My Conversations With Einstein

Scientific Paper
Title	My Conversations With Einstein
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Paul E Rowe
Keywords	Einstein, Classical Physics, dark matter, aether, Bose-Einstein condensate, stellar aberration, Fizeau experiment, twin paradox
Published	2008
No. of pages	11

Read the full paper here

Abstract

In 2004, I wrote a play, "The Fall and Rise of the House of Cards". It included conversations I had (in dreams) with various deceased scientists. The play was so long and so dull that no one could read more than six pages and stay awake. The play suggests the knowable universe is permeated with a concentrated matrix of protons and unpaired electrons, possibly Bose-Einstein condensed hydrogen. Could this be "Dark Matter" and/or the ether of classical physics? This paper includes the beginning of Act II and my conversations with Albert Einstein. I hope someone will be able to read this part of the play. If anyone has trouble sleeping, I will send him or her the entire play.

Overview

This is not a research paper but Act II of a stage play, reproduced verbatim, in which the author converses in a dream with Albert Einstein (with walk-on parts for Niels Bohr and Fizeau). The dramatic device is a house of cards that Bohr and Einstein have been building and that an earthquake demolishes at the end of the act. Rowe uses the dialogue to lay out, without mathematics, a particulate aether model: space is filled with a dense matrix of protons and unpaired electrons, possibly a Bose-Einstein condensate of hydrogen, and this medium is offered simultaneously as the carrier of light, the seat of magnetism, the source of gravity and a candidate for dark matter.

The empirical hook, summarised in the first two pages, is Rowe's own laboratory experience: detonating explosives containing aluminium flake in vacuum yielded "much more gas than was theoretically possible", and he reports producing hydrogen by igniting cupric oxide and aluminium powder in vacuum, by electrical discharge in low-pressure helium, and by placing an evacuated glass tube near an operating spark coil. From this he concludes that "vacuum is not a void" but contains something convertible into hydrogen. The departure from the mainstream account is total in intent but conciliatory in tone: Rowe accepts Einstein's mathematics and disputes only the interpretations, arguing that the same equations follow from a material medium and that the aether was discarded prematurely.

The argument

A Bose-Einstein condensed medium

Rowe's central move is to answer the oldest objection to a material aether — that we would feel it — by making the aether superfluid. Liquid helium below about 2 K, he notes, flows through granular material indefinitely once started, behaving as a zero-viscosity liquid; a condensate at its lowest energy state "cannot absorb energy and remain in this state". He therefore proposes that a proton-electron matrix would remain condensed "at extremely high temperatures" and that a hand can pass through it without resistance, in the same way that a body in motion continues in motion. The matrix is described as "a polymer of hydrogen atoms" that is overall neutral in the way a salt is neutral, and whose unpaired electron spins make it paramagnetic — which, Rowe argues, is what supplies the permeability of vacuum that Maxwell's equations require. He cites Daniel Kleppner's MIT group producing Bose-Einstein condensed hydrogen with aligned proton spins, and suggests earlier attempts may have succeeded undetected because the product simply merged with the aether already filling space.

Michelson-Morley, aberration and Fizeau

Einstein challenges him on the Michelson-Morley experiment. Rowe replies with Sir Oliver Lodge's position: a null result is exactly what one expects if the aether near the Earth moves with the Earth's surface, as air and water do, and a matrix with mass would be expected to be dragged in this way. He notes that Michelson himself continued to accept a material aether.

He then argues that the two experiments Einstein said had influenced him most — stellar aberration and Fizeau's moving-water measurement — both support Lodge rather than Einstein. On aberration: if the local aether orbits with the Earth "at about 26 miles per second", starlight bends as it enters the co-moving region, as sound bends in wind; the bending reverses every six months, and for the pole star the deviation should be a small circle repeating on the same date each year. On Fizeau: light travelling with the water moves faster relative to the Earth than light travelling against it, which "suggests, to me, that the aether, which carries light, tends to move with the molecules of water". A distressed Fizeau then bursts onto the stage to complain, in French, that Einstein misinterpreted experiments he had performed to prove the aether exists.

Mass, time and the twin paradox

Rowe reinterprets relativistic mass increase by analogy with the sound barrier: an aircraft nearing Mach 1 needs ever more energy per unit acceleration, yet nobody says its mass has grown; the air's resistance has. Following Huygens' picture of matter as an open mesh through which the aether passes freely, he suggests aether particles have increasing difficulty moving around atomic nuclei as an object approaches c, so that the force required rises while the mass is unchanged. Mass should be defined against a standard at rest relative to the local aether.

The twin paradox receives the same treatment. A pendulum clock or a clock based on molecular bond vibrations is carried through the aether by the ship; its rate is affected in both directions of flight, while the Earth-bound twin's clock is nearly at rest in the local aether and registers more time. Rowe prefers a definition of time based on a clock stationary with respect to the local aether, with a velocity-dependent correction applied, so that "time would, then, be more nearly universal and independent of velocity". Because the traveller's chemical bond vibrations would be slowed, his biochemistry would slow too, and he "may well appear younger".

