The Nature of Gravitation
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Nature of Gravitation |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Rati Ram Sharma |
| Keywords | Gravitation |
| Published | 2009 |
| No. of pages | 13 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Newton discovered the law of universal gravitation in 1665 after observing the fall of the legendary apple. Einstein's General Relativity in 1916 linked the gravitational field with the curvature of, and gravity waves with the ripples in, the 4-dimensional spacetime continuum. In Unified Theory gravitation is an interactive attraction of the test mass-body with the ambient sharmon medium and through it with all other mass-bodies, the gravitational mass of the elementary cosminos (positrino & negatrino) composing the mass bodies as well as the sharmons of the sharmon medium thus serve as both the cause and mediator of the gravitostatic force and field operating within and through the sharmon medium. Every mass body is composed by electrons, protons & neutrons each having 1020-23 cosmino-sharmon constituents thereby allowing for inherent compositional fluctuations via emission and absorption of small cosmino-sharmon units. The 1.6x10-33 cm diameter sharmons of the sharmon medium pass through inter-atomic spaces and between orbital electrons to enter a mass-body for intimate gravitational interaction between the cosminos composing the mass-body and the surrounding sharmon medium and through it with all other mass-bodies. Action-at-a-distance is thus ruled out. The gravitational wave energy comprising 0-spin sharmons is propagated as a Wave-Quantum UNIT of one cycle and one wavelength length in the sharmon medium via contiguous mechanism through 2-spin gravitons, which do not move from their mean positions but provide a physical carrier. Since 0-spin sharmons compose all forms of neutral mass and energy the identity of gravitational and inertial masses follows naturally. General-relativity's equation for bending of light in a gravitational field is re-deduced from sharmon medium.
Overview
Rati Ram Sharma — a retired professor and head of Biophysics and Nuclear Medicine at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh — presents here one chapter of a much larger programme he calls Unified Theory, developed across three books from 1990 onward. The paper's target is stated in its opening section heading, "From unknown to known to unknowable": Sharma holds that twentieth-century physics abandoned physical reality by relocating light, the gravitational field and gravity waves into a four-dimensional spacetime continuum that does not exist.
The alternative is an unapologetically substantial ether. Sharma posits two indivisible elementary particles, the positive positrino and the negative negatrino, jointly named cosminos; a neutral pair of them forms a sharmon; and sharmons fill all space as a "sharmon medium". Everything else — photons, electrons, protons, neutrons, gravitons, kinetic and potential energy, matter and antimatter — is composed of these. On this picture gravitation is not geometry and not Newtonian action-at-a-distance, but an "interactive attraction of the test mass-body with the ambient sharmon medium and through it with all other mass-bodies." Because sharmons are 10-33 cm across and pass freely between atoms and even between orbital electrons, the interaction is everywhere local and contact-mediated; action-at-a-distance "is thus ruled out."
Sharma's departure from the mainstream is thus doubly radical. He rejects the ontology of general relativity (no spacetime continuum, no curvature, no equivalence principle needed), and he rejects the ontology of quantum field theory (no massless particles, no virtual particles, no Dirac sea). Both are replaced by a single substance from which the observed properties are to be reconstructed.
The argument
Against the spacetime continuum
Space and time, Sharma argues, "are not real physical entities having substance but are mere concepts evolving from the direct human perceptions of successive motions and changes." Space arises from successive perceptions of "there, here, there", time from "then, now, then". Someone raised in changeless surroundings would form neither concept. Two abstractions this intangible "are too intangible and abstract to fuse into any tangible spacetime continuum." He adds a physical objection: a real multidimensional continuum "would retard the motions of material bodies, planets and galaxies", and no such retardation has been observed, contrary to Newton's first law; further, a non-composite static continuum cannot undulate to carry a transverse wave. Continua of 4, 5, 10, 11 or 32 dimensions are therefore "mere mathematical constructs bereft of real physical existence."
The sharmon medium
For the positive case Sharma appeals to ether-drift measurement, citing DeMeo's review and Dayton Miller's 1928 statement that "after considering all the possible sources of error, there always remained a positive effect." He adds the wave results of Young, Fresnel and Sagnac as evidence that light needs a medium, and argues from E = mc2 that mass and energy could not interconvert unless a common "Basic Substance" composed both. Since a wave and its medium are "compositionally one and the same", the light-propagating medium is that basic substance.
