Physics as a Building Project in Need of Design Review
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Physics as a Building Project in Need of Design Review |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Cynthia Kolb Whitney |
| Keywords | physics history, Two-Step Light, special relativity, NPA |
| Published | 2008 |
| No. of pages | 18 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
This paper develops a blueprint for the historical development of physics in general, highlighting present-day contributions from NPA participants in particular. The metaphor for physics as a building project involves a number of unwieldy building blocks in not-completely-stable relation to each other. Stresses and strains are pointed out, and redesign/rebuilding efforts are recommended.
Overview
This is a conference presentation by Cynthia Kolb Whitney, then editor of Galilean Electrodynamics and of the Proceedings of the NPA, delivered in slide form. Its device is a single sustained metaphor: physics is a building whose blocks were laid in the order historical accident supplied them rather than in the order a designer would have chosen, so that some blocks overhang their supports and some towers are visibly unstable. The exercise is to draw the elevation, mark the stresses, and say which parts need rebuilding.
The essay is unusual among dissident critiques in that it is structural rather than doctrinal. Whitney does not argue that any one theory is false; she argues that the load path is wrong — that theories are resting on foundations they do not actually match, and that the overhang is where the anomalies live. The second half turns from diagnosis to her own proposed repair, a model of light propagation she calls Two-Step Light, and closes with a short companion piece, "Mainstreaming — A Personal Progress Report," on how she got such work into mainstream journals.
The argument
The foundation and the two extreme blocks
The foundation is "the body of observational knowledge about physical phenomena." Whitney names the experiment-design and data-interpretation people within the NPA who work directly on it: Halton Arp, Jorge Curé, David Dameron, Glenn Deen, George Galeczki, Peter Graneau, Ron Hatch, Bill Hughes, James Keele, Martin Kokus, Jaroslav Kopernicky, Eugene Mallove, Peter Marquardt, Francisco Müller, Hector A Munera, Thomas E Phipps, Roger A Rydin, Alex Scarborough, Tom Van Flandern and Paul Wesley.
Two blocks sit on that foundation, and they are placed at opposite ends because their guiding visions are opposite. Newton was "all about point particles and action/reaction with forces dependent on particle positions"; Maxwell was "all about infinitely extending fields and helplessly responding test particles." Whitney draws the contrast in political terms: Newton is democratic — physics as a two-body problem with each body reacting to the other — while Maxwell is dictatorial — a one-body problem, a dominant source making the field and an insignificant test particle responding to it.
The Maxwell block is drawn with a slight overhang, because its match to phenomena is very good but not perfect. Whitney itemizes the mismatch precisely: the advanced solutions to the potential and field equations that accompany the expected retarded ones and have no physical referent; the run-away solutions that accompany the expected decay solutions in radiation-reaction trajectories; the insufficiency of the Lorentz Force law to cover all observed forces; and the failure to treat electromagnetic phenomena at atomic scale, which was a large part of the motive for quantum mechanics. She adds that Maxwell's theory was built on the Aether, "a sort of 'intellectual scaffolding', now removed."
The blocks between
Between Newton and Maxwell go two more. Classical electrodynamics — Gauss, Weber, Ampère, Neumann — is Newtonian in spirit, extending force to depend on velocity as well as position, but not as far as Maxwell, for whom fields and hence forces also involve acceleration. Quantum mechanics — Planck, Born, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Bohr — is Maxwell-like in featuring differential equations and waves, but differs from both in featuring uncertainty.
The unstable tower
On the Maxwell side Einstein built special relativity, which Whitney also draws with an overhang: "SRT removed 'aether' but inserted 'length contraction', which like 'aether' is not detected." General relativity sits on special relativity with more overhang still, representing spacetime curvature, and rests on just four tests — clock slowing, light bending, frequency shift, perihelion advance. Modern cosmology sits on general relativity with more overhang again, representing the Big Bang, with Glenn Borchardt, Paul Marmet and Mitchell cited as critics. Her verdict on the stack: "This tower is getting a little bit unstable!"
Above the quantum block she draws three towers. Quantum Electrodynamics is "very good at what it does, so is drawn solidly planted." Quantum chemistry is "difficult and sometimes inaccurate" — she points to her own earlier NPA papers on ionization potentials — and is drawn ill-planted and teetering. Elementary particle physics is "very unsettled" and teeters likewise, with Heaston, Keele, Lucas, Nassikas and Wolff named as people working to improve it.
Towers on the Newtonian side
The key idea for rebuilding is stated flatly: "we should examine, and question, and consider alternatives to, the light speed postulate at the foundation of SRT. In particular, we should try to recover Newton's Universal Time." Two such towers are drawn. One is the work of Parry Moon, Domina Spencer and colleagues, which Whitney credits with doing better on anomalies in metallurgy (the Herring furnace, arc welding), with explaining confounding optical experiments including Sagnac and Michelson-Gale, and with doing "extremely well for anything macroscopic." The other is her own Two-Step Light.
Two-Step Light
Whitney attributes Moon and Spencer's success to a single feature: they assert continuing attachment to the source of light as the reference for light speed. Her addition is a second half to any energy-transfer scenario, a period of attachment to the receiver. Hence "Two-Step."
