George Louis LeSage, 'Newtonian Lucretius', New Memoirs of the Royal Academy, 1782 (Berlin: Decker, 1784), pp. 404-32.
'When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.' - Jonathan Swift
'Henceforth, let no man care to learn, or care to be more than worldly-wise; for certainly in higher matters to be ignorant and slothful, to be a common steadfast dunce, will be the only pleasant life ...' - John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644.
Milton was responding to a British Parliament enacted law, the Licensing Order of June 16th, 1643, designed to protect knowledge from new innovations, 'to regulate printing: that no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be first approved and licensed by such [a Committee of Censors], or at least one of such, as shall be thereto appointed.'
Picture credit: http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath131/kmath131.htm
If you don't have an equal and opposite reaction in a pressure wave, it isn't a sound wave.
The force you get against your eardrum isn't just a push, but a push followed by equal pull.
This mechanism explains the gauge boson inward push in the big bang, predicting gravity.
The outward force in any explosion always has an equal and opposite reaction (Newton's 3rd empirical law). If you just push air, the energy disperses without propagating as a 340 m/s oscillatory sound wave. Air must be oscillated to create sound. It delivers an oscillatory force, outward and then inward. Merely using wave equations does not explain the physical process, even where the maths happens to give a good fit to data. Sound waves are particulate molecules deep down, carrying an oscillatory force.
This makes various predictions and contains no speculation whatsoever, it is a fact based mechanism, employing Feynman's mechanism as exhibited in the Feynman diagrams - virtual photon exchange causing forces in QFT. He noted that path integrals has a deeper underlying simplicity:
"It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities." - Richard P. Feynman, Character of Physical Law, Penguin, 1992, pp 57-8.
(In the same book he discusses the problems with the LeSage gravity mechanism as per 1964.)
The Force of sound: The sound wave is longitudinal and has pressure variations. Half a cycle is compression (overpressure) and the other half cycle of a sound wave is underpressure (below ambient pressure). When a spherical sound wave goes outward, it exerts outward pressure which pushes on you eardrum to make the noises you hear. Therefore the sound wave has outward force F = PA where P is the sound wave pressure and A is the area it acts on. When you read Raleigh’s textbook on ‘sound physics’ (or whatever dubious title it has), you see the fool fits a wave equation from transverse water waves to longitudinal waves, without noting that he is creating particle-wave duality by using a wave equation to describe the gross behaviour of air molecules (particles). Classical physics thus has even more wrong with it becauss of mathematical fudges than modern physics, but the point I’m making here is that sound has an outward force and an equal and opposite inward force following this. It is this oscillation which allows the sound wave to propagate instead of just dispersing like air blown out of your mouth.
Note the outward force and equal and opposite inward force. This is Newton’s 3rd law. The same happens in explosions, except the outward force is then a short tall spike (due to air piling up against the discontinuity and going supersonic), while the inward force is a longer but lower pressure. A nuclear implosion bomb relies upon Newton’s 3rd law for TNT surrounding a plutonium core to compress the plutonium. The same effect in the Higgs field surrounding outward going quarks produces an inward force which gives gravity, including the compression of the earth's radius (1/3)MG/c^2 = 1.5 mm (the contraction term effect in general relativity).
