Universal Medium (According to 'Hypothesis on MATTER')
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Universal Medium (According to 'Hypothesis on MATTER') |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Nainan K Varghese |
| Keywords | Space, aether, fields, ether, universal medium, quantum of matter, matter, 2D energy field, matter field, distortion field, disturbance, effort, force, Hypothesis on MATTER. |
| Published | 2010 |
| Journal | Vixra |
| No. of pages | 18 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Space is a functional entity, presupposed by rational beings, whenever real entities are envisaged. Being a functional entity, space has no structure or form. It can neither physically act nor is able to undergo physical actions. By realizing a real entity that fills the entire space as an all-encompassing universal medium, the formless space can be replaced with a structured real entity. This real entity will have positive existence and at the same time, it can have all properties currently assigned to space or to other imaginary entities like; different types of aether, imaginary particles or various types of fields. No actions can be performed at a distance through empty space. An all-encompassing medium is essential to facilitate (apparent) physical actions between matter bodies at a distance. Aether, used in aether-theories is too vague and fails to describe many physical actions of matter bodies, logically. 'Hypothesis on MATTER' envisages an all-encompassing medium, which has only one type of real (postulated) constituent particles and definite properties. Envisaging a universal medium, as described in the concept, helps to logically explain all physical phenomena, related to matter.
Overview
Nainan K. Varghese's essay summarises the medium-theory portion of his book Hypothesis on MATTER. Its motivating conviction is stated in the opening line of the introduction: "'Action at a distance through empty space' is the worst assumption in physics." Everything else follows from the attempt to remove it. Space, Varghese argues, is a functional entity — something rational minds presuppose in order to locate real things — and a functional entity "has no structure or form. It can neither physically act nor is able to undergo physical actions." From this he draws the conclusion that curvature, expansion or contraction of space "are pure imagination which may aid mathematical exercises to prove illogical and mysterious physical laws."
The proposed replacement is a real, structured, all-pervading medium built from one postulated ingredient. He is explicit that classical Aether theories failed not because a medium is wrong but because the aether was underspecified: it was "weightless, transparent, frictionless, chemically or physically undetectable", a list of negations rather than a structure, and its properties "when taken together often contradicted themselves". His diagnosis of the modern situation is that the medium never went away, only its name: "in many of our theories, we still use vague forms of a universal medium — various types of fields, imaginary particles, space with physical characters". The essay's target is thus the field concept as much as relativity, and its complaint is methodological: "Mathematics may be a very good tool to understand physics, but it should not dictate the theories."
The argument
One postulate: the quantum of matter
Only one entity is postulated: the quantum of matter, a very small real bit of matter that cannot be created, divided or destroyed, and which keeps its individuality under all conditions. Its single dynamical property is adhesive: matter tends to merge at nearest points and to maintain its own integrity. From this, Varghese argues, a free quantum grows in one spatial dimension while shrinking in the other two, so a free quantum is effectively a one-dimensional body — though it retains "positive existence in all three spatial dimensions", its transverse measurements being too small for 3D beings to sense.
Lengthening quanta meet end to end, form junctions, and align, so free quanta assemble into one-dimensional chains. Because ruptures are frequent and free quanta migrate in, chains contain more quanta than they have room for, and every quantum in a chain is therefore held compressed from its ends, "at the brink of their growth into second spatial dimension". Quanta lying in different spatial dimensions do not obstruct one another and simply coexist where they cross.
The 2D energy field
At a junction, four quanta meeting perpendicularly is the most stable configuration, so chains in a given plane settle into a square latticework: this is a 2D energy field. One such field exists in every possible plane in space; fields in different planes passing through a point coexist there; and each acts only within its own plane. Together they fill all space outside 3D matter, with no voids — which forces the unusual conclusion that the matter density of the medium equals that of a 3D matter particle, so that medium and matter form "a single block of matter of uniform matter-density and of infinite extent". Varghese draws an immediate corollary: since matter cannot be compressed beyond this density, "a matter-body of zero volume and infinite mass (singularity) is impossible to achieve." He also identifies the hidden 1D and 2D matter filling nearly all of space with Dark Matter.
