New Physics Based on Force-Free Circular Motion
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Physics Based on Force-Free Circular Motion |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Mitch Emery |
| Keywords | Inertia, Circular Motion, Gravity, Light Speed, Universe |
| Published | 2006 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the NPA |
| Volume | 3 |
| Number | 1 |
| No. of pages | 13 |
| Pages | 24-36 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Present-day theories of the Universe call for all kinds strange things to exist in order to maintain their viability. In fact, it seems the more we know about the Universe, the stranger it gets. Must all of this be so? Or could there just be a problem with the premise on which theories are built? According to Newton's First Law, a body in motion tries to maintain a straight line of travel. There are no exceptions to the rule because it is thought to be an act of Nature. However, this paper argues that unrealized effects from circular motion point to the underlying cause of its tendency to move in a straight line. A phenomenon is then described by which circular motion is force-free by Nature, while space and time each remain separate and absolute entities. Ultimately, it is argued that the Universe can be explained more easily in terms of an appropriately defined force-free circular motion, and that it provides a key to a simple theory of everything. Note: Portions of this paper (enclosed in brackets) have been revised for the purpose of clarification.
Overview
Emery's paper, presented at the 2006 Natural Philosophy Alliance meeting in Tulsa, proposes a single kinematic primitive from which he attempts to derive gravitation, the constancy of the speed of light, atomic structure, magnetism, cosmology and even biological evolution. That primitive is what he calls force-free circular motion: a body possesses an underlying straight-line motion which is "carried and turned effortlessly by the body's spin," so that from a fixed frame it traces a circle without any force acting. Space and time remain "separate and absolute entities" throughout, and there is no curved spacetime.
He distinguishes his position carefully from that of Viv Pope, whose book he cites at the outset. Pope, he says, rejects Newton's first law entirely and holds that "all momentum is angular momentum," with force required to depart from circular motion. Emery's own view is different: Newton's first law "is judged to be wrong, although straight-line motion still prevails." The straight-line motion is real and persists; what is wrong is the claim that it must appear straight. Since "the appellation straight or curved to a motion depends on the viewpoint of the observer" — motion straight with respect to the Moon looks circular with respect to the Earth — a body can be moving in a straight line in its own turning frame while orbiting in ours. Crucially, force-free circular motion cannot be created; "force defeats the cause." It can only have existed forever, as matter itself is taken to have done.
The argument
The tetherball and the causal principle
The paper's foundational reasoning is qualitative and analogical. Emery invokes the causal principle — "a cause has at least as much reality as its effect... whatever makes something hot must itself be hot" — to argue that if the Moon's orbit is force-free then its cause must itself be a force-free turning action.
He then dissects a ball twirling on a string. The ball's inertia pulls the string taut (a fictitious pull); the string pulls back with a real force. Because the pull is unbalanced, the ball "tries to twist itself" from its point of attachment, but the tension prevents the twist, since "straight-line pulling effects are stronger than the angular pull of a twist." The string acts "like a stiff rod," holding the ball's linear momentum at a right angle to the force and dragging it round. Emery's key move is to insist that the suppressed twist is nonetheless real: "the potential but unrealized twisting is just as real as the ball's obvious twirling." Remove the force, and the twist would develop into a full spin that carries the linear momentum around a perfect circle, one turn per 360° of orbit — "somewhat like that of the Moon's orbit."
Gravity as an off-centre twist
Gravity then appears not as a fundamental interaction but as a secondary effect of force-free circular motion. Because one side of an orbiting body moves faster than the other, its momentum is unbalanced; an unbalanced spin creates a twisting force, and a body "tries to rotate about its point of least momentum, or its nearest point to the center of motion" — an off-centre rotation. His Figure 1 shows a body at two orbital positions 60° apart, with the orbit itself shifted 60° by this twist; the net result is that "the body falls to the center of its original orbit."
Emery offers a scaling argument that this reproduces the inverse-square law. Doubling the mass doubles the momentum imbalance and hence the twist. Doubling the orbital radius, however, doubles the time required for the orbit to shift, so the shifting force is halved — and, he concludes, "the gravity-like force is only one-fo[u]rth as strong and in total agreement with the inverse-square law." Because the twist arises within the body itself, gravitational effects are instantaneous, "just as Newton described." He also claims the scheme dispenses with Dark Matter, since a revolving body "has no real tendency to move in a straight line" and galactic rotation curves need no extra mass.
