Peter Jackson

Peter A. Jackson
Born	1951 (age 74–75)
Residence	United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Known for	The Discrete Field Model (DFM); a classical/quasi-classical derivation of quantum optics and Bell inequality violations
Scientific career
Fields	Physics, Cosmology, Astronomy, Architecture
Institutions	Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; visiting student mentor, University of Kent at Canterbury and University for the Creative Arts

Peter A. Jackson (born 1951) is a British independent researcher, architect and observational cosmologist, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, best known in dissident physics circles for the Discrete Field Model (DFM) and for a long-running programme of work arguing that quantum optics, entanglement and violations of Bell's inequality can be reproduced by an ordinary classical mechanism, without invoking non-locality. He is one of the most persistent entrants in the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) essay competitions, with entries in every contest from 2009 to 2020, including a 2011 finalist placing and the top community peer score in 2015.

Biography

By his own account in his FQXi essay biographies, Jackson was born in 1951 and studied for some eleven years across the sciences, architecture, philosophy and engineering at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC), the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), and PCL/Westminster. He holds a Master of Philosophy and lists membership of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society and the Royal Institution, and is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, where his stated interests are astrophysics, plasma physics, observational cosmology, and aero- and hydrodynamics.

Professionally he worked as a consultancy head and lead consultant on major United Kingdom defence, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, energy and renewable-energy projects. He is now semi-retired and devotes himself to full-time research in physics and cosmology, while serving as a visiting student mentor at two universities — the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University for the Creative Arts. Outside science he has been a United Kingdom representative racing yachtsman and yacht club Flag Officer, a Governor of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and a rugby player and club chairman.

Jackson works entirely outside the institutional physics establishment. He describes his method as deliberately "naive" — looking at what is actually observed, without the layers of preconception he argues have accumulated in modern theory — and states his aim as finding a route to unification and simplification of physics by applying existing, well-established mechanisms in a new but logical way.

Scientific contributions

The Discrete Field Model

The Discrete Field Model (DFM) is Jackson's central proposal. It begins from the position that electromagnetic waves are variations in a property or medium we cannot directly know, and that physics should therefore confine itself to modelling what can be observed. Rather than a continuous background field filling all of space, the DFM treats space as populated by discrete fields — bounded regions defined by the ions, plasma and massive particles that actually occupy space over an enormous range of densities.

The physical core of the model is strong coupling, repolarisation and re-emission. When light crosses the boundary into a new medium or a new bounded region — a planetary ionosphere, a moving body of matter, a lens or a plate of glass — Jackson argues that the incoming signal couples strongly to the electrons of that medium, is absorbed and re-emitted, and leaves the boundary at speed c in the frame of the new medium. Local light speed invariance is then not a postulate but a consequence: the constancy of c arises from a real, local, physical process of scattering and re-emission at every discrete field boundary, rather than from an axiom about spacetime. Jackson has argued that this recovers the empirical successes of Special Relativity while restoring a concrete physical mechanism, and does so without requiring an absolute ether frame.

Jackson has emphasised that the model is falsifiable and has put it to test against real optical anomalies. With John S. Minkowski he published "Resolution of Kantor and Babcock-Bergman Emission Theory Anomalies", which revisits Kantor's 1962 interferometer result — apparently supporting emission theory — and the 1964 Babcock and Bergman rotating-glass-plate experiment in vacuum that was taken to falsify it, but which left the anomalies themselves unexplained. Jackson and Minkowski argue that Kantor's finding can appear exactly as reported without violating the postulates of Special Relativity and without an absolute ether, by connecting Maxwell's near-field transition zone, kinetic reverse refraction, non-linear optics and Kerr effects into a single ontological construction. The paper appeared in the Hadronic Journal (Vol. 35, No. 5, October 2012, pp. 527–556) and is posted on arXiv as arXiv:1307.7163.

The model extends naturally to reference frames: Jackson has written on "twin planetary inertial reference frames", an orbiting Earth-centred inertial frame and an inner rotating Earth-centred rotating frame, as the discrete-field reading of terrestrial and near-Earth optical and timing data.

Quantum optics, entanglement and Bell's inequality

Jackson's second and increasingly dominant line of work is a classical (or "quasi-classical") reproduction of quantum mechanics, in particular of the correlations measured in Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen and Bell-test experiments.

His mechanism starts from a piece of physics he argues has been hiding in plain sight: the unused momenta of a spinning sphere. A rotating sphere does not have a single angular velocity at its surface — the surface velocity varies with latitude, from maximum at the equator to zero at the poles, giving a cosine distribution of tangential speeds. Jackson models this orbital angular momentum (OAM) structure as the physical content of a fermion, and shows that interaction between two such spheres, and between a sphere and a polariser or analyser, delivers Dirac's twin stacked inverse complementary pairs classically. In his reading, standard quantum electrodynamic provisions for field phase distribution square the amplitude to give Malus's Law, so the quantum-mechanical predictions are recovered — but from a concrete rotating-body mechanism rather than from an irreducibly non-local postulate.

