The Physics and New Worldview
The ultimate goal of physical theory must be the absolute order of nature.
Anything less leaves unanswered our origins, our position, and our destiny.
There is a non-material side to reality without which no physics can be complete. Its existence is realized by the one feature which joins it to the material world. That is motion. Light and electric and gravitational fields are pure motion. Stop their motion and they cease to exist.
Reality consists of the material and the non-material
Wave motion is the means by which energy is transmitted through a
medium. If light and fields owe their being solely to their wave
action, then underlying their existence must be a medium that
also is non-material. The medium cannot be detected directly by
sensing devices, but its existence can be inferred by experiments
whose results require it.
In 1887, Michelson and Morley tried to measure the movement of
the earth through what was then believed to be an ether which
permeated space and provided the medium by which light waves
traveled. There was no detectable movement of the earth relative
to the motion of light whatsoever. Einstein accepted light's
velocity as being an absolute, but he contended that it was so
because of contraction of anything in motion relative to light
that prevents a measurement of the effect. He dismissed the ether
as being superfluous.
In 1913, eight years after Einstein published his theory of
relativity in which he asserted that no medium was necessary for
light's propagation, Georges Sagnac, a French physicist, modified
Michelson's experiment so that a split beam of light was directed
around the edge of a 20-inch turntable. With a center of
rotation, when the table was turned, the edge by necessity would
have to move through space. Since light was traveling around the
edge, if light were waves in a medium, any rotation of the table
would move relative to the light waves, and hence their medium.
When the table was rotated, this indeed happened. The light
beam directed back upon itself while the table was turning formed
interference fringes. That the light did not come back in phase
indicated that the table edge had moved relative to light waves
during their circling, or more correctly, relative to the
non-material medium which carries the light waves.
In 1925, Michelson with Henry Gale adjusted the original experimental conditions so that they measured the earth's rotation, and modification successfully showed Sagnac's discovery. The Sagnac effect has since been used to develop optical gyroscopes which are widely employed in navigation, so there is no question of its validity.
There is a non-material medium
Why then has there been such denial of the existence of the
medium?
Physicists abhor a medium. In the wake of the Aristotelian downfall thinking changed in such a way that it has not been able to adjust to anything that refutes the conditions upon which physics is founded. The Galilean-Newtonian worldview that gave rise to dynamics has discrete bodies moving without support through an unreactive space void. Any medium for a carrier of light waves cannot at the same time be a non-resisting environment through which material bodies move. Since dynamics is based on the Newtonian concept of forces acting at a distance across space, any interaction between matter and a space medium would put into question the basic principles of physics.
The Galilean-Newtonian worldview does not show reality
The Greeks believed that everything has a natural place in the
universe and strives to reach it. Motion, therefore, in the Greek
physics was a form of change. A change of position required a
force, and any sustained motion required a continual force. The
perplexing question was why a thrown object should continue after
it leaves the hand. This was answered as being caused by a
commotion created in the air behind the object that propelled it
forward. It was discrediting of this theory that led to Galileo's
novel conception of motion.
In experiments with trajectories and inclined planes Galileo
realized that it is not motion but the change of motion that
requires a force. If all obstructions and resistances are
removed, there was apparently no reason why something in motion
should not go on indefinitely. Force causes acceleration, not
motion, so a motion by itself remains undiminished unless
obstructed or acted upon. Galileo, therefore, came to the
remarkable conclusion that motion is more than change, it is a
state of being, just as being at rest is a state. Once motion is
instilled, unless interfered with, it persists forever.
After the heliocentric system of Copernicus, this was the most
revolutionary idea to come out of the Renaissance. It changed a
way of thinking and set the foundation to a new worldview.
Galileo, by his conception of motion as a state, detached motion
from its mooring and set it free to fly through space unimpeded
and endlessly. The effect of motion being a state was that a
moving body no longer needed any participation by the space
through which it travels. Space became a void, and could be
nothing more.
That something can propagate its own motion is a deceptive
notion. To us it seems obvious, even self-evident. But that is
because we have been taught that way. The idea that once
something is given a motion it will continue indefinitely without
further association is sheer abstraction. It does not exist in
reality. Motion is not something that is instilled in a body like
a property which, if not given up, keeps it going forever.
Nothing inanimate can propagate its own motion. It is utterly and
absolutely impossible.
The belief has no rational basis and was assumed to be true
because it just seems that that is what happens. That abstract
concept, nevertheless, shaped the worldview and set the course of
physics for the next four hundred years.