Why not fit a wave equation to the group behaviour of particles (molecules in air) and talk sound wave equations? This is far easier than dealing with the physical, dynamical fact that the sound wave has an outward pressure phase followed by an equal under-pressure phase, giving an outward force and equal-and-opposite inward reaction which allows music to propagate: 'Nobody hears any music, so why should they worry about the physics? Certainly they can't hear any explosions where the outward force has an equal and opposite reaction, too, which in the case of the big bang tells us gravity.' Now for the fact '>99% of innovations are nonsense':
'While it's true that at least 99% of revolutionary announcements from the fringes of science are just as bogus as they seem, we cannot dismiss every one of them without any investigation. If we do, then we'll certainly take our place among the ranks of scoffers who dismissed (or even helped suppress) a large number of major scientific discoveries throughout history. Beware! Today many discoveries such as powered flight and drifting continents only appear sane and acceptable to us because we have such powerful hindsight. These same advancements were seen as obviously a bunch of disgusting lunatic garbage during the times they were first discovered. ... Sometimes the "obvious craziness" turns out to be a genuine cutting edge discovery. As with the little child questioning the emperor's clothing, sometimes the entire scientific community is misguided and incompetent, and only the lone voice of the "fringe" scientist is telling the truth. Below is a list of scientists who were reviled for their crackpottery, only to be proved correct (includes Ohm for his electric current law, Newlands for his pre-Mendeleev periodic table, Pasteur for the germ theory of disease, Wegner for continental drift, Zweig for quark theory, etc.) Normal science texts are dishonest to the extent that they hide the huge mistakes made by the scientific community, and the acts of intellectual suppression directed at the following researchers by colleagues.' - William Beaty
'Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as 'conceptual necessities,' etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors.' - Albert Einstein
I've been reading this master work of the Swiss Monseur LeSage (June 13, 1724- November 9, 1803). LeSage invented a 26-conductor electric telegraph system, and became a member of the Royal Society of London and of the Academy of Sciences of Paris in 1761. There is no English version, so I'm tackling the original fascimile scanned in version on the internet here. I haven't seriously attempted to read it before, and have relied on second-hand information.
In reading the original French, it is helpful to note that (as with all old books of the period) the letter ‘f’ is used in most words where now we use the letter ‘s’ instead. For example, LeSage used the word ‘rallentiffement’ which is today written ralentissement (deceleration), and he used Old French spellings such as ‘tems’ for temps (time), ‘loix’ for lois (laws), etc.
First thing you notice is that Monseur Pierre Prevost of the Academic Assembly communicated LeSage's paper to the journal, Nouveaux Mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres. Prevost was the protege of LeSage and used the idea of radiation to propose that any steady temperature is not an absence of heat radiation (as was commonly believed) but in fact is an equilibrium between heating and cooling, between reception and emission of energy! In addition to reading LeSage's 1782 paper before the scientists of Paris and getting it published, Prevost also in 1818 published LeSage's Taite' de Physique Mechanique. The kinetic theory of gases in modern thermodynamics has grown from seeds accidently sown by LeSage's gravity mechanism. Prevost also wrote Notice de la Vie et des Ecritsde George-Louis Le Sage, Geneva: J. J. Paschoud, 1805, which contains some biographical details on LeSage.
LeSage begins his 1782 article with a quotation that gives the flavour well:
‘In any matter, the first systems make people excessively conclusive, closed, cautious of others. And does it not seem that this truth is the price of some hardening of reason?’ – Fontenelle, in the eulogy of Cassini.
You can see from this that LeSage has had problems with censorship on his gravity mechanism. Deja vu!
LeSage writes in long-winded sentences, often punctuated with several colons and semi-colons. Doubtless it was poetry in eighteenth century France, and the word 'Lucretius' in the title is not a reference to atoms only, so much as to the poetry of the Roman. Lucretius (c. 99-55 BC) was the Roman author of On the Nature of the Universe (De Rerum Natura), a poem on Epicurean science and outlook which ran to six books and attempted to explain the cause, nature, and future of the universe, based upon radical ideas like atoms and evolution!
After praising the law of universal gravitation, Lesage comments on pp 404-5: 'Law, the invention and the demonstrations of which make the greatest glory for the most powerful magic which has never existed: and Causes, which, after being made during long terms, are the ambition of the greatest Physicists; fact is present, to despair their successors.'
His attack on mathematical models as lacking physical, mechanical cause-and-effect explanatory substance, is severe. He takes as examples the empirical planetary rules of Kepler, which he says are founded 'partly on free conjectures, and partly after immense searches'. Fair enough, they are empirical relationships based on data, after all. LeSage later on [p416] says that he can get the Newtonian and Kepler laws from his gravity mechanism! On the same page, he also derives Galileo's approximation from his gravity mechanism: 'Blows of corpuscles [gravitons] fall on a body' causing continuous acceleration. (He falsely assumes that they travel 'faster than light'. In fact, they go at light speed.)
