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Lothar Pernes

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Lothar Pernes
Born1941
ResidenceGermany
NationalityGerman
Known forAnti-Relativity, Anti-Bigbang, Astronomy, Emission Theory, Redshift, Quasars, Pulsars, Variable Stars
Scientific career
FieldsEngineer

Lothar Pernes (b. 1941) is a German engineer and independent researcher who, between 2010 and 2019, developed one of the most systematic modern revivals of the emission theory of light — the classical proposition, associated with Walther Ritz, that the speed of light is constant relative to its source, so that an observer measures LG = c ± v.

What distinguishes Pernes's version from earlier emission theories is that he combines it with an entrained, co-rotating medium (an ether that the Earth carries with it, including in its rotation), and that he derives from the combination a single new mechanism — the Delta-Lambda effect — which he then applies to a long list of otherwise unrelated puzzles: spectroscopic "binary" stars, pulsating variables, pulsars and double pulsars, quasars, the cosmological redshift, the muon lifetime, GPS, the Pioneer anomaly, redshift periodicities, the flyby anomaly, the excess perihelion advances, the Sagnac effect and the Michelson–Gale experiment, and the optical Doppler effect. His claim is that all of these follow from one classical premise, and that the Big Bang cosmology and both relativity theories are consequently false.

He published this work on his own website under the title Eine neue kopernikanische Revolution in der Physik und in der Astronomie ("A new Copernican revolution in physics and astronomy"), subtitled De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Nr. 2 — the Copernican framing being deliberate and central to how he understood his own project.

Biography

Very little biographical information about Pernes has been published. He was born in 1941, is German, and is described as an engineer by training. He worked entirely outside academic institutions, and — unusually even among independent researchers — published no books and sought no journal publication, distributing his work solely through his website (lothar-pernes.de, launched March 2010, last updated May 2019) and through discussion on German-language physics forums such as Das Prinzip des Seins (mahag.com), where he registered in March 2010 and posted several hundred times.

The website has since lapsed and the domain has been sold; the papers survive only in the Internet Archive, and the links in the sections below have been redirected there accordingly.

The Copernican framing

Pernes opened his site with an explicit historical analogy. Modern physics and astronomy, he argued, constitute a contemporary system of epicycles: a body of doctrine that is universally accepted, institutionally enforced, and kept in agreement with observation only by the continual addition of complications. His list of the epicycles ran: length contraction, time dilation, mass increase, curved space, black holes, the Big Bang, quasars fleeing at enormous velocity with unimaginable luminosity at unimaginable distance, dark matter, and dark energy. As with the Ptolemaic system, he held, the number and ingenuity of the corrections is itself the evidence that the underlying premise is wrong.

The corollary he drew is the one Copernicus's example suggests: a genuinely new insight need not be technically deep, and can often be stated simply — its basis being "only logic, common sense, and good old classical physics." Pernes made no claim to sophistication for his own arguments, and presented this modesty as part of the case rather than an apology for it.

A caveat for readers. In the same passage Pernes invokes the Nobel laureates Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, and their Deutsche Physik, as heretics destroyed by the twentieth-century "epicycle system", and complains that discussing this is forbidden. This framing should be read with care and is not endorsed here: Deutsche Physik was a Nazi-era movement whose opposition to relativity was grounded in the racial rejection of "Jewish physics" rather than in physics, and Stark and Lenard were active participants in the persecution of their colleagues. Pernes's technical arguments stand or fall on their own terms and do not depend on that analogy.

Scientific work

Emission theory combined with an entrained medium

Pernes's starting point is the classical ballistic or emission theory: light leaves its source at speed c relative to that source, so that an observer approaching or receding measures c ± v. This proposition was widely regarded as dead after Willem de Sitter's 1913 argument from spectroscopic binary stars, which held that source-dependent light speeds would grossly distort the observed orbits of binaries — the standard refutation of Ritz's theory.

