Abstracts of ABRI Monographs Series 4 - Reprints     AS4-01 Consequences of the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment: the demise of the stationary aether, the rise of Special Relativity, and the heuristic concept of the photon Correa PN, Correa AN     First published in Infinite Energy #38 The extant edifice of electromagnetism owes its inception in the early XXth century to a profound modification of Maxwell's XIXth century electromagnetic field theory, first prompted by the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment and condensed in what Einstein termed the Special Theory of Relativity (SR), and then complemented by Einstein's light particle hypothesis and the Planck distribution that introduced fundamental discontinuity into blackbody radiation. SR did not so much introduce new parameters, as it displaced the sense of what Poincaré called the "Lorentz transformations". Whereas these were intended as mathematical artifices employed to salvage the classical theory of an imponderable but stationary aether, they would gain a physical sense with Special Relativity (SR). This displacement most noticeably precluded what Reichenbach once called a Physics of Time. The first principle of SR posits that there is no absolute motion referenced to an unchanging frame of Space, since all translatory motion is relative to an observer at rest in its own inertial frame of reference. As the covariant complement to the contraction of length in the direction of motion is the objective dilation of time, SR is constrained to 'spatialize Time' by reducing it to a length of Space. Subsequently, once all lengths are treated as covariant intervals, the simultaneity of events is no longer invariant, nor, for that matter, is the notion of spatial coincidence. Synchronicity is considered to be an actual impossibility, and the function for a spatio-temporal continuum remains dissociated from any concept of energy, being flattened onto four-dimensional Space- Time. SR's second principle postulates that the speed of light is a constant for every inertial frame of reference, that is, is the same in all directions and for all observers, and independent of the motion of the source of light or the motion of the receiver, for as long as we are considering solely 'substantial translatory motions'. SR's position in this respect is somewhat paradoxical: one can say that it satisfies Machian relationism by positing all electromagnetically valid observers as being at rest in inertial frames of translation, their speeds being all relative and none absolute. But with the second principle, it explicitly recognizes some form of absolute velocity, an absolute speed of radiation in vacuo which is constant for all inertial frames in 'sufficient translation'. Where SR had proposed that one should conclude from the MM experiment that there is no stationary aether, and that the propagation of light is independent from the inertial frame of the observer, Einstein's photon theory proposes a new model where there is no need to take recourse to an aether in order to explain the propagation of light. The authors propose that, whereas SR was correct in positing the abolition of the stationary aether and in postulating as invariant the electromagnetic speed c, its requirements for adoption of the Lorentz transformations rely entirely upon the classical electrodynamic interpretation of the Kauffman-Bucherer-Bertozzi-type experiments. Since there are critical alternative evaluations of these experiments, this is a tenuous foundation for the abolition of synchronicity. Furthermore, the authors propose that Einstein's heuristic hypothesis be taken as factual - the result being that electromagnetic radiation becomes secondary to an energy continuum that is neither electromagnetic nor amenable to a four-dimensional reduction. It follows that the second principle of SR only applies to photon production, which is always and only a local discontinuity. It does not apply to non-electromagnetic radiation, nor, a fortiori, to the propagation of energy responsible for local photon production.   (0.3 MB)     AS4-02 The Sagnac and Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiments: the tribulations of general relativity with respect to rotation Correa PN, Correa AN     First published in Infinite Energy #39 In the history and theory of Physics there are accursed experiments voted to systematic oblivion. Two such examples are the 1913 Sagnac and the 1925 Michelson- Gale-Pearson (MGP) experiments, which, to this day, remain welded together as the repressed of General Relativity (GR). That the MGP experiment was voted to oblivion is all the more glaring an omission, since it was supposed to provide a test for Einstein's "principle of equivalence" of inertial and gravitational masses, the actual basis for GR. The relativistic expectation sanctioned by Einstein in 1924, was that the MGP experiment should detect a full fringe shift in order to confirm General Relativity, whereas a null result would have been compatible with the notion of a partial aether drag. Note that the expectations regarding the null result had now been inverted with respect to the MM experiment, because the MGP experiment tested for rotation and not translation of the earth. So argued Einstein. In this context, the authors wonder why should rotation be measurable because of a Space-Time drag of inertial frames in rotation, and translation remain unmeasurable and unable to elicit the dragging of its own inertial frame, when translation is also a gravitational motion and there must be equivalence in principle between inertial and non-inertial frames? The problem is further highlighted by GR's later confrontation in the early 1930's with the 1913 Sagnac effect, because GR is here constrained to admit that, 'for non-inertial frames', the speed of light is no longer constant. After all, to be consistent with itself, as Aspden has pointed out, Relativity should have followed Mach's lead and proposed that one should not be able to electromagnetically measure any speed of rotation with respect to Space. To achieve this somersault, Einstein adopted the relativistic dragging of inertial frames from aether drag theory, and even went as far as claiming in 1920 that with GR, "the conception of the ether has again acquired an intelligible content, although this content differs widely from that of the ether of the mechanical undulatory theory of light". But did Einstein's trajectory remain loyal to this program? The authors contend that it did not. Central to the GR paradox was the axiomatic assumption that gravitational field energy can be treated as reducible to the interval metric structure of Space-Time itself. From an energeticist perspective, this was an essential metaphysical lapse - emptying gravitation of its energetic content and replacing it with the structure of a manifold that is susceptible to the criticism that it essentially confuses Time with Space. Moreover, there is no intrinsic or heuristic requirement on the part of the Sagnac effect for any time-dilation transformations. Einstein was in fact obliged to treat the continuum as a pseudo-Riemannian manifold that had a separate physical reality distinct from the spatiotemporal relations between material objects. This clearly introduced substantivist considerations into what was originally deemed to be a relationist project. These considerations lead one to become suspicious of Einstein's utterances about an aether compatible with Relativity. The problem is that the 'aether' that Einstein increasingly appeared to have in mind, rather than becoming, as promised, a 'non-material, non-mechanical and gravitational aether', turned instead into a pure metaphysical fiction; a disembodied Spatial reality endowed solely with a mathematical existence and barred from any access to Time and synchronicity. Einstein operated a reduction of gravitational theory to geometry, and ultimately precluded therefore any recourse to the notion of gravitational energy. With this mystification, rotation was indeed made to appear as a mystery of nature. Subsequent evolution of relativistic cosmology at the hands of Einstein's successors has resurrected the problem of absolute motion in the measurement of peculiar velocity with respect to the CBR. A cosmic universal frame of reference for the propagation of electromagnetic energy has been found, in direct contravention of Special Relativity - yet, as soon as it was made, this discovery was co-opted by Big- Bang ideologists as evidence for a cosmic entropy. Relativist metaphysics succeeded in keeping its cake and eating it too. Such are the privileges of theories that become part of the organon of royal science.   (0.2 MB)