Athanassios A Nassikas

Athanassios A. Nassikas
Born	1947 (age 78–79) Smixi, Grevena, Greece
Residence	Larissa, Greece
Nationality	Greek
Known for	The Claim for Minimum Contradictions, space-time ether, Zero Point Energy, New Energy
Scientific career
Fields	Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Institutions	Technological Education Institute of Larissa / Thessaly (now University of Thessaly)

Athanassios A. Nassikas (born 1947) is a Greek mechanical engineer and emeritus professor whose work begins from an unusual place: not from an experiment, and not from a defect in a particular theory, but from a claim about the language in which every physical theory must be written.

His argument is that any theory of physics has to be stated through a basic communication system — classical Aristotelian logic, the Leibniz principle of sufficient reason, and a usually unnoticed axiom that there is an anterior and a posterior. He offers a theorem purporting to show that this system is inherently contradictory. If that is right, then no perfect theory is available to anyone, and the most that can be sought is a least contradictory one. That is the Claim for Minimum Contradictions, and from it he derives a physics in which space-time is stochastic and is itself matter, gravitational and electromagnetic space-time coexist with the latter's magnitudes imaginary, and general relativity and quantum mechanics both emerge as simplifications.

The position has a striking consequence he accepts openly: the theorem cannot be stated consistently either, since it is stated inside the system it condemns. Strict rigour, he concludes, imposes silence — and the claim for minimum contradictions is what licenses speaking anyway.

Biography

Nassikas was born in 1947 at Smixi, in Grevena. His own account of his career records a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1970, graduate study at the Business University of Athens from 1970 to 1973, work from 1973 as a supervisor in the developmental programme for the ground waters of Thessaly, and the co-founding in 1977 of Hydrowatt Ltd, built on a pump-house patent he co-invented.

From 1985 he pursued doctoral work on the second law of thermodynamics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki under C. B. Akritidis, applying it to drying technology in collaboration with R. Decuypere and A. S. Mujumdar. This part of the record is independently confirmed: two refereed papers with Akritidis appeared in Drying Technology — "Minimum Energy Cycles in Drying" (1989) and "Drying Heat Pump with Supersonic Separator" (1991). They remain his most-cited publications, and the second is worth noting for a reason beyond thermodynamics: its heat pump used a converging–diverging nozzle with a supersonic separator, and the same nozzle geometry reappears twenty years later in his superconducting thruster.

He became a part-time scientific contributor at the Technological Education Institute of Larissa in 1990 and took a professorship in its Department of Mechanical Engineering in 1995, with renewable forms of energy as his subject. The institute was renamed the Technological Education Institute of Thessaly in 2013 and was abolished in 2019, its schools absorbed into the University of Thessaly; from 2019 Nassikas describes himself as emeritus. No information about him after 2021 has been located.

The Claim for Minimum Contradictions

The argument

Nassikas's starting point is that the arbitrariness of axioms is the root problem of theoretical physics. Every theory rests on axioms that are, by definition, chosen rather than proved, and he suspects that this arbitrariness is the source of the contradictions physics keeps discovering in itself. His response is not to propose better axioms but to ask whether there is a privileged set — and he argues that there is, namely the set on which our basic communication system already rests, because no theory can be stated without it.

He then argues that this privileged system is itself contradictory.

It is commonly accepted that so many scientists disagree on various physics theories proposed. The reason why someone believes that a perfect theory can be stated is based on his faith that the basic communication system, through which any theory can be stated, is perfect; if this system is contradictory it is meaningless to try for a perfect theory since it would be stated through a contradictory system.

— Athanassios A. Nassikas, "Basic Statements Required for a Minimum Contradictions Everything" (2005)

The theorem he offers holds, in substance, that Aristotelian logic is a closed and self-sufficient system, so that adjoining to it anything not derivable within it — the anterior–posterior axiom, or human language generally — introduces contradiction. Since physics cannot be done without adjoining exactly such things, contradiction is not a fault to be repaired but a permanent condition.

What follows is a selection principle rather than a counsel of despair. If contradictions can never be eliminated, they can still be minimised, and the theory to prefer is the one that introduces fewest. Nassikas notes that within its area of application this coincides with Occam's razor: every additional axiom is an additional contradiction, so parsimony and minimum contradiction pull in the same direction.

