Greg Volk

Greg Volk
Greg Volk
Born	January 7, 1961
Residence	Eagan, MN, United States
Nationality	USA
Known for	Entropy, Radiation, Entanglement, Unification, Atomic Structure, Toroidal Ring, IAAD, Mach's Principle, Topology, Hertzian Electrodynamics
	Scientific career
Fields	Electrical Engineer, Investments

Greg Volk (born January 7, 1961) is an American electrical engineer, entrepreneur, and independent researcher in fundamental physics. Working outside the scientific mainstream, he is known for his study of Maxwell's equations, for a widely circulated catalogue of unexamined assumptions in modern physics, and for the exploration of geometric and topological ("toroidal ring") models of matter. He has been strongly influenced by Common Sense Science and Creation Science, and served as president of the Natural Philosophy Alliance (NPA) and vice-president of its successor, the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society (CNPS).

Volk's work is unusual within the dissident community for being more diagnostic than doctrinal. Rather than advancing a single rival theory, his best-known papers ask what the alternative-physics literature as a whole has in common, which shared assumptions of the mainstream are doing the most hidden work, and what mathematical language would make a frame-independent physics expressible. His answers converge on two recurring themes — Mach's Principle in a matter-based form, and toroidal, vortex-structured particles — and on the total (convective) time derivative as the operator a reference-frame-independent dynamics requires.

Readers of this wiki also have a specific reason to know his name: Volk contributed the majority of the entries in the Natural Philosophers Database, the collection from which much of this wiki is derived.

Biography

Volk attended Stanford University from 1979 to 1984, studying electrical engineering while also completing the entire core undergraduate physics curriculum. He began, but did not complete, a master's degree in signal processing, and worked in optical character recognition (OCR) and CAD conversion.

Rather than pursue a career in physics or engineering, Volk became an entrepreneur, working over the years as a stock broker and investor, real estate broker, mortgage broker, landlord, music arranger and composer, business owner, and in the oil industry. He has described his introduction to Creation Science in the late 1980s as transforming his worldview toward a conviction in the existence of absolutes.

Volk lives in Eagan, Minnesota. He is married and has three children and one grandchild.

Scientific work

Volk has said that his decision not to pursue physics professionally stemmed in part from unease with the foundational laws of physics, and from a conviction that fundamental theory should exhibit greater elegance and unity rather than ad hoc complexity; he was particularly troubled by the implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

In the summer of 2007, Russ McGlenn introduced him to the work of David Bergman and Dr. Charles William Lucas of Common Sense Science, which renewed his interest in physics. He subsequently studied Bergman's ring model of the atom and the classical foundations of electrodynamics, drawing on the work of Prof. Andre Assis, Dr. Petr Beckmann, Dr. Peter Graneau, Dr. Thomas E. Phipps, Jr., Dr. Paul Wesley, Dr. Parry H. Moon and Dr. Domina Eberle Spencer, as well as the original writings of Newton, Huygens, Faraday, Boltzmann, Mach, Planck and Albert Einstein.

39 Questionable Assumptions in Modern Physics

Volk's most widely read paper, "39 Questionable Assumptions in Modern Physics" (2009), was presented at the Space, Propulsion & Energy Sciences International Forum (SPESIF-2009) and published by the American Institute of Physics (pp. 235-242), then reprinted in the Common Sense Science quarterly Foundations of Science. Publication by the AIP is worth noting, since it is a mainstream venue rarely open to work of this kind.

Its framing is Kuhnian. Every good scientist lists the assumptions behind a theory and argues for their reasonableness — but the assumptions that matter most are the ones so deeply ingrained, so "obviously true", that they are never listed at all. Volk's analogy is that "flat earth" and "weight-proportional gravity" were once in exactly that category, and that some present-day assumptions will one day be regarded with the same condescension. Only by questioning the obviously true, he argues, can new paradigms be established.

His premise is that the accumulating anomalies in new energy, low-energy nuclear reactions, astrophysics, atomic physics and entanglement — together with the failure of the Standard Model and string theory to predict many basic phenomena — call for revolutionary reconceptualization rather than "Band-Aids". Surveying the alternative literature for what its many proposals share, he identifies two themes with long histories:

Mach's Principle in a matter-based form — distinct both from space-based universal frames (an ether at absolute rest) and from observer-based Einsteinian relativity. Inertia refers to the rest of the matter in the universe, not to space and not to the observer.
Toroidal, vortex particles, which in addition to explaining electron spin and the fundamental constants satisfy what he calls the misunderstood requirement of Gauss's B law, ∇·B = 0: that motion itself circulates, with no sources or sinks.

Reference-frame independent dynamics

"Reference-Frame Independent Dynamics, Or How to Get Off Einstein's Train" (2009) is his most technical contribution, and connects directly to the neo-Hertzian tradition of Thomas E. Phipps, Jr.

Volk's argument begins with a distinction: Einstein spent his life seeking dynamics independent of reference frame, but pursued it through covariance, and covariant mathematics only admits transformations between coordinate systems — it "does not suggest a path towards invariance." Something stronger is needed.

His proposal is that the required language already exists. The del operator expresses spatial derivatives independently of coordinate system; and if time is independent of space, the total time derivative d/dt is likewise independent of reference frame. Equations expressible in terms of ∇ and d/dt — rather than the frame-dependent partial derivative ∂/∂t — are therefore naturally invariant. On this criterion Maxwell's equations can be correct only in the form using total derivatives, as proposed by Hertz and advocated in the modern literature by Phipps.