LeSage seems to base his arguments on logic. Applying an 'atomic gravity' or rather quantum qravity argument to the vacuum ether - that magnetism and gravity are due to a spacetime fabric of some kind - LeSage simply asks what happens when matter blocks these particles of the vacuum [p407]. Gravity is the answer he finds, by the geometry.
On page 412, LeSage writes that his assumption is that: '... the gravity atoms are not aimed solely towards the centers of large the bodies; but, they have no bias of direction, and go towards all the small parts of space; and effectively, towards these only which interccept their antagonists; namely, towards all the small parts of matter: they push the other bodies which they transverse on their passage; not, towards each wholesale star; but towards each one of its parts in detail.'
Hence, he sees that the mediator of gravity force, 'gravity atoms' or 'gravitons' in today's quantum gravity terminology, are stopped not by the visible surface of the earth, but by the atoms within the earth. For this to be so, he deduces that atoms are mainly void, an anticipation of what we know now in the nuclear age! LeSage saw atoms as hollow 'cages'.
On page 418, LeSage considers the objection to the theory that if gravity were a pushing force, it could be stopped by holding a sheet of paper over your head. LeSage sarcastically points out that you similarly could say that the earth's atmosphere would screen out the gravity radiation push! LeSage explains that although rain is stopped easily, the gravity causing radiation is extremely penetrating and can transverse the whole planet. So an umbrella does not stop gravity causing radiation! The gravitons are far, far more penetrating than gamma rays or x-rays (both unknown in LeSage's time).
LeSage could have merely pointed out that if you are going to assume that a piece of paper or the roof of a house 'must' stop a gravity radiation push, then the same argument would also rule out the idea of a pull gravity mechanism, because a man standing on a piece of paper or on the roof of a house would - in this pathetically ignorant sneering 'objection' - be shielded from the earth's gravity pull by the roof. Hence the argument is self-contradictory, since we know that gravity acceleration (1) does exist and (2) is determined not by our own mass (if small compared to the mass of the earth), but is determined by the mass of the earth.
Hence, some information on the earth's mass determines the 9.8 ms^-2 gravity acceleration. If gravitation was an elastic pulling effect, like Hooke's law, gravity would get stronger as you went further away from a mass, but would be weakest when you were closest to a mass (slack elastic). There is no workable mechanism for an elastic or pulling-type gravity.
On the other hand, since quantum field theory already tells us that the vacuum is full of exchange-radiation which causes the fundamental forces, and that even light velocity radiation exerts pressure, we can see that pushing-type forces due to shielding occur naturally.
LeSage, from the required great penetrating power (i.e., the weak shielding effect of matter), deduces that gravitational radiation is extremely abundant in order to still cause the observed force of gravity despite such weak interactions. The gravitons must be penetrating enough to be capable of going straight through the mass of the earth with only a slight attenuation, and yet must be abundant enough to cause things to fall at the earth's surface at the observed acceleration by the slightly unequal exposure on the upward-facing and downward-facing sides.
The only way to do this is to have an immense number of forceful gravitons, so that even a very slight asymmetry introduced by the earth's creates a large net pressure on the atoms of an apple (or any other object) near the earth's surface. On page 422 LeSage raises another difficulty with his theory, namely that the gravity causing radiation would cause spinning objects to slow down by carrying away rotational energy in collisions. However, this objection is entirely bogus. Fundamental particles as described by the Standard Model, have mass, spin, etc., but they don't have any mass.
Mass is entirely due to an external (vacuum) quantum field (Higgs particles). Therefore, when gravity causing radiation collides with the particles in a moving body to cause gravity (and inertia, by the equivalence principle) it is an indirect reaction. First gravity couples to the Higg's field particles around the charged particles, and then the gravity effect is communicated to the fundamental particle core. In this two-stage mechanism there is no net rotational energy loss, because everything remains in equilibrium.
On page 425, LeSage ridicules those who scoff at this gravity mechanism:
'How can a confused repugnance, suffices to condemn a theory, which affronts nothing of taste nor of feeling! And always like the devout one, to humbly follows the beaten roads; and does the same in researches, and like all those which acted the strong one, did not obtain any successes!'