Relation to Gödel

The Claim is explicitly modelled on Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and just as explicitly departs from them. Gödel established a limit on what a consistent formal system can prove about itself. Nassikas's concern is different: physics has never possessed a consistent system across its domain — relativity and quantum mechanics have contradicted each other productively for a century — so a result about consistent systems is, on his account, the wrong tool. He therefore substitutes his own theorem, which he holds applies more efficiently to the basic communication system, while regarding it as compatible with the machinery by which Gödel's results were obtained.

He draws one further consequence from this. If the minimum number of contradictions is greater than zero rather than equal to it, then a residue of indeterminacy is built into any statable physics — which he offers as a rationale for the irreducible uncertainty of quantum mechanics rather than treating that uncertainty as a brute fact.

The fullest statement is his Theorem Proving the Existence of Contradiction, Minimum Contradictions, Fuzzy Thinking and Physics in Logical Communication (2013), which he presents as a proof free of the weaknesses of his earlier versions. It has been self-archived rather than published in a journal.

Minimum contradictions physics

Space-time as matter

If physics must be stated through the basic communication system, then it must be stated in space-time terms, since anterior–posterior is what that system supplies. Nassikas takes this literally: matter is not in space-time, matter is space-time, and that space-time is stochastic rather than continuous, its geometry described by a wave function.

Matter, however, is either mass or charge, so there must be two space-times: a mass-gravitational (g) space-time and a charge-electromagnetic (em) one. The relation between them is where the model becomes distinctive.

The (em) space-time behaves as a (g) one, since both are space-time and obey the same principles but it is not. Thus, any time interval in the (em) space-time is incomprehensible with respect to a coexisting (g) one and it can be regarded as an imaginary number, which is incomprehensible too. … Therefore, in general, the electromagnetic energy and in extension (em) magnitudes can be regarded as imaginary.

— Athanassios A. Nassikas, "Electromagnetic Space-Time-Ether" (2008)

The imaginary unit is not a calculational device here but a statement about mutual incomprehensibility: an electromagnetic interval cannot be read off a gravitational clock, and that failure is what "imaginary" records. Admitting antimatter as well gives four space-times — (g), (anti-g), (em) and (anti-em) — and so sixteen dimensions of description. Nassikas is careful about what this does and does not mean:

This does not mean that space-time has 16 dimensions, simply it is described through 16 dimensions. In reality space-time is fractal described through four dimensions.

— Athanassios A. Nassikas, "Electromagnetic Space-Time-Ether" (2008)

Each space-time is approached through its own Hypothetical Measuring Field — a continuous, flat reference field against which the stochastic reality is measured — a device and a term he credits to P. F. Parshin. The two fields coexist through a scale factor, which he identifies with the fine-structure constant: matching his electromagnetic field expression to the Coulomb potential yields a coexistence scale of iα.

The governing equation in both space-times is Schrödinger's relativistic equation in the absence of potential, and from it he writes a single acceleration expression which he argues covers both cases — the sign of the imaginary term producing attraction or repulsion between like and unlike charges, and the expression tending to the Lorentz force as the electromagnetic space-time tends to a continuum. The claim, in short, is that Newton's law and the Lorentz–Coulomb laws are continuum limits of one formula.

Cosmology, the Higgs, and the ether

Because the model makes gravitational and electromagnetic space-time interact directly, Nassikas argues that phenomena usually assigned to additional entities need no such entities. In "Universe Evolution Under The Claim for Minimum Contradictions" (2009) he treats cosmic evolution as driven by the (g)–(em) interaction "and not on any other entities e.g. dark matter", with the total energy of the universe summing to zero, so that creation becomes "a process of zero splitting into (g) and (em) energy" and expansion the reverse. In "Is There a Higgs' Boson?" (2010) — written before the discovery announcement — he argued that particles can acquire mass through the same interaction "without the need of Higgs' boson".

What the model amounts to, in his own terms, is a rehabilitated ether: "Quantum Space Time & Ether is the substance within which the things exist and from which the things are made." It is an ether not posited as an extra medium but identified with space-time itself.

Experiments

Nassikas has consistently held that the (g)–(em) interaction should be detectable, and has pursued two experimental programmes. Both should be read with their results stated plainly, which is what follows.