The operator in question is the convective or Lagrangian derivative d/dt = ∂/∂t + v·∇, which fluid dynamics — Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange — had developed more than a century before Maxwell. Volk's physical reading of it is the paper's most attractive passage: both sides of the equality are observer-independent, but the two right-hand terms are weighted differently depending on how an observer moves relative to the quantity being differentiated. "One observer might see a buildup of material, while another sees an altered flow; one observer might see a changing field, another an acceleration. But the total change, the sum, remains invariant."

From this he derives Maxwell's displacement-current term in Ampère's law and addresses long-standing difficulties with Faraday's law, particularly unipolar induction and the Sagnac effect — the two phenomena most often cited as embarrassments for the standard formulation.

The companion two-part series "The Meaning of Maxwell's Equations" (2009-2010) works through the equations individually, with separate treatments of Gauss's D law and Ampère's law.

Toroids, vortices, knots and topology

"Toroids, Vortices, Knots, Topology and Quanta" (2010, extended 2011) asks what binds matter into stable particles. Volk's answer: at every location within a stable particle there must be a balance between the natural repulsion of like elements and the attraction due to parallel motions; and for a continuum, every moving element must be immediately replaced by another — which forces the flow into a circuit. If circuits are the basis of the structure of matter, then the simplest circuit, the toroid, is the object to study.

The paper develops toroidal coordinates, the relation of toroids to vortices, and the connection between toroidal knots and topology. Its central physical claim concerns quantization. A real stable three-dimensional particle must circulate both around the toroid of radius R and around the cross-section of radius r, so that for every m circuits of the major radius there are n of the minor — an integer relation. When the relative phases exceed 360°, that integer relation changes instantly. Volk identifies this discontinuous jump with the strobe effect familiar from a roulette wheel, from wagon wheels in old westerns, and from Lissajous figures, and argues — with a physical demonstration — that these jumps correspond precisely to the absorption and emission of photons. Quantization, on this account, is a consequence of closed circulation in a continuum rather than a primitive postulate.

The paper closes with the Rodin coil as a case study, a topic he treated separately in "The Rodin Number Map and Rodin Coil" (2010).

Other work

"Pseudovectors and Pseudoscalars, or Reflections on Reflection" (2010) — on the handedness-dependent quantities of electromagnetism and what their existence implies.
"The Nature of Eynptor (Entropy)" (2009) — his attempt to connect entropy with electrodynamics; the coinage reverses the word.
"A Matter of Definition" (2011) — on how definitional choices smuggle physical assumptions into theory.
"The Convergence of New Physics Paradigms: Unity in Diversity" (2011) — the survey argument again, that independent alternative programmes are converging on shared structures.
"Fourier Closed Loops" (2012) and "Analysis of Lockyer Cubes" (2012) — geometric and harmonic analyses.
"An Optimistic Assessment of "Fringe"? Science" (2013) — an assessment of the state and prospects of the dissident community itself.

Organizational roles

Volk became active in the Natural Philosophy Alliance in 2008, where he met David de Hilster. Together they modernized the organization's digital infrastructure, and Volk contributed the majority of the entries in the Natural Philosophers Database — the biographical and bibliographic collection underlying much of this wiki.

He edited the NPA conference proceedings for its 18th and 19th meetings, published as "Proceedings of the NPA, Volume 8" (2011) and "Proceedings of the NPA, Volume 9" (2012). In 2013 he became president of the NPA, in the period of the dispute described at Natural Philosophy Alliance; following the reformation of the membership as the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society he served as vice-president of the CNPS.

Abstracts

2013 - "An Optimistic Assessment of "Fringe"? Science"
2012 - "Analysis of Lockyer Cubes" (Read in full)
2012 - "Fourier Closed Loops" (Read in full)
2011 - "The Convergence of New Physics Paradigms: Unity in Diversity" (Read in full)
2011 - "A Matter of Definition" (Read in full)
2010 - "Pseudovectors and Pseudoscalars, or Reflections on Reflection" (Read in full)
2010 - "The Rodin Number Map and Rodin Coil" (Read in full)
2010 - "Toroids, Vortices, Knots, Topology and Quanta" (Read in full)
2009 - "The Meaning of Maxwell's Equations" (Read in full)
2009 - "The Nature of Eynptor (Entropy)"
2009 - "39 Questionable Assumptions in Modern Physics" (Read in full)
2009 - "Reference-Frame Independent Dynamics, Or How to Get Off Einstein's Train" (Read in full)

Books

2012 - "Proceedings of the NPA, Volume 9" — 19th NPA Conference proceedings, edited by Volk (Read in full)
2011 - "Proceedings of the NPA, Volume 8" — 18th NPA Conference proceedings, edited by Volk

Media

2012 - Fourier Closed Loops (Video Lecture)
2012 - Analysis of Lockyer Cubes (Video Lecture)
2011 - A Matter of Definition (Video Lecture) — formerly hosted at worldsci.org; no longer available
2010 - The Meaning of Maxwell's Equations, Part 2: Ampere's Law (Video Lecture) — formerly hosted at worldsci.org; no longer available
2010 - The Meaning of Maxwell's Equations, Part 1: Gauss D Law (Video Lecture) — formerly hosted at worldsci.org; no longer available
2009 - Reference-Frame Independent Dynamics, Or How to Get Off Einstein's Train, Parts 1 and 2 (Video Lecture) — formerly hosted at worldsci.org; no longer available
2009 - 39 Questionable Assumptions in Modern Physics, Parts 2 and 4 (Video Lecture) — formerly hosted at worldsci.org; no longer available
2009 - Interferometry Group (Video Group Meeting) — formerly hosted at worldsci.org; no longer available

External links