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Victor N Barykin

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Victor N. Barykin
Residence220098 Minsk, Belarus
NationalityBelarusian
Known forMaxwell's electrodynamics without Special Relativity Theory
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics, electrodynamics of moving media, relativity

Victor N. Barykin (Viktor Nikolaevich Barykin, Russian: Виктор Николаевич Барыкин) is a Belarusian theoretical physicist based in Minsk, best known within the dissident-science community for his long-running program of building a complete electrodynamics of moving media that does not require Einstein's Special Relativity Theory and that places no upper limit on the propagation speed of physical signals. Between 2002 and 2010 he published a seven-part series, "Maxwell's Electrodynamics without Special Relativity Theory", in Galilean Electrodynamics, and he is the author of nearly forty self-published books on light, electrodynamics and the philosophy of physics.

Unusually among critics of relativity, Barykin came to his dissident position from inside the Soviet academic establishment: his early work on the symmetries of the material (constitutive) equations of moving media appeared in mainstream Soviet journals such as Izvestiya Vysshikh Uchebnykh Zavedenii — Fizika (translated as Soviet Physics Journal) before he concluded that the ambiguities he had found there could not be resolved inside the relativistic framework.

Biography

Barykin was born in the village of Govoezna, Stolbtsy district, in what is now Belarus. His father chaired a collective farm and his mother taught in a primary school; he attended secondary school in Fanipol. He first intended to become a journalist, but after an interview with the profession left him disillusioned he turned to physics instead, reasoning that "physics will always help in life." He graduated in physics from Belarusian State University in Minsk, ranked among the strongest students of his year.

After a period teaching in the Dzerzhinsk district and a stint as second secretary of the district Komsomol committee, he joined the Institute of Heat and Mass Transfer of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (today the A. V. Luikov Heat and Mass Transfer Institute, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus), working in the Energy Transfer Laboratory headed by Oleg Martynenko. It was there, in the 1980s, that he produced the institute preprints and journal papers on the electrodynamics of inertially moving media that laid the groundwork for everything he wrote afterwards.

Since then Barykin has worked largely independently, publishing his books at his own expense. His papers have appeared in American journals, he has lectured at international conferences in Moscow and St. Petersburg — where, by contemporary accounts, his talks were received with ovations — and his web site has drawn readers in some fifty countries.

(Note: he should not be confused with the Russian ballet dancer and pedagogue of the same name, Viktor Nikolaevich Barykin, b. 1954.)

Scientific work

The problem Barykin set himself

Classical electrodynamics in moving media is the historical crux of the relativity question: it was the Fresnel drag coefficient, the Fizeau experiment, stellar aberration and the Michelson–Morley null result that Einstein's 1905 paper was written to reconcile. Barykin's starting observation, made in the 1980s, was that the material equations — the constitutive relations linking D and H to E and B in a moving medium — are not uniquely fixed by the requirements usually imposed on them. He showed that this ambiguity is not a defect of bookkeeping but has physical content: the same body of optical experiment can be described by constitutive relations that are invariant under the Galilean group in some circumstances and under the Lorentz group in others, a situation he termed the complementarity of the Galilean and Lorentz groups. The choice between them, he argued, is testable in aberration and the Doppler effect.

Pursuing this, he found new space–time symmetries in the electrodynamics of media that are isotropic in their rest frame, and showed that these symmetries are described by a local Lorentz group whose parameters are matrix-valued rather than constant — a structure strictly larger than the global Lorentz group of Special Relativity. Related work with E. A. Tolkachev and L. M. Tomilchik examined the symmetry criteria governing the choice of material equations in the microscopic electrodynamics of moving media.