It was this abstraction of motion as a state that Newton
seized upon and turned into his theory of inertial motion. Newton
made gravity a force of attraction between masses acting at a
distance across space to veer inertial motion into the perpetual
falls of bodies in orbit. To make the conditions fit the
equations he had to have his force of attraction diminishing in
strength by the square of the distance, despite the fact that it
bears no resemblance to any natural geometry.
Newton devised a mechanical model in which the universe was laced
with lines of attraction between massive bodies where mass and
charge were regarded as innate unaccountable properties of
matter. Time was absolute, and the space of the universe was an
immobile arena in which matter and light moved alike.
In subsequent years there were discoveries and new
interpretations that disputed the validity of this
Galilean-Newtonian worldview. In 1803 the interference
experiments of Thomas Young proved without question the wave
motion of light. And a half-century later Michael Faraday showed
that the space around magnets and charges is not an unreactive
and empty void, but contains a reactive field. This led to the
realization that space is permeated with electromagnetic and
gravitational fields. These discoveries, however, were
rationalized in ways to keep intact the established physics.
The logical conclusion should have been that objects in space move spontaneously and without force in response to their field environments. The void of space could have been replaced by a space of fields. This, however, would have made unnecessary the force concept and have caused a revision of how motion is defined. Such a shift in thinking would have dislodge the whole worldview, so it never happened Eventually, to bring order, cause, and structure into a simple comprehensive theory the current worldview has to be changed.
Description of nature can be both mathematical and rational
A theory must be as free of irrationalities of logic as mathematics is of procedural errors.
Order and cause define reality. Mathematics describes the
order; physics gives the cause. Mathematical physics, therefore,
combines order with its causes.
Describing order with mathematics is within the strict guidelines
of mathematics and is therefore unambiguous. Cause, on the other
hand, is a different situation. Cause gives the reason why order
forms, and that is drawn from what we think reality is. It makes
rational the skeletal frame delineated by mathematics by fitting
it into our impression of what the world is all about.
A worldview is subjective, and causes drawn from it are
extremely variable. Science differs from other cultures in that
it finds its causes within the "natural laws"
themselves. This still does not prevent theorists from inventing
causes to devise workable mathematical equations. That is what
Newton did, and his example has been followed by others ever
since.
Galileo showed that motion can be described with mathematics
but he never ventured a cause for orbits. His idea of motion as a
state, however, allowed Newton to find a cause in gravity as a
force of attraction acting across space to bend orbital motion
into perpetual falls. That gravity is a force that can act at a
distance is pure imagination. It violates the direct contact
experience of causality and introduces into physics the attitude
that metaphysics is permissible as long as the equation works.
A cause should be attributed to the direct interaction that
results in it. The interaction must be one that can be confirmed
experimentally to show that it fits into the established
understanding of reality.
Galileo founded mathematical physics, but when he made motion a state he severed it from any direct causal interaction. What seemed like a reasonable conclusion from his experiments has had the effect of excluding from physics the non-material side of reality. Physics became a science of material bodies moving in regular patterns in a spatial void from contrived causes.
The Energy Concept
Motion makes size and shape. It is motion that creates the
structural frame of matter's hierarchy. These structures are
absolute and self-contained, consisting of motion derived from
absolute motions in the universal medium. They exist independent
of our perspective and are localized from the rest of the
universe. The order of these structures owes its existence to a
shifting and adjusting between components and their immediate
space environments.
Dynamics, on the other hand, is based on the response we
measure when we interject ourselves and our probes into these
motions of nature. To disrupt the natural condition, even those
things in relative motion, we have to move against the suspension
of the objects in their respective space environments, and that
suspension is the resistance that we measure as inertia. It is
momentum, the product of mass and motion (mv), therefore, that is
the reaction to our forcing a change on nature. Because of its
application to technology, the effect from altering the natural
kinetics was translated to energy, the most important concept in
physics.
The energy concept originated in an attempt to quantify
motion. In the years after Newton developed his laws of motion
mathematicians turned their attention to the quantity when mass
of a moving body is multiplied by its velocity average - 1/2mv2.
Leibnitz in 1695 referred to this abstraction as vis viva. The
association with motion was clear, but what happens when motion
momentarily disappears, as with a pendulum at the extremity of
its swing? In this case motion ceases, yet the potential for
motion still exists. Johann Bernoulli introduced the idea that
the capacity for doing work can pass to and fro through
interchangeable forms while maintaining conservation virium
vivarum. In 1807, Thomas Young changed vis viva to energy. And
when energy was related to heat, it was elevated to a concept
which dominates the whole of nature. Forty years later the
conservation of energy was recognized as a universal principle
that encompasses all forms of motion, real and potential. Matter
and energy now stand as the two pillars upon which dynamics has
been built.
