Mechanisms of Earthquakes
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Mechanisms of Earthquakes |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | John P Fernandez |
| Keywords | Earthquakes, push gravity, aether, tides, eclipse prediction |
| Published | 1991 |
| Journal | The Toth-Maatian Review |
| Volume | 9 |
| Number | 2 |
| No. of pages | 11 |
| Pages | 4481-4491 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The archived scan is a typescript whose abstract page is set in an italic face that optical character recognition renders unreliably. The following transcription follows the scanned text as closely as the image allows; readers quoting it should check against the PDF.
No explanation for the causes of earthquakes has ever been accepted because of erroneous dogma. The correct mechanisms are given herein. The radiations from the stars in the celestial sphere produce the repulsive gravitational force. Action-at-a-distance is absurd. Therefore, a universal hyperfine gas exists that transmits the impulses of celestial radiations throughout the Universe. The aether gas is comprised of true-solid particles, called photons or quanta of radiations, which carry the radiation impulses. Since gases do not support transverse waves, then the radiation impulses are propagated longitudinally through the aether. The gravitational pressure produced by the celestial radiations must be greater than the internal solar pressure because it keeps the Sun, and other stars, from exploding. Therefore the gravitational force is the strong force. Two bodies, e.g. the Moon and Earth, are pushed towards one another because each one blocks some of the celestial radiation impulses carrying photons, from striking the other one on their near or adjacent sides. This difference between the higher aether pressures on the outer surfaces of electrons and nuclei of the atoms of the two bodies and the lower aether pressures on the opposite surfaces of those electrons and nuclei has been erroneously called the attractive force of gravity - an action-at-a-distance which is mechanically inexplicable.
The Moon, and the Sun, block some of the celestial radiation impulses from impinging upon the electrons and nuclei of the atoms comprising the Earth. These reductions in aether pressures over a hemisphere by the Moon, and by the Sun, produce the lunar, and the solar, tidal rises of the lithosphere, the aquasphere, and the atmosphere, around the Earth. The risings, fallings and shiftings of the tectonic plates produce the earthquakes along the lines of subductions, the sea trenches, the oceanic magma ridges and the tectonic fractures or fault lines.
Since the generation, propagation and absorption of radiations are mechanical processes, then the energy losses of the impulses to collision spins and scatterings of the photons produce the redshifts of the stellar spectra. This renders the Big Bang origin of the Universe and Black Hole theories erroneous. Magnetic and electric fields, like gravitational fields, are actions of the aether photons. The Newtonian law of gravitation is neither correct nor universal.
Overview
John P. Fernandez wrote this paper in the aftermath of the magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake of 17 October 1989, complaining that the many commentaries it provoked gave no mechanics. His answer is a fully worked Le Sage push-gravity cosmology, cited to Lucretius and to Le Sage's 1784 Lucrèce Newtonien, applied to seismology. There is no attraction anywhere in nature. The universe is filled with a "hyperfine" aether gas of solid particles — which he identifies with photons — driven by radiation impulses from the "octillions of stars" of the celestial sphere. A body immersed in that flux is struck equally from all sides and feels nothing; two bodies shadow one another, and the resulting pressure difference is what has been "erroneously called the attractive force of gravity".
From this the seismology follows directly. The Moon and the Sun cast invisible gravitational shadows on the Earth, reducing the aether pressure over a hemisphere. Lithosphere, oceans and atmosphere all rise into the low-pressure region; the tectonic plates, floating on magma, are pushed upward from beneath. Their risings, fallings and shiftings are earthquakes. Because eclipse tracks are published years in advance by the U.S. Naval Observatory, Fernandez claims the places where earthquakes are most likely can be predicted. The paper is thoroughly heterodox in its supporting claims as well: redshift is momentum loss in photon-photon collisions, so the Big Bang and black holes are errors; electric charge does not exist; the Newtonian law of gravitation "is neither correct nor universal".
The argument
Gravity as shadowing
Fernandez begins from Newton's own letter calling action at a distance "so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it", and from Newton's demand for "an agent acting constantly according to certain laws". That agent is the aether gas. Its photons are given a diameter of order 10−15 cm and a mass of order 10−32 g, and are said to make up 90 per cent of the solid matter in the universe. Pressure arises exactly as in any gas: the analogy offered is the air in the author's car tyres supporting 6,000 pounds, and the air beneath an aircraft wing.
Radiation from the stars therefore presses inward on every body. It is this pressure, greater than the Sun's internal pressure, that "keeps the Sun, and other stars, from exploding" and pushes solar ejecta back down — so the gravitational force, in Fernandez's phrase, "is the strong force". Weight is the difference between the aether-photon impacts on the upper and lower surfaces of the electrons and nuclei of a body's atoms. Because a sphere's surface area falls more slowly than its volume as radius decreases, he argues that somewhere on the subatomic scale a unit of surface covers a unit of volume, which is offered as the reason gravity tracks quantity of matter rather than exposed area — Newton's own objection to mechanical causes.
Electrons are held in their orbits by the same mechanism, the aether pressure being greater on their outer than their inner surfaces; the same force pushes moons around planets, planets around suns, and stars into galactic orbits. Since a star's own radiation pushes other bodies away, the Sun exerts a repulsive force on the daylight hemisphere, and the net attraction is the difference between that and the celestial pressure on the night side.
