David Tombe

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Frederick David Tombe
Frederick David Tombe
Born 1958
Residence Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Nationality British
Scientific career
Fields Electromagnetism, Centrifugal Force, Coriolis Force, Aether, Gravity

Frederick David Tombe is a physics and applied mathematics graduate who attended Queen's University Belfast from 1978 to 1982.

Scientific Research in his own Words

I started an undergraduate B.Sc. degree course in physics at Queen's University Belfast in early October 1978 and I took astronomy and applied mathematics as subsidiary subjects. Before October 1978 had ended, I had been introduced on the physics course to Einstein's special theory of relativity as well as being taught that centrifugal force is not a real force. In the same month, on the astronomy course, I was introduced to the concept of stellar aberration. This made me immediately skeptical about Einstein's special theory of relativity on the grounds that it seemed to conflict with the phenomenon of stellar aberration. Stellar aberration analysis applies Galilean vector addition to the velocity of light, even though relativity is founded upon the principle that Galilean addition of velocities does not apply to the speed of light. I became even more skeptical when I realized that the symmetry inherent in the special theory of relativity necessarily contained the absurd implication that two clocks in relative motion would both go slower than each other. This is referred to as the "Clock Paradox" and unbeknownst to me at the time, this matter had already been raised by Professor Herbert Dingle among others. I realized though that to oppose Einstein's special theory of relativity would mean having to oppose its foundation principle which is that the speed of light is a universal constant which doesn't obey Galilean addition of velocities, and opposing this foundation principle would have seemed to be at variance with the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment. The famous Michelson-Morley experiment had measured the speed of light from terrestrial sources six months apart and found no interference fringes that could be due to the Earth's 30km/sec orbital motion around the Sun. The official conclusion is that light is always measured to have the same speed irrespective of the speed of the receiver, and if we accept this, then Einstein's special theory of relativity follows automatically from Pythagoras's theorem. At that time back in 1978, I was unaware that alternative explanations for the Michelson-Morley experiment had existed in the past, and that they involved a physical medium for the propagation of light known as the luminiferous aether. And so unsure how to resolve the conundrum, I concluded that the mystery could only be solved by obtaining a deeper understanding of the physical nature of light. Reading ahead I saw that the linkage between optics and electromagnetism was dealt with in the more advanced courses in future years, and that they would require a considerable degree of proficiency in vector analysis and calculus, and so I therefore took more interest in the applied maths courses in order to prepare myself in advance for when I would eventually embark on one of these advanced courses in electromagnetism. Meanwhile during the period 1979 to 1981, in conjunction with my applied maths courses, I took a considerable interest in gyroscopes and planetary orbits.

I started electromagnetism in earnest in late 1981, and due to my newfound knowledge of vector field theory I was able to see that the modern textbook derivation of Maxwell's displacement current was totally unsatisfactory. James Clerk Maxwell was a nineteenth century Scottish physicist who is credited with having collectively formulated all the laws of electromagnetism, and in doing so having united electricity, magnetism, and optics into a single topic. During the winter of 1981-82 I was struggling with three aspects in electromagnetism which appeared to have no satisfactory explanations. I was asking the lecturers these three questions,

  1. In the magnetic force F = qvxB, what is the velocity term v measured relative to?
  2. Where can we see a formal proof of the theory of conservation of energy in connection with magnetic repulsion and attraction between bar magnets? I never doubted that energy is conserved in these cases, but I was having difficulty finding an appropriate expression for magnetic potential energy. The well-known magnetic vector potential did not answer the question. Apart from Lenz's law which touches on the issue, there seemed to be nothing in the textbooks relating to conservation of magnetic energy.
  3. How is Maxwell's displacement current correctly derived? The textbook derivation of Maxwell's displacement current is highly dubious. It does not derive the transverse term which is used in the derivation of the EM wave equation, and even at that, the irrotational term which is being derived in its place, is being added as an extra term to Ampère's Circuital Law, rather than being extracted from within the already existing electric current term.

There was a tendency for the lecturers to say that it would all become clear when it is taken in conjunction with Einstein's theories of relativity, but I wanted to first know how these matters were resolved before relativity was invented, bearing in mind that Maxwell's equations were published before Einstein was born. On one occasion during that winter of 1981-82, when I questioned a lecturer as to whether there is anybody of renown in the physics world who questions the veracity of Einstein's relativity, he informed me that he had just been reading an article in the Nature journal concerning a certain late Professor Herbert Dingle and his objections to relativity on the grounds of the clock paradox. The article in question revisited an argument that had taken place in the early 1960s between Dingle and another professor called McCrea.

