Jerry Shifman
Jerry Shifman | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | September 26, 1934 Paris, Tennessee, United States |
| Residence | Portland, Oregon, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Alma mater | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
| Known for | Aether, Gravitation, Neoetherics |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Electrical Engineer |
Jerrald Craig "Jerry" Shifman (born September 26, 1934) is an American retired electronics design engineer who developed an aether-based model of gravitation that he named Neoetherics. His work lies outside mainstream physics and forms part of the tradition of aether theories that seek a mechanical explanation for gravity as an alternative to the geometric account of general relativity.
Biography
Shifman was born in Paris, Tennessee, and graduated from high school in Whitefield, New Hampshire, in 1952. He earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (BEE) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1959. He later recalled being distressed that no one at the institute could explain to him how gravitation works, a question that shaped his later independent research. In the early 1970s he was living in Berkeley, California, where he had access to the University of California library system and began working on what he described as a common-sense explanation of gravitation.
Shifman later settled in Portland, Oregon, where he worked as an electronics design engineer before retiring.
Scientific contributions
Shifman began developing his ideas around 1971 and wrote his first essay on the subject in 1972. In 1985 he produced a more comprehensive essay and coined the term "Neoetherics" for his theory. He summarized his paper "Neoetherics: Visualizing Gravity" on the newsgroup alt.science.physics.new_theories, through which he became acquainted with others working on mechanical theories of gravitation. A short note titled "Addendum" added clarifying comments to the original essay. In January 1997 he published his Neoetherics paper on his website, neoetherics.com.
Neoetherics proposes a hydrodynamic aether that fills the universe and is in constant motion. In the theory, mass is treated as a location where aether flows inward and is annihilated, forming a "sink." As aether accelerates toward such a sink, the resulting velocity gradient in the surrounding medium causes nearby masses to move toward it, a process Shifman identified with gravitation. He presented the model as supplying the direct mechanical contact that Isaac Newton regarded as necessary and as clarifying the equivalence between gravity and acceleration.
In May 1997 Shifman presented Neoetherics publicly for the first time at the "Conference on the Fundamental Structure and Mechanisms of the Universe," organized by Ray Tomes and Ross Tessien. In July of that year he took part in "The Nature and Structure of the Aether," organized by Norm Silliman, where he met Steven Rado. In 1998 he met John Chappell, Jr. and became a member of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, participating in its May 2000 conference in Berkeley, California. In July 2000 he attended the "Fundamental Problems of Natural Science and Engineering" conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, for which he prepared a paper titled "Telling Fish About Water."
In November 2000 Shifman was contacted by Alexey Selin of Ukraine, who reported having built devices using a massive rotor spinning at 10,000 to 20,000 rpm that he claimed caused a test mass to lose more than 2% of its weight. Shifman regarded the reported result as supportive of their shared view of gravitation and set out to design and build his own version of the apparatus, which he called the "Selin Device," in an attempt to replicate the results.
Shifman's paper "Neoetherics: Visualizing gravitation" was published in the journal Physics Essays (Volume 30, Issue 1, March 2017, pp. 181–187).
Abstracts
- 2008 - "The Hundred Year Detour" (Read in full)
- 2002 - "Experimental Xenophysics "
- 2000 - "Telling a Fish About Water" (Read in full)
- 1985 - "Neoetherics: Visualizing Gravity" (Read in full)