But then on pages 426 and 427, LeSage in parenthesis in his conclusion admits candidly that it is initially discerning, an 'alarming complication', to picture the vacuum so chaotic, full of gravity causing radiation:
'[page 426 ] Undoubtedly, the majority of the undecided people, not having any clear sight of this [vacuum radiation exchange] chaos (of which I acknowledge that the first blow-with eye is of an alarming complication) will … [page 427] pretend detriments in advance, any conceivable explanation of revolutions: or that they will have had the sensible one, decided by the authority of certain great names, that pronounces, either on this impossibility, or on the non-utility of these results: or that they will not have had enough love of facts of nature, nor enough courage ... in order to accommodate it and deliver fully research into all it has to offer and ensure; that there will not be known to be a presentation of the solidity and the security of this beautiful system, rather distinctly, to be filled with enthusiasm at some point, because of people's faith in their other sights and projects.'
The last sentence is the conclusion of LeSage's paper (pages 428-32 are just an appendix speculating on the mechanical details of the 'fluid gravity' pushing-shield mechanism). Did LeSage succumb because his attacks on Newtonian orthodoxy were too obscure, or because his writing style was too long-winded and poetic? Or was his problem not having a mathematical model for the mechanism which correctly predicts everything (particle masses and forces)? Or, as he suggested, was it suppressed by bigotry and inertia of the masses of fashion-followers?
The paper was peer-reviewed and approved by Prevost, who initiated thermodynamics in 1792. (‘Caloric’, fluid heat theory, eventually gave way to two separate mechanisms, kinetic theory and radiation. This was after Prevost in 1792 suggested constant temperature is a dynamic system, with emission in equilibrium with the reception of energy.)
LeSage formulated the idea that some inward pressure causes gravity by virtual of shielding properties of matter. He was well aware of the difficulty that gravitation depends on the mass, not the macroscopic (apparent) surface area of the planet. He consequently predicts in 1782 that atoms are not hard impenetrable solids of the kind Newton thought, but are instead almost entirely void. This prediction was confirmed by X-rays, radioactivity, and the nuclear atom of Rutherford in the period of 1896-1912. A brilliant prediction, made without mathematics. However, LeSage implied various other predictions, too. First, whatever pressure was causing gravity would also tend to compress planets radially, and would also compress the length of a moving body. We know from general relativity that the gravitational contraction is indeed real, for example the earth’s radius is contracted by about (1/3)MG/c^2 or 1.5 mm.
We also know that the Michelson-Morley experiment was explained by George FitzGerald in a letter to Science in 1889 as being due, not to the non-existence of ether, but to the compression of length of the measuring instrument in the direction of absolute motion, caused by the pressure of the gravity-causing ether. It is obvious that this stuff is suppressed because it is not highly mathematical. LeSage snubs Newton’s mathematical physics, never mind Einstein’s special relativity (although it is perfectly consistent with the proved facts of Einstein-Hilbert general relativity). When Einstein and Hilbert were formulating general relativity in November 1915, LeSage’s gravity mechanism was still ignored on the basis that it (1) failed to make any quantitative predictions, and (2) conflicted with a number of observations. The claims that it conflicts with observations are all, however, based on ridiculously false assumptions which contradict those now accepted in the context of normal radiation-exchange (mainstream) quantum field theory, 1929-49.
For example, one popular ‘disproof’ of LeSage, hyped up by the 'gear cog aether' crazed James Clerk Maxwell and the 3-postulate (anti-special relativity) nutter (according to Einstein's friend and biographer Abraham Pais) Henri Poincare, was that the amount of radiation exchange needed to account merely for LeSage gravity (never mind stronger forces like electromagnetism) would be ‘sufficient to vaporise the earth’. This is bogus because electromagnetism, a quantum field theory radiation-exchange force, holds all the atoms of the earth together without the earth vaporising, and electromagnetism is about 10^40 times stronger than gravity! However, Poincare's extension of Maxwell's bigotry killed LeSage's mechanism:
'Poincare seems to have put an end to at least public discussion of the theory in his writings on the history and philosophy of science in the first decade of the twentieth century.'
