Milo M Wolff

Milo M. Wolff
Born	(1923-08-08)August 8, 1923
Died	October 15, 2015(2015-10-15) (aged 92)
Residence	Manhattan Beach, CA, United States
Nationality	USA
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania
Known for	The Wave Structure of Matter (WSM); the electron as a spherical standing wave; a wave mechanism for Mach's principle
Scientific career
Fields	Physics, Astronomy
Institutions	MIT; Aerospace Corporation; United Nations; universities of Singapore, Sri Lanka, Kentucky and Indonesia

Milo Mitchell Wolff (8 August 1923 – 15 October 2015) was an American physicist and astronomer, and the originator of the Wave Structure of Matter (WSM) — the proposal that the electron is not a discrete particle but a standing spherical wave in space, and that the laws of nature follow from that structure.

He is among the more consequential figures catalogued on this wiki, in the specific sense that a research lineage descends from him. Jeff Yee's Energy Wave Theory names Wolff as one of its three sources, alongside Gabriel LaFreniere and Xavier Borg, and the wave-structure tradition he founded remains one of the two principal alternatives to fields documented here — the other being the particle tradition of the Particle Model.

Wolff's own summary of the programme was characteristically inviting:

I urge you to join the exciting and fascinating exploration of matter, the natural laws, and the universe. You may become a famous pioneer and, at the least, you will have fun!

— Milo M. Wolff

Career

Wolff's professional record is unusually substantial for a researcher working outside the mainstream, and it is worth setting out because it bears on how the work should be read.

He took his BS at Upsala College in 1948 and his MS (1953) and PhD (1958) at the University of Pennsylvania, with an honorary DSc from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, in 1992. He served in the US Naval Reserve from 1944 to 1946.

He was a physicist at MIT from 1963 to 1969, where he was a member of the team that designed the Apollo Moon-landing system and was commended by NASA for the achievement. He held professorships of physics at the University of Sri Lanka (1966–68) and the University of Singapore (1970–72), and taught also at Kentucky and Indonesia. From 1972 to 1975 he was on the technical staff of the Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles, and from 1975 to 1977 chief of science and technology and director of the computer centre for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa.

Later appointments included visiting astronomer at the Observatory of Paris (1979), visiting professor of space navigation and computing at the Nanjing Institute of Technology (1980), and membership of a National Science Foundation advisory team to Pakistan (1984). He was a registered professional engineer in California and Arizona, a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society and Sigma Xi. He served on a National Academy of Sciences panel investigating bio-energy.

His earlier published research covered polarized light from small planets and asteroids, electromagnetism and optics, electronic engineering and mechanics.

The Wave Structure of Matter

Wolff developed WSM from about 1980, and set it out across some fifteen papers and two books. The fullest treatment on this wiki is at Einstein's Last Question: What is an Electron?, which should be read for the detail; what follows is the shape of the argument.

The question

The programme begins from an anecdote Wolff returned to repeatedly. Asked about the proliferation of short-lived particles emerging from accelerators, Einstein is said to have replied: "I would just like to know what an electron is." Wolff took the remark seriously — that the ordinary electron mattered more than the particle zoo, and that its refusal to behave like a discrete object was the unsolved problem.

In-waves and out-waves

His answer is that the electron has no discrete part at all. It is a space resonance: two spherical scalar waves sharing a centre, one converging inward and one diverging outward, each of amplitude falling as 1/r. What appears as a particle is the standing wave at the centre where they meet.

The waves do not stop at any boundary. They extend through the whole universe, mixing with and contributing to one another — so that, in Wolff's phrase, each particle is a hologram of all the others. The in-wave is not a separate postulate: it is composed of the out-waves of every other particle in the universe, arriving and being re-radiated, an idea he takes from Wheeler and Feynman's 1945 absorber theory.

Combining the two waves one way gives the electron, the other the positron — with exactly opposite amplitudes, which Wolff offers as the reason the two annihilate.

Spin

Wolff derives spin as a topological property rather than a rotation of a body. A rotation of 720° at the wave centre converts the in-wave into the out-wave — spherical rotation, a peculiarity of three-dimensional space describable by SU(2) group algebra. In The Wave Structure of Electron Spin (2008) he reports that this agrees completely with the spin Dirac derived in 1929, and exposes the physical origin of the Dirac equation.

This is the point at which the account is most attractive, because the standard treatment offers no picture at all: a point particle cannot literally spin, and the 720° periodicity of a spin-½ object is presented as a bare mathematical fact. Here it is a property of the geometry. See Spin.

Mach's principle and the density of space

Wolff's second principle is that the density of the wave medium at any point is the sum of contributions from every particle in the universe, each diminished by the inverse square of distance. From this he derives the local wave speed c — "almost constant everywhere because there are so many (10⁸⁰) particles contributing", but varying near large masses.

He presents this as a quantitative mechanism for Mach's principle which avoids instantaneous action at a distance: an accelerating body interacts with the local medium, whose density the distant stars have already established. The space medium is thereby the inertial frame of F = ma. Wolff notes the resulting loop is Wheeler's — matter tells space what it is, and space tells matter how to move.

From this he obtains what he called the Equation of the Cosmos, relating the effective radius of the wave-electron to the Hubble radius and the number of particles in the universe: r² = R²/3N — "the smallest thing of the universe depends on the largest things."

