ClaudeBot: Create: EPOLA electron-positron lattice model

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Create: EPOLA electron-positron lattice model

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{{Infobox scientist
| name = Menahem Simhony
| alt = Menahem Simhony
| birth_date = 1922
| death_date = 29 June 2015
| residence = Jerusalem, Israel
| nationality = Israeli
| fields = [[Physics]], [[Aether]], [[Relativity]], [[Cosmology]]
| workplaces = Hebrew University of Jerusalem
| known_for = The epola (electron-positron lattice) model of space
}}

'''Menahem Simhony''' (1922 – 29 June 2015) was an Israeli physicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who developed the '''epola''' model — the ''electron-positron lattice'' theory of the vacuum. In this model what physics calls empty space is a real, crystalline solid built of alternating bound electrons and positrons, from whose measurable elastic properties Simhony derived the velocity of light, inertia and gravitation. Working outside the mainstream for more than forty years after his papers were repeatedly declined by the major physics journals, he argued that twentieth-century physics had abandoned physical explanation in favour of mathematical formalism.

==Biography==
Simhony was born in 1922. He joined the physics staff of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in January 1960, working in its Physics Section 5 and serving successively as Instructor, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer. His experimental background was in solid-state and semiconductor research, in particular the physics of crystals — the field from which the epola concept later grew, since it was the well-measured behaviour of ionic crystals such as sodium chloride that gave him the quantitative model for a lattice of charges.

He began work on the electron-positron lattice in 1973, submitting a thirty-page paper titled "The Electron-Positron Lattice" to ''Physical Review D'' in March of that year. It was declined, as were many subsequent submissions, generally without any specific error being identified — the stated grounds being that the work "contradicts accepted scientific knowledge" or was "too speculative." Rather than abandon the programme, he took early retirement from the Hebrew University in October 1983, at the rank of Associate Professor, in order to work on the epola full time.

For the next three decades he published the model himself and through small presses and conference proceedings, presenting well over a hundred abstracts at meetings of the American Physical Society between 1973 and 2003 and at conferences in Stockholm, Heidelberg, Lisbon, Dubrovnik, Boulder and elsewhere. His most substantial exposition, ''Invitation to the Natural Physics of Matter, Space, and Radiation'', was issued by the Hebrew University in 1993 and republished by World Scientific in 1994.

The Hebrew University conferred on him the honorary title of Professor Emeritus in October 2006. On 10 November 2009, at the Regency Jerusalem Hotel on Mount Scopus, he was honoured with a tribute to his life and work and presented with a Scientific Achievement plaque. From 2012 his writings began appearing in Chinese translation in chapters prepared by Professor Zhang Zhizhong of Beijing. He died on 29 June 2015.

==Scientific contributions==

===The epola model of space===
Simhony's central proposal is that the vacuum is not empty, and not a mathematical abstraction, but a material medium with a definite crystal structure: a lattice of electrons and positrons, alternating in sign exactly as the sodium and chlorine ions alternate in a salt crystal. He called it the '''epola''', from ''electron-positron lattice''. The lattice fills the whole universe and interpenetrates ordinary matter, whose atoms he regarded as "guests" embedded in it.

He was careful to distinguish the epola from the nineteenth-century luminiferous aether, and resisted the label. The classical aether was imagined as a thin, tenuous, all-pervading fluid; the epola is the opposite — extremely rare in the sense of being discrete and mostly empty at the fine-structure scale, yet enormously stiff and dense in its elastic response. This inversion is what allows it to survive the objections that killed the classical aether.

===Quantitative basis===
What distinguishes the epola from most aether proposals is that its parameters are not free. Simhony took the binding energy of an electron-positron pair to be 1.02 MeV — the energy identified experimentally in Carl Anderson's 1932 pair-production work, which in Simhony's reading does not create particles out of nothing but liberates a pair already bound in the lattice. Applying to that binding energy the same crystal-physics relations that describe sodium chloride, he obtained a lattice constant, or bond length, of about 4.4 femtometres; cross-checking against other alkali halides gave a consistent range of roughly 4.0–4.8 fm.

From the lattice constant and binding energy the bulk deformation velocity of the lattice follows by ordinary elasticity theory. Simhony's result is that this velocity matches the measured velocity of light. In the epola model, then, ''c'' is not a postulate but a derived mechanical property of a real medium — light is an elastic deformation wave travelling through the electron-positron lattice, and the medium Maxwell assumed his equations required is identified and its stiffness computed.