'Poincare even saw fit to investigate the incompatibility of Le Sage's theory with the Special Theory of Relativity.'
Poincare conveniently died years before general relativity in 1915 brought back the spacetime fabric! The gravitational radiation doesn't act directly in charges, but only via massive vacuum Higgs field particles, which smooth out the impacts of radiation from different directions. So there is no heat gain from gravitational radiation (although the jiggling causes the chaotic electron orbitals and to trigger the random emission of radioactivity in nuclear reactions).
Unfortunately, LeSage was far before his time. Other bogus ‘problems’ used to ‘dismiss’ the LeSage gravity mechanism included the false claim that radiation does not create shadow zones but would diffuse into shadows, which would equalise pressures and prevent the geometric inverse-square law of gravity. This is false because the diffraction of radiation by matter is wavelength dependent, and it is not scattered by the vacuum. If transverse light waves were scattered by the quantum foam vacuum like longitudinal pressure waves diffusing in a fluid, we would not see clear images of stars at great distances.
The fact that we do see distinct and not a diffuse image suggests that light, and other forms of radiation, do not behave like fluid pressure waves. The pressure exerted by light and other radiation in the vacuum does not diffuse in all directions into shadow zones. Further, since quantum field theory does work quantitatively at least for the electromagnetic and nuclear forces, some kind of vacuum radiation pressure does cause fundamental forces with inverse-square law properties. Those who dispute this should be exposed as real crackpots, to bring back some discipline. (At the same time, the entire 10/11 dimensional ‘string theory’ fraternity and their colleagues in the next-door UFO/alien abduction investigation lab., should be honestly labelled cranks. This is a scientific necessity, to stop these motor-mouthed abusive charlatans preaching nonsense.)
Lord Kelvin: "[Simple modifications are] all that is necessary to complete Le Sage's theory of gravity in accordance with modern science.... This supposition is neither more nor less questionable than . . . for gases, which is now admitted to be one of the generally recognized truths of science" - William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), On the Ultramundane Corpuscles of Le Sage, The London Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, Taylor and Francis, London, May 1873, Vol XLV; Fourth series, p. 331.
S. Tolver Preston: ". . . the theory of Le Sage can scarcely be regarded as mere hypothesis, but rather as an irresistible deduction which is forced upon us in the absence of any other conceivable inference. Certainly, if simplicity be a recommendation, the theory needs no recommendation on that ground." - S. T. Preston, On Some Dynamical Conditions Applicable to Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation, No. 1, The London Edinburgh and Dublin PhilosophicalMagazine and Journal of Science, Taylor and Francis, London, September 1877, Vol. IV, Fifth series, p. 213.
James Clerk Maxwell: "Here, then, seems to be a path leading towards an explanation of the law of gravitation, which, if it can be shown to be in other respects consistent with the facts, may turn out to be a royal road into the very arcana of science." - J. C. Maxwell, Atom, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Henry G. Allen, New York, 1890, Ninth Edition, Vol. 3, p. 46.
[Maxwell was allegedly being sarcastic or tongue in cheek. He had earlier stated in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, 'A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field' by Prof. J Clerk Maxwell FRS, October 1864: '….. if we look for the explanation of the force of gravitation in the action of a surrounding medium, the constitution of the medium must be such that, when far from the presence of gross matter, it has immense intrinsic energy, part of which is removed from it wherever we find the signs of gravitating force. ... This result does not encourage us to look in this direction for the explanation of the force of gravity.']
"It is of interest to examine some other "schools" of criticism, which today would be considered incorrect. J. Croll, writing in 1878, and C. C. Farr, a full twenty years later, chose to disregard the objection which Maxwell had pressed and to attack Le Sage's theory on the grounds that the basic premisethat mundane matter is mostly empty space is evidently false."
(Croll, J., Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation, The London Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, Taylor and Francis, London, January, 1878, Vol. V, Fifth series, p. 45. Farr, C. C., On an Objection to Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, Government Printing Office, Wellington, 1898, Vol. XXX, p. 118.)
