There are Three Main Disputes in Laws of Physics
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | There are Three Main Disputes in Laws of Physics |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Qing Zeng |
| Keywords | light velocity, electromagnetic induction, time space view |
| Published | 2010 |
| No. of pages | 17 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Natural science research benefits humankind and has brought civilization and progress to the world. The great achievements of the ancestral science pioneers who made great contributions to human civilization are recorded in the natural scientific development history of more than two thousand years. But it is regretful that the three big disputes including light velocity dispute, electromagnetic induction dispute and space time dispute still exist in natural science area. Although three great disputes are sometimes intensive, sometimes apathetic, but people always concern disputes propositions, concern that the propositions can be solved as soon as possible, expects that natural science be on the right track to reveal deeper natural mystery.
Overview
Zeng Qingping, of the Second Department of the Air Force Radar Academy of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, presents this paper as a popular-level digest of his book Conclusion of Natural Science Principle (Science Publisher of Hubei, Wuhan, 2009), written, he says, "after 20 years research". Its organising claim is that physics carries three unresolved and interlocking disputes, each of which has been papered over rather than settled: the dispute over the speed of light, the dispute over the physical essence of electromagnetic induction, and the dispute over the nature of space and time.
The paper's structure is adversarial and explicit. Zeng tabulates the two camps: Group A — "Newton, Galileo, Lorentz and author" — against Group B — "Einstein, Maxwell and relativists". Group A holds that emitted light velocity c0 and observer velocity v are both vectors obeying Galilean addition, c = c0 ± v; that induction is in every case the general Lorentz magnetic force acting on metal electrons cutting magnetic lines of force; and that time is absolute and one-dimensionally elapsed while space is absolute and isotropic. Group B holds the constancy of light velocity, the field-theoretic account of induction, and relative time and contracted space. Zeng's departure from the mainstream account is therefore total rather than partial: he rejects the Aether and Special Relativity together, keeping only Galilean kinematics, Newton's laws and the Lorentz force.
The three disputes
The light velocity dispute
Zeng's historical framing runs: in 1727 stellar aberration was measured (he attributes this to "James", i.e. James Bradley) and read as evidence that a static aether is not dragged by the Earth; in 1851 Fizeau found light speed to depend on the motion of the medium; in 1881 Michelson and Morley found the null result. Einstein, he says, resolved the conflict by declaring that "according to the motion of Ether, some are measurable, some are not," and postulating constancy — a move Zeng calls a concealment rather than a solution. He then poses the questions he says the postulate suppressed: "light velocity is absolute or relative? Light velocity is vector or scalar? Motion of light obeys Galilean principle of relativity or Lorentz transformation?"
His own answer is that light velocity is a vector carried by its source. In the transverse case (his Figure 1), a lamp on a train of speed vx emitting a beam vertically produces, for a ground observer, a longitudinal component cy = c0 and a lateral component cx = vx, so the photon lands at b rather than the point a predicted if the beam did not travel with the source. He offers a homely test of the alternative: if cx = 0, that is if the beam is left behind by the moving source, then "people looking at the mirror causes mirror image shift", parallel reflected beams would be displaced, and an interferometer could not return a normally reflected wave. Since mirror images do not shift on a moving Earth, he concludes that light travels with its source and that the aether does not exist. In the longitudinal case (Figure 4) he argues that constancy of c combined with c = λf would forbid any Doppler shift, whereas the ordinary Doppler Effect f = (c0 ± v)/λ follows at once from c = c0 ± v, and that "lots of radar scout and speed measuring radar has proved the correctness of c = c0 ± v".
The electromagnetic induction dispute
Here Zeng identifies four competing accounts of one and the same phenomenon: Faraday's induced electromotive force, Lenz's induced current, Maxwell's eddy electric field and displacement current, and relativity's transformation of B into E. Because dU and I sit on opposite sides of Ohm's law, he calls the Faraday–Lenz priority question "a philosophical problem as egg and chick", and argues that Maxwell's move to a field in the aether changed the physics rather than reconciling it, "because conductor has inherent difference with Ether."
His unifying claim is that all cases reduce to the general Lorentz magnetic force. Whether the coil moves right or the magnet moves left, "magnetic electron cuts the magnetic line of force" — the first case governed by F = q(Vq × B), the second by the same expression with the field's velocity VB. He notes that in his Figures 5 and 6 the rate of change of the field in the region is zero, so Faraday's law and Maxwell's curl equation are, on his reading, simply inapplicable. Against Maxwell's displacement current he argues that a moving magnet in free space ought to produce a back-field B′M, and that "there is no so called B′M in free space", whereas the back-EMF observed in ordinary engineering practice is produced by conduction current driven by the Lorentz force. Against Faraday's flux rule he offers a pair of shielded-loop experiments (his Figures 11–13, crediting a shielding box to Cenzhi Teng): a closed loop with one side inside a magnetic shield and the other exposed, moved through a uniform field, has no change of enclosed flux, so the flux rule predicts no current — yet the exposed side's electrons cut lines of force and, Zeng asserts, a current appears. He concludes that "inductive current on the closed conductor and magnetic flux in the loop have no relation".
