On a Concept of the Electromagnetic Nature of Gravity and Inertia
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | On a Concept of the Electromagnetic Nature of Gravity and Inertia |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Jaroslav J Kopernicky |
| Keywords | electromagnetic, gravity, inertia, gravitation, forces |
| Published | 2005 |
| No. of pages | 15 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The writer brings back to light the well-known fact that vectors of attractive forces of magnets and electrostatic charges are linear and repulsive forces are tangential. The writer asserted that as the consequence of this fact, the attraction between opposite polarities (of magnets and electrostatic charges) and repulsion between same polarities is not equal due to the different geometry of the field, and therefore different density of the field between two (or more) charges (magnets). This asymmetry actually can account for gravitation. That would bring gravitation to the family of electromagnetic forces. The writer also elaborates on the idea of possibility of electromagnetic origin of inertia, brought in by late Prof. William (Bill) Hughes from the University of South Dakota. The consequence here would be an inherence and independence of inertia, in accordance with Newton's views.
Overview
This monograph, revised repeatedly between December 2005 and June 2008 and dedicated to the late Prof. William L Hughes of the University of South Dakota, is a two-part argument that both gravity and inertia are electromagnetic in origin. It grew out of Kopernicky's earlier joint paper with Hughes, A Challenge to Coulomb's Law: Implications for Gravity and Matter Structure (Galilean Electrodynamics, 2005), and opens with Faraday's 1849 diary entry hoping that gravity might yet be bound up with electricity and magnetism "in reciprocal action and equivalent effect."
The central claim is that Coulomb's Law embeds an unexamined assumption: that attraction between unlike charges and repulsion between like charges are of exactly equal magnitude at equal separation. Kopernicky reports that some thirty years of his own bench work with magnets and electrostatic charges shows they are not equal — attraction is slightly the stronger — and that the excess is what we call gravitation. Because the conventional argument against an electrical origin of gravity rests precisely on the exact cancellation of positive and negative contributions in a neutral body, breaking that symmetry is enough, in his view, to bring gravity "to the family of electromagnetic forces." The second half of the paper takes up Hughes' contention that an accelerating charge generates a field opposing its own acceleration, so that inertia too is electromagnetic — and, contrary to Mach's Principle, inherent to the body rather than imposed by distant matter.
The argument
Field geometry, not polarity
Kopernicky is emphatic that his proposed asymmetry is not a difference between the potentials of the two polarities — an error he says readers of the 2005 Galilean Electrodynamics paper repeatedly made. It is a difference in the geometry of the two fields. Between unlike poles the lines of force run essentially straight from one pole to the other, taking "the shortest possible way", so the flux between them is concentrated. Between like poles the lines are deflected tangentially, because the field lines repel one another, and the field in the intervening region is correspondingly diffused and therefore weaker. Merely flipping the sign of a charge in the Coulomb equation, he argues, "doesn't represent the correct reality", because the sign change also changes the direction of the field vectors.
He notes that Weber, Zöllner, Lorenz and Eddington all entertained an attraction–repulsion inequality, but attributed it to polarity; none, he says, considered field geometry. In a late revision he concedes an objection raised by a reader: calling the repulsive field "tangential" does not by itself suffice, since what matters is the resultant force between two aligned three-dimensional tangential fields.
The pocket and inchworm experiments
Two simple demonstrations carry the empirical weight. In the "pocket" experiment a magnet A is fixed at the closed end of an inverted vial while magnet B is advanced by a screw until the attractive force balances its weight, Fa(h) = mg, and it is captured. The vial is then reversed so that B is supported by repulsion instead — and B does not reach the screw. The residual gap is offered as direct evidence that attraction operates over a longer range than repulsion; had the two been equal, attraction would begin exactly where repulsion left off. Kopernicky credits Michael Ibison of Earthtech with framing the balance condition Fr(d) = mg.
Hughes' independent "inchworm" experiment used an air-core Brooks coil and a ring ceramic magnet of similar inner diameter. Driven with alternating current, an exactly symmetric force law would make the ring simply vibrate about a fixed position; instead it migrates toward the coil, even when inclined.
Hughes' field-energy calculation
Hughes treated two point charges of equal magnitude at x = ±s/2 and a doubly infinite y–z plane of infinitesimal but finite thickness s at the origin. For unlike charges the field crossing that plane is everywhere normal to it; for like charges it is everywhere tangential. Integrating the field energy density ½ε0E2 over the plane and dividing by s — since energy is force times distance — gives the force. Exploiting cylindrical symmetry about the x axis, the surface integrals reduce to one-dimensional integrals over z from 0 to infinity, with Ex entering for the attractive case and Etan for the repulsive one. The two integrands are not the same function, and that is the formal statement of the asymmetry.
Gravity as the residue
Kopernicky then proposes writing the gravitational force between two electrically neutral bodies as the difference between the summed attractive and summed repulsive Coulomb forces over all the charge in them, the totals being set by the bodies' energy content via E = mc2. The repulsive term carries a reduced coefficient — the Coulomb constant diminished by an amount tied to G — so that the residue of the two large, nearly cancelling sums is the gravitational attraction. He suggests on this basis that E = mc2, which he notes Einstein himself called "somewhat inexact", would require modification to incorporate the gravitational constant, and that Fa > Fr should be taken as an axiom of broken symmetry at the quantum scale. The attraction of the scheme, he stresses, is causality: "Every quantum of energy indeed generates an electromagnetic field interacting in the way described above."