She builds the proposal by first asking what may legitimately be said about light in flight. Her answer is that nothing about it is directly verifiable, "because 'verifying' anything means 'capturing' the light, and 'captured' means 'no longer in flight'" — and therefore that anything may be said which does not imply an end result contradicting experiment. On that licence she notes that Einstein's "phase velocity is c in any inertial coordinate frame" is itself unmeasurable, since absolute phase is not measurable.
Her own additional statements, attributed variously to Marquardt, Wesley and herself, run: light is a limited wave packet arising from a finite number of atomic sources by laser-like action; such a packet favours a propagation direction — "Don't think 'sphere', think 'cylinder'"; that direction is set by the arrangement of atoms in the source and not by any predetermined receiver; a limited packet has a beginning and an end, hence an amplitude profile whose height and length may vary over time so long as its area is conserved. She flags that this last point contradicts the linear, non-dispersive Maxwell theory, "but not any experiment."
The controversial core follows. Between beginning and end there is a middle, the centroid of the energy distribution, and it is the middle that travels at c. Then the beginning can stay with the source and the end must go off at 2c. Phase fronts beyond the middle did not travel there from the source; they arose there by induction and only then began to travel. The fast end eventually encounters some matter — a random event, selecting a random receiver. After the encounter the process reverses: the end stays with the receiver, the middle moves at c toward it, and the beginning moves at 2c. The scenario is not over until the beginning completes its journey.
The closing charge, and the mainstreaming report
Whitney's mission statement for the field: redo the unstable right-hand tower through SRT, GRT and Big Bang cosmology; redo the teetering towers of elementary particles and quantum chemistry, "and maybe even the quantum mechanics below those"; and unify the two presently fractious alternative-postulate towers. She ends by asking whether a single accepted Theory of Everything will ever exist.
The appended progress report lists her mainstream publications — "Relativistic Dynamics in Basic Chemistry" (Foundations of Physics 37, 2007), "Closing in on Chemical Bonds by Opening up Relativity Theory" (International Journal of Molecular Sciences 9, 2008), and work in the International Journal of Chemical Modeling — and draws four tactical lessons: introduce new theory in the context of experimental problems, because "only experiments can force people open up to new ideas"; look beyond physics experiments, "which are always designed to 'prove' existing physics theory," to chemists "who have no loyalty to physics dogma"; pick a problem with abundant data and no satisfactory understanding, such as ionization potentials; and recover rather than replace existing theory. Her summary: "Never mind being stridently confrontational with the physics establishment. Being quietly subversive works so much better!"
Assessment
The building metaphor earns its keep. Whitney's real insight is that the standard objections to relativity and cosmology are usually made one at a time, whereas what actually matters is dependency: general relativity inherits whatever is wrong with special relativity, and Big Bang cosmology inherits whatever is wrong with general relativity, so a defect low in the stack propagates upward while a success high in the stack does not validate what is beneath it. Drawing that as load-bearing and overhang makes the point visible in a way a list of objections does not. Her catalogue of Maxwellian overhang is accurate and specific — advanced solutions, run-away solutions, the insufficiency of the Lorentz force law, the failure at atomic scale are all real features of the classical theory, not inventions. And the mainstreaming appendix is a genuinely useful piece of practical advice about where a heterodox result can find a hearing.
The parallel she draws between the aether and length contraction — both undetected, one discarded and one retained — is rhetorically effective but not sound as stated. Length Contraction is not an independently postulated entity in special relativity; it is a coordinate consequence of the Lorentz transformation, which is itself constrained by measurements that are not in dispute, notably the lifetime dilation of atmospheric muons and the Ives-Stilwell transverse Doppler measurement. Calling it "not detected" conflates "not directly imaged" with "without empirical consequence."
The Two-Step Light proposal is where the paper is weakest, and by its own construction. Whitney's licensing principle — that anything may be asserted about light in flight which does not contradict an end result — is a permission to speculate, not an argument for a particular speculation, and she offers no reason to prefer the specific amplitude-profile picture over the indefinitely many others the same licence permits. The model's distinctive content is the claim that parts of the packet travel at 0, c and 2c; a superluminal leading edge is precisely the feature that ordinary front-velocity arguments exclude, since the front velocity of a signal in any linear medium is bounded by c and this is what protects causal ordering between emission and absorption. Whitney anticipates the objection about Maxwell but not the one about causality, and she does not identify a single measurement that would distinguish Two-Step Light from ordinary propagation — which sits awkwardly beside her own advice that new theory should be introduced through experimental problems. She also notes, without explanation, that the idea "is controversial, and I don't know why."
Finally, the slide format means much is asserted and little is derived. The claim that the Moon-Spencer postulates explain Sagnac and Michelson-Gale, and the claim that "variant QM does better than QC," are both citations to other work rather than arguments made here; a reader cannot check either from this document.
Read as what it is — a conference overview intended to orient a community rather than to establish a result — the paper does its job. The blueprint is the contribution; Two-Step Light is a sketch attached to it, and should be judged on the papers where it is worked out rather than here.