The first useful breakthrough came around about February 1982 when I found an American textbook, "The Classical Electromagnetic Field", written by Leonard Eyges, which made a brief mention of the fact that Maxwell himself had derived his displacement current differently from how it is done nowadays, and that in his days he had believed in the existence of an aether, and that Maxwell had understood displacement current as being an actual physical displacement in the aether. This drove me to obtain material on Maxwell's original nineteenth century ideas in the hope that the solutions to the problems mentioned above might be found in this realm, and indeed all the solutions were there. Maxwell believed in the existence of a dielectric sea of tiny molecular vortices that are made partly out of aether and partly out of ordinary matter. In March 1982, I concluded that the luminiferous aether of the nineteenth century really does exist, and that it is a dense electric sea of electrons and positrons. This solution then had the additional benefit of solving the riddle of the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment on the grounds that the Earth's gravity entrains a region of the electric sea within its gravitosphere, while orbiting the Sun at 30km/sec. The Michelson-Morley experiment was set up for the purpose of detecting an aether wind as the Earth orbits the Sun, however the gravitationally entrained region of electric sea means that the experiment was shielded from the aether wind, which is why it produced a negative result. This negative result didn't confuse Michelson himself, but it seemed to unnecessarily confuse many other people in the years that followed. In May 1982 I asked my applied maths professor, Benno Moiseiwitsch, if he knows anybody who disagrees with Einstein's theories. He immediately told me about the anti-relativity Professor Richard A. Waldron, who was then the head of mathematics at the nearby Ulster Polytechnic in Jordanstown. I wrote out a preliminary report on my conclusions and posted it to Professor Waldron. He invited me down to discuss the document in June 1982, and at the meeting he informed me about a book by Professor Herbert Dingle called "Science at the Crossroads" which explains all about the omertà in the scientific community. He also explained to me that anti-relativists are divided into two camps. There is the aether camp and there is the Ritzian camp, and Professor Waldron was a Ritzian. The Ritzians don't believe in the aether, instead preferring a ballistic theory in order to explain the constancy of the speed of light. I reject the ballistic theory of light, and on those grounds Prof. Waldron and I parted company, but not before he had provided me with a list of names of those who he believed to be credible anti-relativists, and some of them were in the aether camp. When I noticed on that list the title "A Magnetospheric Aether Drag Theory" by a Dr. Carl A. Zapffe, I went straight to the Polytech library to obtain a copy. I was very impatient to read it. I had now discovered a scientist from Baltimore, Maryland, USA, advocating more or less what I was advocating, only he lacked any structural details. I knew I had to contact this man soon.

I graduated in July 1982 with a B.Sc. degree in physics and applied Mathematics, and by the 2nd August I was at Dr. Zapffe's summer residence in Minnesota. On getting into Dr. Zapffe's car at Brainerd bus station, the first thing that he said to me as he drove off was "In a few years' time they'll get a Michelson interferometer into space, they'll get fringes, and the whole Einstein thing will fall through". I spent a very memorable week with Dr. Zapffe and his family and he provided me with plenty of literature which opened the doors to a worldwide network of anti-relativists. Among these were Dr. Stanisław Kosowski who I visited in Warsaw the following March during the martial law period, and Dr. JP Wesley, an American living in the Black Forest in West Germany, who I visited on the same trip. From the discussions I learned many aspects of the controversy, but I found nobody willing to agree to the electron-positron sea idea. In the following few years, I did a bit of physics teaching, while at the same time being heavily involved in correspondence with anti-relativists worldwide regarding the controversy. In 1985, I decided to completely quit the physics scene altogether as nothing was being achieved. Although I returned intermittently to the controversy over the years, it wasn't until 2004 that I continued the research in earnest. This was prompted when I re-established contact with Dr. Zapffe's next door neighbour in Brainerd. John Remington "Jack" Graham, a lawyer and philosopher, was still interested in the topic and he encouraged me to continue. Following a google search on electron-positron aether, I stumbled across the works of Dr. Menahem Simhony in Jerusalem. I was amazed to discover that Dr. Simhony was also advocating a dense background medium of electrons and positrons, but as a result of having used a totally different but equally valid approach. Simhony was a specialist in Solid State Physics and he had produced a compelling argument involving an analogy with a salt crystal. This bore no relation to the electromagnetic arguments that I had been using, but it produced the same core result. Dr. Simhony had even taken the matter further to the extent of suggesting a structure for the electron-positron medium. He was advocating that these electrons and positrons should be arranged into a cubic lattice array like in the case of a sodium chloride crystal. While at first, I gave this cubic lattice idea serious consideration, I later concluded that it was an impossible structure for the purposes of explaining the electromagnetic forces, and that it hence needed to be modified. After further scrutiny of Maxwell's 1861 paper "On Physical Lines of Force" which I had obtained from the Royal Society at Carlton House Terrace in London, I concluded that the correct array should be a double helix alignment, and in 2006 I began on-line publishing, mainly in the General Science Journal, Episteme Forum, and ZP Energy. Despite my rejection of Dr. Simhony's cubic lattice structure, it should not be overlooked that Dr. Simhony had enlightened me with the first convincing stand-alone derivation of the famous equation E = mc2 which is traditionally attributed to Einstein, and in a manner, which had nothing to do with Einstein's theories. Dr. Simhony showed how this equation is actually just Newton's equation for the speed of a wave in an elastic solid and how it can be applied to electron-positron pair production and annihilation in conjunction with the all-pervading electron-positron sea. I carried this aspect of Simhony's work into my own double helix theory, and on further study of Maxwell's 1861 paper, I realized that Maxwell himself had actually used this equation in Part III (equation 132). A particularly interesting aspect of Maxwell's work is the manner in which he exposed the magnetic field as a centrifugal force field.

