Didier Viel
Didier Viel | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Verneuil Sur Seine, Yvelines, France |
| Known for | gravitation |
Didier Viel is a French independent researcher and retired engineer living in Verneuil-sur-Seine, Yvelines, France. He is known for his work on gravitation, in which he revives and reworks the corpuscular ("push") theory of gravity first proposed by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in 1690, and for his argument that time is not a real physical entity.
Biography
Viel holds a Master of Sciences from the University of Washington in Seattle. He worked as an engineer for the Airbus Group before retiring, and has since pursued theoretical physics as an independent researcher. He has published several books, in both French and English, through the self-publishing house Lulu, and posts his papers on Academia.edu.
Work
The nature of time
In his first books, Et si le temps n'existait pas! (2017) and its English edition Time Doesn't Exist (2017), Viel argues that what physicists call time is not a real entity in the universe, and that only matter and energy are fundamental. He traces what he regards as a conceptual error to Leonhard Euler, who in 1752 defined acceleration as the time derivative of velocity, and proposes instead a formulation based on d'Alembert's experimentally derived definition, in which acceleration is related to duration rather than to time as a differential. The books also apply this view to the Big Bang, dark matter and black holes.
Quantum gravitation and inertia
Viel's later work, published as Gravitation Quantique (2019) and in papers such as "Quantum Gravitation and Inertia" and "Aether Gravitation and Inertia", develops a theory of gravitation based on an aether filling the universe. Taking as his starting point the 1690 theory of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, he introduces new hypotheses about the interaction of the aether with matter and models the process using the de Broglie–Bohm ("Bohmian") formulation of quantum mechanics. In his account, aether particles, or gravitons, produce a pressure force through elastic reflections on atomic nuclei, and this shielding effect yields Newton's inverse-square formula for the gravitational force. He further argues that inertia arises from an induction phenomenon between the aether and atomic nuclei, and that the "mass" of a body is not a real entity but an emergent property of that interaction.
Books
- Et si le temps n'existait pas ! Et bien d'autres choses… (Big Bang, matière noire, trous noirs, …), Lulu, 22 February 2017, 196 pp., ISBN 9781326930691 (in French).
- Time Doesn't Exist! And Many Other Things… (Big Bang, Black Matter, Black Holes), Lulu, 20 November 2017, 188 pp., ISBN 9780244342883.
- Gravitation Quantique, Lulu, 17 August 2019, 178 pp., ISBN 0244209820.
- Gravitation et inertie quantiques (in French).