The quantitative specification is detailed. A cosmino has diameter equal to the Planck length 1.6156 × 10-33 cm, mass 2.596 × 10-48 g, charge ±1.3729 × 10-30 esu and spin ±½. A sharmon (one positrino plus one negatrino) has mass 5.192 × 10-48 g and exists in a 0-spin scalar and a 1-spin vector state which interconvert; the constituents do not annihilate because they are indivisible. The medium holds ~1015 sharmons per cm3, giving a mass density of 5.192 × 10-33 g cm-3, with a mean inter-sharmon spacing of ~10-5 cm — comparable, Sharma notes, to the mean free path of ordinary gases — and a viscosity of 0.57 × 10-22 dyne s cm-2. Because it behaves as a kinetic gas that no enclosure can exclude, absolute vacuum is impossible.
Mechanism of attraction
Sharma gives compositions for the nucleons and electron: the electron is 3.50 × 1020 negatrinos plus 3.94 × 1017 0-spin sharmons; the proton 1.75 × 1020 positive 0-spin diads plus 2.619 × 1023 sharmons. With constituents so numerous, compositions "cannot remain rigidly and unchangeably fixed" but continually emit and absorb small sharmon units. Bodies therefore stand in dynamic exchange equilibrium with the medium; the mediating bosons are sharmon aggregates of mass-energy ΔE, and the mediated force is ΔE/Δx. Gravitostatic, electrostatic and magnetostatic forces share this single origin. The inverse-square law follows geometrically from distribution of the interaction over the sphere 4πr2, and — a distinctive prediction — because the medium's number density can vary locally, the gravitational constant G is "a physical parameter of the sharmon medium" and is locally variable rather than universal.
Waves, gravitons, and the equivalence principle
The photon is an energised 1-spin sharmon; the graviton an energised pair of 1-spin sharmons whose charges oppose, so that it is electrically neutral and couples only gravitationally. Propagation is contiguous: a 0-spin sharmon pair receives the energy, rises to 2-spin, passes it on and drops back, so that "only the gravitonic energy comprising 0-spin sharmons is emitted, propagated and absorbed but NOT the energized 2-spin graviton as a whole." Transverse gravitational waves travel at Vg = (er/d)1/2 = c, set by shear elasticity and density; longitudinal waves ("cosmic sound"), expected from events such as a supernova, travel at (ea/d)1/2 and, since volume elasticity slightly exceeds shear elasticity, faster than light.
Sharma reproduces the standard textbook objections to the principle of equivalence — that a rotating frame's ω2r acceleration grows with r while real gravity falls as GM/r2, and that inertial-frame fields can be transformed away while real fields cannot — and concludes that Unified Theory "does not need the Principle of Equivalence." On the rotating disc he simply denies the relativistic contraction, so that circumference-to-radius stays 2π and space remains Euclidean. On Mach's principle he offers a refinement: total inertial mass is mi = m + mV/c2, so in a matter-free universe the second term vanishes but m survives — where Mach would have all inertia disappear. The identity (not merely equality) of gravitational and inertial mass follows because both are the same 0-spin-sharmon substance viewed in different circumstances.
Kinetic mass, light bending, and wave detection
Sharma replaces the Lorentz factor with m′ = m(1 + ½v2/c2) — or, allowing for the inertia of the kinetic energy itself, m″ = m(1 + v2/c2) — and tabulates all three against special relativity: at v/c = 0.9, 0.99, 0.995 the ratios are 1.405/1.49/2.294, 1.81/1.98/7.088 and (his figures) up to 10.0125 for the relativistic case. At v = c the Unified Theory mass is finite, so superluminal particles are not forbidden. He proposes that the Large Hadron Collider could settle the matter by recording a force-versus-acceleration trace.
For light bending he treats the photon as having gravitational mass, computes the fall s = ½gt2 over transit time t = 2R/c, and obtains θ = 2GM/Rc2 — noting this matches Einstein's earlier value, and suggesting the true deflection is larger because the "influence time" exceeds the transit time, consistent with the later 4GM/Rc2. He also predicts light bending in electric fields (~Db × 10-37 radian, non-dispersive) and magnetic fields (~DHb′λ × 10-92 radian, dispersive), conceding these are "too small and difficult for experimental verification" but "important conceptually because no other theory has them."
