Jump to content

Neomechanics

From Natural Philosophy Wiki

Neomechanics is the physical framework developed by Glenn Borchardt, defined as classical mechanics adapted to the assumption of infinity. Where Newtonian mechanics assumed a universe of finite parts and Einsteinian physics replaced it with spacetime, neomechanics holds that the universe consists of nothing but matter and the motion of matter, all the way down and all the way out, without limit in either direction. It is the mechanical basis of the Universal Cycle Theory, the Infinite Universe Theory, the Neomechanical Gravitation Theory and the Particle Model.

Borchardt summarises the position in a single sentence that carries the whole programme: Matter exists; motion occurs. Anything that exists has xyz dimensions and location. Motion is not a part of the universe; it is what those parts do. Neomechanics is the working out of that distinction, and its central charge against twentieth-century physics is that the distinction was abandoned.

Philosophical foundation

The Ten Assumptions of Science

Neomechanics rests on the framework Borchardt set out in The Ten Assumptions of Science (2004). Following R. G. Collingwood, he holds that fundamental assumptions always have opposites, can never be completely proven, and — if more than one is adopted — must be consupponible, meaning each can be assumed without contradicting the others. The ten are:

  1. Materialism — the external world exists after the observer does not.
  2. Causality — all effects have an infinite number of material causes.
  3. Uncertainty — it is impossible to know everything about anything, but possible to know more about anything.
  4. Inseparability — just as there can be no motion without matter, so there can be no matter without motion.
  5. Conservation — matter and the motion of matter can be neither created nor destroyed.
  6. Complementarity — all things are subject to divergence and convergence from other things.
  7. Irreversibility — all processes are irreversible.
  8. Infinity — the universe is infinite, both in the microscopic and macroscopic directions.
  9. Relativism — all things have characteristics that make them similar to all other things as well as characteristics that make them dissimilar to all other things.
  10. Interconnection — all things are interconnected, that is, between any two objects exist other objects that transmit matter and motion.

The assumption of infinity is the thread running through the rest, and it is what makes the mechanics "neo": classical mechanics is retained, but every appeal to a smallest particle, a largest container, a perfectly solid body or a perfectly empty space is discarded as an idealisation that infinity forbids.

Univironmental determinism

The companion doctrine, developed in The Scientific Worldview (2007), is univironmental determinism. Borchardt divides the universe at any moment into the microcosm — a portion of the universe, any portion, which replaces the notions of "system" and "object" — and the macrocosm, everything outside it. What happens to any microcosm is equally dependent on the infinite matter in motion within it and the infinite matter in motion outside it.

He presents this as a correction to a persistent one-sidedness: Newtonian classical mechanism over-emphasised the macrocosm, while what he calls systems philosophy, including Einstein's, over-emphasised the microcosm. Solipsism is the extreme microcosmic error and fatalism the extreme macrocosmic one. Borchardt claims univironmental determinism as the universal mechanism of evolution, of which neo-Darwinism is a special case restricted to biology and further narrowed by reducing the microcosm to genetics.

Core principles

The neomechanical position can be stated as a short list of commitments, each the denial of something standard:

  • All motion is motion of matter. There is no matterless motion. Nothing moves unless something is moving.
  • There is an aether. Space is not empty; it is filled with aether particles, themselves material and themselves containing further matter.
  • Light is wave motion in the aether, not a stream of particles and not a self-propagating immaterial field.
  • Gravitation is a push, not a pull. There are no true pulls in nature.
  • The cosmological redshift is due primarily to absorption, not to universal expansion.
  • Perfectly empty space and perfectly solid matter are ideas, not realities. Both are excluded by infinite divisibility.
  • Energy is not a thing. It "neither exists nor occurs"; it is a calculation describing the motion or potential motion of matter.

Definitions follow from these. Matter is that which contains other matter ad infinitum. Mass is the resistance of a microcosm to a change in motion. Time is the motion of all things with respect to all other things in the universe — not a dimension, not a substance, and not something that can dilate.

The critique of Einstein

The objectification of motion

Borchardt's central charge, set out in "Einstein's Most Important Philosophical Error" (2011), is that a single philosophical mistake has held physics back for over a century: the objectification of motion — treating motion as though it had material properties.

His analogy is the caloric theory of heat. Eighteenth-century physics treated heat as a fluid, a substance, rather than as the vibratory motion of atoms; the error was not mathematical but ontological, and it was corrected by recognising that heat is something matter does, not something matter contains. Borchardt argues that Einstein, following Maxwell, made the same category mistake with light — beginning from the assumption that light is a particle rather than wave motion in a sea of particles — and then generalised it into a physics in which motion itself acquires material standing. On his account this single error invalidates both special and general relativity, and the ready acceptance of those theories owed more to the appeal of indeterministic philosophy than to the strength of the supporting data. He regards the classic confirmations, including the Eddington eclipse observations and the Hafele-Keating clock flights, as too poor to establish what is claimed for them.