The asymmetric capacitor

The first was an asymmetric capacitor with a grounded, zero-potential casing — a design in the Biefeld–Brown tradition, one flat pole and one wavy pole with a strong dielectric between, filed as international patent application WO2005122384A1 in 2004 and now lapsed. His report is that the device displayed a weight loss, "but without being always reproducible". No voltages, masses or forces were ever published, and the result has not been replicated. He set out a proposed verification protocol in "A Proposed Experiment to Verify Gravitational Electromagnetic Interaction" (2011).

Superconducting self-propulsion

The second is the better known. A casting of the high-temperature superconductor YBCO is shaped as a converging nozzle and fitted with permanent magnets; immersed in liquid nitrogen at 77 K, it is claimed to develop a self-propulsive force directed towards the converging area, measured by the deflection of a pendulum hung from a fixed point. The reported result is about 2.2 grams-force on a 118 g device. The work appeared with Glen A. Robertson at SPESIF-2010 (AIP Conference Proceedings 1208), at the Natural Philosophy Alliance in 2012, and at ICNAAM 2012 (AIP Conference Proceedings 1479); US patent 8,952,773 was granted in 2015 and has since lapsed.

The replication record is negative, and it was published by the effort's own supporter. Paul A LaViolette, who read Nassikas's quantum space-time as close kin to his own subquantum kinetics, crowdfunded a development programme in 2016 and had successor coil designs tested at SuperPower Inc. in Schenectady. In October 2016 a conical REBCO coil driven to 60 A produced less than 2 g against a prediction of tens to hundreds of kilograms-force, with the small motions in the wrong direction; in August 2017 liquid-helium tests of two further versions at 175 A produced no thrust at all, and LaViolette declared the design impractical.

The original YBCO nozzle has never been independently replicated, and was never tested in vacuum. The published criticism — all of it at forum level, since no peer-reviewed critique exists — has centred on three points: that a ~300 K temperature difference in a boiling cryogen, acting on an asymmetric shape, is itself a propulsive mechanism, and that no thermal or fluid analysis appears in the papers; that a genuine constant force on a pendulum produces a damped transient and then a steady angular offset rather than the sustained oscillation shown in the demonstration videos; and that a derivation carried out in standard magnetostatics cannot consistently yield a reactionless thrust.

Recording this is not a concession. A wiki that reported the claim without the tests would be less use to a reader deciding whether to build the device.

Collaborators and venues

Nassikas's work has circulated almost entirely through the dissident and alternative-propulsion conference circuit. He credits an introduction by A. P. Smirnov and Ya. G. (Jaroslav) Klyushin — the latter a professor at the St Petersburg State University of Civil Aviation and GED-East editor for Galilean Electrodynamics — for his collaboration with the late P. F. Parshin, with whom he co-authored "On the Possibility of a Unique Axiom in Physics" (2001), a paper he regards as a decisive step towards his final position. His papers appeared in Galilean Electrodynamics and GED-East, at Michael C Duffy's Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory conferences in 2002 and 2006, at Natural Philosophy Alliance meetings from 2003, and at the SPESIF and ICNAAM proceedings series.

Cynthia Kolb Whitney edited the successive versions of his theorem through the years 2000–2004, making what he describes as considerable corrections including changes of terminology, and she and Duffy edited and reviewed his book.

Two collaborations deserve more prominence than the earlier version of this page gave them. With Menas Kafatos and Daniel P. Sheehan he co-authored "Retro-causation, Minimum Contradictions and Non-locality" (AIP Conference Proceedings 1408, 2011), from the Quantum Retrocausation conference at San Diego — his most-cited physics paper. With Glen A Robertson, formerly of NASA Marshall, he co-authored the 2010 SPESIF paper on the superconducting device.

His connection to Ruggero Maria Santilli is at the level of publisher and topic rather than personal collaboration: Santilli's Hadronic Press issued his book, he wrote "Santilli's Etherino Under the Claim for Minimum Contradictions" (2008), and his most recent located work appeared in the proceedings of the Santilli Foundation's 2020 teleconference on the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen argument. Santilli's hadronic mechanics is itself firmly outside mainstream physics, a context worth stating rather than assuming.

