Dinu Effect

Scientific Theory
Name	The Dinu Effect
Type	Experimental effect; mechanical analogue of magnetism
Author(s)	Ionel Dinu (experiment); named by David de Hilster
Keywords	magnetism, vortex, Aether, fluid mechanics, Bernoulli, rotating cylinders, Four Universal Motions
Year	2006 (experiments); named 2021
Website	https://fourmotions.org/magnetic-motion/

The Dinu Effect is the observation that two cylinders rotating under water attract or repel one another in exactly the pattern of two permanent magnets — attracting when spun in opposite directions and repelling when spun in the same direction — with no magnet, charge or field involved anywhere in the apparatus.

The effect is named after the Romanian physicist Ionel Dinu, who performed and filmed the underwater experiments from 2006 onward as part of a programme to show that electric, magnetic and gravitational forces are fluid-mechanical effects in a liquid aether. The name "Dinu Effect" was coined by David de Hilster in Principia Mathematica 2, written with his father Robert de Hilster, where the effect is adopted as the experimental basis for the magnetic component of the Four Universal Motions.

Its importance to the researchers who use it is that it is a physical demonstration, not an argument. Magnetic-looking attraction and repulsion are produced in a bucket of water, in front of a camera, by rotation alone.

The experiment

The apparatus is deliberately simple. Two cylinders — in other runs, disks — are suspended in water and set rotating, and their subsequent motion is observed. The variable is the relative direction of rotation.

Opposite directions of rotation → the cylinders attract and move together.
Same direction of rotation → the cylinders repel and move apart.

This is the same rule that governs magnets, and it is the whole of the observation. Dinu has also run the experiment with rotating disks and has supported the physical work with computational fluid dynamics simulations.

The fluid mechanism

The effect has a straightforward hydrodynamic explanation in terms of pressure, and it is essentially Bernoulli's principle applied to the gap between the two bodies.

When the cylinders rotate in opposite directions, the circulation each one drives through the gap runs the same way as the other's. The two flows reinforce, the fluid in the gap moves faster, and by Bernoulli's principle its pressure falls below the surrounding pressure. The higher outside pressure then pushes the cylinders together — observed as attraction.
When they rotate in the same direction, the flows they drive through the gap run against each other. The circulation is obstructed, the fluid in the gap is compressed, and its pressure rises above the surrounding pressure, forcing the cylinders apart — observed as repulsion.

As with the aether-pressure account of gravitation, the attraction is not a pull. Nothing reaches across the gap; the surrounding fluid pushes inward wherever the pressure between the bodies is lower. This is why the effect is of interest to researchers who reject action at a distance: it is a case where an apparent pull is demonstrably a push, and where the medium between the bodies is doing all of the work.

The interaction of rotating cylinders in fluids is itself an established topic in ordinary fluid mechanics, and this pressure-based account of attraction and repulsion between co- and counter-rotating cylinders has been treated in the conventional literature independently of any aether interpretation.

Dinu's interpretation

For Dinu the experiment is an analogue, and the analogy is meant seriously. He models the aether as a compressible, inviscid liquid filling the vacuum and the spaces between atoms within matter, and argues that:

Magnetic attraction and repulsion occur between vortices in that liquid — the rotating cylinder standing in for a circulating region of aether.
Electrostatic and gravitational attraction correspond to Bjerknes forces, the established fluid-mechanical attraction and repulsion between bodies pulsating in a fluid.

He developed the pressure argument formally in "Bernoulli Equation for the Aether and Ampere's Effect" (2007) and has extended it with computational fluid dynamics, reporting that a CFD simulation of a current-carrying coil produces vortex lines in the aether corresponding to the magnetic field lines of the coil. His broader case is set out in "Rudiments of a Theory of Aether" (2010) and the Fundaments of a Theory of Aether series.

His conclusion is the general one: attractions and repulsions occurring apparently at a distance are in every case transmitted through the liquid lying between the bodies.

Adoption in the Four Universal Motions

Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster adopted the result as the empirical foundation of magnetic motion, the second of the Four Universal Motions, and gave it the name by which it is now known in that literature.

In their model magnetism is orbiting motion: a magnetic field is nothing but G1 particles caught in orbits, around atomic nuclei or in larger orbits extending well beyond the atomic scale. The rules they state for it are the rules Dinu observed in water —

two opposite magnetic motions coming near each other reinforce and produce attraction;
two like magnetic motions coming near each other disturb one another and produce repulsion.

The de Hilsters differ from Dinu in what is doing the circulating. Dinu's rotating region is a continuous fluid; theirs is a swarm of discrete particles in orbit, guided by what they call gravity tubes. Both treat magnetism as circulation rather than as a field, and both dispense with action at a distance. The adoption is also consistent with the univironmental principle underlying the Four Universal Motions, since in both accounts what a body does is determined by the medium surrounding it as much as by the body itself.

What the effect does and does not show

The Dinu Effect is a genuine and reproducible fluid-mechanical phenomenon, and independent experimenters have repeated it. What is at issue is not the observation but its scope.

It does show that the attraction-and-repulsion pattern usually taken as characteristic of magnetism can be produced mechanically, by circulation in a fluid, with no field and no charge — and therefore that the pattern by itself does not require a field-theoretic explanation.

It does not by itself establish that magnetism is aether circulation. A shared pattern of attraction and repulsion is an analogy, and analogies in physics have gone both ways historically: some, like the wave analogy for light, proved structural; others, like the caloric fluid for heat, proved misleading. Dinu's stronger claim rests on the further work — the Bernoulli treatment, the CFD correspondence between coil vortex lines and magnetic field lines — rather than on the water experiment alone.

Read at its most modest, the effect is a demonstration that a mechanical explanation of magnetism is possible, which is precisely the point in dispute between the researchers documented on this wiki and the field-theoretic mainstream.

External links

fourmotions.org — Magnetic Motion, where the effect is named and a video is linked
"Experiments with Cylinders Rotating in Water" (2010)
"Unravelling the NATURE of the MAGNETIC Field" (2008)
AETHERscience — Dinu's YouTube channel