Light Preceded by Weak Nuclear Charge Oscillations
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Light Preceded by Weak Nuclear Charge Oscillations |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Ralph Sansbury |
| Keywords | nuclear, Charge, light, electromagnetic radiation, time dilation |
| Published | 2009 |
| No. of pages | 26 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Since Maxwell's 1864 paper, the theory of Light has involved ever stranger, more non-intuitive assumptions: Maxwell hypothesized a vacuous space filled with invisible wheels and ball bearings, like vortices in a gas, but utterly massless, and with the density of iron! Later, massless, even probabilistic particles (photons) transferring discontinuous changes in energy, time dilation, space contraction and curvature, one dimensional objects ('strings') vibrating in 10 dimensions, etc. The mystic, religious appeal of these concepts, appealing to the right side of our brain, is undeniable. But, annoying to the left side of the brain, is the continual addition of properties of light-carrying particles and of the space or spacetime continuum between source and receiver. It is reminiscent of the ever increasing number of Ptolemaic epicycles that were added to explain planetary motions. The Ptolemaic theory, which was intended to reduce and simplify the chaos of raw data, became as extensive as the raw data itself- until the comfortable, but incorrect assumption of a central Earth was replaced with the correct premise of a central Sun. A similar correction to the theory of Light and electromagnetic radiation is long overdue.
Overview
The paper is a self-contained statement of Ralph Sansbury's programme for replacing the wave and photon accounts of Light with what he calls "cumulative instantaneous forces at a distance." On his account nothing travels between an emitter and a receiver. Instead, the oscillating charge in the emitter exerts an instantaneous electrostatic force on charge inside the electrons and atomic nuclei of the receiver; the observed transit "delay" is the time it takes those internal charge oscillations, driven repeatedly at a fixed frequency, to build up to a detectable amplitude. The delay therefore belongs to the receiver, not to a signal in flight, and the constant c is reinterpreted as "a measure of elasticity of charge polarization inside electrons and atomic nuclei" rather than a propagation speed.
The departure from the standard account is total. In place of a field propagating through space at c, Sansbury posits sub-electron structure: a free electron is taken to be an orbiting charge of −2e about a heavier core of charge +e, and a lattice nucleus an orbiting charge of −e about a core of +2e. Magnetism is then not a separate phenomenon but the electrostatic force between the transverse dipoles these internal orbits acquire when a current flows; the relativistic mass increase of a fast electron becomes "a decrease in the rate of increase of magnetic and electric responsiveness" as internal polarization saturates. The paper's stated motivation is Ptolemaic: each new anomaly in optics has been met with a new postulated property of light or of spacetime, and the author holds that the accumulation itself is the symptom of a wrong premise.
The argument
An experiment offered as the starting point
Sansbury opens with an experiment he reported in the 1997–1998 online Optical Testing Digest. A shuttered photocell was exposed to 15-nanosecond light pulses, 2000 per second, from a source thirty feet (thirty nanoseconds) away. When a modulated Pockels-cell shutter blocked the photocell at the expected arrival time ±5 ns, the signal was "nearly maximal"; when the photocell was blocked during the time of emission, the signal was zero. He reads this as showing that the receiver responds to the emission event rather than to an arriving pulse.
Internal charge polarization and the resonance model
The core derivation treats the receiving antenna as a forced, damped harmonic oscillator. The source field Es(t) acts repeatedly on free electrons between thermal collisions and, crucially, on the light negatively charged particles Sansbury places inside atomic nuclei. Changing transverse polarization inside the nuclei induces longitudinal polarization, which produces a field "stronger than the field from the emitter and in the opposite direction," and the repeated forcing drives a cumulative growth of amplitude. Writing the mechanical analogue Fcos(ωt) = hx + jx′ + mx′′ and dividing by the mass, he obtains the transient solution
- ER(t) = (1 − exp(−ct/kr))[(f2/c2)(QD/r)cos(2πft)] Es(t)
The bracketed factor, he notes, "is formally the same as predicted by Maxwell's famous equations"; the whole content of the new theory sits in the exponential rise-time term. The oscillation reaches about two-thirds of its steady-state value after kr/c seconds, where k ≤ 1. The physical limit on k is that the induced dipole length rv/c inside a nucleus cannot exceed roughly 0.1 Å, the inner electron radius; once it saturates at some r\* = kr the effective delay becomes kr/c.