Reception

Nassikas's physics has attracted almost no engagement of any kind. No published review, critique or rebuttal of the Claim for Minimum Contradictions appears to exist, in mainstream or dissident venues alike, and the citation record for his physics papers is close to zero — his two engineering papers on drying remain his most-cited work. The one sustained external engagement is Paul A LaViolette's, favourable on the theory and, to his credit, candid about the failed hardware tests.

Silence is not refutation, and the Claim is unusual enough to deserve a hearing it has not received: it is one of very few attempts anywhere to derive physical principles from constraints on the language of physics rather than from experiment or from mathematical elegance. But it should be recorded honestly that the argument stands untested by anyone other than its author.

Papers on this wiki

• 2012 – Experimental Verification of Superconducting Self Propulsion (read in full)
• 2011 – A Proposed Experiment to Verify Gravitational Electromagnetic Interaction (read in full)
• 2010 – Is There a Higgs' Boson? (read in full)
• 2009 – Universe Evolution Under The Claim for Minimum Contradictions (read in full)
• 2008 – Electromagnetic Space-Time-Ether (read in full)
• 2008 – Santilli's Etherino Under the Claim for Minimum Contradictions
• 2007 – On a Minimum Contradictions Ether - Everything
• 2006 – Minimum Contradictions Everything & Ether and Forces' Unification
• 2006 – Minimum Contradictions Space-Time Ether - Everything
• 2005 – Basic Statements Required for a Minimum Contradictions Everything
• 2004 – On a Minimum Contradictions
• 2003 – Minimum Contradictions Physics as a New Paradigm
• 2002 – The Relativity Theory and the Quantum Mechanics Under the Claim for Minimum Contradictions
• 2001 – A Claim for Minimum Contradictions in Physics
• 2001 – On The Possibility of a Unique Axiom in Physics (with P. F. Parshin)
• 2000 – A Hypothesis of Quantum Space-Time Aether
• 1996 – The Hypothesis and The Equations of The Unified Matter Field

Books

• Minimum Contradictions Everything — Hadronic Press, November 2008 (often cited as 2009), 190 pp., ISBN 1-57485-061-X. Reviewed by Michael C Duffy and edited by Cynthia Kolb Whitney.
• The Claim for Minimum Contradictions — Trohalia, Athens, 1995, 220 pp., ISBN 960-7022-64-5 (in Greek). The basis, by his own account, of all his later work.

Selected publications elsewhere

• A. A. Nassikas and C. B. Akritidis, "Minimum Energy Cycles in Drying", Drying Technology 7(4), 723–745 (1989).
• A. A. Nassikas and C. B. Akritidis, "Drying Heat Pump with Supersonic Separator", Drying Technology 9(4), 1105–1114 (1991).
• "The Hypothesis of the Quantum Space Time–Aether", Galilean Electrodynamics GED-East, Special Issues 2, vol. 11, 34–40 (2000).
• "Consequences in Physics & Technology of the Claim for Minimum Contradictions", PIRT-X, London (2006).
• A. A. Nassikas and G. A. Robertson, "Minimum Contradictions Physics and Propulsion via Superconducting Magnetic Field Trapping", AIP Conference Proceedings 1208, 339–349 (2010).
• M. Kafatos, A. A. Nassikas and D. P. Sheehan, "Retro-causation, Minimum Contradictions and Non-locality", AIP Conference Proceedings 1408, 291–296 (2011).
• "Superconducting Self Propulsion Requires Beyond the Standard Model", AIP Conference Proceedings 1479, 1024–1027 (2012).
• "Theorem Proving the Existence of Contradiction, Minimum Contradictions, Fuzzy Thinking and Physics in Logical Communication" (2013), self-archived.
• "Minimum Contradictions Theory of Everything", in Proceedings of the 2020 International Teleconference on the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Argument, Curran Associates (2021), 701–714.

See also

• Aether
• Zero Point Energy
• Quantum Mechanics
• General Relativity
• Ruggero Maria Santilli
• Cynthia Kolb Whitney
• Michael C Duffy
• Natural Philosophy Alliance

External links

• US Patent 8,952,773 — "Magnetic propulsion device using superconductors" (2015, lapsed).
• WO2005122384A1 — "Propulsion of a wavy asymmetric capacitor having a zero potential casing" (2005, ceased).
• Paul LaViolette on minimum contradictions physics.
• Test results: the successor thruster designs fail liquid-helium testing (2017).