The objectification of time

A parallel argument appears in "Failure of the Relativistic Hypercone" (2011), written with Steven Bryant. Einstein's 1922 derivation introduces light-time l = ct and uses it in place of time t. But a velocity multiplied by a time is a distance, so l measures distance, not time. Treating a single quantity as both invalidates the hypercone construction and the conclusions drawn from it — an instance, the authors argue, of the same objectification, this time applied to time, which is itself a measure of motion.

E = mc2

In "The Physical Meaning of E=mc2" (2009) Borchardt classes the famous relation as an "Einsteinism": true, but for the wrong reason. It does not describe energy becoming matter or matter becoming energy, both of which the assumptions of inseparability and conservation forbid. What occurs in fission is a transfer of motion — the motion of the fragments imparted to the aether at velocity c — and the equation is the bookkeeping for that transfer, not evidence of a conversion between two kinds of stuff. On the same reasoning, acceleration is not the addition of energy to a body but the transfer of motion from macrocosm to microcosm, taken up as increased internal motion of the submicrocosms, which is what registers as increased mass.

Applications

Gravitation

The most developed application is the Neomechanical Gravitation Theory (2012), with Stephen J Puetz. Because there are no true pulls, gravitation must be a push. Baryonic matter consists of aether complexes that restrict the free motion of aether particles, displacing them and creating what amounts to a partial vacuum for aether; neomechanical collisions absorb and re-emit motion, further reducing aether activity near massive bodies. The result is a gravitational pressure gradient — aether pressure lowest where baryonic matter is densest and greatest in intergalactic space, the inverse of Earth's atmospheric gradient. Satellites remain in orbit because distal aether pressure exceeds proximal aether pressure.

Borchardt and Puetz present this as taking "the best from the best": the inverse-square law from Newton, the involvement of inertia from Einstein, pushing from Le Sage, vortex motion from Descartes, and the aether from the ancient Greeks — while claiming to avoid the non-local causes that sank Le Sage's version, since neomechanical gravitation is universal but strictly local. The theory further predicts that the velocity of light is a function of aether density.

Cosmology

Applied to cosmology, neomechanics yields the Infinite Universe Theory, which Borchardt offers as the alternative to the Big Bang. If the universe is infinite in both directions and matter and motion are conserved, there can have been no origin, and cosmogony — the study of the origin of the universe — has no subject. The cosmological redshift is attributed to absorption of light by the aether over great distances rather than to recession: each collision within a medium accelerates the collidee and decelerates the collider with slight internal absorption, delaying subsequent waves and lengthening the wavelength. Borchardt points to elderly galaxies at the supposed edge of the universe and to colliding galaxies as observations the expanding model handles badly.

Cycles

In Universal Cycle Theory: Neomechanics of the Hierarchically Infinite Universe (2011), Borchardt and Puetz combine neomechanics with the cycles Puetz identified statistically in 2009. Two motions do most of the work: vortices, which rotate matter and produce circular cycles, and waves, which compress and decompress matter and produce linear cycles. The universal cycles are hypothesised to result from variations in aether density produced by compression waves. The authors summarise the division of labour in the book's own title: cycles explain the motions in the universe, infinity explains its hierarchical structure, and neomechanics supplies the physical laws.

The Particle Model

The Particle Model developed by David de Hilster and others takes neomechanics as its mechanical basis, working out particle structure and interaction in terms of matter in motion within an infinite hierarchy.

Reception and standing

Neomechanics is not accepted in mainstream physics, and Borchardt does not present it as a refinement of the current consensus but as a replacement for its philosophical foundations. He argues that the choice between finity and infinity is an assumption rather than a result — neither can be proven — and that physics adopted the finite alternative largely without noticing that it had made a choice at all. His prediction is that the switch to the assumption of infinity will constitute what he calls the Last Cosmological Revolution.

The framework's chief attraction to researchers on this wiki is that it is a complete alternative rather than a local objection: it supplies a philosophy of science, an ontology, a theory of gravitation, a cosmology and a programme of application, all derived from a single stated assumption. Its chief difficulty, by the same token, is that it stands or falls with that assumption, which by Borchardt's own account can never be proven.

Papers on this wiki

Books

See also

External links

Retrieved from "https://wiki.naturalphilosophy.org/index.php?title=Neomechanics&oldid=300216"