Morton F Spears

Morton F. Spears
Morton F. Spears
Born	November 10, 1921
Died	October 22, 2006 (aged 84)
Residence	Duxbury, MA, United States
Nationality	USA
Known for	Capacitance Theory of Gravity, electrostatic derivation of the gravitational constant G, permittivity cosmology
	Scientific career
Fields	Physics, Electrical engineering, Cosmology
Institutions	Spears Associates, Inc.

Morton F. Spears (1921-2006) was an American electrical engineer, inventor and independent researcher who argued that gravity is an electrostatic phenomenon. Known professionally for antenna and sensitive-receiver design in the ELF/VLF/LF spectrum, he spent the last decades of his life developing a "Capacitance Theory of Gravity" (CTG) in which gravitational attraction emerges as a residual electrostatic effect between charges, governed by the permittivity of the intervening medium, rather than as a separate fundamental force or as curvature of spacetime. His work is carried forward today by Dennis P Allen, who describes his own gravitational research as "Neo-Spearsian".

Biography

Morton F. Spears was known internationally for contributions to electromagnetic antenna and sensitive receiving circuit designs, particularly those applicable to the ELF/VLF/LF frequency spectrum. A holder of many patents, his commercially successful technical achievements included original work for magnetic recording, remote radio signal timing and navigation, underwater electromagnetic signal reception and processing, and general low-frequency antenna technology. He was an electronic engineering graduate of MIT (1943). He served from Ensign to Commander in the U.S. Navy during World War II and Korean conflicts and acquired professional skills in radar and nuclear physics, which he used during his tours of duty.

In 1970 he and several colleagues founded Spears Associates, Inc., which specialized in the design and supply of high-technology communication and navigation equipment for submarines, aircraft, ships, and land-based applications. Spears Associates was purchased by Sippican in 1996 and is now part of Lockheed Martin Sippican.

At Spears Associates he served in progression as President, Chairman of the Board, and finally as Senior Scientist returning to state-of-the-art research in electronics and physics. After retirement from Spears Associates in 1994, he continued to develop his experimentally-based capacitance theory of gravity. He also explored the implications of permittivity and permeability for understanding observed properties of the Universe.

Morton F. Spears died on October 22, 2006, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, at the age of 84. His daughter Leigh Spears Tesfatsion, Department of Economics, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-1070, maintains his posthumous website, from which his books and research reports remain freely available. She also communicated his final paper to Galilean Electrodynamics, where it appeared posthumously in 2010.

Scientific contributions

Gravity as a residual electrostatic effect

Spears's central claim, stated flatly in the opening of his 2010 paper, is that "gravity is an electrostatic phenomenon." Rather than treating gravitation as a fourth force or as spacetime geometry, he sought to derive it from ordinary electrostatics combined with classical circuit theory — Coulomb's law, Ohm's and Kirchhoff's laws, and above all capacitor theory.

His approach begins from the elementary result that the energy stored between the poles of a capacitor of capacitance C carrying charge Q at potential difference V is QV/2, so that the force between the poles separated by a distance r is F = QV/2r. Spears observed that a V/r gradient need not arise from the familiar linear voltage drop through open space: two separated poles in a medium also produce a voltage drop per unit of elastance (the reciprocal of capacitance, measured in darafs). Working in volts-per-daraf rather than volts-per-metre, and then converting back, he obtained an attractive force between two charged particles treated as the two poles of a capacitor in free space.

To isolate this effect he modelled two electrons sitting in separate hydrogen atoms one metre apart in open space of permittivity ε₀, the hydrogen atoms serving to cancel or attenuate the ordinary electrostatic fields so that only the far weaker capacitor-generated gradient remains. Equating the resulting electrostatic force to Newton's F = GM_e²/r² then defines the gravitational constant in terms of purely electrostatic parameters — elementary charge, electron mass, the proton/electron mass ratio, the permittivity of vacuum, the speed of light and the effective electron radius. The value obtained, about 6.685 × 10^-11, falls within the spread of the best experimental determinations of G and lies roughly 0.19% above the then-accepted value.

Why measured values of G disagree

A distinctive consequence of the theory is that G is not an invariant of nature. Because the linking "field" is a V/S gradient that is far too weak to displace electrons or to polarize matter, it cannot be shielded — Spears noted that not even a sheet of silver acts as a Faraday shield against it — and it therefore penetrates every particle of a body, passing through particle-filled matter with less attenuation than through open space. Consequently the effective permittivity ε₁₂ of the path between two masses enters the result, and a measured value becomes G = G₀ε₁₂²/ε₀², where G₀ is the base value in ε₀ space.

