Jean Pierre Vigier

Jean Pierre Vigier
Jean Pierre Vigier
Born	January 16, 1920; Paris, France
Died	May 4, 2004 (aged 84); Paris, France
Residence	Paris, France
Nationality	French
Alma mater	University of Geneva
Known for	The causal stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics; non-zero photon mass; a relativistic reading of the Michelson–Morley–Miller ether drift
	Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical physics, foundations of quantum mechanics
Institutions	Institut Henri Poincaré; Pierre et Marie Curie University, Paris

Jean-Pierre Vigier (16 January 1920 – 4 May 2004) was a French theoretical physicist, assistant to Louis de Broglie for fourteen years, and the leading twentieth-century exponent of the causal stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics — the position that quantum processes, though genuinely stochastic, remain causal, in the tradition of de Broglie and David Bohm.

He is one of the most substantial figures catalogued on this wiki. He published more than two hundred papers, sat on the editorial board of Physics Letters A, and was known in the French press as l'hérétique de la physique and l'éternel résistant — the second a reference to his wartime service in the French Resistance as much as to his standing in physics.

For this wiki his most directly relevant contribution is a specific one: the argument that a small but non-zero photon mass makes the small ether drift measured by Michelson and by Miller not an embarrassment to relativity but a consequence of it.

Career

Vigier earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Geneva in 1946 and served briefly as a member of the French Atomic Commission alongside Frédéric Joliot-Curie. In 1948 he was appointed assistant to Louis de Broglie (Nobel Prize 1929, for the discovery of the wave nature of particles), a position he held until de Broglie's retirement in 1962, although their collaboration continued for another ten years.

He was the author of more than 200 scientific papers, and co-authored and edited a number of books and conference proceedings. He served on the editorial board of Physics Letters A, and was one of the most vocal proponents of the stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics. He died in Paris on May 4, 2004.

The causal stochastic interpretation

Vigier's lifelong programme was to restore causality to quantum mechanics without denying its statistical character. Where the Copenhagen interpretation treats indeterminacy as irreducible, the causal stochastic interpretation treats quantum behaviour as the statistical outcome of a real underlying process — a sub-quantum medium in which particles move, so that the probabilities are those of an ordinary stochastic process rather than a fundamental feature of nature.

The lineage matters: Louis de Broglie's pilot wave, revived and extended by David Bohm, and developed by Vigier into an explicitly stochastic form. Its standing was strengthened by John Stewart Bell, whose theorem showed that any such hidden-variable account must be non-local — a price Vigier, unlike most physicists, was willing to pay.

He set the position out across Causality and Locality in Modern Physics (1998) and The Present Status of the Quantum Theory of Light (1998), and it is the subject of the volume Jean-Pierre Vigier and the Stochastic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2000).

Photon mass and the ether drift

Vigier's paper Relativistic Interpretation (with Non-Zero Photon Mass) of the Small Ether Drift Velocity Detected by Michelson, Morley and Miller (1997) is the reason he appears alongside Miller in this archive, and its argument is unusually neat.

He begins by conceding what most defenders of relativity will not: the small drifts Michelson observed are not compatible with Newtonian mechanics, and a detailed analysis of the experiments from 1887 to 1926 contradicts the classical addition of velocities. But he then argues that they are not incompatible with relativity either — provided the photon is not exactly massless.

It is shown in this letter that the introduction of a small photon mass m_g ~ 10⁻⁶⁵ gr. by Einstein, Schrödinger, de Broglie et al implies a small anisotropy in the velocity of light (at each frequency) and the reintroduction of an observable absolute inertial frame.
— J.-P. Vigier, Relativistic Interpretation (with Non-Zero Photon Mass)… (1997)

A photon with mass travels at slightly less than the invariant speed c, and its speed becomes frequency-dependent — which reintroduces, in principle, an observable absolute inertial frame. Combined with Dirac's chaotic covariant ether distribution, this gives what Vigier presents as a relativistic interpretation of Michelson's 8.1 km/s drift, later confirmed by Miller in 1933.

