Beyond the Light Rays: Explanations of the Oscillations of Radiant Energy
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Beyond the Light Rays: Explanations of the Oscillations of Radiant Energy |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Thomas Henry Moray |
| Keywords | light, radiant energy |
| No. of pages | 11 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
In writing this very short account of the oscillating theory of the Moray "Radiant Energy" discoveries, one can only touch the high spots as many large books would have to be written to even in a small way cover the subject.
All who may read this may not understand me, as I may fail to explain myself as fully as I might desire. There have been truly great men who were unable to express themselves so that men of their time understood their inner meaning. Franklin, Faraday, Cavendish and others gave to the world, their ideas in a form unintelligible to many learned ones of their day, yet their theories have since become known facts. It is hard to rid ourselves of inherited ideas which so completely, although perhaps unconsciously control our line of thought. Another difficulty which has hindered man in forming a true picture of the objective world is that mixed blessing — egotism. In early centuries he could not escape from the false assumption of his own preeminent importance, and these same shackles are still prejudicing the observations of most persons.
Overview
This is a promotional booklet rather than a technical paper: Thomas Henry Moray of the Moray Scientific Laboratories, Salt Lake City, setting out in plain language the "oscillating theory" behind his Radiant Energy device. It has four unequal parts — a personal statement of the Aether doctrine that underlies his work, a short passage of notes from his 1918 diary, a longer textbook exposition of electromagnetic radiation and the oscillatory discharge of a condenser, and a closing polemical address to sceptical "men of science." The copy archived here is scanned from Pepe's Tesla Pages.
Moray's departure from the mainstream is not a technical disagreement but an ontological one. He proposes that "electrons, protons, and ions... are portions of ether, that by some unknown means have become dissociated here and there and become electrically charged," so that matter is a secondary appearance of electrified aether. "Matter is susceptible to motion. Ether is susceptible to stress." From this he draws the practical claim that ambient aether oscillations are a usable energy supply, tapped by an oscillator tuned to resonance with them, and he is careful to insist this is not perpetual motion: "My device oscillates because of the oscillations of the Universe" — no more perpetual, he says, than the motion of the Earth.
The argument
Aether as the substratum of matter
The opening establishes the framework. All energy "appertains either to matter or ether, and continually passes from one to the other." Electricity is "vibrations of radiation"; where the aether is quiescent we see nothing; all substances are combinations of one primordial substance which is "electricity, or, in other words, electricity is specifically modified ether." Moray extends the mechanical analogy explicitly: "What electricity is to matter, so is electric force to common mechanical force, and electrical inertia to common inertia — I mean the ratio of force to acceleration," suggesting that electric inertia might be defined as the ratio of electric motive force to the acceleration of electric displacement.
He also insists that generation is a misnomer. "We speak of generating electricity: To be exact, we only transfer it from one place to another... We cannot generate it because we can neither create nor destroy it." Using electricity lowers its potential the way water passing over a wheel is not consumed; it "sinks back from whence it came," and is being liberated from the aether naturally, slowly and steadily — man's contribution being only to make the process rapid. He quotes Nikola Tesla: "Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic? If static our hopes are in vain: if kinetic and this we know it is for certain, then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature."
The cosmic generator and the beat note
The most speculative section proposes a cosmological relay. A "great generator" at some point A radiates electrical vibrations in every direction; body B picks them up and retransmits to C, which is "the distribution point to other worlds, suns and stars." On this scheme the Sun has no power of its own, "being nothing more than what the electrodes are to the arc lamp without the power from the generator," and this incoming energy is what makes the Earth rotate and hold its orbit. Moray claims to have found that these waves have "a regular beat note of time, coming and going as the waves of the sea, but in a very definite mathematical order of time, coming to the earth from every direction, stronger in the day time than at night" — a beat note he calls "the Father of Time, the Sire of Gravitation." He adds that the surgings are of very high frequency and that "if we knew of a speed greater than that of light, I would say their speed exceeds that of light (based on 186,000 miles per second)." Of the device itself he says only that it runs one frequency on the high-voltage primary and a much lower frequency on the commercial secondary, and that diffraction gratings used for other radiations were of no use in measuring the wavelength of the current he obtained.
Ether demanded by electric phenomena
The third section is a conventional late-nineteenth-century exposition. Induced currents spring up in neighbouring conductors with no visible connection; originating a current requires energy; if we believe in the continuity of the propagation of energy — that when it disappears in one place and reappears in another it must have passed through the intervening space — "we are forced to postulate a vehicle for its conveyance from place to place, and the vehicle is the ether." Electrifying a conductor is therefore storing energy in the surrounding medium, and "when we speak of the charge of an electrified conductor we refer to the charge of energy in the ether around it." Maxwell's theory is presented as the determination of how that energy is distributed through the field.
The aether around a charge is described as polarised, positive and negative charge corresponding to opposite polarisations "perhaps, like right-handed and left-handed twists or rotations." Alternating the charge rapidly therefore sends waves of alternating polarisation outward carrying energy — "this, then, is the electromagnetic theory of the luminous vibration." Moray notes that the older elastic-solid theory treated light as actual oscillation of aether elements about positions of rest, and that this limitation "is, however, unwarranted": all we know is that the change is periodic and transverse. Light and heat waves are reduced to the same category as waves of electric polarisation, "the only quality of the latter required to constitute the former is sufficient rapidity of alternation," with Heinrich Hertz's experiments cited as the strongest confirmation.