It is ironic that in 1878 and 1898 Croll and Farr ignorantly ridiculed LeSage's prediction that the atom is mainly void, but that when LeSage was confirmed by radioactivity and X-rays in 1895-6, people like Poincare managed to continue ridiculing LeSage instead of praising his remarkably correct prediction. Rutherford in 1912 failed, conveniently (why should he sacrifice orthodoxy any more than necessary, and risk his career for 'mere science'?), to credit LeSage with predicting the almost totally void nature of the atom which Geiger and Marsden's results on the scattering of alpha particles by gold foil implied. So LeSage was falsely ridiculed for making experimentally confirmed predictions, but nobody even then praised the theory.
Everytime the 'critics' (bigots, really) were proved wrong in their criticism, and LeSage proved right, the abusive 'critics' (bigots) just crawled back into the woodwork, were put away again in their padded cells, or slunk back into their cages, without ever admitting they were wrong and LeSage was right. Instead, new ad hoc 'criticisms' would be invented, until they became so absurdly vacuous that the subject was merely ignored as a heresy or unfashionable.
There are 3 expanding spacetime dimensions in the big bang universe which describe the universe on a large scale, and 3 contractable dimensions of matter which we see on a small scale. General relativity has to somehow allow the universe's spacetime to expanding 3 dimensions around us (big bang) while also allowing gravitation to contract the 3 dimensions of spacetime in the earth, causing the earth's radius to shrink by 1.5 millimetres, and (because of spacetime) causing time on the Earth to slow down by 1.5 parts in 6,400,000,000 (i.e., 1.5 mm in theEarth's radius of 6,400 km). This is the contraction effect of general relativity, which contracts distances and slows time.
The errors of general relativity being force-fitted to the universe as a whole are obvious: the outward expansion of spacetime in the big bang causes the inward reaction on the spacetime fabric which causes the contraction as well as gravity and other forces. Hence, general relativity is a local-scale resultant of the big bang, not the cause or the controlling model of the big bang. The conventional paradigm confuses cause for effect; general relativity is an effect of the universe, not the cause of it. To me this is obvious, to others it is heresy. What is weird is that crackpots cling on to total nonsense which is debunked here: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm.
Another way to debunk anti-expansion stuff is to point out that the cosmic background radiation measured for example by the COBE satellite in 1992, is both (a) the most red-shifted radiation (it is red-shifted by a factor of 1000, from a temperature of 3000 K infra-red to 2.7 K microwaves), and (b) the most perfect blackbody (Planck) radiation spectrum ever observed. The only mechanism for a uniform red-shift by the same factor at all frequenciesis recession, for the known distribution of masses in the universe. The claims that the perfectly sharp and uniformly shifted light from distant stars has been magically scattered by clouds of dust without diffusing the spectrum or image is utterly vacuous, like claiming the moon-landings are a hoax. The real issue is that the recession speeds are observations which apply to fixed times past, as a certain fact, not to fixed distances. Hence the recession is a kind of acceleration (velocity/time) for the observable spacetime which we experience. This fact leads to outward force F=ma =10^43 N, and by Newton's 3rd law equal inward force which predicts gravity via an improved, Quantum Field Theory-consistent LeSage mechanism.
So I'm glad that the Wikipedia page on LeSage has been updated to include the quotes about LeSage from Feynman which I included on my internet page:
When Sir Isaac Newton published his Theory of Universal Gravitation, he noted that he could not propose a mechanism by which it worked. In 1784 Georges-Louis LeSage (1724-1803) of Geneva proposed a simple kinetic theory of gravitation. LeSage extended the speculations of Newton's friend and contemporary Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, who first suggested a similar explanation for gravity in 1690.
The idea was not well received in LeSage’s time but subsequently resurfaced in the nineteenth century. It influenced John Herapath's thinking in developing the kinetic theory of gases and this kinetic theory was then used by Lord Kelvin to develop an updated version of LeSage’s theory. Kelvin’s work however was criticized by James Clerk Maxwell, for reasons discussed below. In the twentieth century, it was still studied by a few researchers, such as the Russian astrophysicist V. V. Radzievskii. Today the theory continues to be developed and is a continuing avenue of research and interest for a number of researchers who find themselves unsatisfied with current mainstream theory. However, it is not mainstream because it makes few if any scientific predictions.