Photons, gravity and a prediction

A compass needle beside a DC wire holds its orientation, which Rowe reads as the wire's electrons orienting nearby aether electrons; at high frequency the needle's inertia prevents it following, but aether electrons, having negligible inertia, keep up. He speculates that the Planck constant may be related to the inertia of an aether electron with respect to that rotation. For a half-wave dipole antenna, each reversal of current launches a "line of energy" that leaves the antenna at 45 degrees to it, followed on the next reversal by a mirror-image line at 135 degrees — one antenna cycle producing a pair of photons. Because an integral number of aether electrons take part, only specific energies can be carried, which he offers as the basis of quantum theory.

Gravity is handled more tentatively. If the neutron is a proton plus an electron, the weight of any material is close to the weight of the protons it contains; assuming a residual attraction between protons after electrical forces cancel "one can come very close to explaining gravity". Rowe concedes to Bohr that he is "not very" happy with this.

The act closes with a prediction: if the medium is denser near masses, the speed of light is lower near the Earth than in interstellar space and lower in galaxies than between them, so that distances to other galaxies "may be considerably greater than they have calculated". He connects this to gravitational lensing, reading light bending near the Sun as vacuum having a raised dielectric constant or permeability near masses, and asks how a void can have position-dependent properties at all.

Assessment

The piece is engaging and does not pretend to be more than it is: Rowe says outright that he "purposely avoided mathematics in this play". As popular writing it has a real virtue, which is that it identifies the right pressure points. The quotation he digs out of Einstein and Infeld's The Evolution of Physics — "we may still use the word ether, but only to express some physical property of space" — is genuine, and his question of how empty space can have a permittivity, a permeability and a position-dependent value of both is a fair one that textbooks tend to skate over. His closing suggestion that light travels more slowly deep in a gravitational potential is not the heresy he takes it for: in general relativity the coordinate speed of light is reduced near a mass, which is precisely the Shapiro delay measured by radar ranging to Venus and by the Cassini spacecraft, and the "optical medium" reading of gravitational lensing is a standard pedagogical device going back to Eddington. That is a case of a mainstream result being offered as a rival to the mainstream.

The difficulties, however, are decisive, and several are checkable on the page.

The orbital speed is wrong. The Earth's orbital velocity is 29.8 km/s, which is 18.5 miles per second, not the 26 miles per second Rowe gives. The number matters, because the aberration angle is just v/c: 29.8/299 792 = 20.5 arcseconds, which is the measured constant of aberration to three figures. Rowe's 26 mi/s (41.8 km/s) would predict about 29 arcseconds. He has, it appears, taken the figure in km/s and relabelled the units.

Aberration refutes the drag he invokes it to support. This is the classical argument and it runs the other way. If the aether within reach of the telescope moved with the Earth, starlight would be entrained along with it and the aberration would be cancelled, not produced. That is why Stokes' dragged-aether model required a very particular irrotational flow and was still shown by Lorentz to be untenable. Airy's 1871 water-filled telescope tested exactly this and found the aberration angle unchanged, as the un-dragged picture predicts. Fizeau's result compounds the problem rather than relieving it: the measured drag coefficient is 1 − 1/n², so a medium of refractive index near 1 — air, and a fortiori the tenuous matter around the Earth — drags light essentially not at all. Fizeau's number is therefore evidence against the whole-scale entrainment Lodge proposed, which is the opposite of what the stage Fizeau says.

The twin-paradox argument contradicts itself. Rowe writes that as the clock approaches c "the period of the pendulum would decrease and time, as measured by the clock, would decrease". A clock whose period decreases ticks more often and registers more elapsed time, not less. To get the slowing he wants, the period must lengthen. The sentence as written gives the wrong sign, and nothing in the aether picture as described fixes which way it should go — that is the point at which the missing mathematics would have to do the work.

Dark matter cannot be protons and electrons. The identification is ruled out by two independent measurements, not by theoretical preference. Primordial deuterium abundances measured in high-redshift quasar absorption systems, and the relative heights of the first three acoustic peaks in the cosmic microwave background, both fix the baryon density at roughly a sixth of the total matter density. A space-filling proton-electron matrix would also be visible: free electrons at any appreciable density disperse radio pulses, and pulsar dispersion measures limit the interstellar free-electron density to of order 0.03 per cubic centimetre.

The condensate claim is asserted, not calculated. The condensation temperature of a boson gas depends on number density as T_c ∝ n^2/3/m. Rowe says the matrix "should remain Bose-Einstein condensed at extremely high temperatures" on the basis of "the weights of protons and electrons and their separation", but gives neither a density nor a number, so the claim cannot be checked. The related claim that a hand moves through a condensate "without restriction" is also only conditionally true: superfluid flow is dissipationless only below the Landau critical velocity, above which drag reappears, and helium II is not frictionless at arbitrary speeds.

Finally, the laboratory observation that motivates the whole picture — anomalous hydrogen appearing in evacuated apparatus — has an unglamorous standard explanation in outgassing of hydrogen dissolved in metal walls and electrodes, a well-known nuisance in vacuum practice, and in the reduction of adsorbed water by hot aluminium. Rowe gives no gas-purity analysis, no mass balance and no leak accounting in this text, so the reader cannot weigh the claim; the underlying experiments are described elsewhere in his work rather than here.

See also

• Paul E Rowe
• Aether
• Dark Matter
• Albert Einstein
• Michelson–Morley experiment
• Time Dilation
• Speed of Light
• Gravitational Lensing
• Vacuum
• Hydrogen Atom
• James Clerk Maxwell