Although built of rigid quanta, the latticework is flexible in its plane: junction angles deflect and chain quanta change length. Every distortion provokes a restoring reaction, so the field "strives towards homogeneity, isotropy and serenity" by itself. Because it cannot hold a distortion locally, any distortion propagates outward square by square, and the sequential nature of that propagation introduces a time delay — which Varghese identifies as the origin of inertia. Distortions once introduced persist until cancelled by equal and opposite ones. Definitions follow: displacement of quanta is work, the accompanying stress is energy — "energy has no independent existence and it is a functional entity. It appears as a shadow of work-done" — and the rate of introducing distortion is force.
Gravitation as the primary effort
The medium is under compression and closes any gap in itself. That closing tendency, acting on the curved perimeter of a disturbance in the field, is gravitation, and it is of push nature. Because the extent of field outside two bodies always exceeds the extent between them, and gravitational effort is proportional to that extent, the resultant pushes them together: apparent gravitational attraction is a residual of a much larger push. Varghese insists on the priority of the static over the dynamic aspect: "Gravitational effort is enormously stronger than all other manifestations of 'natural force'," and the other forces "are derived from gravitational actions". Since matter and medium are in direct contact, gravitational change is instantaneous, and "no transfer of imaginary particles/energy from one body to another is required."
3D matter, the photon and the biton
A local rupture releases quanta into a gap; encroaching chains gather them into a circular 2D disturbance; if its matter content exceeds a limit, gravitational compression forces it to grow into the third dimension, and 3D matter is created. Asymmetric ejection sets it moving and spinning. The result — a segmented spherical, disc-shaped core moving at the maximum linear speed and spinning at a rate proportional to its matter content, together with its surrounding "inertial pocket" of distortions — is a photon. Varghese makes the photon the only basic 3D particle; all else is combinations of photons. Wave–particle duality is then structural: "the core body provides the corpuscular nature and the inertial pocket provides the electromagnetic nature."
The speed of light is the highest speed at which the latticework can transfer distortion without rupturing, and is therefore a constant of the local medium. A striking consequence is drawn about attempts to change it: "an attempt to increase linear speed of a photon results in an increment in its matter content ... with corresponding increase in its frequency rather than a change in its linear speed", and conversely.
Two complementary high-matter photons orbiting a common centre form a biton, the primary particle; bitons combine into fundamental particles, atoms and macro bodies.
Fields as three kinds of distortion
Distortions resolve into three components, each identified with a known field. Linear distortions — latticework squares compressed or expanded along one direction, lines of force straight — are magnetic fields; no single body produces them, so they arise only from arrays of particles. Angular distortions — squares deflected in rotation, lines of force curved — are electric fields, produced by the circular photon paths inside bitons. Radial distortions are nuclear fields, outward-directed (repulsive) for electrons and inward (attractive) for positrons.
Two consequences are unusual and sharply stated. First, charge is not a possession but a viewing direction: circular electric lines of force appear clockwise from one side and anticlockwise from the other, so "electric charges are relative directions of an electric field ... every electric field has both positive and negative electric charges", and electrons and positrons have similar fields. Second, a curved line of force of large enough radius acts locally as a straight one, so an electric field of low curvature behaves magnetically — Varghese's account of why electricity and magnetism are inseparable and mutually perpendicular. He posits a zilch force distance at which two electric fields produce no force at all, electric behaviour dominating inside it and magnetic behaviour outside.
Mass, relativistic mass and aether drag
Because rate of distortion transfer into a moving body's matter field falls as the body's speed rises, an external effort becomes progressively less efficient. Since mass is defined as the ratio of effort to acceleration, mass so measured rises with speed — but nothing has been added to the body. Relativistic mass increase is therefore, on this account, an artefact of the definition, not conversion of energy into matter, and "differentiation into 'gravitational mass' and 'inertial mass' is arbitrary".
The drag problem is answered by inverting the usual picture: bodies do not move through the medium, the medium moves them. Moving distortions carry the body and its immediate surroundings together, "like, when an object is blown away by wind, there is no relative motion between the object and air in its immediate neighbourhood," so no friction arises. For photons, resistance and ejection effort are both supplied by the medium and cancel, which is what fixes the maximum speed. The Michelson-Morley Experiment null result is thus expected rather than fatal. Frame dragging by a rotating central body is dismissed as a "fictitious drag" on functional entities.