Electrodynamics without a velocity restriction

From these results Barykin developed what he calls Maxwell's electrodynamics without the velocity restriction. Its distinguishing features, as set out across the seven-part Galilean Electrodynamics series, are:

  • it does not invoke Einstein's Special Relativity Theory;
  • it is formulated on Newtonian space and time as the underlying arena, with Minkowski space-time and a Euclidean "super-light" space-time both emerging as derived structures rather than being postulated;
  • it admits superluminal velocities naturally, and specifies the experimental conditions under which they should be observable;
  • it reproduces, in a single unified scheme, the classical experiments of Bradley (aberration), Fizeau (drag), Michelson and Doppler.

Technically, the later parts of the series recast the theory in spinor form for the group V(4) = (U(1) × SU(2)) × (U(1) × SU(2)), and introduce scalar 0-cohomology groups w(x) that control what Barykin calls the inertia of the field. In this picture the Lorentz transformations are not a fixed kinematic backdrop but a family of transformations parameterised by the cohomology, describing the dynamical influence of the measuring apparatus on the electromagnetic field. Relativistic effects thereby become dynamical consequences of field–medium–apparatus interaction inside Newtonian space-time, rather than properties of space-time itself — the same explanatory move, in spirit, that Lorentz and Poincaré made and that Einstein's kinematic interpretation displaced.

A characteristic result of Part II is that a particle of non-zero rest mass can be limited to the vacuum speed of light — the light barrier is recovered as a special case for matter, rather than imposed as a universal axiom on all signals.

Other lines of work

Beyond electrodynamics proper, Barykin has developed a structural model of the particle of light (his "atom of light"), a unified theory of electromagnetism and gravitation, and a "transfinite" reformulation of relativity theory. These appear mainly in his books rather than in the journal literature.

Reception

Barykin's position places him squarely in the tradition of relativity critics catalogued on this wiki: like Petr Beckmann, Thomas E. Phipps, Jr. and other contributors to Galilean Electrodynamics, he holds that the experimental content of electrodynamics can be preserved — and better explained — without adopting Einstein's kinematics. He is included in Jean de Climont's Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.

His work is more mathematically heavyweight than most of the anti-relativity literature, drawing on group theory, spinor calculus and cohomology, which has been both its strength and an obstacle to wider readership. Mainstream physics has largely ignored the program; his early Soviet-era papers on material equations remain cited in the specialist literature on the electrodynamics of heterogeneous and moving media, while the later "without Special Relativity" series has circulated chiefly within dissident-science venues.

Publications

Papers on this wiki

Earlier journal papers and preprints

  • V. N. Barykin, "Complementarity of Galilean and Lorentz groups in the electrodynamics of inertially moving media", Soviet Physics Journal (translated from Izvestiya VUZ — Fizika)
  • V. N. Barykin, "New space-time symmetries in the electrodynamics of a medium", Soviet Physics Journal 29 (1986), 795-799 (translated from Izvestiya VUZ — Fizika, No. 10, 26-30, October 1986)
  • V. N. Barykin, Electrodynamics of Moving Media, Preprint No. 1, Heat and Mass Transfer Institute, Academy of Sciences of the BSSR, Minsk (1985)
  • V. N. Barykin, E. A. Tolkachev, L. M. Tomilchik, on symmetry and the choice of material equations in the microscopic electrodynamics of moving media

Books

Barykin is the author of nearly forty books, most of them self-published in Minsk. They include:

  • Электродинамика Максвелла без относительности Эйнштейна (Maxwell's Electrodynamics without Einstein's Relativity), URSS, Moscow, 2005, 183 pp.
  • Основы трансфинитной теории относительности (Foundations of the Transfinite Theory of Relativity), Minsk, 2007
  • Новые интеллектуальные технологии (New Intellectual Technologies), Minsk, 2016
  • Атом света (Atom of Light)
  • Новая физика света (New Physics of Light)
  • Новая концепция света (New Concept of Light)
  • Лекции по электродинамике и теории относительности без ограничения на скорость света (Lectures on Electrodynamics and Relativity Theory without a Restriction on the Speed of Light)
  • Философия современной физики (Philosophy of Modern Physics)
  • Этика привычек (Ethics of Habits)

See also

References

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