James Arathoon
James Arathoon | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Critique of Special Relativity from dimensional analysis; competing models of the Michelson-Morley experiment; the Ritzian aether toy model; the fine-structure constant; the work of Alfred O'Rahilly |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, Electromagnetism, History of science |
James Arathoon is a researcher and speaker in the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society (CNPS) online seminar series, where he has given talks on the foundations of electromagnetism, the interpretation of the Michelson-Morley experiment, the nature of charge and mass, the fine-structure constant, and the history of science and medicine. His work is critical of Special Relativity and of the conceptual foundations that mainstream physics takes for granted, and he draws on the older critical electromagnetic tradition, particularly the writings of the Irish physicist and mathematician Alfred O'Rahilly.
Biography
Little biographical detail about Arathoon is available in public sources. A 1991 undergraduate thesis submitted for a B.Sc. in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Lancaster, Atmospheric Electricity Investigations: Measurement of Atmospheric Conductivity, reporting measurements made with a Gerdien condenser at a weather station near the university, was self-archived under his name on the Internet Archive in 2023. He has presented regularly in the CNPS livestream seminar series since 2023, hosted by Ian Cowan.
Scientific contributions
Incompatibilities with Special Relativity
Arathoon argues that Special Relativity is not compatible with the ordinary theory of measurement and with dimensional analysis. On this view the relativistic treatment of length and time is not simply a novel but self-consistent account of measurement; rather, it conflicts with the requirements that any coherent system of physical units and dimensions must satisfy. The critique is therefore aimed at the theory's foundations rather than at any particular experimental result, and it places Arathoon among those researchers on this wiki who hold that the relativistic reinterpretation of space and time was adopted without adequate examination of its logical prerequisites.
Models of the Michelson-Morley experiment
Rather than treating the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment as settling the question in favour of relativity, Arathoon treats it as a problem with several competing mathematical explanations, and compares those explanations on their merits. This approach — surveying the alternative model space of aether-drift, emission, and contraction accounts side by side — is characteristic of the dissident tradition, which holds that the historical choice among these models was made prematurely and for reasons that were not purely empirical.
Charge, mass and the Ritzian aether model
In his treatment of charge and mass, Arathoon highlights the key conceptual differences between Newton's law of gravitation and Coulomb's law. Using what he calls a Ritzian aether toy model — a model in the tradition of Walter Ritz's emission electrodynamics — he argues that the fundamental physical phenomenon underlying Newton's law of gravitation is a 1/R type effect, and not a 1/R² effect as it is with Coulomb's law and Poisson's equation. On this account the apparent formal similarity between the gravitational and electrostatic inverse-square laws conceals a real physical difference between the two interactions, and gravitation is not simply the gravitational analogue of electrostatics.
The fine-structure constant
Arathoon has examined the fundamental nature of the dimensionless constant alpha, which quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles, asking what physical content lies behind a number that mainstream physics accepts as a brute empirical input.
Alfred O'Rahilly and the critical electromagnetic tradition
Arathoon has done substantial work recovering the contribution of the Irish academic Alfred O'Rahilly, whose Electromagnetic Theory: A Critical Examination of Fundamentals (published in 1938 under the title Electromagnetics) is a systematic critical re-examination of the foundations of electromagnetic theory. O'Rahilly's book is a landmark of the sceptical tradition in electrodynamics, and Arathoon's presentation of it makes the case for its continued relevance to present-day foundational debate.
Irreversibility and thermodynamics
In public discussion Arathoon has argued that thermodynamics is an amalgam of classical mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and mathematics by way of probability theory, and that its irreversibility is introduced by the probabilistic treatment applied after the fact rather than arising from the underlying physics. He regards electromagnetism as inherently irreversible, and notes that no one has succeeded in modelling adiabatic sound propagation and irreversible heat conduction simultaneously with the same molecular components in air, despite ample computing power — a gap he holds is bridged by assumption rather than by demonstration.
History of science and medicine
Arathoon has also written and spoken on the history of science, including an examination of the beginnings of recorded Greek medicine and what he describes as the inability of post-modern historians to write coherently and rationally on that and related subjects.
CNPS talks
He has presented in the CNPS online seminar series:
- "Competing Mathematical Models Explaining the Michelson-Morley Experiment" (22 November 2025)
- "Alfred O'Rahilly" (29 March 2025)
- "The Fine-Structure Constant" (2 February 2025)
- "What is Charge? and What is Mass?" (26 October 2024)
- "Incompatibilities with Special Relativity" (5 August 2023)
- "The Myth of the Hippocratic Oath" (22 July 2023)
Works
- Atmospheric Electricity Investigations: Measurement of Atmospheric Conductivity, B.Sc. thesis, University of Lancaster, January 1991.