Athanassios A Nassikas

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; minimum-contradictions physics; zero point energy
	Scientific career
Fields	Mechanical engineering, renewable energy, foundations of physics
Institutions	Technological Education Institute of Larissa

Athanassios A. Nassikas (born 1947 in Smixi, Grevena) is a Greek mechanical engineer and professor of renewable energy at the Technological Education Institute of Larissa, who since the mid-1990s has developed a programme he calls minimum-contradictions physics.

Its founding move is not physical but logical. Nassikas argues that the system of reasoning physics inherits — Aristotelian logic together with the principle of sufficient reason and the anterior–posterior axiom — is itself contradictory. If that is so, no consequence drawn from it can be free of contradiction, and the most one can ask of a theory is that it minimise them. From this he derives a unified account in which space-time is stochastic and is matter, and in which gravitation and electromagnetism are two aspects of the same space-time.

Career

Nassikas took a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (ΕΜΠ) in 1970, followed by graduate study at the Business University of Athens from 1970 to 1973.

His early career was in water engineering. From 1973 to 1977 he was a supervisor in the Developmental Program of Ground Waters of Thessaly, and from 1977 to 1985 he co-founded and ran Hydrowatt Ltd, which built pump houses for ground water on the basis of a patent he co-invented.

Between 1985 and 1989 he designed a doctoral programme on the second law of thermodynamics and took his PhD at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki under Prof. K. Akritidis, working with Prof. R. Decuypere of the Royal Military Academy in Belgium and Prof. A. S. Mujumdar of McGill University in Montreal on drying applications. That work produced articles in Drying Technology and in Mujumdar's Drying volumes (1989, 1991, 1993) and a United States patent in 1992.

He joined the Technological Education Institute of Larissa as a part-time scientific contributor and professor in 1990, and took up a professorship in its Department of Mechanical Engineering in 1995, his subject being renewable forms of energy.

The Claim for Minimum Contradictions

The logical starting point

The programme began with the book The Claim for Minimum Contradictions, written between 1990 and 1995 and published in Greek by Trohalia (220 pp., ISBN 960-7022-64-5). Nassikas has described the questions that prompted it: the choice between deterministic and indeterministic accounts of nature, the implications of Gödel's theorem, the outstanding problem of unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics, and the accumulating indications of zero point energy.

Gödel's incompleteness results were his epistemological starting point, but he judged them inadequate for treating contradictory systems — they concern what a consistent system cannot prove, not how to proceed when the system is itself inconsistent. His own theorem, developed between 2000 and 2004, was intended to fill that gap: if the basic communication system is contradictory, its consequences must be derived under a claim for minimum contradictions rather than none.

Minimum-contradictions physics

The physical content follows from applying that claim. Space-time is stochastic, distributed according to the quantum-mechanical probability density through what Nassikas calls a Hypothetical Measuring Field (HMF), and space-time is not a stage on which matter sits but is matter itself — a "matter-ether".

Because matter may be either mass or charge, there are correspondingly two space-times: a mass-gravitational (g) space-time and a charge-electromagnetic (em) space-time. Real space-time corresponds to mass space and imaginary space-time to charge space, the two connected through photons. The (em) space-time obeys the same principles as the (g) one, since both are space-time — and yet is not the same: any time interval in the (em) space-time is, in Nassikas' phrase, incomprehensible with respect to a coexisting (g) interval, and is represented by an imaginary number, which is itself incomprehensible.

What results is a matter space-time relativistic quantum mechanics which, he stresses, has both similarities to and differences from relativity theory and quantum mechanics rather than reducing to either.

Consequences

Two consequences recur through the later papers, and both are eliminative: the interaction of the (g) with the (em) space-time is asked to do work for which the standard model introduces new entities.

No Higgs boson. In "Is There a Higgs' Boson?" (2010) Nassikas argued that particles can acquire mass through the (g)–(em) interaction, so that no Higgs field is required, and staked the question explicitly on the forthcoming CERN result. The discovery of a Higgs boson was announced in 2012, and the reader should weigh the paper accordingly.
No dark matter. "Universe Evolution Under The Claim for Minimum Contradictions" (2009) treats the evolution of the universe as driven by the same (g)–(em) interaction rather than by dark matter or comparable additions.

He has also related the scheme to R. M. Santilli's hadronic mechanics, in "Santilli's Etherino Under the Claim for Minimum Contradictions" (2008) and in a later article on neutron synthesis.

Experimental work

Nassikas has attempted to demonstrate the gravitational–electromagnetic interaction directly. He built an asymmetric capacitor with a zero-potential casing which showed a loss of weight — but, by his own account, not reproducibly. He has also proposed and reported further tests, in "A Proposed Experiment to Verify Gravitational Electromagnetic Interaction" (2011) and "Experimental Verification of Superconducting Self Propulsion" (2012).

Collaborators and editors

The development of the work is unusually well documented, and two names recur. After an introduction by Professors A. Smirnov and G. Klyushin, Nassikas collaborated with the late Prof. P. F. Parshin on "On The Possibility of a Unique Axiom in Physics" (2001), which he regards as a decisive step toward his own theorem. The successive versions of that theorem were edited by Cynthia Kolb Whitney, then editor of Galilean Electrodynamics, who made substantial corrections including changes of terminology.

From 2004 he presented at Natural Philosophy Alliance and PIRT conferences. His book Minimum Contradictions Everything (Hadronic Press, 2009) was written at the suggestion of Dr M. C. Duffy, who reviewed it, and again edited by Whitney; it gathers the whole of the programme in a form intended to leave no gaps.

Papers on this wiki

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

Books

2009 — "Minimum Contradictions Everything" (Hadronic Press)
1995 — "The Claim for Minimum Contradictions" (Trohalia, in Greek; ISBN 960-7022-64-5)