The oscillating discharge
The mathematical core, credited to Sir William Thomson's 1853 Philosophical Magazine paper, is the classical treatment of a condenser discharging through a circuit of resistance R and self-induction L. With E = Q/C and I = −dQ/dt, the circuit equation becomes
L(d2Q/dt2) + R(dQ/dt) + Q/C = 0,
whose auxiliary equation u2 + (R/L)u + 1/CL = 0 gives u = −R/2L ± a with a2 = R2/4L2 − 1/CL. If a is real — that is, if R2 > 4L/C — the charge simply decays to zero. If R2 < 4L/C, writing a′2 = 1/CL − R2/4L2, the solution becomes
Q = Q0e−Rt/2L(cos a′t + (R/2La′)sin a′t), I = (Q0/CLa′)e−Rt/2L sin a′t.
The current starts from zero, rises to a maximum where tan a′t = 2La′/R, vanishes at a′t = nπ where the charge is maximal, and reverses; the discharge is a back-rush and a train of alternating currents. The half-period is π/a′, and for small resistance T ≈ 2π√(CL), with a footnote that in mixed electrostatic and electromagnetic measure this becomes 2π√(CL)/v, v the velocity of light. The successive maximum charges are Q0, −Q0e−πR/2La′, Q0e−3πR/2La′, ..., so "the quantities therefore diminish in geometrical progression, and the energy of the charge diminishes correspondingly on each oscillation, being lost by radiation into space, or in heating the circuit, or both." Whether the discharge is continuous or oscillatory depends on whether 4L is less or greater than CR2. Moray notes Feddersen's confirmation: viewed in a revolving mirror the spark was drawn out in width at high resistance, but broke into a series of separate strips when the resistance was low enough for oscillation.
The appeal to witnesses
The booklet closes not with evidence but with an argument from testimony. The demonstration described is minimal — two poles, an antenna wire with insulators, a driven ground, both leads to the device, standard light globes and heating appliances, no rewiring of the house, and demonstrations given "miles away from all power lines" on antennas and grounds erected by the witnesses themselves. Disconnecting antenna or ground extinguishes the lights and throws "a heavy brush discharge... many inches"; reconnecting at once restores it, but otherwise the device goes dead and must be retuned. Moray's challenge is: "if you cannot point out any weak points, and no one can, then there are none." The closing letter reports that during the past year the capacity of the discovery "has been increased over 2000 times what it was a year ago," that the device carries six times as much current as a comparable device without warming, and invites anyone to dispute the claims.
Assessment
What is worth taking seriously here is the underlying instinct rather than the device. Moray's insistence that energy is transferred rather than created, that the field around a conductor is the storehouse and the wire only the guide, and that "electric inertia" should be defined as the ratio of electric motive force to the acceleration of electric displacement, are all defensible field-theoretic intuitions with respectable nineteenth-century ancestry — essentially the Poynting–Heaviside picture. Moray is also careful about a distinction many of his contemporaries blurred: he explicitly repudiates perpetual motion and getting something for nothing, and locates the source of his power outside the device.
The physics that is actually derived in the booklet is correct, and it is standard. The circuit equation, the auxiliary roots, the overdamped condition R2 > 4L/C, the underdamped solution with its R/2La′ coefficient, the current expression (Q0/CLa′)e−Rt/2Lsin a′t, the maximum-current condition tan a′t = 2La′/R, the half-period π/a′ and the limit T = 2π√(LC) are all exactly right, and the Gaussian-unit footnote dividing by v is right too. This is Kelvin's 1853 analysis reproduced faithfully. One small slip survives: the text says the approximation holds "if the resistance be small compared with the reciprocal of the capacity," which is dimensionally impossible — the correct comparison is with √(4L/C), as the paper's own oscillation criterion states two paragraphs later.
But this is precisely where the booklet defeats itself, and the point deserves to be stated plainly. The one piece of quantitative physics Moray presents demonstrates the opposite of his claim. His own equation gives successive charge maxima falling in geometric progression by the factor e−πR/La′, and his own text says the energy is "lost by radiation into space, or in heating the circuit, or both." A damped LCR ring-down is a dissipative system; nothing in the analysis provides a source term, and no amount of "synchronization with the vibrations of that energy through space" appears anywhere in the mathematics. The claim that "when the recovery is distinctly oscillatory and harmonics set in the oscillations will go on forever" is contradicted by the exponential factor e−Rt/2L in the very solution he prints. The step from a resonant circuit to a self-sustaining one is asserted, never derived.
The cosmological framework fares worse. The A–B–C relay of energy, the claim that the Sun has no intrinsic power and is merely an arc electrode, and the identification of the incoming beat note as the cause of the Earth's rotation and orbit, are offered without a single number and conflict with straightforward measurement: the solar constant of 1361 W/m2 is accounted for by nuclear fusion in a star of known mass, luminosity and spectral energy distribution, and the Earth's orbital motion follows from Newtonian gravitation to the precision at which spacecraft are navigated. The claim of a diurnal variation "stronger in the day time than at night" is the kind of thing that would be trivially decisive if measured and published; no measurement is given.
Finally, the closing section inverts the burden of proof. "If no man can point out one way that it could be fake then what?" is not an argument, and the challenge to critics to supply "drawings and explanations on some possible way these demonstrations could be anything but what is claimed" asks sceptics to do the work that the inventor's own disclosure would do in a paragraph. Moray states that he "cannot give a technical account of my device without disclosing too much" — which is a commercial position, not a scientific one, and it is the reason the Radiant Energy device has remained untestable rather than merely unconfirmed. The one measurement that would settle the matter — a sustained input-versus-output energy balance over hours, with the antenna and ground characterized — is nowhere in the booklet, and the numbers that do appear ("over 2000 times," "six times as much current") are unaccompanied by units or method.