Gravity, Magnetism, and Light
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Gravity, Magnetism, and Light |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Ralph Sansbury |
| Keywords | Light, Gravity, Magnetism, Electric Dipoles, Relativity, Quanta, Exchange Forces. |
| Published | 2009 |
| No. of pages | 10 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
A summary of the soon-to-be-published book by Ralph Sansbury based on charge polarization in electrons and atomic nuclei. First version written in 1993. click on http://mysite.verizon.net/r9ns/summary.doc
Overview
This ten-page document is the introduction and summary of Ralph Sansbury's book, first drafted in 1993 and circulated in this form in 2009. It is not a self-contained research paper — Sansbury repeatedly defers demonstrations to "the last section of the book" — but it lays out the whole programme in condensed form, with the key formulas and the numerical arguments he thinks decisive.
The single postulate is charge polarization inside electrons and atomic nuclei: sub-particles orbiting within the nucleus at frequencies "billions of times larger" than atomic-electron frequencies, capable of being displaced to form tiny dipoles. From this Sansbury proposes to eliminate three things at once. Magnetism becomes electrostatics: "parallel wires carrying currents in the same (opposite) direction 'magnetically' attract (repel) each other due to colinear electrostatic dipoles in their nuclei." Gravity becomes the same thing on a planetary scale: nuclear dipoles induced by the constantly changing forces of the Earth's spin and orbit, so that "gravity would not exist in a motionless universe". And light becomes instantaneous action at a distance, with the apparent travel-time delay relocated inside the receiver — the observed lag being the time an internal charge distribution needs to build up under a forced oscillation, not a transit time across space.
The consequence Sansbury draws is radical and stated plainly: starlight "cannot have originated years or centuries ago as implied by the extrapolation of terrestrial light speed measurements", and indeed "could not have originated more than 12 hours or 12 times 3600 = 43,200 seconds earlier at most", that being how long a body stays above an observer's horizon.
The argument
Magnetism as dipole electrostatics
In a current-carrying wire the battery or generator sustains a non-zero longitudinal electric field, which distorts the orbits inside the lattice nuclei and produces dipoles transverse to the current. Sansbury requires the dipole moment per unit length to be rnAev/c, where r is the wire separation, n the electron density, A the cross-section and v the drift velocity — that is, ri/c where i is the current. The force between two collinear dipoles then reads
- F = 9(109)(rnAev/c)(rnAev*/c)dsds*/r4
which he says is "exactly" the magnetic force 10−7ii*dsds*/r2. The two factors of r in the numerator are explained by a feedback: "as the wires are drawn further apart the transverse force from the first wire is reduced allowing the transverse dipole created by the longitudinal field in the second wire to become larger — and vice versa — in proportion to r." He notes that with r a few centimetres and v a tenth of a millimetre per second, the displacement rv/c is around 10−15 m, "about the diameter of an atomic nucleus". The c in these expressions, he specifies, "is √3 times the speed of light".
Dielectrics show no such effect under a steady field because their outer electrons rearrange to screen the nuclei; but under a changing field the nuclei respond before the screening is complete, and a transverse polarization survives.
Gravity
Because the Earth spins and orbits, the atoms of terrestrial matter are constantly subject to changing forces, which are "ultimately electrical", and so acquire persistent nuclear polarization along the Earth's radii and lines of longitude. "The inverse square gravitational force is equivalent to an inverse fourth power electrostatic dipole-dipole force if the dipoles in any pairwise interaction are proportional to the distance between the dipoles." Objects along a radius attract, objects on adjacent longitudes repel, and the sum is claimed to be the gravitational force. The Cavendish attraction between two steel balls is recast as "the horizontal projection of their attraction to the Earth's center".
Light as a receiver effect
An oscillating source dipole applies a Coulomb force F(t) = 9(109)Ne2D sin 2πft/r3 to charges in the receiver. The resulting displacement drives transverse nuclear dipoles krv/c, whose own current drives longitudinal dipoles a factor (2πfkr/c)2 smaller, opposed to the original field — "equal exactly to the delayed radiation field derived from Maxwell's equations". The build-up is written as a saturating exponential:
- ER(t) = (1 − e−ct/r)(Es)(2πfkr/c)2(sin 2πft)/r*3
"instead of changes happening through ethereal vortices or wheels and ball bearings... it happens in orbital movements of actual, charged, particles inside atomic nuclei in the receiver and source."
Re-reading the classical measurements
Sansbury's criterion is whether an experiment involved constant exposure of receiver to source. Rømer's 1676 Jupiter-moon timings did not, so they measure nothing; he sides with Cassini, who "thought that the changes Roemer observed were due to the changes in viewing position and not light speed". Fizeau's 1849 toothed wheel did involve constant exposure, so the delay could have accumulated in the distant mirror and the eye; he reworks the numbers, 8.67 km each way, 720 teeth at 25 rev/s. Bradley's aberration he attributes not to the star's light but to the delay between the telescope's objective lens and the eyepiece 12.5 feet away, giving a delay of about 25.5 ns; from the 20.5-arcsecond half-amplitude and the Earth's 29 km/s he recovers 2.929 × 108 m/s.
He accepts that GPS ranging and Pioneer telemetry are consistent with an r/c delay for weak signals — 4.34 × 1012 m divided by 3 × 108 m/s giving about four hours — while maintaining that bright sources arrive "almost instantaneously". The closing section takes up the Kaufmann beta-ray experiments, arguing that the apparent relativistic mass increase was really "a change in magnetic responsiveness as the speed of a charged particle increases".
