Electromagnetism in Ether
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Electromagnetism in Ether |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Giuseppe Cannata |
| Keywords | Ether, Dipole, Electromagnetism, Inertia |
| Published | 1999 |
| No. of pages | 18 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
To attribute an inertia to free space is not an option. It is soundly consistent with the fundamental laws of physics. The mechanical interpretation of electromagnetic phenomena would supply a concrete way of simplicity and unification. Consequently, the revised quantum theory could become without any contrast a modern chapter of a renewed classical physics. Here it is proposed a new elementary charge model, which would simplify the interpretation of many phenomena, including the controlled nuclear fusion.
Overview
Electromagnetism in the Ether is Giuseppe Cannata's English presentation of a mechanical, fluid-dynamical reading of Maxwell's electromagnetism — an argument he had earlier set out in Italian under the title Concezione meccanica dell'elettromagnetismo secondo Maxwell. Its starting point is a dimensional observation rather than a metaphysical preference: momentum, force and energy all have physical dimensions that contain mass, and electromagnetic momentum, force and energy are not supposed to be quantities distinct from the mechanical ones. If those quantities are localized in what is called vacuum, then, Cannata argues, "we must therefore admit that vacuum has mass and may be easily called ether again."
From that premise the paper proceeds to reconstruct the electromagnetic quantities as mechanical properties of a real, massive, granular medium. The permittivity of free space ε0 is reinterpreted as a mass density of the ether, the reciprocal permeability 1/μ0 as an elastic (compression) modulus, electric charge as a mass flow dm/dt, the electric field as a local velocity of ether, the magnetic field vector as a volume vortex torque, and the magnetic vector potential A — usually treated as a gauge-dependent mathematical convenience — as a physically observable ether displacement, the "primary wave function" from which every other electromagnetic quantity follows.
The distinctive constructive claim of the paper is a new model of the elementary charge and hence of the electric dipole. Proton and electron are pictured as ether line vortices in the sense of Helmholtz fluid dynamics, sustaining a mass flow of about 1.6 × 10-19 kg/s and an angular momentum. Because the elementary charge is a vortex rather than a point source, the field lines of a dipole are rotational rather than radial, and Cannata argues that this single change accounts for a list of things he regards as unexplained on the standard picture — why a dipole radiates at all, why it does not radiate along its axis, why no central (longitudinal) electric field has ever been detected in free space, and why E and B come out mutually perpendicular, in phase, and both transverse to the direction of propagation.
The argument
Global characteristics of the ether
Cannata opens by clearing away what he considers the failed nineteenth-century ether. His ether is (a) not absolute — no observation of its stationarity anywhere in the universe has ever been made; (b) not subject to partial or total drag, because it is an integral part of a star or a particle and extends outward with decreasing density to a limit surface beyond which it belongs to another body. On this picture the Earth carries its own ether as an "ether-terraqueous system" shaped less like a spheroid than like a huge drop, compressed on the sunward side by the solar wind and drawn out on the other into the long geomagnetic tail. He reads the Michelson-Morley experiment as confirming the relative rest of the ether in the Earth's proximity — no significant fringe shift is expected, because there is no relative motion to detect. Bradley's stellar aberration, usually cited as evidence for an ether at absolute rest, is reconciled by noting that starlight spends years crossing space and only a few terrestrial diameters inside the Earth's own ether shell, so the aberration angle tan α = u/c survives unchanged.
The ether is further said to be (c) not continuous but granular, composed of "extremely small particles (ether monads)" — the paper suggests neutrinos or gravitons as candidates — since quantization of mass and energy is a universal feature and wave propagation requires only contiguity of the medium's particles, not continuity; and (d) not the "paradoxically gelatinous" solid that Victorian physicists had to invoke to carry transverse waves, since the intrinsic rotationality of both fields makes the elastic-solid paradox unnecessary. Finally (e) the same medium is held to transmit every kind of perturbation — electromagnetic, nuclear, gravitational, and even pressure and temperature.