Pernes's response is twofold. First, he argues that a pure corpuscular emission theory is indeed refutable — by the Sagnac effect among other things — but that light is unquestionably an electromagnetic wave, so a medium must be involved. He therefore proposes a hybrid: light is emitted into a medium which, within a wide region around the source, propagates it onward at whatever speed it was emitted at, and only gradually accelerates or decelerates it toward the medium's own characteristic speed. This preserves LG = c ± v locally while giving wave behaviour globally. Second, he argues that de Sitter's refutation misidentified what happens to the light on its journey — which brings in the Delta-Lambda effect.

The medium in his scheme is entrained and co-rotating with the Earth. He regards this as demonstrated by his analysis of the flyby anomaly, and it is what allows him to accommodate the Sagnac effect and the Michelson–Gale experiment, which both ether theorists and relativists have used against emission theory. He is notably even-handed in his polemic here, accusing the ether camp of being no less dogmatic than the relativists in refusing to consider the combination.

The Delta-Lambda effect

The Delta-Lambda effect (Δλ effect) is Pernes's central original contribution, set out in "Der Delta-Lambda-Effekt der Emissionstheorie, oder: Wovon de Sitter noch keine Ahnung hatte…" ("…or: what de Sitter had no idea about").

The mechanism is simple. When a source emits a wave, the front of the wave departs slightly before the end of it. If the source's velocity v changes even minutely during that interval — that is, if the source is accelerating or decelerating, as any orbiting or otherwise bound source is — then under LG = c ± v the front and the end of the wave travel at different speeds. Over a long journey the wave therefore stretches or compresses: its wavelength changes en route, and the change accumulates in proportion to the path length.

Three consequences follow immediately, and they are what give the idea its reach:

  • The observed line shifts of accelerating sources are not Doppler shifts but Delta-Lambda shifts, and can be far larger, because they accumulate over distance rather than being fixed at emission.
  • Redshift grows with distance as a matter of course, with no expansion of space required — as Pernes puts it, "the Hubble effect sends its regards." The cosmological redshift becomes a propagation effect, aligning his position with the wider redshift-anomaly tradition on this wiki.
  • Because the effect distorts the apparent timing of a source's orbital positions, it can mimic orbital motion that is not there, or conceal motion that is.

Applications

Spectroscopic "binary" stars and Algol. Pernes argues that many spectroscopic binaries are not binaries at all but Sun–planet systems, whose radial-velocity curves are Delta-Lambda effects rather than Doppler curves — which, if correct, answers de Sitter's objection at its root by denying that the observed curves measure orbital velocity in the first place. He treats Algol's long-uninterpreted line shifts as positive evidence, calculating orbital-timing compressions and extensions of the order of 14 to 140 minutes, within the range of Algol's observed brightness variations.

Pulsars and pulsating variables. The same mechanism is applied to short- and long-period "pulsation" variables and to pulsars and double pulsars, in the work "Pulsare und 'Pulsations'-Veränderliche beweisen: LG=c±v gemäß Emissionstheorie", where he also addresses the standard argument from binary pulsars against emission theory.

Quasars and the cosmological redshift. Quasars, on his account, are not enormously distant objects of impossible luminosity fleeing at relativistic speed, but ordinary objects whose extreme redshifts are produced by a braked Delta-Lambda effect. This dissolves the quasar luminosity problem at a stroke, and connects to the redshift-periodicity anomalies he also cites.

The Pioneer anomaly. The unexplained blueshift in the Pioneer probes' radio signals, conventionally interpreted as an anomalous sunward acceleration, is on his analysis a Delta-Lambda effect arising because the probes were decelerating in the Sun's gravitational field while transmitting — so the beginning and end of each wave left at slightly different speeds. He treats this as his second experimental proof after GPS, and as the bridge from a local anomaly to the cosmic redshift.

The flyby anomaly. In "Die Lösung des Flyby-Rätsels beweist: LG=c±v" (2013) he argues that the anomalous velocity changes measured during spacecraft Earth-flybys have been misattributed to defects in Newtonian celestial mechanics, when they in fact demonstrate both LG = c ± v and the entrained, co-rotating medium. His comment on the literature is characteristic: whenever a "new physics" was said to be needed, it was always assumed the answer must lie beyond relativity rather than before it.

