Mark Creek-water Dorazio
Mark Creek-water Dorazio | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Arizona, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Popularizing and extending the electron-positron pair models of Ernest J Sternglass and the electron-positron lattice (epola) aether of Menahem Simhony; a non-quark model of protons and neutrons |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics, Cosmology, Aether |
Mark Creek-water Dorazio (born Mark Dorazio, also writes as Mark Creekwater) is an American independent researcher and self-described "talented and enthusiastic amateur" in physics, based in Arizona. He is best known for his sustained effort to publicize and build upon the largely neglected theoretical work of Ernest J Sternglass (1923–2015) and Menahem Simhony (1922–2015), who modeled nuclear particles and the vacuum itself in terms of relativistic electron-positron pairs rather than quarks. His own principal claim is that Simhony's electron-positron lattice ("epola") model of space and Sternglass's relativistic electron-positron pairs are two descriptions of the same underlying physical reality.
Biography
He was born Mark Dorazio, the oldest of six children in an Air Force family that moved frequently; most of his relatives live in Delaware. He acquired the nickname "Creek-water" from his preference for drinking creek water rather than tap water. He has traveled around the United States and lived primarily outdoors since the early 1980s, a life he prefers to call living "home-free" rather than homeless, and he has walked across the country roughly half a dozen times in support of activist causes, including the 2014 Great March for Climate Action. He took part in the mass anti-Vietnam-War demonstration at the Washington Monument on 15 November 1969.
He has said that his passion for physics developed after college rather than during it, and he describes himself as an amateur physics and astronomy enthusiast rather than a professional physicist, writing that "as an amateur physics enthusiast, the writer is not aware of any technical expertise upon which he can draw." He renewed a serious study of physics in the mid-2000s working from open university libraries, and names Simhony and Sternglass as his two main physics mentors. He wrote a roughly 200-page book on astrophysics and nuclear physics while walking across the country in 2012.
In February 2015 he traveled to Ithaca, New York, hoping to meet Ernest Sternglass, a 1952 Cornell graduate whose papers he had read extensively; Sternglass died on 12 February 2015, about a week after his arrival. He spent much of his time in Ithaca in the archives of Cornell's Olin Library, reading boxes of Sternglass's papers and correspondence, including letters to Sternglass from Albert Einstein dating from the early 1950s. Having narrowly missed meeting Sternglass, he came to regard it as a responsibility to make the work of Sternglass and of Simhony known, describing them as "two gentlemen who are almost unknown."
He has more recently been based in Arizona, publishing his essays from Chandler and Phoenix. His work appears outside the conventional journal system — on his own blog, on the Booksie writing platform, on Academia.edu, in the General Science Journal, and in talks given to the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society.
Scientific contributions
Sternglass's relativistic electron-positron pairs
His work is chiefly an exposition, extension and quantitative testing of the electron-positron pair models developed independently by Sternglass and Simhony. Its starting point is Sternglass's 1961 paper in Physical Review, which showed that an electron and a positron can in principle orbit one another in an extremely tight, highly relativistic orbit, each moving at nearly the speed of light, without annihilating. In such a state the pair's relativistic mass increase allows a system built from ordinary electrons and positrons to account for the masses of much heavier particles.
On this basis he argues that the entire particle zoo discovered over the last century can be described as combinations of relativistic electrons and positrons, with no need for quarks — a point he emphasizes by noting that no quark has ever been observed in isolation in a laboratory. In his treatment the neutral pi-meson is the simplest such system, a single tightly bound electron-positron pair; the neutron contains a spinning electron-positron pair at its center, held from annihilating by magnetic repulsion; and the proton can be pictured, following Sternglass, as four electron-positron pairs together with one unpaired positron, which supplies the proton's net positive charge.
He has pursued the quantitative consequences of these pictures with semi-classical calculations rather than quantum field theory. He has published derivations of the charge radii of the proton and neutron from their measured magnetic moments using elementary algebra, obtaining a characteristic pair-orbit radius on the order of 10−15 metre, and has proposed observations of neutron stars as an empirical test of the two models.
Simhony's epola model
The second of his central subjects is the electron-positron lattice, or epola, proposed by the Israeli physicist Menahem Simhony beginning in the 1970s. In this model, what mainstream physics calls "empty space" or "the vacuum" is in fact a real material medium: a crystal lattice of bound electrons and positrons, arranged in a face-centred cubic structure — the same structure as an ordinary salt crystal. The lattice permeates the entire universe and inter-penetrates all ordinary matter, so densely packed that he notes there would be more than ten thousand lattice elements between two adjacent atomic nuclei in a grain of salt.
