What Part of Coulomb's Law Don't You Understand?
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | What Part of Coulomb's Law Don't You Understand? |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Leslee A Kulba |
| Keywords | Coulombs Law |
| Published | 2004 |
| Journal | Electric Spacecraft Journal |
| Number | 37 |
| No. of pages | 10 |
| Pages | 1-11 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The physical universe consists solely of nucleons with unit charge and mass inextricably connected. Electromagnetic radiation is hypothesized to be a natural consequence of charge obeying Coulomb's Law and mass obeying Newton's Law of gravitation. This is equivalent to saying that the net distribution of charge in the universe is constant and momentum is conserved.
Overview
Leslee Kulba's 2004 paper in the Electric Spacecraft Journal is a radical exercise in subtraction. It asks what physics would look like if one kept only two force laws — Coulomb's law and Newton's law of gravitation — and one kind of constituent, particles carrying "either a positive or a negative quantum of charge, and one of two allowable masses, depending on its charge". Everything else is to be derived or discarded. The photon goes, the field goes, the wave goes; muons, "wavicles" and wormholes are dismissed at the outset as "twentieth-century constructs" whose fundamentality the reader is asked to set aside.
In place of the electromagnetic field Kulba offers the coulomb chain reaction. His two governing principles are that "the net distribution of charge in the universe remains constant" and that momentum is conserved. If a charge moves, every other charge in the universe learns of it instantaneously (through the potential, which he takes to be a real and instantaneous quantity) and adjusts. Actually completing the adjustment takes time, because matter must traverse a continuous path. Light is that adjustment propagating: "the result would resemble the waves sports fans make in stadiums as each person in a row stands up in succession." The rest of the paper works this picture through reflection, refraction, dispersion, polarization, diffraction and interference, and then applies it to relativity, the photon, the photoelectric effect and the EPR correlations. Kulba is explicit about the epistemic status of the whole thing — "as with any speculation, it will be constructive to treat the hypotheses as such" — and invites refutation.
The argument
Two properties, inextricably connected
Kulba takes the electron and proton as the constituents, treats the neutron as composite (citing Bergman and Lucas), and assigns each particle a charge of 1.60×10−19 C and a mass — 9.11×10−31 kg for the electron, 1.67×10−27 kg for the proton. He stresses that the exact values do not matter to the argument; what matters is that the proton is "roughly 1833 times" the more massive, and that charge and mass on a given particle can never be separated.
Gravity, in his treatment, does all the work usually assigned to inertia. "A foreign, electrically-neutral mass introduced into a universe would move under the influence of the positions and motions of all other bodies… The pursuit of such a course by a body is referred to as its inertia. Any forces attributable to inertia are therefore only consequences of Newton's law of gravitation." Mach's principle, momentum conservation and Newton's second and third laws are all read as statements of the gravitational law summed over the universe.
Why the electron moves
The key move comes with two atoms. If both are held in place by the rest of the universe, "the easiest way for the two atoms to establish equilibrium with each other would be to alter the positions of their electrons", because — in Kulba's parenthesis — "protons are 1833 times more massive than electrons, so the Gm1m2/r2 force from the rest of the universe will be 1833 times greater on the protons." Extending this to a row of atoms gives the chain reaction: each atom's electron shifts, the next feels the change through an inverse-square force, and the disturbance travels. Ordinary jostling damps out quickly and passes unnoticed — Kulba speculates it may constitute "background effects that are taken for granted, such as the 4 K background radiation."
Frequency without energy levels
What survives damping is a standing wave. Kulba offers this in place of quantized energy levels: "If the time during which an electron remains at its furthest extent from the atomic nucleus is equal to, or harmonically related to, the time of transit back to its point of nearest nuclear approach, a standing-wave coulomb chain reaction will be established." Characteristic spectral lines then follow from a resonance condition between the relaxation time of the medium and the electron's transit time, without needing what he calls the "Ptolemaic crystalline spheres" of undergraduate quantum mechanics. Intensity is the number of atoms excited, not the degree of stretch — otherwise, he argues, one would need a further law to explain why the ratio of relaxation time to oscillation period stays fixed at every displacement.
