Richard Benish
Richard Benish | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | November 23, 1955 |
| Residence | Eugene, OR, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Known for | Gravity, Relativity, Space Generation Model |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Gravitation, Physics |
Richard J. Benish (born November 23, 1955) is an American independent researcher in gravitation based in Eugene, Oregon. He is best known for developing the "Space Generation Model" (SGM) of gravity and for advocating a laboratory experiment intended to test the motion of a test object inside a massive body, an idea he traces to a question first posed by Galileo in 1632. His work departs from both Newtonian gravity and general relativity and lies outside the scientific mainstream.
Biography
Benish is a self-described independent investigator who has pursued gravitation research outside of any conventional academic or institutional affiliation. He conducted much of his early literature research at the University of California, Berkeley libraries and corresponded with physicists in an effort to determine whether the experiment he envisioned had ever been performed. He operates a website, Gravitation Lab (gravitationlab.com), through which he publishes and promotes his ideas, and he has posted numerous papers to preprint and repository services including viXra, PhilArchive, Academia.edu and ResearchGate.
Scientific contributions
Benish reports that in the mid-1980s he concluded that a new idea he had been developing about gravity could be tested by a laboratory experiment. The proposed experiment tests a prediction common to both Newtonian gravity and general relativity: given a uniformly dense sphere with a hole bored through its center, a test object released at the surface is conventionally expected to oscillate back and forth through the center. Benish argues that this prediction has never been directly verified by experiment, describing what he calls an "empirical gap" in gravitational physics, and he proposes an apparatus—which he has called a "Small Low-Energy Non-Collider" and a modified Cavendish balance—to carry it out.
In Benish's "Space Generation Model," gravity is conceived not as spacetime curvature but as a process in which matter continuously generates space through an outward motion, with the cumulative effect being an exponential expansion of the universe. He has argued that the model gives new meaning to the so-called "large numbers coincidences" and relates the gravitational constant to other physical constants. Whereas standard theory predicts an object dropped into the central hole would oscillate indefinitely, the SGM predicts it would stop short of the center. Benish has also written on a derivation of a maximum force, Fmax = c4/4G, which he presents as consistent with general relativity, and he has suggested that proper-motion versus line-of-sight velocity comparisons in globular clusters show a pattern consistent with his model, while acknowledging such observations are inconclusive. These ideas have not been accepted by the mainstream physics community.
Abstracts
- 2009 - "Maximum Force Derived from Basic Physical Principles" (Read in full)
- 2009 - "Space Generation Model of Gravity, Cosmic Numbers & Dark Energy" (Read in full)
- 2009 - "Strong Field Gravity in the Space Generation Model" (Read in full)
- 2008 - "Empirical Gap in Newtonian Gravity" (Read in full)
- 2008 - "Light and Clock Behavior in the Space Generation Model of Gravitation" (Read in full)
- 2008 - "Space Generation Model of Gravitation and the Large Numbers Coincidences"
- 2000 - "Modified Cavendish Balance for Testing Gravitational Interior Solution" (Read in full)
External links
- Gravitation Lab – Benish's personal research website
- Laboratory Test of a Class of Gravity Models on PhilPapers