The move is worth appreciating on its own terms. It grants the dissident observation and the orthodox framework at once: the drift is real, and relativity survives, because the thing assumed to be massless is not quite. Hector A Munera later extended the same proposal in his own absolute-space interpretation of the non-null results. See Preferred frame.

Vigier pressed the question of limiting velocity further in Experimental Repeal of the Speed Limit for Gravitational, Electrodynamic, and Quantum Field Interactions (2002).

Redshift and cosmology

In Spatial Fluctuation of the Hubble "Constant" — written in 1975 but unpublished for fifteen years — Vigier examined the redshift asymmetry reported by Rubin and others across six samples of objects, found the effect consistent throughout at an average magnitude of about 1300 km/s, and noted that it vanishes at large distances.

His conclusion favours a non-Doppler redshift arising in intergalactic space within the Local Supergalaxy and other concentrations of galaxies — that is, a component of redshift that is not a recession velocity at all. This places him with Halton C Arp and the intrinsic redshift literature documented here, and the paper's long suppression is itself part of the story: it was published, in the editors' words, "in the hope that it will stimulate fresh thinking on the controversial issue of non-velocity 'cosmological' redshifts."

Dirac's ether, and later work

Vigier's late work returned to Dirac's 1951 proposal of a relativistically covariant ether, in Interactions of Internal Inertial and Phase Space Motions of Extended Particle Elements Moving in Dirac's Real "Aether" Model (2006) — particles as extended elements with internal motions moving through a real medium, which is the natural home of both the stochastic interpretation and the photon-mass argument. See Aether.

He also worked on cold fusion, proposing new hydrogen and deuterium Bohr orbits in specially structured dense media as a mechanism, in papers at the 1992 Nagoya and 1994 Minsk conferences and in Physics Letters A (1996).

Assessment

Vigier is a limiting case for a wiki of dissident science: he was a mainstream figure by every external measure — de Broglie's assistant, a professor at Pierre et Marie Curie, an editor of Physics Letters A, with a Festschrift symposium held in his honour — who nonetheless spent his career defending positions the profession had abandoned.

The strength of his work is that it is constructive rather than merely critical. He did not argue that relativity is wrong; he argued that a photon mass of 10⁻⁶⁵ g would reconcile it with measurements the textbooks deny. He did not reject quantum mechanics; he supplied a causal substructure for it. In each case the proposal is quantitative and, at least in principle, testable — experimental bounds on photon mass have tightened considerably since, and are the natural place to test the ether-drift argument.

The corresponding weakness is that these remain interpretations. A photon mass small enough to have escaped detection is also small enough that its consequences are extraordinarily hard to observe, and the stochastic interpretation, like other hidden-variable accounts, reproduces the predictions of standard quantum mechanics rather than departing from them. Both are arguments about what the world is like, not about what will be measured — which is why they have persuaded few and been refuted by none.

Related work on this wiki

Dayton C Miller — whose drift Vigier's photon-mass argument was written to accommodate
Hector A Munera — extended the non-zero-photon-mass interpretation of the non-null results
Halton C Arp and Intrinsic redshift — the non-Doppler redshift question
David Bohm, Louis de Broglie and John Stewart Bell — the causal-interpretation tradition
Preferred frame · Aether · Michelson–Morley experiment

Articles

"New Hydrogen Energies in Specially Structured Dense Media: Capillary Chemistry and Capillary Fusion", in Third International Conference on Cold Fusion, Frontiers of Cold Fusion, 1992. Nagoya Japan: Universal Academy Press, Inc., Tokyo, Japan.
"New Hydrogen (Deuterium) Bohr Orbits in Quantum Chemistry and Cold Fusion Processes"' in International Symposium on Cold Fusion and Advanced Energy Sources, 1994. Belarusian State University, Minsk, Belarus: Fusion Information Center, Salt Lake City.
"On Cathodically Polarized Pd/D Systems", Phys. Lett. A, 1996. 221: p. 138.