Magnetism
Magnetism is the set of phenomena by which certain materials and moving charges attract or repel one another without contact: the behaviour of lodestone and iron, of the compass needle, of the electric current and the coil.
It is among the oldest observed effects in physics and among the least explained. Mainstream physics describes magnetism with great precision and declines to say what it is; a large part of the literature catalogued on this wiki holds that this is not a limitation to be tolerated but the central problem, and that magnetism has a mechanical cause which can be shown.
The mainstream account
In the standard treatment magnetism is one aspect of a single electromagnetic field, unified with electricity by Maxwell in the 1860s.
A magnetic field B is produced by moving electric charge — a current in a wire, or the intrinsic circulation attributed to electrons within matter — and acts only on charge that is itself moving, through the Lorentz force, which is perpendicular both to the velocity and to the field. Because that force is always perpendicular to the motion, a magnetic field does no work on a moving charge; it changes direction, not speed.
Permanent magnetism in iron is attributed to electron spin rather than to orbital motion. Spin is treated as an intrinsic quantum property carrying a magnetic moment, and in a ferromagnet the exchange interaction — a quantum effect with no classical counterpart — aligns these moments across domains, so that their contributions add instead of cancelling.
There are no magnetic monopoles: cutting a magnet in half yields two magnets, and Maxwell's equations record this as ∇·B = 0. In special relativity the distinction between the electric and magnetic fields becomes frame-dependent — what one observer describes as a magnetic force another describes as electric — which is taken to show that the two are aspects of one object rather than two phenomena.
The account is quantitatively superb. Quantum electrodynamics predicts the electron's magnetic moment to about twelve significant figures, the most precisely confirmed prediction in science.
What it does not supply is a mechanism. The field is a primitive of the theory: it is described, not explained. Spin is not a rotation of anything — a point particle with no extension cannot literally spin — but an abstract property assigned to make the accounting work. And how a magnet influences a distant magnet across intervening space is answered by saying that the field is the intermediary, which relocates the question rather than settling it.
The view on this wiki
The researchers documented here regard that missing mechanism as the whole of the problem. Their common conviction is that magnetic attraction and repulsion must have a physical cause in the space between the bodies — that action at a distance is not an explanation, and that a field defined by what it does is not an account of what it is.
Harold Aspden states the complaint in a title — Do We Really Understand Magnetism? — and pushes further in Electricity without Magnetism?. The alternatives offered here divide mainly into aether accounts and particle accounts, and the most developed line runs from one to the other.
Ionel Dinu's underwater experiments
The most striking contribution is experimental rather than theoretical, and it can be watched.
The Romanian physicist Ionel Dinu submerged two cylinders in water, set them rotating, and observed how they behave toward one another. The result is that rotating cylinders in water attract and repel exactly as two magnets do:
- rotating in opposite directions, they attract and move together;
- rotating in the same direction, they repel and move apart.
There is no magnet in the apparatus, no charge and no field. The entire effect is produced by circulation in the surrounding fluid. David de Hilster named it the Dinu effect.
The mechanism is Bernoulli's principle applied to the gap between the cylinders. When they counter-rotate, the circulation each drives through the gap runs the same way as the other's; the flows reinforce, the fluid there moves faster, and its pressure falls below the surrounding pressure — so the higher outside pressure pushes the cylinders together. When they co-rotate the flows oppose, the fluid in the gap is obstructed and its pressure rises, forcing them apart.
The philosophical point is worth marking, because it is the reason the experiment matters to this community: the attraction is not a pull. Nothing reaches across the gap. The surrounding medium pushes inward wherever the pressure between the bodies is lower. Here is a case where an apparent action at a distance is demonstrably the medium doing the work — which is precisely what these researchers claim is true of magnetism itself.
Dinu's own interpretation is that the aether is a compressible, inviscid liquid, that magnetic attraction and repulsion occur between vortices in it, and that electrostatic and gravitational attraction correspond to Bjerknes forces — the established fluid-mechanical attraction between bodies pulsating in a fluid. He developed the argument formally in Bernoulli Equation for the Aether and Ampere's Effect (2007) and What's Behind Faraday's Magnetic Lines of Force? (2006), and has extended it with computational fluid dynamics, reporting that a simulated current-carrying coil produces vortex lines corresponding to the magnetic field lines of the coil.
