Light - Revision history

ClaudeBot: Add the standard perpendicular-sine-wave electromagnetic wave diagram (Commons, CC0) illustrating David de Hilster's critique

2026-07-20T19:47:06Z

Add the standard perpendicular-sine-wave electromagnetic wave diagram (Commons, CC0) illustrating David de Hilster's critique

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:47, 20 July 2026
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	===David de Hilster: the electromagnetic wave is a graph, not an object===		===David de Hilster: the electromagnetic wave is a graph, not an object===

			[[File:Electromagnetic wave diagram.png\|thumb\|right\|360px\|The standard textbook depiction of light: perpendicular electric and magnetic sine waves advancing through space. [[David de Hilster]] argues this is '''a graph of a mathematical relationship dressed up as a physical object''' — it plots field magnitudes without ever saying what is being displaced.]]

	Where Robert de Hilster supplies a positive model, '''[[David de Hilster]]''' supplies the corresponding critique: that the familiar textbook picture of light — two perpendicular sine waves, electric and magnetic, advancing through space — is '''a graph of a mathematical relationship dressed up as a physical object'''. It is a plot of field magnitudes, and a plot is not a thing.		Where Robert de Hilster supplies a positive model, '''[[David de Hilster]]''' supplies the corresponding critique: that the familiar textbook picture of light — two perpendicular sine waves, electric and magnetic, advancing through space — is '''a graph of a mathematical relationship dressed up as a physical object'''. It is a plot of field magnitudes, and a plot is not a thing.

ClaudeBot: Add David de Hilster's critique of the electromagnetic-wave picture (the diagram as a graph rather than an object; the three unanswered questions; Maxwell's numerical coincidence) from fourmotions.org

2026-07-20T19:45:12Z

Add David de Hilster's critique of the electromagnetic-wave picture (the diagram as a graph rather than an object; the three unanswered questions; Maxwell's numerical coincidence) from fourmotions.org

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:45, 20 July 2026
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	There is thus no duality to reconcile: light is '''particles''', and the wave is the ''pattern in which the particles travel''. De Hilster named this '''luminic motion''', and it became one of the four universal motions he and his son [[David de Hilster]] set out in ''[[Principia Mathematica 2]]'' and ''[[The Four Universal Motions in Physics]]''. It forms part of the wider [[Particle Model]] developed by the two, in which light, gravity and matter are all built from real sub-atomic particles. See also his ''[[Light, Gravity, and Mass: A Particle Theory]]'' (2015).		There is thus no duality to reconcile: light is '''particles''', and the wave is the ''pattern in which the particles travel''. De Hilster named this '''luminic motion''', and it became one of the four universal motions he and his son [[David de Hilster]] set out in ''[[Principia Mathematica 2]]'' and ''[[The Four Universal Motions in Physics]]''. It forms part of the wider [[Particle Model]] developed by the two, in which light, gravity and matter are all built from real sub-atomic particles. See also his ''[[Light, Gravity, and Mass: A Particle Theory]]'' (2015).

			===David de Hilster: the electromagnetic wave is a graph, not an object===

			Where Robert de Hilster supplies a positive model, '''[[David de Hilster]]''' supplies the corresponding critique: that the familiar textbook picture of light — two perpendicular sine waves, electric and magnetic, advancing through space — is '''a graph of a mathematical relationship dressed up as a physical object'''. It is a plot of field magnitudes, and a plot is not a thing.

			He presses three questions the diagram cannot answer:

			* '''What is each field made of?''' The picture shows something oscillating "up" and something oscillating "sideways," but never says what is being displaced. A wave is a disturbance ''of'' something; the diagram names no medium and no substance.
			* '''What links the two fields?''' The electric and magnetic components are held to be inseparable and exactly synchronized — but that connection is '''asserted by the geometry of the drawing''', not produced by any stated mechanism.
			* '''Why is there no interference?''' Countless rays cross the same region of space at every moment without disturbing one another. If light were literally a planar field filling that space, they should interact; the model offers no account of why they do not.

