Gravitomagnetism: Successes in Explaining the Cosmos

Scientific Paper
Title	Gravitomagnetism: Successes in Explaining the Cosmos
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Thierry De Mees
Keywords	gravitomagnetism, gravity, bending of light, Mercury perihelion advance, meson lifetime increase, disc galaxies
Published	2010
No. of pages	41

Read the full paper here

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation: PART ONE

• To explain what Gravitomagnetism exactly is and how the magnetic part can be interpreted.
• To show that many cosmic issues can be explained by calculating it strictly, without other assumptions, just by using common sense.
• To show that the bending of light and the Mercury issue can be purely deduced and don't need to be gauges for a theory.

PART TWO

• Explain my current research, consisting of a new theory of forces: the Coriolis Gravity and Dynamics Theory.

Overview

This is a conference slide deck rather than a journal article — forty-one slides in which Thierry De Mees surveys the range of phenomena he claims to have accounted for using nothing but the gravitational analogue of Maxwell's equations. The starting point is Heaviside's observation that Coulomb's law and Newton's law have the same form, so that if one substitutes m for q and G for k_e, the whole apparatus of electromagnetism carries over: a set of Heaviside–Maxwell equations for gravity, and a Lorentz-type force law F = m₂(g₁ + v₂ × Ω₁). The second field Ω, which plays the role of the magnetic field, De Mees calls gyrotation; its units, he notes, are those of g with an extra factor of s/m — that is, s⁻¹.

De Mees is emphatic about what he is not doing. "No further assumptions! No further theories! Just simple maths and common sense!" The claim of Part One is that a long list of astronomical phenomena — the swivelling of orbits into equatorial planes, flat galactic rotation curves, the shapes of supernova remnants, the perihelion advance of Mercury, the deflection of starlight at the solar limb, Saturn's ring structure, the spacecraft fly-by anomaly, the meson lifetime increase — follow from these equations alone, with no relativity, no gauge choices, and no dark matter. Part Two sketches a further speculation, the Coriolis Gravity and Dynamics Theory, in which gravity itself is derived from a Coriolis effect on trapped light emitting gravitons.

The argument

Gyrotation

The four Heaviside–Maxwell equations are given directly: ∇ · g = −4πGρ; ∇ × Ω = −4πGj/c² + ∂g/∂t (up to the constants as De Mees writes them); ∇ · Ω = 0, so "there are no gyrotational monopoles"; and ∇ × g = −∂Ω/∂t. A linear mass flux is therefore encircled by a gyrotation field, Ω = 2Gṁ/Rc², and a circular mass flow produces a dipole field, Ω = (GI/r³c²)[ω − 3r(ω · r)/2r²], formally identical to a magnetic dipole.

The one point at which De Mees goes beyond the formal analogy concerns the reference frame. Since the force depends on velocity, a velocity must be defined relative to something. His answer is that "the 'local absolute velocity' of the mass is defined by an external gravity field": an external gravity field defines zero velocity, or in the case of an isolated rotating body, its own field does. He states the consequence bluntly — "the aether velocity of a mass is always zero."

Four effects, and a catalogue of applications

The first effect is orbital swivelling. Applying a_p = g_sun + v_p × Ω_sun to an inclined orbit gives a torque that drives it toward the equatorial plane of the central body: "Every planet's orbit swivels to the Sun's equator plane. Same occurs for: Saturn rings, disk galaxies. Gyrotation transmits angular momentum at a distance by gravity." From this he derives flat rotation curves without dark matter: for a spherical galaxy with a spinning centre the Keplerian v = √(GM₀/R) holds, but for a swivelled disc the enclosed mass grows with radius so that v = √(GnM₀/kR) is constant — the Milky Way's 235 km s⁻¹. The same gyrotational pressure on orbits is offered as the origin of the high density of the disc, local grouping and local voids.