Optics
Propagation speed is set by the medium: "EM advances only as electrical forces outweigh prior inertial forces at the wave front", so denser or more sluggish media propagate more slowly. Reflection is damping at an interface; a black surface damps entirely, a white one reflects across the spectrum, colour is a resonance condition. Refraction is momentum bookkeeping between reflected and transmitted portions, with bending arising because the lateral restraint from atoms flanking the advancing front exceeds the restraint along the normal. Polarizers work because some lattices damp one transverse direction. Two-slit interference is a matter of contradictory instructions: "each atom on the screen is receiving instructions from each excitation at the source twice", and where the two arrive 180° out of phase "the electron will balance the commands to net zero." Kulba notes explicitly that his account is indifferent to whether the electron is "a super-fast-orbiting speck of matter or a continuous blob".
Consequences for modern physics
Relativity becomes unnecessary: "Light cannot be pushed into light because an emitting vehicle is moving, but every molecule must wait its turn as before", so no Lorentz contraction or time dilation is needed to keep the speed constant. Photons are dispensed with: radiation momentum belongs to the electrons that carry the reaction, radiation pressure follows from the fact that the chain consists of expansions and not contractions, and the photoelectric effect could arise if chain reactions "constructively interfere to overcome the ionization energy". Entanglement is handled by economy: flipping one particle is a cheaper way for the universe to conserve momentum and charge distribution than realigning the whole half-space behind its partner.
For the instantaneity of the potential Kulba quotes David Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics at length, and appeals to the argument, associated with Eddington and pressed by Tom Van Flandern, that planetary orbits would spiral if bodies interacted with each other's retarded positions.
Assessment
The paper has real virtues as a piece of writing and as a piece of intellectual hygiene. Kulba states his premises, keeps them few, flags his speculations as speculations, and asks for empirical refutation rather than assent. His impatience with explanations that pile "multiple levels of inference beyond the realm of observation" is a legitimate discipline, and applied to optics it produces some genuinely clarifying passages — the observation that a laser beam is visible only by scattering, the insistence that rectilinear propagation names only the part of a spherical front aimed at the observer, and Table I's tidy reduction of transparency, blackness, colour, gloss and lustre to lattice properties. He is also right on two small factual points where the mainstream popular account is loose: a Crookes radiometer turns by thermal transpiration rather than radiation pressure, and a comet's ion tail is driven by the solar wind.
Several numbers in the paper check out. The interstellar density of about 1 particle/cm3 is right. The deuterium isotope shift he quotes at footnote 11, "1-2 Å shorter" than the hydrogen lines, is correct: the reduced-mass shift for the Balmer-α line is Δλ/λ ≈ me/2mp = 2.7×10−4, giving 1.8 Å at 6563 Å. But that result is a standard, exactly calculable consequence of nuclear recoil, and it is not evidence for gravity acting inside the atom — the gravitational attraction between a proton and an electron is smaller than the Coulomb attraction by Gmpme/ke2 = 4.4×10−40, which is why nobody includes it. The background temperature is 2.725 K, not 4 K, and it has a blackbody spectrum measured by COBE to better than 50 parts per million, which is not what a residue of undamped local jostling would look like.
The central mechanism rests on a confusion of force with acceleration. Kulba's reason for the electron rather than the proton doing the moving is that gravity from the rest of the universe pulls 1833 times harder on the proton. It does — and it produces exactly the same acceleration on both, since a = GM/r2 is independent of the falling body's mass. That is the equivalence principle, and Kulba relies on it elsewhere. So the gravitational grip of the universe supplies no differential restraint whatever, and Figure 2's caption is unsupported by its own reasoning. The electron does respond more readily, but the reason is its smaller inertia — precisely the quantity Kulba has just finished redefining as an effect of gravitation. Since inertia is the thing his framework must derive rather than assume, the mechanism is circular at its foundation.