By 2007 I had it all synchronized into a concise aether theory. The summary is that magnetic attraction between two unlike magnetic poles is more fundamentally due to electrostatic attraction between electrons and positrons in an all-pervading sea of rotating electron-positron dipoles. These dipoles align along their mutual rotation axes, electron to positron, in a double helix manner forming magnetic lines of force as per the prevailing magnetic field. Magnetic attraction is therefore primarily electrostatic attraction channeled along a double helix. Magnetic repulsion between like poles on the other hand is caused by centrifugal pressure acting sideways from the lines of force, induced by the rotation of the constituent electron-positron dipoles. Despite the fact that modern physicists deny the reality of centrifugal force, it is actually crucial to the understanding of magnetic repulsion. Fine-grained centrifugal force is the source of pressure in the medium for the propagation of light, and it's the source of the equation E = mc2. But since it is a consequence of absolute rotation, it challenges the modern paradigm that everything is relative and that there are no absolutes, and so it has been wrongly reduced to a fictitious illusion in the literature. Centrifugal force in fact holds the key to the dismantling of the entire Einstein myth.

Einstein's Big Mistake

Einstein overlooked the fact that the speed of light, as it occurs in the Lorentz transformation equations, is determined by the density and elasticity of a physical medium which pervades all of space, and which acts as the medium for the propagation of light waves. This fact had already been established by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, (1831-1879), whose death happened to occur in the same year that Einstein was born. The physical medium in question was known to Maxwell as the luminiferous medium although Einstein later referred to it as a Lichtäthers (luminiferous aether). Maxwell provided us with a reasonably clear picture of what the physical structure of this medium would need to be. He proposed that all of space is filled with a sea of molecular vortices comprised of tiny aethereal whirlpools, each surrounded by electric particles.

Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity first appeared in German in a paper entitled "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" which was received for publication in Bern, Switzerland, on 30th June 1905. Translated into English, the title of this paper is On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, and a translation can be viewed here, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:On_the_Electrodynamics_of_Moving_Bodies . The Lorentz transformation equations appeared in this paper, although they had already been broadly established by Hendrik Lorentz and Sir Joseph Larmor in the previous decade, in conjunction with a luminiferous medium! Einstein was inspired by the symmetry inherent in electromagnetic theory which is observed in the case where an electric current is induced in a conducting coil when a bar magnet is moved into it. The result is exactly the same whether the magnet moves into the coil, or the coil moves over the magnet. In order to rationalize with this observation, Einstein considered two of Maxwell's equations which happen to exhibit a perfect duality when expressed in electrostatic units. This perfect duality comes in conjunction with an overt expression of the speed of light. The two equations in question are the differential (curl) version of Ampère’s Circuital Law, with Maxwell's displacement current, and the Maxwell-Faraday Law of Induction (time-varying case), also a differential (curl) equation. Einstein found a way to maintain the mathematical form of these two equations under a Lorentz transformation, although this wasn't able to be demonstrated correctly until Henri Poincaré published his Palermo paper, Sur la dynamique de l'électron”, Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo 21, pp. 129-175 (1-47). This paper was received on 23 July 1905 and published in 1906 in Sicily. Poincaré's Palermo paper introduced the concept of four-vectors, an ingenious mathematical tool which is essential to the analysis, and which exposes the existence of what we now know as four-dimensional space-time. The four-vector invention was in some respects the modification to Sir William Rowan Hamilton's quaternions, that was needed to make them fully useful in electromagnetic theory. Maxwell missed out on this tool, although in his 1873 treatise, he did inadvertently demonstrate the futility of quaternions within the context of electromagnetism. Hamilton, in 1843, had in effect substituted the imaginary part of a complex number with a three-vector. It's as if Poincaré then puts the imaginary part back in again, but this time in place of the scalar component. (The term imaginary is somewhat misleading in the context. It simply refers to the use of the square root of minus-one as an algebraic tool. All physical concepts involved are real.)