The second effect concerns spin orientation: planets spinning in the same sense as the Sun are described as having unstable momentum, those spinning oppositely as stable. The third is internal: gyrotation produces surface compression forces which, combined with the centrifugal term, are compressive only within 35°16′ of the equator. De Mees writes the two components explicitly and defines a "critical compression radius" R_C = Gm/c², with compression where r ≤ R(5R_C/(6R − 3sin²α)) for a fast-spinning sphere. This is applied as a prediction attempt for the shape of supernova remnants, with η Carinae and the hourglass nebula of SN 1987A as illustrations. The fourth effect is molecular: like spins repel and opposite spins attract horizontally, with the reciprocity reversed vertically, giving a "natural preferential ordering inside the Earth" that he applies to the expanding Earth and to a stellar life cycle in which a star expands to a red giant as its spin slows, then re-accelerates and collapses to a white dwarf.

The two showpiece calculations are the classical tests. For Mercury, the perihelion advance comes from three terms — Newtonian gravity, a term in the Sun's velocity v₁ through the Milky Way, and a negligible term from the Sun's own rotation — evaluated with δ = v²/c²/26 and ⟨cos²α⟩ = ½ over a full orbit, eccentricity neglected. For light grazing the Sun the same three-term structure appears, with α the angle between the ray and the Sun's orbit and φ the solar latitude at which the ray passes. De Mees's point is that these come out "purely deduced" rather than as gauges fixed to match observation.

Further applications are listed in quick succession: the formation of Saturn's many thin rings from turbulence and separation under gyrotational pressure; the fly-by anomaly, with an explicit expression predicting a strong equatorward acceleration near the poles, a weak poleward one at 25° inclination, and nothing near 0° and 45°; vacillating stars in the halo of disc galaxies; preferential orbit and spin orientations of asteroids; orbital velocity about fast-spinning stars, v²/r = GM/r² + GIωv/r³c², causing velocity-dependent orbit precession; explosion-free fast-spinning stars held together by gyrotational compression; bursts in binaries fed by matter from a companion; and mass and light horizons for toroidal black holes, where he notes that the graph of the horizons at the equator "is mass-independent". Citing Oleg Jefimenko on gravity-field deformation from retardation, he offers the high-speed meson lifetime increase as a gyrotational compression effect, with a pressure p(r, θ) ∝ 3Gm²(1 − v²/c²)/4πr²c²(1 − (v²/c²)sin²θ)^3/2.

Part Two: Coriolis gravity

The closing slides report what De Mees calls a discovery: a relationship between the Sun's spin and its geometry, v_eq = πGm_Sun/c'R_eq, which he reads as meaning that "the rotational speed of a body is determined by its enclosed mass." He then proposes a mechanism. Particles are treated as trapped light which releases gravitons, and the Coriolis relation 2c × ω = −a is applied to three cases: a tangential graviton from particle 1 hitting particle 2 directly, which reproduces the Sun's spin rate; one hitting it indirectly along a spiral, which gives a₄ = −Gm₁/R² — "we get Newton's gravity law!"; and one returning to particle 1, giving F = m'a. The question he leaves is: "Are forces between particles just a Coriolis effect?"

An aside on strategy

One slide, headed "Between brackets", is advice rather than physics: "How to be accepted by Mainstream as a dissident? Don't say: GRT is wrong; I use Gravitomagnetism! But say: I use the Linear Weak Field Approximation of the General Relativity Theory," with Agop, Buzea and colleagues at Iaşi named as authors who "wrote many papers this way, accepted by mainstream, and could boost their studies on superconductivity."

Assessment

The attraction of this programme is real and easy to state. Gravitomagnetism is not a fringe idea — the same field appears in the linearised weak-field limit of general relativity as frame dragging, and it was measured directly by Gravity Probe B. De Mees's move is to take the Heaviside equations as fundamental in their own right rather than as an approximation, and then to push them much harder than usual, into regimes where nobody normally applies them: galactic discs, stellar interiors, supernova morphology, asteroid spin distributions. Some of the qualitative consequences are genuinely suggestive. That a gyrotational torque should pull inclined orbits toward the equatorial plane of a spinning central mass is the correct behaviour of a dipole field acting on a moving test mass, and the observation that this same mechanism ought to apply to Saturn's rings, to planetary orbits and to galactic discs alike is a legitimate unifying thought about why flattened systems are so common. The deck is admirably explicit about its equations — the compression criterion, the 35°16′ boundary, the fly-by expression with its predicted zeros at 0° and 45° — and a specific prediction with named zeros is a testable one, which is more than many alternative-gravity proposals offer.