For the Earth, gravity is the product of three effects: a "downward twist" toward the rotation axis from the momentum imbalance; a "sideways twist" attributed to the Coriolis force, which pivots the downward twist toward the centre of mass; and an "escaping effect," in which the rotating body turns away from a falling object like a roller-coaster car cresting a drop. He argues these combine so that apparent surface gravity is nearly constant from equator to pole even though the underlying downward twist weakens. Latitude-dependent bulging, solar and lunar tides (the latter attributed to the Earth's wobble rather than the Moon's attraction), and the origin of the Moon as "a huge volcanic discharge" from the Earth all follow.
Kepler, the "northerly curve" and cosmology
Emery posits that the Universe as a whole has two perpendicular force-free rotations in roughly a 2:1 speed ratio — a fast east-west horizontal spin and a slower north-south vertical spin. The slower one produces what he calls the northerly curve. As the Earth's orbital motion alternately lengthens and shortens the radius of its northerly curve, the angular speed of that curve fluctuates, the Earth's distance from the Sun changes, and the orbit becomes elliptical "according to Kepler's Laws." He argues small and slow orbits are most distorted, offering Mercury and Pluto as examples, and attributes perihelion precession to the twist shifting the direction of the northerly curve.
Creation follows the same template. A single "Big Mass" carrying the dual spin ("the Big Spin") is squeezed by its own gravity, spins ever faster by conservation of angular momentum, until gyroscopic effects drag on the spin, gravity "lost its grip," and the mass inflated and exploded into pre-existing space. Successive stages of decompression and thermal explosion produce galaxy groups, then rotating dust clouds, then stars and — by discharge from "parent" bodies — planets and moons. Expansion will eventually reverse into a "Big Squeeze" and a "Big Bounce," each world "almost identical to the previous world because the cause stays nearly the same." The Cosmic Microwave Background is identified as radiation from the original creation still circling the Universe and destined to return.
Light
Radiation is emitted in a straight line by force at speed c, but "carries the free circular motion of its source." A faster-rotating star emits light that is faster but more curved; because the increase in path length is proportional to the increase in angular speed, the apparent speed — defined as the magnitude of the average velocity — is unaffected. Likewise, the Earth's own curved motion adds an apparent curvature that exactly cancels the relative-motion effect, so measured light speed stays constant. On this basis Emery reinterprets several standard results: the Shapiro delay becomes a strengthened twist as a photon's solar orbit shrinks; light bending near the Sun becomes "the natural curve in starlight"; a Black Hole becomes "the absence of starlight as it curves away from the view of an observer," a blind spot rather than a mass; and the apparent infinity and edgelessness of the Universe results from starlight circling to the outskirts and returning, so that "an observer might look to the east and see the backside of everything in the west."
Cosmological redshift is not stretching of space — "space has no fabric" — but shrinkage of atoms: bodies lose momentum through radiation, their spins slow, escaping effects within their atoms weaken, electrons fall closer to the nucleus, atoms shrink and emit shorter wavelengths, so older light is redder. The dimness of Type Ia supernovae is attributed to photons scattering "like the spokes of a wheel" along longer curved paths, so that Dark Energy is unnecessary and the true expansion is decelerating. The solar neutrino deficit is explained the same way.
Atoms and magnetism
The atom repeats the cosmic pattern: each electron carries two perpendicular orbital motions in a 2:1 ratio, producing the looping trajectory of Figure 2 and, at one phase, a "halo orbit." Strong and weak nuclear forces are replaced by absorption: an electron "is like a sponge that absorbs particles at an exceeding rate," and the pull of absorption draws it toward the proton's emitted particle field without changing its orbit's character, only shifting it closer to the nucleus. The electron's spin squeezes it, and the competition between squeezing and escaping effects around the loop determines when photons are discharged — at P4 yes, at P1 no — while a maximally squeezed electron "might even seem to disappear from what can be called the Black Hole effect." Magnetism arises from atoms with synchronised orbits: opposite poles place electrons of one magnet between the protons of the other so that absorption draws them together, like poles bring protons or electrons face to face so that radiation drives them apart.
