Torsion Field Mechanics: Verification of Non-local Field Effects in Human Biology
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Torsion Field Mechanics: Verification of Non-local Field Effects in Human Biology |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | David G Yurth |
| Keywords | Torsion Fields, Non-local Fields, Human Biology, spin, Einstein-Cartan theory, physical vacuum |
| Published | 2000 |
| Journal | Journal of New Energy |
| Volume | 5 |
| Number | 2 |
| No. of pages | 16 |
| Pages | 64-75 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Over the course of the 20th Century, various investigators in different countries, representing a variety of interests, have repeatedly reported the discovery of unusual non-local field effects in human biology which could not be explained in the framework of the Standard Model. Since the investigators and writers could not understand or explain the physics associated with the observed phenomena, they were forced to invent new names for the fields, emanations and energies believed to be responsible for the creation of these phenomena.
Overview
Yurth's paper is a survey rather than a report of original experiment. Its organising claim is that a long list of anomalies reported over a century — under more than fifty different names, from Kozyrev's "time emanation" and Reich's "orgone" to "pseudomagnetism," "shape power," "the fifth force" and "free energy" — are all manifestations of one physical entity, the torsion field, and that this field is generated by spin and angular momentum density rather than by charge or mass. Roughly the last third of the paper turns to biology, where two experimental programmes are offered as the promised verification: V. P. Kaznacheev's sealed-culture experiments of the 1960s and V. Poponin's "DNA phantom effect" of 1997.
The departure from the mainstream is not the idea of torsion itself, which Yurth correctly traces to Cartan and to the Einstein-Cartan theory (ECT) developed by Kibble, Sciama, Trautman and Kopczyński. It is the magnitude claimed. Standard ECT makes spin-torsion coupling proportional to the product of G and Planck's constant, so torsion is contact-only and, in Yurth's own figure, "approximately 27 orders of magnitude weaker than the constant of gravitational interactions" — far too feeble to matter. Yurth's escape is that this holds only for a static, non-propagating torsion field. In "non-linear torsion theories," he writes, "the Lagrangian of a spinning source which is dynamically propagating radiation contains a large number of terms with constants which do not depend on G or h," so that on Shipov's theory "the constant of dynamic spin-torsion interactions must be valued at no less than 10−5 to 10−6." That single step — a jump of some twenty-two orders of magnitude in coupling strength — carries the entire paper.
The survey
Physics background
Yurth assembles the case for anomalous spin-spin effects from four bodies of work. The Soviet and French "pseudomagnetism" literature of the 1960s (Baryshevsky, Skrotsky, Abragam and Goldman) is cited for distant correlations of nuclear spin states. Tam and Happer's 1977 result that two circularly polarised laser beams attract or repel according to the relative sense of their polarisation is presented as violating "a number of rules embodied in the standard model of electrodynamics." A. D. Krisch's polarised proton-proton scattering experiments of the 1980s are said not to be describable "in the framework of the quark model." And a series of gyroscope experiments — Kozyrev's in the 1950s, Veinik's in the 1960s to 1980s, Hayasaka and Takeuchi's 1989 free-fall measurements — are cited as showing weight variations depending on angular velocity and sense of rotation.
To these Yurth adds Kozyrev's astronomical work. Using detectors of his own design behind a shielded telescope, Kozyrev reported registering a signal not only from a star's visible position but from its computed true position, and from a position symmetric to the visible one about the true one, which Yurth glosses as detection of the star's future position. This is taken as evidence of transport velocities "billions of times greater than the speed of light," and, on Shipov's Physical Vacuum Theory, of torsion fields that "propagate in both the future and in the past" — hence a physical basis for precognition.
Properties attributed to torsion fields
The paper then lists the field's characteristics. Torsion fields have axial rather than central symmetry; they come in left and right varieties according to the sense of rotation; a uniformly rotating body with no precession or nutation makes a static field, while non-stationary rotation radiates torsion waves. The waves "transmit information without transmitting energy," propagate without interacting with media in the ordinary sense, yet alter the spin state of media (which is how they are detected). Their lower-bound velocity is given as 109c, because torsion is identified with "the transverse spin polarization of the physical vacuum." They cannot be shielded by most materials, though some spin-structured ones — notably aluminium — will shield and even reflect them.