The universe is steady and perpetual: 3D matter is destroyed in some regions and rebuilt in others, reverting to quanta and rejoining the medium, which "regulate[s] entropy of the universe within limits" and yields a steady-state cosmos without expansion.
Assessment
The genuinely attractive feature of this scheme is its parsimony and its refusal to let a formalism stand in for a mechanism. One postulated entity with one property — adhesion — is asked to generate structure, gravitation, inertia, charge, magnetism, the photon and the speed limit, and Varghese never reaches for a second postulate when the going gets hard. The medium is specified positively (a square latticework of chained quanta under end compression) rather than by the list of negations that made the nineteenth-century Aether unfalsifiable, and that is a real methodological advance over the theories he criticises. Several of the derivations are elegant on their own terms: making inertia the propagation delay of a lattice rather than a brute property of matter; making the maximum signal speed the rupture threshold of that lattice, so that the constancy of c is a property of the medium rather than a postulate; and resolving distortion into linear, angular and radial components to get magnetic, electric and nuclear fields from one substrate. The observation that electric charge could be a relative direction rather than a possessed quantity is a striking idea, and the Push Gravity account — attraction as the residue of a much larger push, hence its weakness — is a coherent version of a long dissident tradition. The essay is also candid about its status: the references are marked "self-published by the author. They are neither reviewed nor edited."
The difficulties are severe, and most of them are of one kind: the paper argues throughout from what is logical rather than from what is measured, and it contains no numbers at all. Not one quantity is computed — not the size of a quantum, not the lattice spacing, not the value of the gravitational constant, not the photon's critical radius, not the electron-to-proton mass ratio, not the "zilch force distance" that carries so much explanatory weight. A theory of the medium that fixes c as a rupture threshold ought, at minimum, to relate c to the lattice parameters; instead the constant is asserted to follow and no relation is written. Without a single derived number, the claim that the concept "helps to logically explain all physical phenomena" cannot be checked anywhere, and the closing criterion — "if all physical phenomena, related to matter, can be logically explained by this concept of universal medium, it should be recognised as true" — sets a standard that no measurement can adjudicate.
Where the paper does touch measurement, it conflicts with it. Instantaneous gravitational action is asserted twice, on the ground that matter and medium are in direct contact; but the propagation speed of gravity has been measured, and the essentially simultaneous arrival of gravitational waves and gamma rays from the neutron-star merger GW170817 constrains it to the speed of light to within about one part in 1015. The claim that inertial and gravitational mass are "arbitrary" distinctions sits oddly with the fact that their equality is a measured result, confirmed by torsion-balance and satellite tests to parts in 1015 — a result that any theory deriving the two from different mechanisms (lattice delay versus extent-of-field asymmetry, as here) must explain rather than dismiss. Making the photon the only basic 3D particle and building all matter from photon groupings gives no account of why particle masses take the values they do, nor of lepton number, nor of why the electron is stable; and the assertion that electrons and positrons have "similar electric fields with both positive and negative electric charges" is hard to reconcile with the fact that a beam of electrons deflects one way in a transverse field and a beam of positrons the other, regardless of which side the observer stands on. The radial-field account, on which electrons repel and positrons attract "all other primary and fundamental particles", contradicts the ordinary electrostatics of the hydrogen atom.
There are also internal strains. Gravitation is said to require "a gap in a ruptured 2D energy field", yet the medium is also said to have no voids and to close any gap immediately; the two statements are hard to hold together, and the essay does not say how a permanent particle can sit in a gap that the lattice is by construction always eliminating. The medium is asserted to be simultaneously as dense as solid matter, structurally rigid, perfectly fluid, and frictionless — the same combination of properties Varghese faults classical aether theories for holding, and the wind analogy does not resolve it, since air genuinely does exert drag on a body moving relative to the bulk, which is precisely the case he needs to exclude. Finally, the parity of "every possible plane contains one 2D field, each acting only in its own plane" makes the number of fields through any point uncountably infinite while insisting the total matter density stays finite; no accounting of that is offered. Read as an exercise in metaphysical hygiene — an attempt to say what a medium would have to be if action at a distance is to be refused — the essay is thoughtful and consistent in its own idiom. Read as physics, it has not yet reached the point where it could be wrong.