Quantitative properties: ε0 as a density
The quantitative core of the paper is a comparison of the electromagnetic wave speed
c = 1/√(ε0μ0)
with the acoustic wave speed
v = √(k/ρ)
where ρ is the mean density of the medium at rest and k its compression modulus. Matching the two forms lets ε0 = 8.85 × 10-12 be read as a mean ether density in kg/m3, and 1/μ0 = 7.96 × 105 N/m2 as an elastic modulus — a value Cannata notes is comparable in order of magnitude to the compression modulus of air, k = (cp/cv)p0 = 1.4 × 105 N/m2. The same conclusion is reached from Coulomb's law F = qq' /4πε0r2: the left side has dimensions containing mass, so mass must be present on the right; since charges without mass have never been observed, a mass factor should sit in each charge and hence a mass factor in ε0.
A first remark draws the cosmological consequences. An ether density of order ε0 — or smaller in interplanetary and interstellar space — would, Cannata suggests, supply the dark matter or "missing mass" astrophysicists seek, and would explain the gravitational cohesion of galaxies. The redshift of stellar spectral lines would then not be a Doppler recession effect proportional to distance but "the attenuation of the energy as the light travels through space," growing with distance for that reason — a tired light reading on which "the hypotheses of big-bang, black holes, etc. would not stand any more."
Charge as mass flow; the new dipole
Rearranging Coulomb's law dimensionally gives charge the dimensions of a mass flow,
q = dm/dt, [q] = MT-1,
and the electric field the kinematic dimensions of a velocity, [E] = LT-1. Cannata notes that the largest observed field strengths — the dielectric strength of air, about 3 × 106 V/m, and of mica, about 2 × 108 V/m — read as velocities do not exceed c. The proton is modelled as a tiny axial permanent jet of ether at a conservative velocity Er (the "old" central electric field) with compensating vortex flows Ei (the "old" induced field); the electron aspirates ether axially and disperses it in circular swirls, with recovery accomplished through the contiguity of neighbouring vortices.
An argument from Gauss's theorem is used to limit how many field lines an elementary charge may emit. If two or more lines emerged from a single proton enclosed in a conducting shell, they would attract as many electrons to the inner surface and call up as many positive ions on the outer surface — more than the inducing charge, contradicting experiment. Cannata concludes that "an elementary charge acts directly only on a single opposite charge, as it happens naturally in neutral atoms," and that the point charge with spherical field distribution is valid only as a large-scale average. Two figures contrast "today's model of dipole" with the "new proposed model": the two agree only along the straight line joining the opposite charges, but where the conventional model makes the remaining lines radial and irrotational, the new one makes them rotational, opposed to the central field, and generating in turn a rotational magnetic field.
Deriving Maxwell's equations mechanically
Section 5 rebuilds the field equations from fluid kinematics. For a fluid position vector field A(x,y,z,t), any elementary displacement decomposes as
dA = ∇(dψ) + dθ ∧ A,
a radial part plus a rotational part. Taking minus the time rate of change gives
E = -∂A/∂t = -∇(∂ψ/∂t) - ω ∧ A,
which Cannata identifies as the Cauchy–Helmholtz theorem on velocities in fluids, with E a local velocity field and φ = ∂ψ/∂t a velocity potential. Applying the curl operator yields curl(E) = -∂B/∂t with B = curl(A), the induction law; applying the divergence operator to B = curl(A) yields div(B) = 0.
Charge density is then written as the time derivative of ether mass density, σ = ∂ε/∂t, and Newton's second law applied to a unit volume of fluid, together with a Hooke's-law relation between the time derivative of the momentum density εE and curl(B) with elastic modulus 1/μ0, gives
curl(B) = μ0(ε0∂E/∂t + j),
the Ampère–Maxwell equation with j = σE. Taking the divergence and setting div(ε0E) = σ = ∂ε/∂t — Maxwell's fourth equation, the local form of Gauss's theorem — leaves div(j) = -∂σ/∂t. Both are read as continuity equations, expressing mass conservation and, as a consequence, charge conservation.
The magnetic field and particle spin
The magnetic field vector H is assigned the dimensions L-1MT-2 of a volume vortex torque, while the induction B becomes dimensionless, like an angle; the energy density w = ∫H·dB = μ0H2/2 is then formally the rotational energy ∫τ·dθ — the same quantity dissipated in a ferromagnetic hysteresis loop. Each charge's B field has concentric circular flow lines on planes perpendicular to the rotation axis, which is the direction of the central field Er. The neutron is treated as a close, and outside the nucleus unstable, coupling of proton and electron with the same B field; the hydrogen atom as a steadier loose coupling; the H2 molecule as a parallel coupling of two atoms with doubled B. All behave diamagnetically, opposing their field to an external one.