Finally, he estimates the strain a gravity wave would induce in a resonant aluminium bar as ~1.85 × 10-36, "far beyond the planned capability (~10-18)", and concludes that "neither the Laser Interferometers ... nor the Resonant Mass Detectors would be able to detect the gravity waves." As an alternative he proposes that sharmon showers from a supernova thicken the local medium and add redshift Z = 6πrηD/h, so that the Type Ia supernova results "would not create 'amazement and horror' among the astronomers." A closing section reinterprets gravitational lensing, adding the claim that two masses together act as a concave lens with a telescopic effect.
Assessment
The programme has real ambition and a coherent guiding instinct. Sharma wants every physical quantity to be made of something, and he refuses the modern habit of treating a mathematical structure as an explanation. His insistence that E = mc2 demands a common substrate if the conversion is to be more than bookkeeping is a serious philosophical point, and his account of gravitational and inertial mass as one substance in two circumstances is more satisfying than an unexplained coincidence. The contiguous propagation mechanism, in which the carrier never moves and only the energy quantum advances, is a genuinely clean way to have a medium without ether drag. And unlike much work in this genre, the theory commits to numbers — a sharmon mass, a medium density, a viscosity, a variable G — which is what makes it assessable at all.
That assessability is also its undoing, because the numbers do not survive contact with measurement. The kinetic-mass formulae are the clearest case. At v/c = 0.99 Unified Theory gives a mass ratio of 1.49 to 1.98 where special relativity gives 7.09, a discrepancy of a factor of four to five. Storage rings and synchrotrons are steered by magnet settings computed from the relativistic value and would be misaimed by orders of magnitude if Sharma were right; the same factor is confirmed independently in the measured lifetime dilation of cosmic-ray and accelerator muons. Sharma's proposal that the LHC add software to trace force against acceleration is offered as though the test had not been performed, when the machine's daily operation presupposes the answer. Second, and decisively for this paper's central claim, gravitational waves were directly detected: LIGO recorded GW150914 in September 2015 at a strain of about 10-21, and dozens of events have followed with waveforms matching general-relativistic templates for binary inspiral. Sharma's estimate of 1.85 × 10-36 is wrong by fifteen orders of magnitude, and the prediction that interferometry could not succeed is falsified. His superluminal longitudinal wave fares no better: the near-simultaneous arrival of GW170817 and its gamma-ray counterpart constrains the gravitational-wave speed to within about one part in 1015 of c.
Several internal problems are visible without any external comparison. The medium's mass density is given as 5.192 × 10-33 g cm-3 in section 1.2 — consistent with 1015 sharmons of 5.192 × 10-48 g — but reappears as 5.19 × 10-34 g cm-3 in the detector calculation of section 15.2, a factor-of-ten inconsistency in the paper's own numbers at the point where they matter most. The value quoted for the gravitational constant, G = 6.5592 × 10-9 cgs, is off by more than a factor of ten from the measured 6.674 × 10-8 cgs. Two different kinetic-mass formulae are derived and neither is chosen. The gravity-wave stress estimate rests on "arbitrarily assuming that the stress propagated within a wave is proportional to the mass density of the medium" — the author's own word. And the abstract's claim that "general-relativity's equation for bending of light ... is re-deduced" is not what section 13.1 does: it derives the Newtonian half-value 2GM/Rc2, then closes the remaining factor of two by asserting that gravity's "influence time" exceeds the transit time, without calculating it. Since Eddington's 1919 measurement and every subsequent one, including radio interferometry at the 10-4 level, favour the full 4GM/Rc2, this is exactly where a derivation was needed and none is given.
Finally, a locally variable G is a strong claim with a strong constraint attached: lunar laser ranging and binary pulsar timing bound any variation in G to below about 10-13 per year, and the paper offers no magnitude for its predicted variability that could be checked against this. The composition figures for the electron and proton — 3.50 × 1020 negatrinos, 2.619 × 1023 sharmons — are quoted from the author's book rather than derived here, so the reader cannot see what fixes them. Read as a manifesto for a substantival physics the paper is vigorous and internally motivated; read as a theory of gravitation it makes predictions that have since been measured and found wrong.