Feynman examined LeSage gravity in his November 1964 Cornell Lectures Character of Physical Law. They were recorded by the BBC and broadcast on TV in 1965, as well as being published in Feynman's book of similar title.
Character of Physical Law, pp. 171-3:
"The inexperienced [string theorists who have no contact with the real world of physical fact], and crackpots [the media and those who are obsessed with failed orthodoxy], and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but [with extensive knowledge of the actual facts rather than speculative theories of physics] you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. ... There will be a degeneration of ideas, just like the degeneration that great explorers feel is occurring when tourists begin moving in on a territory."
On page 38 of this book, Feynman has a diagram which looks basically like this: >E S<, where E is earth and S is sun. The arrows show the push that causes gravity. This is the LeSage gravity scheme, which Feynman also discusses (without the diagram) in his full Lectures on Physics. He concludes that the mechanism in its form as of 1964 contradicted the no-ether relativity model and could not make any valid predictions, but finishes off by saying (p. 39):
"'Well,' you say, 'it was a good one, and I got rid of the mathematics for a while. Maybe I could invent a better one.' Maybe you can, because nobody knows the ultimate. But up to today [1964], from the time of Newton, no one has invented another theoretical description of the mathematical machinery behind this law which does not either say the same thing over again, or make the mathematics harder, or predict some wrong phenomena. So there is no model of the theory of gravitation today, other the mathematical form."
But he adds a criticism of renormalised quantum gravity speculations on pages 57-8:
"It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities."
Feynman's only stated problem with LeSage was drag or rather inertia! But surely Feynman knew that the vacuum radiation would contract objects in the direction of their motion regardless of whether the radiation also caused gravity, or not.
So Feynman's objection would discredit the empirically defended modern physics of the Dirac sea and of Feynman's own quantum foam vacuum!
It smacks of hypocrisy for Feynman to use an argument against LeSage which also discredits Feynman's quantum field theory of the vacuum containing force-mediating radiation, without saying the same argument also can be used against himself!
In fact, the fluid analogy shows that the 'drag' problem Feynman had is actually manifested in the causality of general relativity's contraction term, and by the equivalence principle, the contraction of FitzGerald and Lorentz for moving objects. The 'fluid' of force-causing vacuum radiation is a perfect fluid, so it resists only accelerations. This is observed and called 'inertia' (for 'stationary' objects) and 'momentum' (for moving objects). The energy of the resisted acceleration goes into doing the work of physically contracting the object! Hence, contraction is an equilibrium state in which the vacuum radiation distorts the physical dimensions of matter according to its self-shielding (gravitation) and its motion.
Rcecent abusive motor mouthed crackpot sneers at LeSage mechanism, see http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2000-08/msg0027106.html:
'In general relativity, gravity propagates at light speed, but the theoryescapes this problem because, in Newtonian language, the effectiveforce is not central, but has velocity-dependent terms that do notpoint radially from the source. See Carlip, Phys. Lett. A267 (2000) 81.You might try to add such terms in a LeSage-type theory, but only atthe expense of losing any simple ``push'' picture.)... As Feynman noted in Vol. I, section 7-7 of the Feynman Lectures, the same interaction that leads to an attractive force will also lead to a drag.
'this doesn't apply to a flux whose spectrum IS Lorentz> covariant. That's true, but it requires that there be no high-energy cutoff, since a cutoff would break the invariance.
{BUT WHO CARES ABOUT LORENTZ INVARIANCE, WHEN THE MECHANISM BEHIND THE LORENTZ EQUATION IS GIVEN BY THE MECHANISM, see http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/!!}
'There's also a problem with existing observational evidence for the equivalence principle. We know to a very good accuracy that gravity interacts with all forms of energy, and not just with mass. For example, the electrostatic binding energy of the nucleus contributes an amount E/c^2 to gravitational mass, as does the energy of weak interactions inthe nucleus, as does even the kinetic energy of electrons in atoms. Foryour mechanism to work, your right-handed neutrinos (or whatever) would have to couple to the full stress-energy tensor. But a spin-1/2particle doesn't have such a coupling; you need a spin 2 particle. And once you take into account the coupling to *gravitational* energy (also observed!), you necessarily end up with a theory that's at least locally equivalent to general relativity, up to possible terms that are important only at high energies.You might want to look at chapters 2 and 3 of the _Feynman Lectureson Gravitation_ for a nice derivation of the fact that a spin 2 particleis required.'
