron's mass and for congruency with the field lines Briddell's theory predicts.

This is unusual and valuable work. Dissident physics is often criticised — fairly — for producing many private systems that never engage one another. Hohenberger, Briddell and Lockyer arrived independently at the view that particles are geometry, and Hohenberger attempted to find out whether their geometries agree.

Assessment

The programme's attractions are its mechanism and its ambition. Hohenberger refuses to accept a constant as brute fact, insists that every phenomenon have a structural cause, and produces definite geometric objects rather than gestures. His willingness to test his constructions against other researchers' is rarer still.

The reservations are substantial and should be stated. Deriving physical constants from geometry is a field with a long history of numerological failure: with enough freedom in choosing fractals, exponents and combinations, target values can usually be reached, and the discipline that separates derivation from curve-fitting is a formal account of why these structures and no others. The papers are conference contributions to the Natural Philosophy Alliance rather than journal articles, have not been independently checked, and — apart from his own synthesis paper — have attracted no published examination. And the same framework that yields the aether structures also yields the I Ching, the Qabala and the metaphysical body, which will cost him readers who might otherwise assess the geometry on its merits.

What can fairly be said is that he is one of a small group here who took the structural programme seriously enough to try to make it one theory rather than three.

Abstracts

• 2013 - "Integrating Vector Particle Physics with the Dodecahedron Quark Ball and the Octahedral Hexagonal Fractal" (Read in full)
• 2012 - "Aethereal Fractal Structures for the Electron & Proton" (Read in full)
• 2011 - "The First Priniciples of Aether" (Read in full)
• 2010 - "An Explanation for the Mechanisms that Cause Near-Death and Out of Body Experiences" (Read in full)
• 2010 - "The Structure of Aether and a Structural Method for Calculating Phi and Planck's Length" (Read in full)
• 2010 - "Twist-Loop Aethereal Fractal Structures" (Read in full)
• 2009 - "The Structure of Aether and the Mechanics of the Electromagnetic Wave Spectrum" (Read in full)
• 2008 - "The Effects of Human Perception & the Human Mind on Building a New Paradigm for Physics" (Read in full)
• 2008 - "Methods for Visualizing Aether, Electromagnetic Waves, and All Else" (Read in full)
• 2008 - "A Unified Vision of the Universe" (Read in full)

Books

• 1992; 2nd ed 2008 - "Perceptions: A Symphony of Words" (Read in full)

Media

• 2012 - Video demonstration
• 2011 - First Principles for Aether (video lecture)

See also

• Aether
• Don Briddell and Field Structure Theory
• Thomas N Lockyer and Vector Particle Physics
• Expansion Tectonics
• Space Lattice
• Category: Aether