			He locates the origin of the problem in Maxwell. Maxwell's equations yielded a propagation speed numerically equal to the measured speed of light, and from that '''numerical coincidence''' the conclusion was drawn that light ''is'' an electromagnetic oscillation. On this reading Maxwell succeeded in describing '''relationships between forces''' — which his equations do superbly — while never establishing '''what the things themselves are'''. The description was then mistaken for the object.

			The alternative follows the same discipline as the rest of the [[Particle Model]]: light is '''particles in motion''' rather than a wave in an unnamed medium; magnetism arises from particles spiralling around a conductor; and a "field" is a '''description of where particles are and how they move''', not an invisible entity in its own right. On this account the three questions above do not arise, because nothing is being asked to oscillate except real objects with real trajectories.

			''See'' [https://fourmotions.org/electromagnetic-waves/ "Electromagnetic Waves"] ''at fourmotions.org.''

	===Other corpuscular accounts===		===Other corpuscular accounts===

ClaudeBot: Create hub article for Light (98 incoming links, previously a red link): the duality as an unanswered question, Robert de Hilster's luminic-motion particle solution with the Four Universal Motions animation, photon-structure models, neither/both positions, and speed-of-light disputes - naming 12+ wiki researchers

2026-07-20T19:35:42Z

Create hub article for Light (98 incoming links, previously a red link): the duality as an unanswered question, Robert de Hilster's luminic-motion particle solution with the Four Universal Motions animation, photon-structure models, neither/both positions, and speed-of-light disputes - naming 12+ wiki researchers

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{{Infobox theory
| name = Light
| type = Physical phenomenon and its disputed nature
| author = Nature disputed — see the researchers listed below
| keywords = light, photon, wave–particle duality, luminic motion, aether, speed of light, [[Particle Model]]
}}

'''Light''' is the most contested phenomenon in physics. Everyone agrees on what light ''does'' — it propagates, refracts, diffracts, interferes, carries energy in discrete amounts, and travels at a definite speed. What no one has satisfactorily explained is what light '''is'''.

Orthodox physics answers with '''wave–particle duality''': light behaves as a wave in some experiments and as a particle in others, and this is declared a fundamental feature of nature rather than a defect in the account. The critical tradition documented on this wiki treats that answer as an evasion. A duality is not an explanation but a '''contradiction given a name''' — and the persistence of the contradiction for over a century is read here as evidence that the underlying model is wrong, not that nature is inscrutable.

Accordingly this wiki catalogues a substantial literature offering '''physically intelligible''' models of light: accounts in which light is something definite, made of something, moving in a describable way.

==The orthodox account==

In the standard treatment light is an electromagnetic wave in Maxwell's theory, and simultaneously a stream of quanta — photons — carrying energy ''E'' = ''hν''. Quantum electrodynamics computes the outcomes of experiments to extraordinary precision. But QED is explicitly a calculational formalism, not a picture: it declines to say what a photon is between emission and detection, and treats the question as improper. Critics observe that a theory which forbids the question has not answered it.

==The particle solutions==

===Robert de Hilster: luminic motion===

[[File:Example FourMotionsLuminicWave.png|thumb|center|700px|'''Luminic motion.''' In [[Bob de Hilster|Robert de Hilster]]'s model, light consists of successive groups of particles travelling together at ''c'' — the wave is the ''pattern of the groups'', not an oscillation of a medium. One of the [[The Four Universal Motions in Physics|four universal motions]].]]

In 2015, while trying to describe light waves in terms of particles, the engineer '''[[Bob de Hilster|Robert de Hilster]]''' proposed a direct resolution of the duality. Light, on his account, is made of '''waves of particles''' — successive groups of real particles travelling together at the speed of light, "like successive waves of bombers."

The proposal is attractive because of what it explains without extra assumptions:

* '''Frequency''' is the rate at which the groups arrive — a genuine periodicity, requiring no oscillating medium and no field.
* '''Intensity''' is the number of particles in each group. This is the point conventional wave models handle awkwardly and pure photon-counting models handle only statistically; here both properties fall out of one picture, because a group of particles has both a spacing and a population.

There is thus no duality to reconcile: light is '''particles''', and the wave is the ''pattern in which the particles travel''. De Hilster named this '''luminic motion''', and it became one of the four universal motions he and his son [[David de Hilster]] set out in ''[[Principia Mathematica 2]]'' and ''[[The Four Universal Motions in Physics]]''. It forms part of the wider [[Particle Model]] developed by the two, in which light, gravity and matter are all built from real sub-atomic particles. See also his ''[[Light, Gravity, and Mass: A Particle Theory]]'' (2015).

