James Marsen
James Marsen | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1948 (age 77–78) |
| Residence | Ridgefield Park, NJ, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Known for | Ether, Relativity, Gravity, Electromagnetism, Quantum Mechanics, Cosmology |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Independent Researcher, Physics |
James Marsen (also published as Jim Marsen, born 1948) is an American independent researcher and Columbia University-trained engineer working outside the academic mainstream on aether physics. He is best known as an author of the Tron Theory, a proposed unification of physical science built on a new sub-electron particle called the tron, and as an advocate of local-ether models of light propagation as an alternative to Einstein's Special Relativity.
Biography
Marsen was educated entirely at Columbia University in New York City:
- BA, Columbia College, Columbia University, 1970
- BSME, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University, 1972
- MSME, Plasma Physics, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University, 1975
- PhD candidate, Plasma Physics, Graduate School of Arts and Science, Columbia University, 1976-1979
He lives in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, and describes his current work as independent research. He maintains profiles on Academia.edu and ResearchGate, where his papers on the Tron Theory and on aether-drift experiments are posted, and he is a member of the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society, in whose online seminar series he has presented repeatedly.
Scientific contributions
The Tron Theory
The Tron Theory, developed with Richard A. Marsen and set out in the papers "Introduction to the Tron Theory" (2014) and "The Tron Theory: A novel concept for the Ether and Matter" (2016), is offered as a unifying framework for physical science. Its central posit is a new fundamental particle, the tron, several orders of magnitude smaller than the electron and of minute mass, with a simple spherical-like structure. Each tron is itself composed of a variable number of still smaller particles called rons, which share the tron's structure and are in turn composed of yet smaller units called Ons.
Adjacent trons are premised to attract one another by an elemental force that is neutral of charge and inversely proportional to the distance between tron cores. Tenuous arrays of contiguous trons constitute the aether, which Marsen calls the tronos; its density is variable and depends on the local electric or gravitational potential, so that fields are understood as states of this medium rather than as abstract mathematical entities. Where tron arrays are highly compressed, they cohere to form the fundamental particles of ordinary matter.
A key claim of the theory is that quantum-mechanical phenomena arise from the interaction of fundamental particles with the tronos "in a completely deterministic and causal manner" — that is, the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics is treated as an artifact of an unmodelled physical medium rather than as an irreducible feature of nature. The theory is presented axiomatically, its foundation being a set of seven axioms given as the Tron Postulate, which specifies the composition and dynamic properties of the tron and the ron.
Local-ether models and the aether-drift experiments
Marsen also works on the experimental question of whether an aether has already been detected. He has promoted the local-ether propagation model developed by the late Petr Beckmann (1986) and, independently, by the late Prof. Ching-Chuan Su of National Tsing Hua University (from 2000), together with Su's corollary theory of Quantum Electromagnetics. On this model, a body of sufficient gravitational influence carries with it a local ether at rest in its own gravitational potential: the Earth's local ether sits within the Sun's, which sits within the galaxy's, and so on. Marsen argues that such nested local ethers are compatible with stellar aberration, the change in the phase fronts of starlight occurring at the boundary of the ether halo surrounding the Earth, and that the model accounts for the classic null results without requiring the relativity of simultaneity or a variable rate of time.
From this position Marsen has proposed a decisive test. Because a terrestrial Michelson-Morley apparatus is at rest in the Earth's local ether, it should return a null result whatever the truth of relativity; the experiment must therefore be moved off the Earth. In "A Michelson-Morley Type Experiment Should be Performed in Low Earth Orbit and Interplanetary Space" he proposes flying an interferometer on a spacecraft, and predicts a positive fringe shift corresponding to the spacecraft's orbital velocity — roughly 7.6 km/s for a 500 km Earth orbit, and roughly 30 km/s for a craft orbiting the Sun in interplanetary space — where Special Relativity predicts null results in both cases. He presented this proposal to the CNPS in December 2024.
More recently Marsen has argued that an aether signal may already be sitting in the published record. The 1979 Brillet-Hall experiment, the most precise Michelson-Morley type test of its era, is normally reported as null; but the experimenters also found a persistent non-null signal of amplitude about 2 × 10⁻¹³ at twice the rotation frequency of the apparatus, with fixed phase in the laboratory frame, which they set aside as spurious because standard relativity does not predict it. Marsen's 2026 CNPS talks re-examine this residual and ask whether Brillet and Hall in fact detected the aether.
CNPS talks
He has presented in the CNPS online seminar series:
- "1979 Brillet-Hall Experiment Might Have Detected Aether" (18 July 2026)
- "Did the 1979 Brillet-Hall Experiment Detect the Aether?" (23 May 2026)
- "Perform a Michelson-Morley Experiment in Space" (7 December 2024)
- "The Local-Ether Model – A viable alternative to Einstein's Relativity" (12 June 2021)
Works
- 2016 - "The Tron Theory: A novel concept for the Ether and Matter" (Read in full)
- 2014 - "Introduction to the Tron Theory" (Read in full)
- "A Michelson-Morley Type Experiment Should be Performed in Low Earth Orbit and Interplanetary Space"
- "The Local-Ether Model and Quantum Electromagnetics Theory of Prof. Ching-Chuan Su"