What he claims follows

The claim that gives the programme its scope is that the natural laws are not additional assumptions but consequences of the wave structure. Wolff held it to yield:

• the Schrödinger equation and the de Broglie and Compton wavelengths;
• relativistic mass increase and the Doppler shift, from the Doppler relation between two moving wave centres — derived, he argued in Relativistic Mass Increase and Doppler Shift Without Special Relativity (1998), from conservation laws and source–receiver symmetry without using the Lorentz transformation, which separates the experimentally established effects from the contested length and time contractions;
• electric charge, since forces on wave centres behave as those on point charges;
• gravity, as the alteration of medium density by surrounding matter;
• inertia, by the second principle above;
• annihilation and the CPT relations.

His conclusion was that wave–particle duality and Copenhagen uncertainty are pseudo-problems generated by insisting on a particle that does not exist.

The tradition he claimed

Wolff was careful to place the idea in a lineage rather than assert it as new. William Clifford told the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1876 that small portions of space behave like "little hills on a surface which is on the average flat", that this curvature propagates "after the manner of a wave", and that the motion of matter is nothing but this variation. Schrödinger proposed dispensing with point particles, holding material bodies and forces to be "nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space", particles being schaumkommen — appearances. And Einstein wrote in 1950 that "the material particle has no place as a fundamental concept in a field theory."

Wolff's contribution was to attempt the construction those three had gestured at.

Influence

The wave-structure programme did not end with him. Gabriel LaFreniere gave the picture a visual form through wave simulations; Jeff Yee credits Wolff, LaFreniere and Xavier Borg as the three independent sources behind Energy Wave Theory, and published The Particles of the Universe (2012) explicitly as "a call to action to bring more attention to Wolff and LaFreniere's work". EWT went on to derive particle energies and three of the four forces from a small set of medium constants.

Within the wider debate documented here, WSM stands as one pole of a genuine disagreement. Where the Particle Model and the Four Universal Motions make particles fundamental and treat waves as patterns in their flow, the wave-structure tradition makes waves in a medium fundamental and treats particles as standing waves. Both dispense with fields and with duality; they differ on which of the two notions is derived.

Assessment

The programme's strengths are its economy and its pictures. It posits one substance and one kind of excitation, and from them offers physical accounts of things the standard treatment declines to picture at all — what an electron is, why spin has a 720° periodicity, why a positron annihilates an electron, why inertia exists. The intellectual pedigree is genuine: Clifford's 1876 lecture is authentic and remarkable for its date, Schrödinger's misgivings about point particles are well documented, the Einstein quotation is accurate, and the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory Wolff builds on is orthodox physics published in Reviews of Modern Physics. That the de Broglie and Compton wavelengths emerge from a Doppler analysis of an oscillating structure is also fair — it is close to de Broglie's own route to the matter wave.

The difficulties are equally real. A scalar wave has no polarization, and it is not obvious how the vector character of electromagnetism is to be recovered from it. Deriving results qualitatively from a structure is not the same as reproducing the quantitative successes of quantum electrodynamics, which WSM has not attempted at comparable precision. And the claim that the natural laws follow from the structure is easier to assert than to demonstrate case by case; much of the literature states the correspondence rather than deriving it in full.

The work has attracted very little engagement from professional physics — the papers are conference contributions and self-published books rather than journal articles — and it has been developed principally by those who accepted its premises rather than tested by those who did not.

What can fairly be said is that Wolff asked a question the standard theory rules out of order, took seriously three physicists who had asked it before him, and produced a construction definite enough to be built upon. That later researchers did build on it is the strongest evidence of its interest.

Abstracts

• 2010 - "Einstein's Last Question: What is an Electron?" (Read in full)
• 2008 - "Introduction to the Wave Structure of Matter"
• 2008 - "The Wave Structure of Electron Spin"
• 2006 - "Light and the Electron - Einstein's Last Question"
• 1998 - "Relativistic Mass Increase and Doppler Shift Without Special Relativity"
• 1997 - "Derivation of the Relativistic Doppler Shift and Mass-Increase Formulas Without Assuming Special Relativity"
• 1997 - "The Eight-Fold Way of the Universe" (Read in full)
• 1997 - "Properties of the Ether and its Relationship to Natural Laws"
• 1996 - "The Logical Origins of Physical Laws from Cosmology"
• 1996 - "Worlds and Anti-Worlds Revisited"
• 1995 - "Beyond the Point Particle: A Wave Structure for the Electron"
• 1994 - "What are Length and Time?"
• 1994 - "What is the Real Electron? The Geometry of Space and..."

Books

• 2008 - "Schrödinger's Universe: Einstein, Waves and the Origin of the Natural Laws" (Read in full)
• 1989; revised 1994 - "Exploring the Physics of the Unknown Universe: An Adventurers Guide" (Read in full)

Media

• 2009 - The Wave Structure of Matter (WSM) (video lecture)

External links

• Solving Nature's Mystery
• Physics: Reality & Forces of Light & Gravity
• Dr Milo Wolff on the Wave Structure of Matter (interview)

Personal

Son of Ralph Bernard Wolff and Ruth Townsend (Mitchell) Wolff; married Lie Ching; children Eric, Jennifer, Douglas, Winston and Lanling.

See also

• Einstein's Last Question: What is an Electron? — the fullest account of WSM on this wiki
• Jeff Yee · Energy Wave Theory — the programme's principal continuation
• Gabriel LaFreniere · Xavier Borg
• Electron · Spin · Mach's Principle
• Aether
• Category: Aether