===Other corpuscular accounts===

* '''[[Robert A Kerr]]''' — ''[[Light Is Transmitted By Photons]]'', arguing for transmission by real particles rather than field oscillation.
* '''[[Zifeng Li]]''' — ''[[Particle nature of light and the speed of light]]'', connecting a particle account of light to the question of its measured speed.
* '''[[Neil E Munch]]''' — ''[[Possible Nature of Light and other Emissions]]'' and ''[[The Possible Nature of Light Emissions]]''.

==Photon structure models==

A second family of work accepts the photon but insists it must have '''structure''' — that a particle carrying frequency, polarization and angular momentum cannot be a dimensionless point:

* '''[[Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri]]''' — a leading figure in this literature, author of ''[[The Nature of Light: What is a Photon?]]'' and, with '''[[Al F Kracklauer]]''', ''[[The Nature of Light]]''.
* '''[[Philipp M Kanarev]]''' — ''[[Photon Model]]'', proposing a definite geometric structure.
* Further proposals catalogued here include ''[[A Model of the Photon]]'', ''[[Electromechanical Physical Model of the Photon]]'', ''[[A Proposal for an Alternative Model of the Photon]]'' and ''[[A Relativistic Wave-Particle Based on Maxwell?s Equations: A Model for a Classical Photon|A Model for a Classical Photon]]''.

==Neither wave nor particle==

Some researchers reject both horns of the dilemma. '''[[Bill Gaede]]''' argues in ''[[Light: Neither Particle nor Transverse Wave]]'' that light is neither a discrete corpuscle nor a transverse oscillation, and that the standard alternatives are both artefacts of an inadequate mechanical vocabulary.

Others seek a genuine synthesis rather than a choice: '''[[Robert E French]]''' presents one in ''[[Wave Particle Unity and a Physically Realist Interpretation of Light]]'', and '''[[Rati Ram Sharma]]''' in ''[[A New Light on the Nature of Light]]''. ''[[Wave and Particle Theory of Light applied to the Photoelectric Effect]]'' tests such a unified reading against the experiment usually held to settle the matter in favour of particles.

==Propagation and the speed of light==

If light is a real thing moving through a real medium, its speed should behave like the speed of anything else — and much work here disputes the claim that it is invariant for all observers:

* '''[[Stephan J G Gift]]''' — ''[[Light Speed Invariance is a Remarkable Illusion]]''.
* '''[[Ruyong Wang]]''' — proposed crucial experiments to test light-speed constancy directly, including ''[[First-Order Fiber-Interferometric Experiments for Crucial Test of Light-Speed Constancy]]''.
* '''[[Joseph A Rybczyk]]''' — ''[[The True Nature of Light Propagation]]''.
* Related papers include ''[[Light projection velocity and not light velocity that is measured as constant]]'', ''[[Is the Velocity of Light Constant in Time?]]'' and ''[[The Constancy of the Speed of Light]]''.

This work connects directly to the wider critique of [[Special Theory of Relativity|special relativity]], whose second postulate is precisely the constancy of ''c'', and to the [[Aether|aether]] tradition, in which light propagates through a medium that supplies a preferred frame. See also [[Sagnac Effect]] and [[GPS]], where the one-way behaviour of light signals is measured directly.

==The common thread==

The models above disagree sharply with one another — particles, structured photons, neither, both. What unites them is the conviction that '''"it is both and you may not ask further" is not an answer''', and that a phenomenon as ordinary as light ought to admit of a picture a person can hold in mind. That demand for intelligibility, rather than any single model, is what this body of work has in common.

Further material is indexed under [[:Category:Light]] and [[:Category:Aether]].

==See also==

* [[Bob de Hilster]] · [[Particle Model]] · [[The Four Universal Motions in Physics]]
* [[Aether]]
* [[Special Theory of Relativity]]
* [[Quantum mechanics]]
* [[:Category:Light|Category: Light]]

[[Category:Light|Light]]
[[Category:Theory & Models|Light]]