Because the lattice is a real elastic solid, it can carry waves. Its elasticity allows it to propagate electromagnetic radiation of every wavelength, and its extreme stiffness — he describes it as "stiffer than a diamond" — accounts for the very high speed at which those waves travel, that is, for the speed of light. This is an important reversal of the historical picture: the nineteenth-century luminiferous aether was imagined as a thin, wispy, tenuous fluid, whereas the epola is dense and rigid. Simhony himself resisted calling the epola an aether at all, precisely because of that association. Dorazio has traced this history in his essay History of "Aether", and has written elsewhere on whether the aether's constituent elements might be, in some sense, directly observable.
In Simhony's treatment the same lattice is used to derive both radiation and gravitation, so that phenomena usually treated by two separate theories — electromagnetism and general relativity — emerge from a single material medium. His CNPS presentation Gravity By Menahem Simhony is devoted to this gravitational side of the model, presenting gravity as an effect of the lattice rather than as a curvature of an abstract geometrical spacetime. He has elsewhere argued that gravity is best understood as an emergent phenomenon, drawing connections to the emergent-gravity arguments of Erik Verlinde.
Connecting Sternglass and Simhony
His own principal contribution is an attempt to identify the constituents of Simhony's lattice with the smallest of Sternglass's relativistic electron-positron pairs. Sternglass modelled particles as hierarchies of tightly bound, rapidly rotating electron-positron "cosmological systems." Dorazio argues that the smallest possible Sternglass system, one whose total mass is that of a single electron, may be exactly the element out of which Simhony's epola is built.
His supporting argument is a resonance calculation. For an electron-positron pair of electron mass, he computes the Larmor precession frequency — a magnetic quantity — and the orbital frequency — an electrical quantity — and finds them to be nearly equal. He interprets this near-coincidence of two independently derived quantities as evidence both that the electron has the mass it does for a physical reason, and that the two models, developed separately and for different purposes, are describing the same objects. On this picture the epola elements are extremely small and extremely dense, with a radius on the order of 4×10−15 cm and a mass density of roughly 5×1015 g/cm3, some twenty times the density of a proton or neutron.
Epola elements in accelerator data
Following from this, he has proposed that the epola may already have been observed without being recognised. He suggests that certain short-lived baryons reported from particle accelerators — the bottom lambda, bottom sigma and bottom xi — with energies near 5.8 GeV, may not be new particles at all, but energetically disturbed epola elements. The argument turns on the kinetic energy an electron would need in order to "see" a structure as small as an epola element, which he calculates to fall in the same energy range.
Cosmology and critical stance
He extends the Sternglass framework to cosmology as well, presenting Sternglass's hierarchy of self-similar rotating pair systems as an alternative account of what mainstream cosmology attributes to the Big Bang. He writes explicitly as a critic of the standard model of particle physics and of the academic consensus that supports it, and much of his output is aimed at general readers rather than at journals. He has cited Einstein's advice to the young Sternglass — "Be stubborn" — as a motto for that stance.
CNPS talks
He has presented in the CNPS online seminar series:
- "Gravity By Menahem Simhony - presented by Mark Dorazio" (11 November 2023)
- "Theoretical Work By Ernest Sternglass with Mark Creekwater" (29 October 2023)
Works
- Theoretical Work by Ernest Sternglass & Menahem Simhony (book)
- "Is There an 'Ether'?? Can We 'See' the Elements Which Compose It??" (2020)
- "A History of 'Aether'" (2020)
- "Larmor-Precession Calculation Shows Connection Between Theoretical Work of Sternglass and Simhony" (2020)
- "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Neutral Pi-Mesons, But Were Afraid to Ask" (2020)
- "The Structure of Protons and Neutrons: An Alternative to Quark Theory" (2018)
- "Regarding Theoretical Work by Ernest Sternglass: An Alternative to the Standard Model" (2018)
- "Sternglass Cosmological Systems: the Big Bang Explained" (2018)
- "Re Sternglass's 'Table 1' and Simhony's 'Epola'"
- "Elliptical Orbits" (2017)
- "Regarding the Magnetic Moments of Protons and Neutrons"
- "Regarding 'Neutron Stars' as a Way to Test Theoretical Work of Sternglass and Simhony" (2017)
- "Technical Support for Sternglass's Model" (2016)