The space-time dispute
The third section is the most polemical. Zeng argues that with both of Einstein's postulates rejected, the relativistic conclusions collapse. He presses the reciprocity of length contraction and time dilation as a reductio: the Moon photographed round would have to be judged oval-and-compressed; astronauts would be "sometimes shorter, sometimes higher, sometimes fatter"; a rotating disc would be judged tighter by one observer and looser by another. He dramatises the reciprocity of Time Dilation with a husband and wife who each own an identical gold watch and each prove the other's runs slow, and with the twin case, noting that the factor 1/(1 − β2)1/2 "has no relation with movement direction", so each twin calls the other younger.
He grants that flown clocks do run slow, but attributes this to acceleration within Newtonian mechanics rather than to velocity: the pendulum period at the poles is T = 2π(l/g)1/2 and at the equator T = 2π[l/(g − a)]1/2, and a pendulum in a lift speeds up or slows down as the lift accelerates. "The clock's speed depends on acceleration, not the constant linear motion." He then separates two notions the paper insists are conflated: "Clock is man-made measure attribute; it depends on measure tool and environment. But time is not clock, time is nature attribute; it is absolute and one-dimension elapsed."
His treatment of curved space (Figures 16–19) makes an unusual charge: that the bending of light is an artefact shared by the aether picture and by relativity. If light does not travel with its source, then a photon detected at B was emitted at D, and if an obstructing ball sits on the line DB one must say the light curved around it — "emphasis on bending space is copy of Ether saying". On his own kinematics no such conclusion arises: with c = c0 + v, the photon emitted at C simply arrives at B along a straight path of length ct = (c02t2 + vx2t2)1/2, and the apparent detour is an error of bookkeeping. He extends this to the perihelion advance of Mercury and asks astronomers "to set things straight of general relativity in accordance with Galilean principle of light velocity."
The paper closes with a summary of the book's ten chapters and an appeal that "physical scholars and physical teachers in college, academicians in ministry of mathematic – physical science and philosophers can take some time to review this book," adding "I prefer that the Royal Society to judge this book."
Assessment
What is genuinely valuable here is the diagnostic framing. Zeng is right that the physical essence of electromagnetic induction is presented inconsistently in teaching: the flux rule, the motional-EMF Lorentz force account, and the field-transformation account are logically distinct statements which happen to agree numerically in the standard cases, and textbooks do often "copy word by word" without saying which is fundamental. Feynman made essentially the same observation about the "two different phenomena" hidden under one flux rule. Zeng's instinct to demand a single mechanism, and his choice of the Lorentz force on charge carriers as that mechanism, is a defensible and long-standing dissident position, and his shielded-loop thought experiments are a well-chosen way to separate flux from force. The insistence that a clock is an instrument and time is not — that measured rate changes need a physical cause in the instrument — is likewise a serious philosophical point, not a naive one.
The difficulties, however, are severe and the paper does not engage them. The central claim, c = c0 ± v, is an emission theory of light, and emission theories have been tested directly. De Sitter's spectroscopic binary argument shows that if light speed depended on source velocity, the orbits of close binary stars would appear grossly distorted or multiply imaged, which they do not; the same conclusion follows far more tightly from gamma-ray emission of binary pulsars and from the Alväger et al. measurement of light from decaying neutral pions moving at 0.99975c, which found the emitted photon speed unchanged to within a few parts in 104. None of this evidence is mentioned. Zeng's appeal to radar is not to the point: Doppler radar measures a frequency shift, which is common ground between all theories, and does not measure a one-way light speed at all.
The mirror argument is the paper's most concrete claim and it is also the clearest error. Zeng asserts that if light were not carried with its source, a moving observer's mirror image would shift — but the aberration he is describing is exactly the effect that is observed, in the annual aberration of starlight he himself cites as the 1727 result, and the reason a hand mirror shows no shift is that source, mirror and eye share the same motion, so the effect cancels to first order regardless of which theory one holds. His treatment thus uses aberration as evidence for a static frame in section 1 and against source-independent propagation in section 2.3, without reconciling the two uses. Similarly, the Faraday-versus-Lorentz shielded-box experiments are described but no measurement is reported; the outcome is asserted ("but in fact, metal electron in cd cuts magnetic line of force, and generates inductive current") rather than shown, and a magnetic shield that leaves the field on one conductor while removing it from the other necessarily alters the enclosed flux, so the premise that flux is unchanged is not established. Denying Maxwell's displacement current outright conflicts with the existence of propagating electromagnetic waves, which the same equations predict and which the author's own radar practice depends on.
Finally, the reciprocity objections to relativity — the couple with two watches, the mutually younger twins, the oval Moon — are the classical popular objections, and each has a standard resolution that the paper does not state in order to refute: the twins' situation is not symmetric because one twin accelerates, and Length Contraction concerns measurements made simultaneously in a frame, so its reciprocity is a consequence of the relativity of Simultaneity rather than a contradiction within it. Refuting a theory requires engaging its own account of these cases, and this paper argues instead from incredulity and from the authority of "500 years engineering practice". The list of Chinese anti-relativity figures and officials in section 1 serves the same rhetorical function. The result is a paper whose critical framing of the induction problem deserves attention and whose positive kinematics is contradicted by direct measurement.