The consequence Jackson stresses is that the cosine intermediate angular surface velocity distribution, recursive at each scale of OAM diameter, produces a violation of the Bell inequality by itself. On this account the observed violations are real and confirmed by experiment, but they falsify only the hidden assumptions built into Bell's derivation — not local realism. Jackson repeatedly invokes John Bell's own remark that the belief that no classical rationale is possible at quantum scales amounts to "sleepwalking", and argues that his construction lies close to what Einstein, Bell and von Neumann were reaching for. This work is set out in "Quasi-classical Entanglement, Superposition and Bell Inequalities" and in a series of FQXi essays, and it converges with the parallel classical Bell-test work of Declan Traill.

Foundations, logic and cosmology

In his later essays Jackson has pushed the critique further back, into the foundations of logic and mathematics themselves. In "Blondes, Brunettes and the Flaw of the Excluded Middle" (2020) he argues that the three classical Laws of Thought are flawed: the identity A = A fails both because there is only ever one unique entity and because, once time and prediction are admitted, an entity is not identical to itself a moment later. He argues that the law of the excluded middle, and binary mathematics built on it, likewise import a false dichotomy into physics, and that fuzzy-set and chaos-theoretic reasoning gives more coherent answers in relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology. In the same vein he holds that "action at a distance" in both electromagnetism and gravity emerges once Dirac's mathematical cut-off is placed physically, between the lowest electromagnetic coupling scale of fermion pairs and a condensate scale — endorsing Dirac's view that the answers cannot emerge in "mathematical terms" alone but require "physical entities".

His essay "The Red/Green Sock Trick: Can Mathematics Demystify Nature?" (2015), which took the highest community peer score in that year's FQXi competition, argues that mathematics is fundamentally digitised geometry and an excellent descriptive tool, but that algorithms do not automatically model nature's mechanisms — and that assuming they do actively hampers understanding. Reliance on mathematics as "the language of physics", he argues, became a pragmatic necessity only because physicists could not classically rationalise their findings.

In "Ridiculous Simplicity" (2018) he argues that "fundamental" is relative rather than absolute within reductionist hierarchies and may be infinitely recursive, but that the condensation of massive particle pairs with discrete rotations occupies a non-arbitrary position in the sequence. Relative motion in viscous fluids produces paired vortices at every known scale; taking the simplest such motion — spherical rotation — as the candidate for "most fundamental", he tests it by the severest reductionist criterion available, the unification of established theories, and argues that Relativity and Quantum Mechanics may share a single, very simple derivation.

Jackson has also applied the model to cosmology, developing an account of cyclic galactic evolution and arguing for a recycling universe in place of a single-origin expansion.

CNPS talks

He has presented in the CNPS online seminar series:

• "Discrete Field Model with Dr. Peter Jackson" (1 April 2023) — new light on Special Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, gravity and cosmology through the behaviour of subatomic particles in a fluid condensate, via strong coupling with electromagnetic fluctuations, repolarisation, and re-emission at speed c.

Works

• Peter A. Jackson and John S. Minkowski, "Resolution of Kantor and Babcock-Bergman Emission Theory Anomalies", Hadronic Journal, Vol. 35, No. 5 (October 2012), pp. 527–556. arXiv:1307.7163
• "Quasi-classical Entanglement, Superposition and Bell Inequalities" (v2)
• "Unification of Relativity and Quantum Physics: The Discrete Field Model"
• "2020 Vision: The Discrete Field Model" (expanded from the 2011 FQXi finalist essay)
• "Twin Planetary Inertial Reference Frames: an Orbiting ECI Frame and Inner Rotating ECRF"
• "The Intelligent Bit"

FQXi essay competition entries

• "Blondes, Brunettes & the Flaw of the Excluded Middle" (2020)
• "Ridiculous Simplicity" (2018)
• "Classical Quantum Conciousness" (2017)
• "The Red/Green Sock Trick. Can Mathematics Demystify Nature?" (2015) — highest community peer score in the competition
• "Do Bob and Alice Have a Future?" (2014)
• "The Intelligent Bit" (2013)
• "Much Ado About Nothing" (2012)
• "2020 Vision: A Model of Discretion in Space" (2011) — contest finalist
• "Perfect Symmetry" (2009)

External links

• Peter Jackson on ResearchGate
• Peter Jackson on Academia.edu
• Peter Jackson's articles on arXiv
• FQXi community forums