Quantization without quanta
Planck's constant is re-derived as an ordinary mechanical quantity: h is "the kinetic energy expended in one orbit," so that hf returns the instantaneous kinetic energy factor ~10−18 J for the hydrogen ground orbit, with X-rays and gamma rays handled by a rescaled h\* and f\* for smaller, faster orbits. Discrete spectral lines arise because adjacent out-of-phase orbits of the same radius radiate cancelling fields, so that only the average frequency of the two orbits in a transition is uncancelled. Sansbury stresses that this average is, within measurement error, equal to the difference frequency — which is why, on his view, "there is no need for the quantum premise of discontinuous absorption and emission." Orbit stability, the ground-state radius and the n2r0 series are attributed to the balance between nucleus–electron attraction and the repulsion between polarized charge inside the orbiting electron and inside the nucleus.
Light-speed measurements re-read
The last third of the paper is an attack on the evidential base for c as a transit speed. Planetary radar (he quotes Pettingill et al., "A Radar Investigation of Venus") is faulted because the receiver is switched on only shortly before the expected echo and because the echo is recovered by integrating a pseudo-random code out of noise — a procedure that, he argues, cannot exclude a return from an earlier transmission and selects the sequence that is "least like noise." GPS is treated as the one case with independent confirmation, but Sansbury argues that its 50 W transmitters and receiver calibration allow engineers to tune the apparent delay to match the Newtonian satellite geometry. Bradley's aberration and the Fizeau toothed-wheel result are re-read as measurements of the parameter c in the rise-time term rather than of a transit time; Rømer's Jupiter-moon timings are reassigned to Cassini's alternative explanation as changes in the viewing geometry from Earth. A worked estimate for a star at 148 light years gives, on his dipole-saturation limit, an actual delay of order 10−8 s — "the same as the delay for the light from the objective lens at the top of a 12.5 foot telescope to reach the ocular lens and eye." Light from the Sun and Moon arrives, he concludes, with delay "nearly zero."
Assessment
What is genuinely distinctive here is the attempt to give a mechanical, cause-and-effect story for reception. Standard electrodynamics tells you the field at the receiver but says nothing about how a detector's internal charge reorganizes as the signal builds; Sansbury makes that build-up the whole phenomenon, and in doing so reduces two postulated entities — the photon and the propagating field — to one, the electrostatic force. The single testable consequence he draws is admirably sharp: because the exponential term depends on how fast the receiver's internal dipoles saturate, a stronger source at fixed distance should be detected sooner than a weak one, which Maxwell's theory flatly forbids. He deserves credit for stating the prediction, for noting that Fizeau–Michelson-type experiments at 5–25 miles have never compared strong and weak sources, and for conceding that he has found no evidence supporting it.
The difficulties are severe. First, the sub-electron structure is asserted, not derived. The charge assignments (−2e orbiting +e in the electron, −e orbiting +2e in the nucleus) are chosen so that parallel currents attract, and their masses (a companion paper quotes 10−56 kg moving at superluminal speed) are fixed by the answer required; no independent measurement constrains them. Second, the central formula is not obtained from the new premises but is Maxwell's radiation formula with an exponential factor appended, so its quantitative success is inherited rather than earned. Third, the retreat is self-undermining: the paper concedes that at short range the "transverse interfering field" grows with the longitudinal field, so that strong and weak sources are received at the same time — which removes the theory's only distinguishing prediction precisely in the regime where it could be tested cheaply.
Against established measurement the position is very hard to hold. If light from a star 148 light years away arrives in ~10 ns, then stellar aberration, the observed light curves of eclipsing binaries, the arrival-time offset between the neutrino burst and optical brightening of SN 1987A, and the routine two-way ranging of spacecraft with independently known ephemerides all require separate ad hoc reinterpretation; Sansbury supplies one for Rømer and Bradley but not for the rest. His treatment of GPS is also internally awkward: he uses GPS as the case with genuine independent confirmation, then argues that the confirmation is an artefact of receiver calibration, which would have to be a coincidence repeated across every independently manufactured receiver design. The Planck-constant reinterpretation likewise sits uneasily with the photoelectric threshold and with Compton scattering, neither of which the paper addresses. The result is a proposal that is coherent as a picture and stimulating as a critique of how light-speed data are actually gathered, but that does not yet contain a derivation or a surviving prediction that could decide between it and Maxwell.