The symmetry inherent in Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity seems to have convinced Einstein that no physical medium is required for the propagation of light waves. He therefore used one absurdity to justify another absurdity. Firstly, it's absurd to suggest that light, being a wave, doesn't require a physical medium of propagation. A wave is by definition, a propagated oscillation in a physical medium. Secondly, it's the symmetry in Einstein’s special relativity which leads to the absurd implication that two clocks in relative motion would each be ticking slower than the other. None of these absurdities would exist if the Lorentz transformation equations where to be applied in conjunction with the luminiferous aether, as they were originally intended to apply. The Lorentz transformation equations are mathematically identical to Einstein's special theory of relativity, but when applied as originally intended by Larmor and Lorentz in conjunction with the luminiferous medium, the physical implications are no longer absurd. Many of the experiments which are claimed today as evidence of Einstein's theories of relativity are in fact merely evidence of the Lorentz aether theory, in conjunction with Maxwell's sea of molecular vortices. The important difference though is that the aether provides an absolute physical rest frame, entrained within the Earth's gravitational field, and this means that there are no paradoxes associated with time. The time variable in the Lorentz transformation equations simply refers to the frequency of the physical processes within the molecular structure of a moving body. So, when motion through the luminiferous medium causes GPS satellite clocks in orbit to tick slower than the ground clocks, this is simply due to a physical interaction between the caesium atoms within the mechanism of the atomic clocks and the luminiferous medium itself, and we are in no doubt that it is the satellite clocks, and not the ground clocks, which will tick slower as a consequence of this motion. In actual fact, the satellite clocks tick faster than the ground clocks, but this is because of an additional dominant effect related to the fact that the Earth's gravitational field strength is weaker at higher heights. Time dilation, within the context of the Lorentz aether theory, will not however involve a slowing down of actual time, and it will not involve any clock paradox since there will be no symmetry. The motion of ponderable matter through Maxwell's sea of molecular vortices will cause a shear interaction that results in an increase in the internal pressure, which will in turn cause all the atomic and molecular processes to slow down. This is just Dan Bernoulli’s Principle. The frequency change in the atomic clocks is not the same thing as the actual time dilation that is inferred by Einstein's special relativity after he foolishly overturned centuries of wisdom by casting out the aether. The Earth will still complete an orbit of the Sun, relative to the background stars, in a time period defined as one year, and this standard of time will apply equally to all observers throughout the universe, no matter how fast they are moving. Their own individual motion cannot alter the Earth’s orbital period around the Sun, and so it cannot alter the measurement of actual time.

In 1920, when Einstein re-introduced the aether during an address at the University of Leiden, it was only a half-baked aether, more aimed at explaining gravity than explaining electromagnetic induction. In fact, it explained neither. Einstein proposed no structural details, and it certainly wasn't Maxwell's aether. But ten years later in 1930, Paul Dirac proposed a peculiar theory in which all space is pervaded by a sea of electron-positron pairs existing in a negative energy state. There is no record, however, that Dirac associated this negative energy sea with the nineteenth century luminiferous medium, yet the idea is not too far removed from the idea that space is filled with rotating electron-positron dipoles in a bound state, where the latter definitely would serve as the carrier of light waves. And although modern quantum mechanics variations on the Dirac Sea idea still retain a fundamental duality in space, it's interesting that there have been no recent attempts to link this to the medium for the propagation of light. It would seem though, that in order to reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity, this matter will have to be addressed at some stage in the future. (F.D.T. 1st October 2020, updated 21st September 2022)

Abstracts

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