Tides, eclipses and earthquakes
The geometry is worked out in detail. Both Sun and Moon subtend about half a degree, so each casts a shadow cone whose reduced gravitational force is spread over half the Earth. At perihelion the Earth is about 5,000,000 km — roughly 3 per cent — closer to the Sun than at aphelion, so the solar disc is largest, the shadow deepest, and the solar land, sea and atmospheric tides highest. The same applies to the Moon at perigee. The greatest effect comes when new Moon, perigee and perihelion coincide and the three bodies are in line, which is when solar eclipses occur: the Moon's visible and gravitational shadows then coincide, and the Sun's gravitational shadow coincides with its light. "It is along that track that earthquakes are most likely to occur." Partial-eclipse zones are the next most probable; and when the Moon's 5° orbital inclination puts the shadows off the ecliptic, the shadow forces act at angles that produce torsional stresses on plates, seas and air, giving the third most probable class of earthquake-prone areas.
Light, redshift and the rest of physics
Light is not a thing that travels. Each impulse-carrying photon crosses its own mean free path and transfers its impulse by contact collision to the next photon: "radiations of light and X-rays are not things or particles but are actions". The measured speed c is therefore the average of two inversely proportional variable velocities — the flight velocity across the mean free path, which exceeds c, and the slower collision-transfer velocity — so c varies with aether density, and Poincare's limiting postulate "was erroneous at inception". Wavelength becomes a measure of the mean free path and frequency the number of collision transfers per second, and Planck's constant is reconstructed as photon mass times a constant velocity times a variable distance. Momentum lost to photon spins and off-line scattering shifts starlight toward the red, which disposes of the expanding universe. Starlight deflection at eclipses, and gravitational lensing around galaxies, are refraction by an "aether wind", the same mechanism as a terrestrial mirage. Following his reading of Maxwell, Fernandez denies that charges exist at all, and holds that "the hydrogen nucleus is a neutron".
Assessment
The paper is at least an honest mechanical programme: it names its ancestry (Lucretius, Le Sage), it insists that a force must be transmitted by contact, and it applies one idea consistently across gravitation, tides, optics and cosmology rather than patching each domain separately. The seismological suggestion is also, unusually for this literature, a falsifiable one — eclipse tracks are published in advance, so the prediction can be scored. And several of its incidental figures are CORRECT: the Sun is about 1,400,000 km across at about 150,000,000 km, which does give an angular diameter of 0.53°, "about a half degree" as stated; and the Earth is indeed about 5,000,000 km closer at perihelion than aphelion, which is 3.3 per cent of the mean distance, matching the paper's 3 per cent.
The central gravitational claim, however, contains a plain error. Fernandez writes that "the gravitational force between the Sun and one of its planets is proportional to the cube of their distance of separation, which is shown in Kepler's third law of planetary motions". Kepler's third law is T2 ∝ a3; combining it with the circular-orbit relation a = v2/r = 4π2r/T2 gives acceleration ∝ r/T2 ∝ r/r3 = 1/r2. That is Newton's own derivation, and it yields an inverse square, not a cube. The paper contradicts itself on the same page, stating a paragraph earlier that "the reduction in force is proportional to the square of the distance, which comes from the spreading area of the impulse carrying photons in an expanding spherical shell" — which is right, and is the standard Le Sage result. Relatedly, the treatment of G as an "arbitrary constant" whose dimensions were invented to make the units work misses that G is fixed by the equation it appears in and is measured, in the laboratory, between two lead spheres in Cavendish's 1798 experiment — an arrangement with no celestial sphere in view, which a shadowing mechanism must also account for.
Le Sage models have two classical difficulties that this paper does not address, both raised by Poincare in 1908. First, drag: a body moving through an isotropic flux meets more impulses ahead than behind, so it feels a velocity-dependent retarding force; for a flux intense enough to produce g = 9.8 m/s2 the Earth's orbit would decay on a geologically short timescale, whereas lunar laser ranging measures the Moon's recession at 3.8 cm per year and accounts for all of it by tidal friction. Second, heating: gravity requires the flux to be absorbed, and the energy deposited by an absorbed momentum flux of that magnitude would vaporise the Earth. Nothing in the paper is quantified — no aether pressure, no photon flux, no derived value of g — so neither objection can even be checked against it.
Two claims are directly contradicted by measurement. The photon is assigned a mass of about 10−32 g; laboratory and astrophysical bounds place the photon rest mass below roughly 10−18 eV/c2, that is below 2 × 10−54 g, some twenty-two orders of magnitude smaller. And the paper's own premise that "gases do not support transverse waves" is fatal rather than helpful: light's transverse polarisation is not a theoretical preference but a direct measurement, seen in Malus's law, in Brewster's angle, and in every polarising filter. A purely longitudinal impulse chain in a gas cannot be polarised at all. The dismissal of the "huge cylinder of aluminum" in Washington — a Weber resonant-bar detector — as "tribute to the erroneous concept that gravity was propagated by transverse waves" has since been settled the other way by the LIGO detection of GW150914 in 2015, whose transverse quadrupole waveform matched a binary merger template. The denial of electric charge sits badly with the Millikan oil-drop measurement the paper itself cites, and "the hydrogen nucleus is a neutron" cannot be reconciled with the 1.29 MeV proton-neutron mass difference or with the roughly fifteen-minute half-life of the free neutron against the indefinite stability of hydrogen.
Finally, the seismological prediction is the part most easily tested and the part the paper never tests. Global earthquake catalogues show at most a percent-level modulation of seismicity by solid-Earth and ocean tides, concentrated in shallow thrust and volcanic settings, and no association whatever with solar eclipse tracks. Fernandez does not check his own motivating case: Loma Prieta struck on 17 October 1989, while that year's only solar eclipses were the partial events of 7 March and 31 August, neither near California nor near the date. A mechanism that predicts where the largest earthquakes will fall, published alongside an earthquake that does not fall there, needed that comparison made.