39 Questionable Assumptions in Modern Physics

Scientific Paper
Title	39 Questionable Assumptions in Modern Physics
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Greg Volk
Keywords	Paradigms, Assumptions, Relativity, Reference Frame, Mach?s Principle, Vortex, Toroidal Ring, Elementary Particles
Published	2009
No. of pages	16
Pages	235-242

Read the full paper here

Abstract

The growing body of anomalies in new energy, low energy nuclear reactions, astrophysics, atomic physics, and entanglement, combined with the failure of the Standard Model and string theory to predict many of the most basic fundamental phenomena, all point to a need for major new paradigms. Not Band-Aids, but revolutionary new ways of conceptualizing physics, in the spirit of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This paper identifies a number of long-held, but unproven assumptions currently being challenged by an increasing number of alternative scientists. Two common themes, both with venerable histories, keep recurring in the many alternative theories being proposed: (1) Mach's Principle, and (2) toroidal, vortex particles. Matter-based Mach's Principle differs from both space-based universal frames and observer-based Einsteinian relativity. Toroidal particles, in addition to explaining electron spin and the fundamental constants, satisfy the basic requirement of Gauss's misunderstood B Law, that motion itself circulates. Though a comprehensive theory is beyond the scope of this paper, it will suggest alternatives to the long list of assumptions in context.

Overview

This is a survey and a manifesto rather than a theory paper. Greg Volk compiles thirty-nine propositions that contemporary physics treats as settled fact but that he classifies as unexamined assumptions, and for each one he sketches at least one alternative drawn from the dissident literature. The paper was first given at the Space, Propulsion & Energy Sciences International Forum (SPESIF-2009) and reprinted in Foundations of Science by Common Sense Science in August 2009. Volk opens with the observation that the dangerous assumptions are not the ones scientists list in their papers but the ones so "obviously true" that they are never listed at all — the flat earth and weight-proportional gravity of their day. Following Thomas Kuhn, he argues that revolutions happen only when such invisible premises are made visible.

Two positive commitments run through the whole list and give it what unity it has. The first is a matter-based reading of Mach's Principle: motion, energy and even simultaneity are relations between pieces of matter, not properties of space or of an observer's frame. This distinguishes Volk's position both from aether theories that posit a fixed frame in space and from Einsteinian relativity, which he regards as observer-based. The second is the toroidal, helical ring model of the particle inherited from his mentors at Common Sense Science, in which every elementary particle is a finite closed circuit of circulating charge. Volk is explicit that the paper does not attempt a complete theory; he asks the reader only to "reconsider even one long-held assumption."

The thirty-nine assumptions

Light, energy and the constant c (1–5)

The list is deliberately ordered, and Volk says the first assumption is placed first "because a host of other assumptions are presumed because of it." That assumption is that light is a thing that travels from A to B. If light is instead an interaction between elements of matter, then talk of its travel is a convenience. He leans on Petr Beckmann and on Richard Feynman's own account of Fermat's principle in QED — the phase contributions of all non-least-time paths cancel — to argue that least-time propagation is an "as if" result rather than a mechanism. Assumptions 2 and 3 extend this: that energy can exist without matter, and that the photon is a thing in itself. Volk cites the Ashworth–Jennison treatment of the Compton effect by purely electromagnetic scattering as evidence that light quanta are not required, and proposes locating the quantum "with the particle, as understood by Poincaré, rather than with space, as proposed by Einstein."

Assumption 4 denies that c is a property of space. Since e, m and h are all treated as properties of particles, he asks why c alone should not be. He invokes Wilhelm Weber's 1846 electrodynamics and the 1856 Weber–Kohlrausch measurement — documented by Andre K T Assis — in which c emerges as the speed at which charge must move for electric and magnetic forces to balance: the "speed of charge," which Maxwell only later identified with the speed of light. Assumption 5, that nothing exceeds c, is called the one on which "his relativity house of cards is held up," citing Laplace's orbital-stability argument and Tom Van Flandern's claim that gravity propagates far faster than light.