The propagation model conflicts with the behaviour of light in vacuum. "Light does not exist outside of matter," and the rate of advance is "a function of the number of particles that must undergo the chain reaction over a given volume of space". But the refractive index of a gas obeys n − 1 ∝ density, so as the density falls the speed tends to a definite limit — and it is that limit, not the medium, that fixes c. In laboratory vacuum at 10−9 mbar there are about 107 molecules per cm3 against 1019 at atmospheric pressure, a range of 1012, over which the measured speed changes only by the 3×10−4 refractivity of air; on Kulba's account it should vary enormously. The same problem arises on the largest scale: intergalactic voids hold perhaps 10−6 particles/cm3, a million times sparser than the interstellar medium he cites, yet light crossing voids and light crossing clusters arrive with the same speed — gamma-ray-burst timing bounds any path- or energy-dependent variation at the 10−15 level. A medium theory of this kind also singles out a rest frame for the medium, and light speed relative to that frame has been shown isotropic by the Michelson–Morley experiment and, in modern optical-cavity versions, to parts in 1017.
The dispersion argument contradicts itself within a paragraph. Kulba correctly states that red light is bent furthest from the normal on entering a denser medium and violet least — that is, violet has the larger index. He then explains it by an impulse argument: "Lower-frequency oscillations require more time for completion at the interface… and more time spent undergoing the bending force leads to a greater deflection." Greater deflection means bent more toward the normal, which is what violet does, not red. The proposed mechanism predicts the opposite of the phenomenon it was introduced to explain.
The appeal to Griffiths undercuts itself. Kulba quotes the passage in full, and Griffiths' point in that passage is the reverse of Kulba's: the scalar potential V in the Coulomb gauge does respond instantaneously, but "V by itself is not a physically measurable quantity", and the measurable field E "will change only after sufficient time has elapsed for the 'news' to arrive." The instantaneity is a property of a gauge choice, not of nature, and the quoted authority says so on the page quoted. As for the orbital-spiralling argument, the standard resolution — worked out in detail by Carlip in 2000 — is that in a field theory of gravity the velocity-dependent terms cancel the naive aberration to high order, so stable orbits do not require instantaneous propagation; and the arrival times of the gravitational wave and the gamma-ray burst from the 2017 neutron-star merger GW170817, separated by 1.7 s after 130 million years, fix the speed of gravity to equal that of light to a few parts in 1015.
The photoelectric effect is the wrong evidence to invoke. A model in which chain reactions accumulate until they "constructively interfere to overcome the ionization energy" predicts an intensity threshold and a time delay at low intensity, and predicts electron energies that grow with intensity. What is measured is the opposite in all three respects: the maximum electron energy depends only on frequency, emission ceases below a frequency threshold no matter how bright the source, and Lawrence and Beams showed in 1928 that the delay is under 3×10−9 s even at intensities where a wave would need seconds to deliver the energy. Radiation pressure, likewise, is not merely inferred from radiometers: it was measured directly by Nichols and Hull in 1901, is used every day in optical tweezers, and propelled the IKAROS solar sail in 2010, in each case matching P = I/c.
On entanglement Kulba deserves a fairer hearing than the other topics allow. His model is explicitly and unashamedly nonlocal — instantaneous potentials, universe-wide bookkeeping — and Bell's theorem excludes local hidden-variable models, not nonlocal ones. In that narrow sense his account is not refuted by the Bell experiments, and it sits in the same family as Bohm's theory. The cost, which he does not discuss, is the same one Bohm's theory pays: a preferred frame, and hence a tension with the relativity he has already discarded on other grounds.
Finally, the ontological economy is purchased at a price the paper does not price. The muon whose fundamentality readers are asked to set aside is detected at sea level at roughly 1 per cm2 per minute, has a measured lifetime, a measured magnetic moment agreeing with theory to parts in 109, and — through the survival of atmospheric muons to the ground — furnishes one of the most direct demonstrations of the time dilation Kulba is trying to avoid. "All laws of physics can be derived from these simple principles" is asserted in the conclusion but nowhere shown; no quantitative prediction is derived anywhere in the paper, and no number is calculated and compared with a measurement. Kulba asks to be refuted with "data and logical connections thereto". The data exist; the paper's difficulty is that its own framework offers no calculation to set against them.