A consequence Cannata emphasizes is that on this model particles carry only an induced magnetic moment, not a pre-existing one, and that a magnetic reaction should appear even in neutral particles. He claims the Stern–Gerlach splitting of a narrow beam of atoms in a non-uniform but symmetric magnetic field follows from the vortex model "without introducing at all a presumed directional quantization of a magnetic dipole momentum, which in our opinion does not exist."
Waves, the vector potential, and the gauge condition
The final section treats plane monochromatic linearly polarized waves. The electric and magnetic energy densities are equal, w = ε0E02/2 = B02/2μ0, exactly as the acoustic energy density can be written either as ρω2s02/2 or as p02/2ρv2. In a chargeless, currentless region the substitutions B = curl(A), E = -∂A/∂t give the wave equation ∇2(A) - ε0μ0∂2A/∂t2 = 0 once the Coulomb gauge div(A) = 0 is imposed, with the travelling solution Ay = A0sin(kx - ωt), from which Ey and Bz follow by differentiation in t and x respectively and the two energy densities are shown to be identical.
Cannata treats the gauge choice as physics, not convention. A non-zero divergence of A "would paradoxically contrast the homogeneity of free space," so div(A) = 0 is the physically correct condition; the relativistically invariant Lorenz condition div(A) = -ε0μ0∂φ/∂t is dismissed as not physically meaningful, because φ is not a spatial wave function and no experiment has ever located a variable longitudinal electric field in free space. The two coincide when φ is constant in time.
Assessment
The paper's attraction is its economy of ambition: it does not propose new equations. Every one of Maxwell's four equations is recovered in its standard form, and the wave equation with it; what changes is the interpretation of the constants and potentials appearing in them. Reading ε0 as a density and 1/μ0 as an elastic modulus is a genuinely suggestive dimensional observation, and the comparison of 7.96 × 105 N/m2 with the compression modulus of air is a concrete, checkable number rather than a hand-wave. The insistence that the vector potential A is an observable physical displacement rather than a gauge artefact also puts the paper on the side of a live question, since A is known to have measurable consequences in interference experiments. And the argument that electromagnetic energy and momentum, having mass in their dimensions, ought to belong to something material is a real difficulty that the standard account answers by re-founding those quantities on the field itself rather than on a medium — a move the paper simply declines to make.
The difficulties are correspondingly clear. The dimensional argument is not a derivation: SI units are a bookkeeping convention, and ε0 and μ0 carry the dimensions they do because of how the ampere is defined, so the identification with a density and a modulus is an analogy that would have to be cashed out by predicting something the standard reading does not. The paper does not do this — no measurable consequence is derived from the numerical value of the ether density, and the fusion application promised in the abstract is not developed in the text. The reading of Michelson–Morley as confirming an Earth-attached ether revives the entrained-ether option that Cannata elsewhere denies ("partial or total drag of the ether does not exist"), and the tension between those two statements is not resolved; the classical objection remains that an ether entrained enough to give a null interferometer result at the Earth's surface is difficult to reconcile with stellar aberration, and the paper's answer — that starlight crosses only a few Earth diameters of terrestrial ether — is asserted rather than worked out quantitatively. The Stern–Gerlach claim is likewise asserted, not calculated: the experiment's discrete two-valued splitting, rather than a continuous smear, is precisely what a classical induced moment does not obviously give, and no alternative calculation of the observed pattern is offered. Denying the intrinsic magnetic moment also puts the model at odds with the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, one of the most precisely confirmed numbers in physics. Finally, the cosmological remark about redshift as energy attenuation is a passing aside, unsupported here by any attenuation mechanism or a fitted redshift–distance relation, and the rejection of the relativistically invariant gauge condition on the grounds that it is "not physically meaningful" trades an argument for a preference. Readers should take the paper as a programmatic reinterpretation with one worked constructive proposal — the vortex charge and rotational dipole — rather than as a finished alternative theory.