Spears argued that this explains, in a way conventional theory cannot, why careful experimenters using different physical layouts continue to obtain systematically different empirical values for G: each is measuring a G appropriate to the medium along the path between their test masses. He cited the reported spread of about 0.75% between the Fitzgerald and Michaelis determinations as evidence, and pointed to the tower gravity measurements of Eckhardt, Jekeli, Lazarewicz, Romaides and Sands — which found a slight extra drop in weight with height beyond the inverse-square prediction — as supporting the picture, since moving upward replaces part of the high-permittivity path through the Earth with lower-permittivity air.

Mass, effective radius and packing density

In Spears's treatment, the "effective radius" of a body plays the role that mass plays in Newtonian gravity, the two being directly proportional. When particles are far apart relative to their own radii, the effective radius of the cluster is simply the sum of the individual radii; when they are packed closer together, the total is less than the sum. He illustrated this with a laboratory analogy: the capacitance to ground of two widely separated 7.6 cm aluminium balls is 2C, but when the balls are brought into contact the total falls to about 1.4C. This is, he argued, exactly the behaviour of mass — a body's mass is always equal to or less than the sum of its constituent particle masses — and it gives packing density a direct physical meaning. He further suggested that different elements possess internal effective dielectric constants for very small fields, ranging upward from ε₀ for hydrogen, an idea he supported experimentally by showing that scattering fine particles in the air gap of a capacitor raises its apparent permittivity.

Permittivity cosmology

Spears extended the same reasoning to cosmology. If the velocity of light depends on the permittivity and permeability of space, and if these are not everywhere the constants assumed by standard cosmology, then distance and time estimates drawn from light propagation must be revised. In a series of reports from 1998 onward he argued that permittivity effects can account for the phenomena otherwise attributed to dark matter, and imply a Universe considerably older than the accepted figure, while also producing the appearance of accelerating expansion.

Development of the theory and reception

The first book, Capacitance Theory of Gravity (1991), obtained results Spears regarded as essentially correct but was criticized for an incomplete account of unit conversion. A second book (1993) recast the theory in terms of CV²/2r capacitance forces, at the cost of an arbitrary choice of the electron's effective radius; Spears later judged this a three-year detour and returned to the first book's approach. He credited Trevor Silvey, an engineer from England, with persisting in the analysis that showed why the original results had been so accurate and with steering the work back to its first formulation. He also patented a "Force Generating System", popularly described as an "artificial gravity mat", applying high-voltage electrodes.

Discussed in CNPS talks

Spears's electrostatic account of gravity is the direct basis of the "Neo-Spearsian" gravitational theory developed by the mathematician Dennis P Allen, who has presented it in the CNPS online seminar series:

"Electrostatic (Capacitance) Gravity Theory with Dr. Dennis J. Allen Jr." (2 September 2023)

Allen's book Foundations of Neo-Spearsian Gravitational Theory with Application to Earthquake Early Warning Systems (2011) sets out to complete Spears's programme, treating the permittivity of the gravitating body as the "missing hidden variable" of gravitational theory and drawing out a practical consequence: if the permittivity of rock changes under stress, gravimetric monitoring could give early warning of earthquakes.

Abstracts

Books

1993 - "CTG: Capacitance Theory of Gravity, Book II" (Quill Publications, Inc.) (Read in full)
1991 - "Capacitance Theory of Gravity" (Quill Publications, Inc.) (Read in full)

Selected journal publication

Morton F. Spears, "An Electrostatic Solution for the Gravity Force and the Value of G", Galilean Electrodynamics, Vol. 21, No. 2 (March/April 2010), pp. 23-32 — communicated posthumously by his daughter, Leigh Spears Tesfatsion. (PDF)

Patents

Morton F. Spears (1992), Force Generating System ("Artificial Gravity Mat"), US Patent 5090643.
Charles E. Odams and Morton F. Spears (1972), Apparatus for Correlating Energy Waves, CA Patent 915267.
Morton F. Spears (1970), Loop Antenna Comprising Plural Helical Coils on Closed Magnetic Core, US Patent 3495264.
Charles E. Odams and Morton F. Spears (1968), Directionally Selective Energy Receiving System, US Patent 3369235.
Morton F. Spears (1965), Timing System for Setting Clocks to Distorted Standard, US Patent 3217258.
Ralph H. Sherman and Morton F. Spears (1960), Shielded Magnetic Translating Apparatus, US Patent 2951912.
Morton F. Spears (1960), Device for Manifesting Thermal Boundaries, US Patent 2930232.
Morton F. Spears (1956), Means for Controlling Current Flow in Electric Circuits, US Patent 2744981.
Morton F. Spears (1954), Stepped Magnetic Recording Head, US Patent 2678972.
Morton F. Spears (1951), Magnetic Recording and Reproducing System, US Patent 2567582.

External links

An Experimentally-Based Theory of Gravity (Morton F. Spears) — posthumous archive maintained by Leigh Spears Tesfatsion, with full text of both books and all research reports
Morton Spears: Capacitance Theory of Gravity (Rex Research)