The difficulties are severe, and most of them follow from the same source: the analogy is asserted rather than derived, and its one physically loaded assumption is never defended. Electromagnetism has two signs of charge; gravity has one. That single difference is what makes the electromagnetic field equations consistent with a vector potential and the gravitational field, in any full treatment, a tensor. De Mees notes the difference parenthetically — "besides the fact that masses always attract" — and proceeds as though it changes nothing. It changes a great deal: the factor-of-two structure of the gravitomagnetic field in general relativity, and the coefficient in the light-bending result, are consequences of gravity's spin-2 character, and cannot be recovered from a spin-1 analogy without inserting them by hand.

The frame problem is more serious still. The force law is velocity-dependent, so an answer to "velocity with respect to what?" is load-bearing for every number in the deck. De Mees's answer — that an external gravity field defines zero velocity, and that "the aether velocity of a mass is always zero" — is stated in a single line and never examined. It is not obvious that it is even well defined when several external fields are present, which is the generic case, and the Mercury and light-bending calculations depend on it directly: both take the Sun's velocity through the Milky Way v₁ as a physically meaningful quantity entering the force. That is a strong claim with an immediate consequence — the perihelion advance and the deflection would then depend on the orientation of the orbit relative to the galactic centre, and on the season, in a way that the general-relativistic prediction does not. The deck does not report that dependence being looked for, and the perihelion advance of Mercury is measured to a fraction of an arcsecond per century. Similarly, the ⟨cos²α⟩ = ½ averaging and the explicit "eccentricity neglected" mean the quoted agreement is at best order-of-magnitude, and no residual is given.

Several of the applications are asserted rather than calculated. The flat rotation curve is obtained not from the gyrotational force but from the assumption of concentric shells of equal mass M₀, which by construction makes enclosed mass proportional to radius and gives v = constant for ordinary Newtonian gravity; gyrotation enters only to explain why the galaxy is a disc in the first place. That is a legitimate contribution, but it is not a derivation of flat rotation curves without dark matter, and the deck presents it as one. The stellar life-cycle sequence, the ordering of molecules inside the Earth and the supernova shapes are qualitative pictures with no numbers attached, and the supernova slides show images without any comparison between predicted and observed geometry. The meson-lifetime claim is the most exposed: time dilation of muon and pion lifetimes is measured to be a function of γ alone, verified across many orders of magnitude in energy at accelerators and independent of the particle's mass, whereas a gyrotational self-compression effect must scale with Gm²/c² and is therefore vanishingly small for a meson — roughly forty orders of magnitude below what would be needed. No estimate of the magnitude is given.

Part Two is frankly speculative and does not hold together as stated. Deriving the inverse-square law from a Coriolis relation applied to gravitons emitted by trapped light involves treating ω, a and c as vectors in a relation, 2c × ω = −a, whose physical content is never established; the step from a₂ = −Gm₁/2πR² to a₄ = −Gm₁/R² is a factor of 2π introduced by the geometry of a spiral path that is drawn but not specified. De Mees marks these slides as "current research" and phrases the conclusion as a question, which is appropriate; they should be read as a sketch.

Finally, the "How to be accepted by Mainstream as a dissident?" slide deserves comment, since it is not incidental. Advising readers to present the work as the linear weak-field approximation of general relativity while privately holding that general relativity is wrong is advice to misrepresent one's own position in order to pass review. Whatever one thinks of the physics, this undercuts the deck's own repeated appeal to strictness and to deducing things purely; a case that must be disguised to be heard is not being tested. The honest version of the same point is available and stronger: the gravitomagnetic sector genuinely is common ground between the two frameworks, and the interesting question is exactly where taking Heaviside's equations as exact rather than approximate makes a difference that can be measured. De Mees's fly-by predictions, with their specific zeros, are the place to look; the rest of the deck would be more persuasive if it were narrowed to them.

See also

• Thierry De Mees
• Gravity
• General Relativity
• Special Relativity
• Electromagnetism
• James Clerk Maxwell
• Oleg D Jefimenko
• Dark Matter
• Expanding Earth
• Expansion Tectonics
• Aether
• Push Gravity
• Black Hole
• Isaac Newton