GPS. Pernes regarded GPS as an experimentum crucis — a billion-dollar, exquisitely engineered, continuously repeated experiment which the relativists themselves had nominated as confirmation, and which he argued convicts them. His technical claim concerns the receiver's correlation procedure: the incoming satellite signal is Doppler-shifted to frequency f′ = f(1 ± v/c), and the receiver generates a matching comparison signal and slides it in one-chip steps until correlation. A chip has a length of one microsecond in the unshifted frequency, but a length of 1 μs × f/f′ in the shifted signal actually arriving. The receiver nevertheless multiplies the step count by the unshifted one microsecond, and so obtains not the true travel time t but a pseudo travel time tps larger or smaller by exactly the factor (1 ± v/c). Multiplying that pseudo-time by c gives the correct distance only because the two errors cancel — which, Pernes argues, is precisely what one expects if the signal really travels at c ± v and is being measured with a c-based ruler. The system works, on his reading, by accident of compensating errors rather than by confirming light-speed invariance.

The muon lifetime. In "Experimentelle Widerlegung der Speziellen Relativitätstheorie" (2011) he attacks the CERN muon-lifetime measurements as inadequate to establish the relativistic curve, on the ground that lifetimes were reported at essentially two velocities (rest and 0.9994 c) while determining a curved function requires at least three points. He proposed instead that the increased decay probability of decelerated high-speed muons is a collisional effect. Pernes pursued this claim with unusual vehemence, filing criminal complaints against CERN physicists — an episode that did his broader case no favours and is not representative of the rest of his work.

Other applications. Further papers treat the excess perihelion advances as a consequence of mass change rather than curved spacetime ("Massenänderung…Periheldrehungen"), the meaning of the Lorentz factor ("Was √(1−v²/c²) wirklich bedeutet"), the optical Doppler effect, and — in his last piece — the 2019 Event Horizon Telescope image ("Der Fake mit dem Schwarzen Loch").

Reception

Pernes's work circulated almost entirely within the German-language relativity-criticism community. It was hosted and discussed by Kritische Stimmen zur Relativitätstheorie (kritik-relativitaetstheorie.de), which reproduced several of his papers, and debated at length on the Das Prinzip des Seins forum; he is listed among relativity critics on Mark Weger's index of Gegner der Relativitätstheorie. He is included in Jean de Climont's Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.

He received no mainstream engagement whatever — a fact that is unsurprising given that he never submitted to a journal, and one he would have regarded as confirming his thesis about the epicycle system rather than as a defect of method. Even within the dissident community he was a somewhat isolated figure: emission theory has few modern defenders, since most critics of relativity prefer a stationary or partially entrained ether to a source-dependent light speed, and Pernes's insistence on both — a co-rotating medium and LG = c ± v — put him at odds with the ether camp as well as the relativists, as he cheerfully acknowledged.

Judged on its own terms, the program has the virtue his Copernican framing claims for it: a single stated mechanism, the Delta-Lambda effect, is applied consistently across a dozen unrelated anomalies without the introduction of a new adjustable entity for each — which is more parsimony than he was granting to the standard model. Whether the mechanism survives quantitative confrontation with the binary-star and binary-pulsar data that killed Ritz's original theory is the question his critics would press, and it is not one he can now be asked.

Works

All of Pernes's papers were self-published on his website, which is now defunct; the links below point to the Internet Archive.

  • 2019 - "Der Fake mit dem Schwarzen Loch" (Read in full)
  • 2013 - "Der Sagnac-Effekt und LG=c±v gemäß Emissionstheorie" (Read in full)
  • 2013 - "Die Lösung des Flyby-Rätsels beweist: LG=c±v" (Read in full)
  • 2012 - "Pulsare und 'Pulsations'-Veränderliche beweisen: LG=c±v gemäß Emissionstheorie" (Read in full)
  • 2011 - "Die schwachsinnigen Grundlagen der Relativitätstheorien" (Read in full)
  • 2011 - "Die Pioneer-Anomalie beweist: LG=c±v gemäß Emissionstheorie" (Read in full)
  • n.d. - "Massenänderung und Periheldrehungen" (Read in full)
  • n.d. - "Der optische Doppler" (Read in full)

Abstracts

oder: Wovon de Sitter noch keine Ahnung hatte... ]]" (Read in full)

See also

References

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