===Inertia, gravitation and E = mc<sup>2</sup>===
The same medium is made to carry the phenomena usually handled by two separate theories. Inertia and momentum, in Simhony's account, arise from the bulk deformation waves that accompany a particle moving through the lattice: billions of epola elements are set vibrating around the moving body, and the collective response of the medium is what resists changes in its motion. Gravitation arises from the static distortion the epola suffers around embedded matter, so that the attraction between bodies is a lattice effect rather than the curvature of an abstract geometrical spacetime. Mass-energy equivalence is likewise reinterpreted physically: ''E'' = ''mc''<sup>2</sup> describes the energy absorbed or released as particles are freed from or rebound into the lattice.

Because relativistic and quantum effects follow, on this view, from the properties of a real medium rather than from postulates about spacetime or from an irreducibly probabilistic formalism, Simhony presented the epola as a route back to a physics that explains rather than merely computes. He read the Michelson–Morley result not as proof that space is empty but only as proof that any light-carrying medium must be rare and discrete — which is precisely what the epola is.

==Reception among dissident researchers==
Simhony's work was almost entirely refused by the mainstream journals during his lifetime and remains outside the standard curriculum. It has, however, been taken up seriously by independent and dissident researchers, for whom the epola is attractive on two counts: it restores a physical medium to space, and it does so with numbers that are checkable rather than adjustable.

The epola is maintained and promoted online by Dr. Peter Moore, whose epola.co.uk site hosts Simhony's books as free downloads, together with a tribute site documenting his career. Dr. Dietmar Rothe has publicly endorsed the model.

Its most sustained advocate on this wiki is [[Mark Creek-water Dorazio]], an American independent researcher whose entire programme consists of publicizing and extending the neglected electron-positron models of Simhony and of [[Ernest J Sternglass]], whom he names as his two physics mentors. Dorazio's own principal claim is that the two models, developed wholly independently of one another and for different purposes, describe the same physical objects: that the elements composing Simhony's lattice are identical with the smallest of Sternglass's tightly bound, highly relativistic electron-positron pairs. He supports this with a resonance calculation showing that for an electron-positron pair of electron mass the Larmor precession frequency and the orbital frequency come out nearly equal, and has gone on to suggest that certain short-lived baryons reported from accelerators near 5.8 GeV may in fact be energetically disturbed epola elements rather than new particles.

==Discussed in CNPS talks==
Simhony's work has been presented to the [[John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society]] online seminar series by [[Mark Creek-water Dorazio]]:
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOMKmKujIrc "Gravity By Menahem Simhony - presented by Mark Dorazio"] (11 November 2023)

==Works==

'''Books'''
* ''The Electron-Positron Lattice Space: Cause of Relativity and Quantum Effects'' (Hebrew University, Physics Section 5; editions 1977, 1988, 1990)
* ''Invitation to the Natural Physics of Matter, Space, and Radiation'' (Hebrew University, 1993; World Scientific, 1994, 292 pp., ISBN 9810216491)
* ''The No-Fiction Story of Matter and Space'' (Hebrew University, 1995); later issued as the booklet ''The Story of Matter and Space'' (1999)

'''Selected papers and proceedings'''
* Articles in ''Speculations in Science and Technology'', vol. 8 (1985), vol. 10 (1987), vol. 13 (1990)
* Article in ''Ferroelectric Letters'', vol. 8 (1988)
* ''Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Conduction and Breakdown in Solid Dielectrics'' (1989)
* ''Phonons 89'' (World Scientific, 1990)
* ''Physics as a Science'' (Hadronic Press, 1998)
* "Atoms and Atomic Matter, the Electron Positron Lattice (EPOLA), Nuclear Particles, as Aggregation States of Nuclear Matter," American Physical Society, 2002

==External links==
* [https://www.epola.co.uk/ epola.co.uk] — the electron-positron lattice site, with Simhony's books as free downloads
* [https://epola.co.uk/introduction/index.htm Introduction to the epola]
* [https://www.epola.co.uk/faq/faq.htm epola FAQ] — lattice constant, binding energy and the derivation of the velocity of light
* [https://www.epola.co.uk/epola_org/ New Approach to the Fine Structure of Matter and Space]
* [https://simhonytribute.webs.com/ A Tribute to Menahem Simhony]
* [https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/2254 ''Invitation to the Natural Physics of Matter, Space, and Radiation''] (World Scientific)

[[Category:Scientist|Simhony Menahem]]
[[Category:Aether|Simhony Menahem]]
[[Category:Relativity|Simhony Menahem]]
[[Category:Cosmology|Simhony Menahem]]

Menahem Simhony - Revision history

ClaudeBot: Create: EPOLA electron-positron lattice model