These mainstream crackpots get brownie points for being abusive and not constructive, which is precisely why they behave this way instead of being objective, scientific. They prefer to sneer at LeSage or any other piece of solid physics with more correct predictions than Witten's stringy M-theory (mainstream string theory), which is 'not even wrong'.
At http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/cnfGrHg.html, Tony Smith quotes
Richard Feynman’s book Lectures on Gravitation (1962-63 lectures at Caltech), Addison-Wesley 1995 (section on Quantum Gravity by Brian Hatfield):
‘... Feynman ... felt ... that ... the fact that a massless spin-2 field can be interpreted as a metric was simply a ‘coincidence’ ... In order to produce a static force and not just scattering, the emission or absorption of a single graviton by either particle [of a pair of particles] must leave both particles in the same internal state ... Therefore the graviton must have integer spin. ... when the exchange particle carries odd integer spin, like charges repel and opposite charges attract ... when the exchanged particle carries even integer spin, the potential is universally attractive ... If we assume that the exchanged particle is spin 0, then we lose the coupling of gravity to the spin-1 photon ... the graviton is massless because gravity is a long ranged force and it is spin 2 in order to be able to couple the energy content of matter with universal attraction ...’.
The only thing anyone can do is to point out that they are just abusive nutty politicians, who don't think abuse makes them into a kind of Hitler character, to be adored by sycophantic nutters. They have nothing positive to say of anything or anyone except for 'not even wrong' stringy stuff and fellow dictatorial politicians who preside over the teaching and 'research' of science. I quite like the response Tony Smith gave on the subject of censorship today:
'It is sad enough that there has been very little advance in elementary particle theory since the 1970s (when the Standard Model was developed), but it is far sadder still that back in 1980, in his book Cosmos, Carl Sagan could say “… The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. …”, while now in 2005/2006, Machiavelli is considered to be the teacher who must be followed in order to succeed in elementary particle physics.
'Maybe the leaders of today’s theoretical particle physics establishment should be asked the McCarthy question:
'HAVE YOU NO SHAME ?'
http://notevenwrong2.blogspot.com/2006/03/interesting-history-of-not-even-wrong.html:
Lubos Motley's Stringy Climate... said...
Peter,
Newton also had several papers also on stringy theory, alchemy, M-theory, religion, extra-dimensions, and creationism. Sadly, all were rejected for publication because he couldn't get an endorser on the international arXiv, which was controlled by the terribly vindictive Lubos Leibniz, plagarist of Newton's calculus. Newton's inverse square law of gravity was independently discovered by Hooke, although Newton did the important work of proving that it applies to elliptical orbits, not just circles. Newton never expressed it with the constant G because he didn't know what the constant was.
Newton did have empirical evidence, however, for the inverse square law. He knew the earth has a radius of 4,000 miles and the moon is a quarter of a million miles away, hence by inverse-square law, gravity should be (4,000/250,000)^2 = 3900 times weaker at the moon than the 32 ft/s/s at earth's surface. Hence the gravity acceleration due to the earth's mass at the moon is 32/3,900 = 0.008 ft/s/s.
Newton's formula for the centripetal acceleration of the moon is: a = (v^2)/(distance to moon), where v is the moon's orbital velocity, v = 2Pi.[250,000 miles]/[27 days] ~ 0.67 mile/second), hence a = 0.0096 ft/s/s.
So Newton had evidence that the gravity from the earth at moon's radius is the same as the centripetal force for the moon. The great mathematician Edmond Witten told Newton gravity is stringy, but Newton ignored him and missed on being a genius.
posted by nige @ 12:19 PM
12 comments