Energy exists in two basic forms: the radiant energy of light
and the kinetic energy of matter. The energy of light is
proportional to its frequency, and the velocity is constant. The
energy of matter is proportional to its mass and velocity, and
its velocity is variable. Energy is the common factor that
equates the two types of motion.
The problem is, energy as such is an abstraction. It itself is
not something real. When a pendulum swings to and fro it doesn't
expend and accumulate something, it merely changes its position
in space. Only light represents a direct identification with
energy. On the radiant level light and energy are synonymous. In
all forms relating to the motion of matter, energy is an
abstraction representing the effect of some direct but
unidentified cause.
By relying on the energy concept physicists have built a false
image of reality and have barred themselves from a comprehensive
physical theory. The energy concept prevents physicists from
including the non-material side of reality into their theory, and
without the non-material medium, fields, inertia, and spontaneous
motion are without direct causes. Motion, not energy, is the
connecting bridge from the non-material universal medium to the
creation and structuring of matter. And the supports of that
bridge are the laws and principles of the new physics.
In the new physics there is a direct transformation of force to structure. In gravitational systems bodies are suspended in the non-material medium by their gravitational fields and all motions are closed and potentially orbital. The length of an orbit is absolute. Any force applied to a body in space is against the body suspended by its gravitational field. The displacement caused by the force is a span added to the orbit length (F = ml).
Mathematical Structural Physics
The material world consists of three fundamentals: matter,
motion, and order. Motion became the subject of physics, order
the subject of mathematics, and matter, which must have
structural order, remained largely empirical. The progression of
science throughout history has been to integrate these three
factors into a single comprehensive theory.
In Greek science physics and mathematics were separate.
Aristotle developed a non-mathematical physics for motion where
everything moved relative to the earth, and astronomy was devoted
to bringing the celestial motions into mathematical order. There
was no theory for the structure of matter.
Galileo's crowning achievement 1,500 years later was to bring
motion and mathematics together. In his studies with falling
objects and inclined planes he discovered that things in motion
followed mathematical rules. Once it was realized that motion
could be mathematized the goal of naturalists was to bring the
orbital order of the Copernican system into the scope of
mathematics. Newton devised a workable scheme for turning orbits
into perpetual falls by transforming Galileo's motion as a state
to inertial motion and adding gravity as a force of attraction
acting at a distance across space.
Dynamics became mathematical physics. It was a method of
defining kinematic order by precise mathematics. The procedure,
however, has not been able to fully integrate structure. It
remains a physics of motion, and any order or structure has been
regarded as a result of a fortuitous balance of forces (dynamic
equilibrium).
The problem is the way motion has been explained by dynamics.
Motion, in Newtonian physics, is not something that is an innate
part of the creation of matter. It is a property of matter that
is instilled in it by an external force. There is no interaction
of an object with its space environment that causes movement and
shapes the course of its path. Space is an unreactive void and
objects are discrete bodies moving through it by whatever motion
they have been given.
The energy concept was the final obstacle that prevented a full integration. When motion was tied to mass as momentum, it became irrevocably excluded as the creating feature of structure. Physicists concentrated on defining everything in terms of energy and reaped the benefits of its application to technology. Matter, however, is not structured on energy, it is structured on motion.
A New Worldview
Nature is organized on simple mathematical order. From our
perspective that order often appears complex, as does the
seemingly erratic movement of the planets. In order to determine
the natural order we have to convert the complex order to the
objective order by corrections. Or to be more correct, we have to
imagine some simple order which from our perspective shows the
complex order that we witness. That is what Copernicus did.
If we make corrections for conditions that skew our image of
the order from its objective order, such as corrections for the
time delay by light's transmission, then the corrections are
valid. If, on the other hand, we invent conditions, such as
implied variances, simply to make the description of the motions
accurate, then we have a problem. The added conditions can give a
practical answer to the problem of correction, but they are not
conditions from nature. They are contrived, like having glasses
to make right the skewed image of a carnival mirror.
This is what the Greeks did for the motion of the planets.
They did not foresee the simple order underlying the planets'
erratic behavior. Instead, they kept the image from our
perspective and devised a model of circles and epicycles to
account for them.