Time, dating and evolution
Since gravity is generated by rotation, a slowing Earth means weakening gravity, longer days and a growing orbit — but no measurable change, because clocks are calibrated to the rotation and shrink along with everything else. "This phenomenon is like a cosmological constant," Emery writes: everything truly changes but seems unchanged relative to everything else. He concludes that radiometric dating is unreliable because "a year was once much shorter than it is today." The final section extends the cycle-of-worlds picture to biology: life evolves across many successive worlds, "like throwing a handful of dice in trying to roll all sixes" with each six left standing between throws, so that each world is "a blue print for the following world, and life is recreated as if by intelligence."
Assessment
What is attractive here is the ambition and the internal consistency of the metaphor. Emery has one idea and follows it everywhere, and he does so in plain language with concrete, visualisable pictures — the tetherball, the roller coaster, the highway curve, the sponge. He is also unusually candid about the observational puzzles he is targeting: flat rotation curves, the dimness of high-redshift supernovae, the solar neutrino deficit, the Pioneer anomaly, and the sheer proliferation of unseen constituents required by the standard picture. The complaint that opens the abstract — that the more we learn "the stranger it gets," and that the strangeness may be a symptom of a bad premise — is a legitimate motivation for looking again at foundations, and his distinction between his position and Viv Pope's shows he has read the neighbouring literature carefully.
The difficulties are, however, fundamental rather than incidental, and the author states the largest of them himself in his conclusion: the idea "has not been tested or verified by mathematics." There is not a single equation in thirteen pages. Every quantitative claim is therefore a verbal scaling argument, and the central one does not survive inspection. The derivation of the inverse-square law asserts that doubling the mass doubles the twist and that doubling the radius halves it, giving "one-fo[u]rth as strong" — but one-fourth of a doubled quantity is a factor of one-half overall, and in any case a force that scales as m/r2 with no reference to the second body's mass violates Newton's Third Law and cannot reproduce Newtonian gravitation, which depends on the product Mm. Nothing in the argument fixes a coupling constant, so G never appears and no number can be computed. The same absence defeats the claimed explanations of the Shapiro delay and light bending: the 1.75-arcsecond solar deflection and the ~250 μs maximum Shapiro delay are measured quantities, and a qualitative "natural curve in starlight" makes no prediction that can be compared with them.
Several claims conflict directly with established measurement. Making gravity a product of a body's rotation implies that a non-rotating or slowly rotating mass should gravitate weakly or not at all, which laboratory Cavendish-type measurements on stationary masses exclude outright; it also implies latitude- and orientation-dependent effects far larger than the parts-per-trillion limits set by modern torsion-balance and atom-interferometer tests of the equivalence principle. The proposal that a moving train changes local gravity and shrinks or expands its atoms is a first-order effect that would have been obvious in a century of transported-clock and Hafele–Keating-type experiments. Attributing lunar tides to an Earth wobble rather than to the Moon leaves unexplained why the tidal pattern tracks lunar phase and lunar distance with the observed r−3 dependence — Emery acknowledges the correlation and simply asserts the two "coincide because they both arise from the same cause," which is not an explanation. The redshift-by-shrinking-atoms proposal faces the same obstacle as all tired-light variants: it does not produce the (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves, which is measured directly and is independent of any assumption about photon energy loss. And the appeal to Hayasaka's rotating-gyroscope weight-loss result rests on an experiment that later, more sensitive repetitions failed to confirm.
There are also internal tensions. Force-free circular motion is said to be uncreatable by force, yet a rocket's thrust is said to induce exactly such motion; the Big Mass is said to explode "into pre-existing space" while space elsewhere has "no fabric" and is not a substance; the Universe is simultaneously flattened by its slower vertical spin and possibly "shaped like a donut." Most tellingly, the closing epistemology — that "it can be known that the idea of force-free circular motion is true. The laws of probability say so," and that wrong ideas "lack the simplicity and beauty of something that is truly right" — substitutes an aesthetic criterion for the test the paper itself concedes has not been performed. Emery's instinct that a theory ought to be intelligible rather than merely predictive is a defensible dissident position; but the paper offers no way for a reader to find out whether he is right, and by the end it is asking to be believed rather than checked.