Because every substance has a stereochemistry that fixes the mutual orientation of its atomic and nuclear spins, every substance is said to carry a unique torsion signature; and because spin can be re-oriented, a torsion configuration can be "recorded" onto an object and persist in a metastable state after the source is removed. Torsion signatures are said to be visible by Kirlian photography and to psychically gifted observers, who report them as auras.
Five classes of torsion generator are catalogued: spin-polarised materials such as permanent magnets; devices exploiting the torsion component that Shipov is said to have proved must accompany any electromagnetic field (with Nikola Tesla named as the first to harness this); mechanically rotating masses and rotating magnetic fields; shape-based "passive" generators, where objects proportioned by the golden section, pyramids, cones, church spires and domes, and the honeycomb structures studied by Grebennikov, produce effects on organisms; and hybrids of the preceding four. Yurth adds that magnetised water, inexplicable classically because distilled water is diamagnetic, is really a torsion effect, and that a French patent describes a 16-sided prism at 60–300 kV that reduces gravitation and leaves a residual field lasting four days.
The biological evidence
Kaznacheev's protocol is described in detail: an infected cell culture and a healthy one, each hermetically sealed, joined so that only optical contact through a glass or quartz plate connects them. As the infected culture degraded, the sealed healthy culture became infected too. The result was registered in 1973 as a Soviet discovery of "remote intercellular interactions in the system of two cultures." Kaznacheev interpreted it electromagnetically; Yurth reports that Lupichev's group in the late 1980s found the effect persisted through metal screens, that aluminium screening was effective while other materials were not, and concludes the mechanism is torsional rather than electromagnetic.
Poponin's experiment is the paper's centrepiece. Fine dust was dropped through a light-scattering chamber, shielded from electromagnetic fields and illuminated with diffuse low-level laser light, and a MALVERN instrument mapped the cascade patterns until a reproducible baseline of randomness was established. A sterile Petri dish was introduced: no effect. Distilled water: no effect. Ultra-pure NaCl at the salinity of human blood: no effect. Live human DNA in the saline solution: the scattering pattern became "distinctly different from the one obtained before the DNA was placed in the chamber." Poponin's stated conclusion is quoted — "we were forced to accept the working hypothesis that some new field structure is being excited from the physical vacuum" — as is the further finding that the pattern persisted after the DNA was removed, in several cases for up to a month, provided the chamber was undisturbed. Two conditions are said to be necessary: the presence of DNA, and its exposure to weak coherent laser radiation. Yurth notes that the phantom field's coupling to the electromagnetic field can be estimated from the scattered intensity, and that the localised excitations are modelled by the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattice rather than by solitons.
Assessment
The survey has a real use. Much of the literature Yurth cites is Russian-language, pre-1991, and effectively unavailable to English readers, and assembling it in one place with full bibliographic detail is a service regardless of what one makes of the conclusions. Yurth is also right on the history: torsion in gravitation is not a fringe invention. Cartan proposed it, Kibble and Sciama built it into a gauge theory of gravity, and Trautman and Kopczyński showed in 1973 that torsion can remove the cosmological singularity — a result still taken seriously. Yurth states the standard coupling strength honestly rather than concealing it, and he is careful to distinguish the static case from the propagating one.
That honesty is also what exposes the paper's central weakness. Having correctly reported that ECT torsion is about 27 orders of magnitude below gravity, Yurth needs a coupling of 10−5, and he obtains it by assertion. No Lagrangian is written down, no term is identified, no derivation is offered; the reader is told only that "a large number of terms with constants which do not depend on G or h" exist, and referred to Shipov. A dimensionless spin-spin coupling of 10−5 acting at macroscopic range between polarised spins would be one of the strongest forces in nature — comparable to the weak interaction — and it would have been found long ago. It has been looked for, hard. The Eöt-Wash torsion-balance programme uses pendulums containing on the order of 1023 polarised electron spins with negligible net magnetic moment, and constrains new spin-dependent forces at centimetre-to-metre ranges to some twenty orders of magnitude below gravitational strength; the Hughes-Drever nuclear resonance experiments and their modern successors bound spin-dependent anisotropies at comparable precision. A coupling of 10−6 is excluded by these measurements by an enormous margin, and the paper cites none of them.