Action, fields and the particle (6–15, 23–30)

Assumptions 6 to 11 concern locality. Volk notes that Newton's own gravitational formula, and Coulomb's and Gauss's laws at face value, contain no time delay, and that the Bell/CHSH and Aspect experiments force either incompleteness or non-local entanglement. He reinterprets the demand that all forces be contact forces: if a particle's fields are an inseparable part of it, then it is in "contact" with all other matter at once, and Mach's Principle requires fields rather than abolishing them. From this follows the claim that a particle's energy is not localized where the particle is but spread through space in its fields — "a sea of energy" — so that space cannot be empty. He is careful to separate this from the aether-as-fixed-frame idea.

Assumption 12 attacks the identification of mass with quantity of matter: one may define mass as amount of stuff or as resistance to motion, but not both, and if mass is stuff, then what is charge? Dropping it opens the door to variable particle masses and to the small mass discrepancies (neutron versus proton plus electron; carbon-12 versus its constituents). Assumptions 13–15 develop the toroidal picture: a ring can expand or collapse at constant action h and charge e, so quantized states appear as equilibria, and discreteness arises from a strobe-like beat between a particle's geometric "resonant" frequency and its "actual" frequency in a given environment. René Thom's catastrophe theory supplies the general point that continuous fields routinely produce discontinuities; Volk stresses that such nodes carry zero energy density, unlike the infinite densities of point particles and black holes.

Assumptions 23–30 press the same case: point particles are a Maxwellian approximation turned into dogma; spin and magnetic moment are unintelligible without circulating current in a finite body; the claim that quantum mechanics cannot be explained classically is "a ludicrous tautology" if "classical" is defined as "not derivable from quantum mechanics"; and the particle zoo is larger than Mendeleev's element list, which should itself invite suspicion. His most distinctive structural claim is assumption 28: there are not two kinds of charge but two handednesses of circulation. A stable ring needs an Amperian pinch both around the torus and around its cross-section, so the motion must be helical, and a helix admits exactly two observer-independent chiralities — Franklin's "positive" and "negative." Antimatter then becomes the mirror image Paul Dirac originally described, not an exotic substance.

Cosmology (16–22)

Volk argues that gravity is not fundamental (Assis's fourth-order non-cancelling electromagnetic term, and Charles William Lucas's derivation of the inverse-square law from it) and, more strongly, that it is not dominant: the Coulomb force between charged particles exceeds gravity by a factor of 10⁴⁰, yet cosmology is built on gravity alone. He points to Anthony L Peratt's plasma simulations, following Alfvén and Bostick, which reproduce galaxy morphologies including Arp's peculiar galaxies, and to the Electric Sun model as an alternative to core fusion, noting that solar hot fusion "is theoretical only, and has never been reproduced in a lab."

On redshift (19) he cites Arp's associations of high-redshift quasars with low-redshift parents and William G Tifft's redshift quantization, arguing for an intrinsic, Compton-like interaction component alongside the distance trend. On the CBR (20) he follows Assis and Neves in noting predecessors who derived a background temperature near 2.7 K from blackbody arguments before Penzias and Wilson. Assumption 21 recasts c/H not as an age but as a size, and links it speculatively to Dirac's large-number coincidence, so that the Big Bang (22) becomes a conclusion resting on the earlier assumptions rather than an independent finding.

