Did Einstein Get it Wrong?
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| Author | Michael J Kelly |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Aether, Relativity, gravitation |
| Published | 2006 |
| Publisher | Trafford Publishing |
| Pages | 80 |
| ISBN | 1412029015 |
Did Einstein Get it Wrong? is a 2006 book by Michael J Kelly in which the author argues that the aether is real, that Einstein's abandonment of it was a mistake with serious consequences for the special theory of relativity, and that a medium filling space can be made to account for mass, for gravitation and for the wave-particle duality of light and matter. It is a short book of eighty pages, self-published through Trafford Publishing and written for a general readership rather than for specialists.
Summary
Kelly's starting point is that the nineteenth-century aether was discarded too readily. In his account the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment was taken as proof that no medium exists, when what it actually showed was that the particular kind of medium being looked for — a stationary aether through which the Earth ploughs unimpeded — was the wrong one. Kelly offers his own explanation of why that experiment failed to register a drift, and argues that once the failure is understood the case for removing the medium from physics collapses. Einstein, on his reading, then built relativity on the absence of something that was in fact there, and the repercussions run through the whole of the special theory.
In place of the discarded medium Kelly proposes that space is pervaded by antimatter, and he develops the consequences from two stated axioms: that matter attracts antimatter, and that antimatter repels itself. From these he argues that the self-repulsion of the medium keeps it spread uniformly through space, while its attraction to ordinary matter causes it to gather around bodies; the resulting distribution and pressure of the medium is what he identifies as the cause of mass, and the mutual shading or displacement of the medium between two bodies is what he offers as the mechanism of gravitation. He presents the same medium as the carrier that reconciles the wave and particle descriptions of light and of matter. Kelly describes the result as a "theory of everything" built on simple axioms, and stresses that it is deliberately free of mathematical complexity so that a non-specialist reader can follow the argument.
Two further claims are developed from the model. The first is geophysical: Kelly argues that his account implies a geomagnetic reversal in the not too distant future, and that such a reversal would have catastrophic consequences. The second is experimental. Because he regards the Earth's own environment as unsuitable for detecting the medium, Kelly proposes an experiment carried out on the Moon, which he claims would demonstrate the existence of the aether directly — an appeal to a decisive observational test rather than to argument alone.
Relation to other aether models
The wiki's Aether article distinguishes eight families of aether model among the researchers documented here. Kelly's proposal is a substantial, particulate medium rather than a geometrical or purely field-theoretic one, and in that respect it sits nearest the particulate and corpuscular aethers; it is unusual within that family, however, in identifying the medium with antimatter — an already recognised form of matter — rather than postulating a new class of sub-particle. Readers should treat that placement as approximate: Kelly does not classify his own model against the others, and the book's brevity leaves several points of comparison undetermined.
About the author
Michael J. Kelly (BSc, H.Dip.Ed.) is an independent researcher who developed and self-published his aether-based theory after a career in industry and in secondary-school science teaching. See Michael J Kelly.
Links to Purchase Book
- Did Einstein Get it Wrong? (Amazon)