Inertia as self-generated field
The second half reports Hughes' result that a spinning charge forced to accelerate generates an electric field at the observation point opposing that acceleration, proportional to the charge, the permeability of free space and the acceleration, and falling off with distance — "just as in Newtonian inertial force." Hughes did not compute the energy released by deformation of the spin, judging it negligible against the inertial resistance, nor did he examine the effect of a nearby gravitating body.
Kopernicky supplies the experimental side. He describes an observer in a rotating cylindrical chamber — Newton's bucket without the water — carrying a disc whose angular velocity and sense he can control. Accelerometers on the disc rim read ωc + ωd when disc and chamber turn the same way and read zero when the disc turns opposite at equal rate, so that the observer recovers both the direction and the magnitude of the chamber's rotation without any external reference. He names the instrument the "Mobiloscope". Moving the disc off-centre near the wall, he argues, lets the same trick register uniform linear motion, since on the side facing the wall the accelerometers momentarily match and cancel the floor's speed.
He then analyses a rolling cylinder. At the instant a rim point A touches the ground, vA = 0 and vG = ωr for the centre G; A becomes the instantaneous pivot for G, and combining aG = ω2rA/G with the counter term gives aA = 0. Since a rim accelerometer on the cycloid path registers a changing acceleration through the cycle, he concludes that a rolling wheel cannot be re-described as a stationary rotating wheel by a change of observation point, that current wheel-balancing practice is therefore imperfect, and that "the physical process can not be influenced by a simple change of the observer's frame of reference." From the same principle he sketches a Galilean inertial contribution to tides and earthquakes, with Moon and Sun acting only as stimulus, and a galactic habitability argument: only near the "bottom of the galactic cycloid", where external accelerations on the solar system are small, can planetary orbits stay near-circular, which he takes to shrink the Drake equation drastically.
He closes on the Equivalence Principle, arguing that weight is simply the force required to accelerate a body at 9.8 m/s2 and that this force is the same by whatever means the acceleration is produced, so no distinction between gravitational and inertial mass is needed — Newton, he notes, "never proposed two different masses."
Assessment
The paper's attraction is that it is falsifiable and cheap to test. The pocket experiment requires two magnets, a vial and a screw; the inchworm experiment a coil and a ring magnet. Kopernicky does not hide behind formalism, and he explicitly invites replication rather than assent. The conceptual move is also cleanly stated: the standard dismissal of electrical gravity depends on exact cancellation in neutral matter, so an asymmetry however small is exactly the right place to attack. And unlike a geometrical account of gravitation, an electromagnetic residue would supply a mechanism, which is what the paper means by "causality."
The difficulties are serious. The asymmetry is asserted from field-line pictures rather than derived: the tangential-versus-linear geometry of the two configurations is a consequence of the superposition of Coulomb fields, not an independent input, so one cannot use it to conclude that the Coulomb force law itself is unequal without circularity. Hughes' plane-integral argument shows only that the field energy is distributed differently in the two cases — which is uncontroversial — and does not exhibit a calculation in which the two integrals differ once both are done consistently. No number is ever given: neither the fractional excess of attraction over repulsion measured in thirty years of experiments, nor the value it would need to have to reproduce G. That omission is fatal to the central claim, because the required ratio is extraordinary — the electrostatic force between two protons exceeds their gravitational attraction by about 1036, so the proposed asymmetry would have to be fine-tuned to roughly one part in 1036 and be identical for every material. The paper does not address why such a residue would then be exactly proportional to mass-energy rather than to net charge distribution, nor why it would be independent of chemical composition, which Eötvös-type torsion-balance experiments constrain to better than one part in 1013.
The two bench demonstrations also admit ordinary explanations the paper does not exclude. Both the pocket and inchworm configurations involve permanent magnets in an inhomogeneous field, where induced magnetisation and hysteresis in the ceramic magnet, together with friction and the finite length of the magnets, produce exactly the kind of small directional asymmetry reported; no null runs, error bars or control for induced moments are described. The proposed modification of E = mc2 to include G is stated in a single line and never used to compute anything.
The inertia section is weaker still. The rotating-chamber and cycloid analyses are correct classical mechanics but do not show what is claimed: that an accelerometer detects rotation and that a rolling wheel is not equivalent to a spinning wheel are standard results, since rotation is absolute in Newtonian mechanics and in general relativity alike, and neither bears on Mach's principle, which concerns the origin of the inertial frames rather than their detectability. The claim that the cycloid arrangement can register uniform, unaccelerated linear motion without an external reference contradicts Galilean relativity and is not demonstrated — the cancellation described near the chamber wall is a rotational effect, not a translational one. The galactic-habitability and tidal corollaries are offered without calculation.
Taken on its own terms, then, the paper is a clear statement of a testable conjecture backed by two reproducible-sounding demonstrations, and it is honest about which parts came from Hughes and which from criticism. But it stops short of the quantitative work — a measured asymmetry with an uncertainty, and a derivation of G from it — that would make the conjecture assessable.