Time, circuits and method (31–39)

Assumption 32 replaces the frame-dependent instant with a universal one, and with it partial time derivatives by total (convective) derivatives following Hertz and Thomas E Phipps; expanding v·∇ in Ampère's and Faraday's laws yields terms absent from the textbooks, with the Lorentz forms recovered as approximations. Assumption 33 uses this to argue that Kirchhoff's voltage law can fail transiently on a rotating platform until the charge is "entrained," which he offers as the setting for John Bedini-style spike energy; the Sagnac Effect persists precisely because light, not being a thing, is never entrained. Assumption 34 separates clock rate from time itself: GPS and Hafele–Keating show that caesium atoms oscillate more slowly under gravitation or acceleration, not that time dilates. Assumption 35 anchors zero-point energy to matter — the energy a particle needs to remain a particle, the balance of repulsive Coulomb and attractive Amperian terms — rather than to a free-floating ether, and makes the ratio of total energy to ZPE a measure of entanglement with the environment. The list closes with three methodological items: observation does not affect reality (measurement affecting the measured is a different and uncontroversial claim), mind may nevertheless belong in physics, and experiments never prove theories but only falsify them.

Assessment

The paper's real value is as a map. Volk has read widely across the dissident literature — Weber and Assis on electrodynamics, Beckmann and Phipps on relativity, Arp and Tifft on redshift, Peratt on plasma, Peter Graneau on longitudinal forces, Bergman and Lucas on ring particles — and the list functions as an index to that literature with the connections drawn. Several entries are genuinely well posed. Assumption 12, that mass cannot simultaneously be "amount of stuff" and "resistance to motion" without begging the question, is a clean logical point. Assumption 39's distinction between proof and evidence is elementary but routinely blurred in popular accounts. The chirality account of charge in assumption 28 is the one item that does real theoretical work: it derives a definite prediction (exactly two particle types, mirror-related) from a stated requirement (stability against both azimuthal and cross-sectional repulsion) rather than merely asserting a possibility.

The weaknesses are structural. Because each entry occupies a paragraph, almost nothing is derived; the alternatives are gestured at and referred out to other papers. The paper never demonstrates that a toroidal ring reproduces the electron's measured magnetic moment to the precision QED achieves, nor that catastrophe theory's seven elementary catastrophes actually match the observed particle spectrum — the correspondence is called "surprisingly overlooked" and cited, not shown. Several items also sit in tension with each other. Assumption 1 denies that light travels; assumption 5 asserts that gravity propagates at least 10⁷ times faster than c, which presupposes that propagation speed is a meaningful attribute of an interaction after all. Assumption 6 embraces instantaneous action at a distance while assumption 32's total-derivative formalism is defended as recovering Lorentz-type results as approximations; how a strictly instantaneous theory reproduces retarded radiation fields is left open.

Against measurement, the most exposed entries are cosmological and relativistic. The intrinsic-redshift reading of assumption 19 has to account for the (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves, which tracks redshift as a time-dilation effect and is hard to obtain from a scattering mechanism; Compton-like interaction also generically blurs images, which quasar observations constrain tightly. Assumption 20 correctly notes pre-1965 temperature estimates, but those were single numbers, whereas the measured CBR spectrum is a blackbody to about one part in 10⁵ with an anisotropy power spectrum whose acoustic peaks no ambient-temperature argument has reproduced. Assumption 34's clocks-not-time reading is a defensible philosophical position, but it must still explain why the muon lifetime, the transverse Doppler shift and the GPS correction all agree quantitatively with one formula; Volk's version, in which the travelling twin ages slightly faster, is stated without the calculation that would let it be compared with Hafele–Keating's numbers. Assumption 38's invitation to admit mind into physics is the point at which the paper's own standard — that experiment can falsify — becomes hardest to apply, and Volk offers no criterion by which a mind-matter claim could fail.

Taken on its own terms, the paper does what it says it will do. It is not an argument that the thirty-nine propositions are false, and Volk explicitly asks the reader not to treat it as one; it is an argument that they are assumptions, which is a weaker and much more defensible claim. Read that way it is a useful and unusually well-referenced entry point to the alternative-physics programme of the late 2000s.

See also

• Greg Volk
• Mach's Principle
• Toroidal Ring
• Andre K T Assis
• Wilhelm Weber
• Charles William Lucas
• Thomas E Phipps
• David L Bergman
• Halton C Arp
• William G Tifft
• Anthony L Peratt
• Zero Point Energy
• Redshift
• Big Bang
• Sagnac Effect