The claimed propagation speed fares no better. A lower bound of 109c is not a small violation of relativity but the abolition of a light cone, and it comes packaged with Kozyrev's still stronger claim of signals from stars' future positions. Nothing in the paper addresses how such signalling avoids the ordinary causal paradoxes, and no group outside the Kozyrev-Lavrentiev-Akimov circle has reproduced the astronomical detections. The "true position" of a star is, in any case, a calculable small offset from the visible one — aberration plus proper motion — which makes it exactly the sort of target an instrument with pointing-dependent systematics could appear to find.
Several of the load-bearing experimental claims have known null replications that the paper does not mention. The Hayasaka-Takeuchi gyroscope weight loss is the clearest case: after their 1989 Physical Review Letters paper, independent attempts by Faller and colleagues, by Nitschke and Wilmarth, and by Quinn and Picard at the BIPM all searched for the effect at equal or better sensitivity and found nothing. Yurth's pre-emptive reply — that the null experiments failed to use non-stationary rotation — does not fit the case he is defending, since Hayasaka and Takeuchi's own experiment was a free-fall measurement and the replications reproduced those conditions. The related fifth-force episode ended the same way: Fischbach and colleagues' 1986 reanalysis of the Eötvös data prompted a decade of dedicated searches, all null. Gurvich's mitogenetic radiation, the ancestor of the Kaznacheev result, was tested repeatedly in the 1930s, most thoroughly by Hollaender and Claus for the US National Research Council, and did not survive. And the Tam-Happer beam interaction, while a genuine PRL result, has a conventional explanation in light-induced spin-exchange in alkali vapour; it is anomalous only if one omits the vapour.
There are internal inconsistencies as well. Torsion fields are said to be unshieldable by most materials, yet aluminium both shields and reflects them — and Kozyrev's telescope is said to have worked through metal screens, which raises the obvious question of what the screens were made of. The statement that torsion waves "transmit information without transmitting energy" is not coherent on the paper's own terms: information reaches a detector only if the detector's state is changed, and Yurth says two sentences later that torsion waves "alter the spin state of physical media," which is an energy exchange. The claim that ECT torsion "fails to propagate as the potential separating quantum points approaches zero" is garbled; in ECT torsion is algebraically determined by spin density and simply does not propagate at all outside matter.
The biological verification promised by the title is thin. Kaznacheev's design does not exclude the confound most likely to matter — two chambers in physical contact share thermal and mechanical conditions, and "optical contact through quartz" admits ultraviolet, which has well-documented effects on cell cultures. Poponin's DNA phantom is a single-group result, published mainly outside peer review, never independently replicated in the quarter-century since, and reported here with no error bars, no blinding, no statistics and no count of trials. The control sequence — empty dish, water, saline, DNA — is not a control for the obvious alternatives: a DNA solution differs from saline in viscosity, surface tension and absorption, and a "phantom" that persists for a month in an undisturbed chamber is at least as consistent with residual contamination, slow instrumental drift, or a settled aerosol layer as with a new field. The paper does not consider these.
Finally, the citation practice deserves comment, because a survey lives or dies by it. A large fraction of the endnotes are "ibid.," several point back to the same handful of sources, and the claim that the 10−6 coupling "has been confirmed experimentally by a number of researchers" is footnoted to work from within the same Shipov-Akimov school whose theory is being confirmed. That programme was itself the subject of a formal investigation by the Russian Academy of Sciences after it attracted state funding in the 1990s. None of which settles whether torsion fields exist; but it does mean that the paper's evidential base is far narrower than its fifty-name opening list suggests. Read as an annotated bibliography of a distinctive Russian research tradition, this is a useful document. Read as the verification its title claims, it does not deliver: the crucial coupling strength is asserted, the key replications are omitted, and the biology rests on two unreplicated results.