Assessment
There is a real question underneath this document, and Sansbury deserves credit for pressing it: what physical thing is happening in the receiver when a "photon" is detected, and how much of the observed lag is transit and how much is response time? The demand for a mechanism rather than a field equation — "instead of ethereal vortices or wheels and ball bearings" — is in the honourable tradition of nineteenth-century electrodynamics, and locating radiation physics in the detector rather than in empty space is at least a coherent thing to want.
The execution does not survive checking.
The magnetism derivation is an SI unit identity, not a result. Set his dipole per unit length p = ri/c into his own dipole–dipole expression: 9 × 109 p p*/r4 = (9 × 109/c2)ii*/r2. This equals the quoted magnetic force 10−7ii*/r2 if and only if c2 = 9 × 1016. But 9 × 109 is 1/4πε0 and 10−7 is μ0/4π, so the condition is just 1/(4πε0c2) = μ0/4π — an identity built into the SI definitions of the ampere and the metre. It would come out "exactly" for any postulated dipole of the form ri/c, whatever the physical picture behind it, and it says nothing about charge inside nuclei. Worse, Sansbury then declares that his c "is √3 times the speed of light", which breaks the very identity that made the numbers work — with that substitution his force is one third of the measured magnetic force. The √3 is doing the job of the numerical coefficient in the collinear dipole–dipole law (which is 6/4πε0r4, not 1/4πε0r4); it is a fitted fudge, and it does not even fit.
A polarization proportional to the separation of the wires is a reductio. The displacement rv/c does come out around 10−14 m for laboratory numbers, which is genuinely suggestive of nuclear dimensions, and that arithmetic is right. But the whole construction requires the internal displacement to grow linearly with how far away the other wire is. At a kilometre it exceeds an atomic diameter; over the Earth–Moon distance it would exceed a centimetre; and the polarization inside a wire would depend on the distance to a wire it has not yet interacted with. The paper's justification — that the transverse restraining force weakens with distance — is asserted, never derived, and would in any case have to be a local property of the wire.
Two arithmetic slips of a full power of ten. The Fizeau calculation reads "(17.34) km./5.55(10−4)s. = 3.124(107) m/s". But 1/(25 × 720) is 5.55 × 10−5 s, not 5.55 × 10−4, and 17.34 km divided by that is 3.124 × 108 m/s. As printed, Sansbury's own reconstruction of the most famous terrestrial light-speed measurement yields a tenth of the speed of light. Similarly, the GPS discussion pairs a delay of 0.0066 s with a range of 2.02 × 103 km; the GPS constellation orbits at 20,200 km, giving about 0.067 s. The Pioneer figure (4.34 × 1012 m, 14,400 s, four hours) is correct.
Stellar aberration cannot be an effect inside the telescope. This is the cleanest test the paper offers against itself. If the 20.5-arcsecond displacement arose from the light's transit between objective and eyepiece, the angle would scale with the instrument's length — a 12.5-foot refractor and a 3-foot one would give different aberration constants, and the naked eye would give essentially none. The aberration constant is instead the same for every optical instrument ever used to measure it, the same for reflecting telescopes with no objective lens, and the same again for very-long-baseline radio interferometry, where there is no glass anywhere in the path. It is v/c and nothing else. The paper also switches, within a paragraph, from a 12.5-foot telescope to "the 25.5 foot telescope" as the hypotenuse, and quotes the tangent of 20.5 arcseconds as 0.0000099 when it is 0.0000994 — the value his own answer of 2.929 × 108 m/s actually requires.
The twelve-hour limit on light travel is contradicted by direct measurement. Sansbury's claim that no observed radiation can have left its source more than 43,200 seconds ago is not a matter of interpretation. Supernova 1987A was seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud with a neutrino burst arriving hours before the optical brightening and 168,000 years after the collapse, and its expanding light echo has been imaged since. Gravitationally lensed quasars show time delays of hundreds of days between images of the same event. The Shapiro delay in signals passed near the Sun has been measured with the Cassini spacecraft to a part in 105. Lunar laser ranging returns a 2.5-second round trip from corner cubes on the Moon, to millimetre precision, with no "receiver" but a photon counter. And Type Ia supernova light curves are observed stretched by exactly (1 + z), which requires the signal to have been in transit for cosmological times. A mechanism that concedes r/c delays for "weak" signals while denying them for bright ones also needs to explain why the measured delay is independent of source intensity, which it is, over many orders of magnitude in received power.
Finally, the treatment of Kaufmann is a historical misreading offered as physics. Kaufmann's early data did favour Abraham's rigid-sphere model over Lorentz's, but the discrepancy was resolved experimentally by Bucherer in 1909 and by Neumann and Guye and Lavanchy afterwards, all in favour of the relativistic formula; and the velocity dependence of inertia is now confirmed daily in every particle accelerator, where the beam energy required to reach a given momentum follows γ over six orders of magnitude. Reattributing it to "a change in magnetic responsiveness" would require the same factor to appear in electrically neutral systems, which it does — in neutron time-of-flight and in the lifetimes of neutral kaons in flight.
The document should be read for what it announces itself to be: a prospectus for a book, whose central mechanism is stated but whose supporting demonstrations are deferred. On the evidence presented here, the one calculation offered as exact is a restatement of the SI relation between ε0, μ0 and c.