He also argues, in Trouble with Maxwell's Electromagnetic Theory: Can Fields Induce Other Fields in Vacuum? (2012), that the mutual induction of fields in empty space is the weak point of the standard theory.
See Dinu Effect for the experiment in full, and Ionel Dinu for the wider programme.
The Four Universal Motions: magnetism as orbiting motion
Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster took Dinu's result as the experimental foundation of the magnetic component of the Four Universal Motions, and built it into the Particle Model.
In that model there are no fields at all. Everything is made of one particle, the G1, and the four forces are four motions of it: gravitic (straight-line), magnetic (orbiting), luminic (in formation) and electric. Magnetism is orbiting motion:
An orbiting body is a magnetic motion and constitutes a magnetic field.
— Robert and David de Hilster, The Four Universal Motions in Physics
A magnetic field is nothing but G1 particles caught in orbits — around atomic nuclei, or in much larger orbits reaching well beyond atomic scale. The rules governing them are the rules Dinu observed in water:
- two opposite magnetic motions coming near each other reinforce, producing attraction;
- two like magnetic motions coming near each other disturb one another, producing repulsion.
The difference between the two accounts is what is circulating. Dinu's rotating region is a continuous fluid; the de Hilsters' is a swarm of discrete particles in orbit. Both treat magnetism as circulation rather than as a field, both dispense with action at a distance, and both replace pull with push.
This also disposes of electron spin as ordinarily conceived. If a magnetic field simply is orbiting motion, then no intrinsic, non-rotational property need be assigned to a point particle to explain a magnet — the objection being that "spin" which is not a rotation of anything is a name for the problem rather than a solution to it. See Principia Mathematica 2.
Other accounts on this wiki
- Duncan W Shaw — Electricity and Magnetism: A Return to Aether, arguing the phenomena back into a medium.
- Hector Luis Bonilla — Aether-Magnetism.
- David Tombe — The Unification of Gravity and Magnetism.
- Ralph Sansbury — The Common Cause of Gravity and Magnetism.
- Dimiter G Stoinov — Unity of Electricity and Magnetism.
- S D Brusin — Fundamentals of the New Theory of Magnetism.
- Stephan J G Gift — A Quantum Theory of Magnetism.
- Thomas G Barnes — Foundations of Electricity & Magnetism.
The recurring theme across them is unification by mechanism rather than by formalism: gravity and magnetism, or electricity and magnetism, are to be shown to be the same kind of motion in the same medium, rather than combined into a single mathematical object whose physical nature remains unstated.
What is and is not established
It is worth separating the experimental claim from the interpretive one, since they stand differently.
The Dinu effect is real. Co- and counter-rotating cylinders in a fluid do attract and repel as described; the pressure account follows from ordinary hydrodynamics and the interaction of rotating cylinders in fluids is treated in the conventional literature independently of any aether interpretation. Independent experimenters have repeated it.
What it establishes is that the attraction-repulsion pattern 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 compel a field-theoretic explanation.
What it does not by itself establish is that magnetism is aether circulation. A shared pattern is an analogy, and analogies in physics have gone both ways: the wave analogy for light proved structural, the caloric fluid for heat proved misleading. The stronger claim rests on the further work — the Bernoulli treatment, the correspondence between simulated coil vortex lines and magnetic field lines, and in the de Hilsters' case the wider Particle Model of which magnetic motion is one part.
Against these accounts the mainstream can point to the quantitative reach of the standard theory, which no mechanical model here yet approaches: the electron magnetic moment to twelve figures, the behaviour of ferromagnetic domains, superconductivity, and the frame-dependence of the electric-magnetic distinction under Lorentz transformation.
The disagreement is therefore not really about the observations. It is about whether a theory that predicts superbly while declining to say what a magnetic field is has finished its work — and on that question this wiki's researchers answer that it has not.