Einstein did the same thing with the time delay of light's
transmission. He did not make a theory built from the objective
order in nature, he devised equations with added devices, his
relativistic effects, to describe the motions as seen from our
perspective. It is a procedure for making an accurate description
of what we see and measure, but it uses conditions that do not
exist in reality. Relativistic effects are no more a part of
nature than the circles and epicycles of the Greeks.
Einstein in modern physics played the role of Eudoxos and
Ptolemy of antiquity. He did not make the revolutionary advance
of an Aristarchos or a Copernicus. Instead of defining natural
order on nature's terms, he described the complex order seen from
our perspective by whatever means to make the equations accurate
and predictive. He continued a physics founded on the
Galilean-Newtonian worldview that explains all things from a
dynamic image of reality.
The seventeenth century founders of our physics saw the world
as discrete bodies moving relative to each other in a space void.
There was no sense of the non-material side of reality, no
experiments demonstrating light waves and fields in space. We now
know they exist. For physics to be complete it must include the
non-material with the material in a comprehensive theory. The
dynamics developed from the Galilean-Newtonian worldview is
inappropriate for the task.
The shattering of the celestial spheres left the moon and
planets without support or cause for motion. Newton replaced the
cause with Galileo's endless motion and his abstract force acting
at a distance in a space void. The support was replaced by a
fortunate balance. Neither of these questionable conditions is
necessary, however, when the void is discarded for a space of
fields in a non-material medium. The support of objects in space
becomes the space environments themselves.
When Copernicus moved the center of cosmic order it was a
question of position. It now seems obvious that there was no
scientific reason to believe that we are at the center of the
universe. A reorientation of cosmic order required a change in
the parameters responsible for it. That is what occurred three
hundred years ago when Aristotle's physics was replaced by
Galilean relativity and Newtonian dynamics.
The Copernican revolution occurred because the mathematics to
describe the Ptolemaic system became so complex and redundant
that it was no longer realistic. It was apparent that it no
longer reflected the true order of nature, but rather a distorted
image of it as seen from our perspective. Our conception of the
natural order had to be detached from our perception and new
conditions imagined that would have formed it. That reorientation
took parameters of a new physics.
The same problem exists in current physics, not of position
but of composition. Like Copernicus recognizing a simpler order
because the orientation was wrong, we need to recognize a simpler
structural order because the composition is wrong. Matter is not
a skeletal frame of components moving relative to each other in
an empty and unreactive void. It is composed of structural
arrangements of matter formed in a non-material universal medium
in a self-creative way from responding to a field environment.
There is a medium. We simply don't experience it directly.
Unlike light, we are detached from it. Our contact with it is
through our gravitational field. That field suspends us in the
medium and offers resistance to displacement. Since fields weaken
the tension of the medium they retard the velocity of light and
the equilibration of fields in it. The combination of the impulse
to remain centered and the slowing of field equilibration is
responsible for the spontaneous motion of objects in space. The
medium, therefore, does not affect us directly but is
nevertheless the fundamental cause of motion of objects in space
and the organizing principle upon which the kinematic structures
of matter formed.
Including the non-material side of reality shifts the
parameters for motion off of those of dynamics as completely as
reorienting of position shifted Newtonian physics off of
Aristotelianism. It dispenses with inertial motion, the force
concept, and space as a void. All motion becomes closed and
structural. Structures form directly from motions in the medium,
are kinematic, and are absolute.
When we see objects move we see them move relative to each other.
We cannot see the space environment but we mentally create it as
a background to complete the image. That space is the space of
Newtonian physics. Because there is no apparent resistance to
bodies moving in that space this was the basis to the impression
that space is simply a void. That space, however, doesn't exist.
It is a cerebral creation.
The space that exists consists of gravitational fields generated in the universal medium by the structural motions of matter. Because it is invisible we do not perceive it, nor do we see its variations in intensity and shape around material bodies. It is these non-uniformities, however, that are responsible for the motion of bodies in space as they glide along the contours, freely and spontaneously, to remain centered in their space environments.
Why it is important.
It isn't our perception but our conception of reality that
needs to be changed. Our mental image is the frame in which we
sketch our theories. Copernicus did not change the way we see the
world, only the way we know it to be. We still think of the earth
as being stationary, of the sun as rising and falling. But the
heliocentric image of the world more correctly described the
natural condition and shifted thinking to a more creative form of
physics.
A physics based on the new worldview is on a firmer foundation
than that of dynamics. It gives new insights and interpretations
more consistent than have been possible by the current physics.
The theories of the structure of matter, the basis of its
hierarchy, and the origin of the universe, when reexamined from
the perspective of the pre-material medium open up theoretical
physics to excitingly new vistas.