The Conservation Law
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Conservation Law |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Roland H Dishington |
| Keywords | mechanical systems, energy, momentum, conservation laws |
| Published | 1998 |
| Journal | Apeiron |
| Volume | 5 |
| Number | 1-2 |
| No. of pages | 20 |
| Pages | 1-21 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
For more than 150 years, starting with mechanical systems, the fact that certain quantities such as energy, momentum, etc. are constant in physical processes has led to an increasing number of conservation laws. With the advent of quantum physics, new conserved quantities, such as baryon and lepton numbers, have been found. In these new cases, the question of just what is being conserved arises. Moreover, it is clear that the same lack of understanding applies to the "classical" laws, since no one understands what "energy" or "momentum" really are, for example. Recently, much emphasis has been placed on the related transformation symmetry properties, and the realization that gauge transformation symmetries are the source of certain quantum conservation laws. However, in spite of the insight this approach has provided, in no case has true understanding of "what it is" that is conserved been forthcoming. The following account suggests that, rather than the multiplicity of conservation laws now in use, a single conservation law produces all of the effects now ascribed to the many; and further, the nature of the one quantity that is being conserved is indicated.
Overview
Roland H. Dishington's paper opens with a complaint that is more philosophical than technical: physics has accumulated a growing list of conservation laws — energy, momentum, charge, baryon number, lepton number — without ever saying what the conserved thing is. Gauge symmetry, he grants, explains where certain conservation laws come from, but "in no case has true understanding of 'what it is' that is conserved been forthcoming." Conservation laws in modern physics are bookkeeping identities over quantities nobody can point at. Dishington's proposal is that there is only one conserved quantity, that it is a substance rather than an abstraction, and that every other conservation law is a derived consequence of it.
That substance is a massless, frictionless, compressible fluid aether. The paper is a condensed application of a deterministic unified field programme Dishington had developed over five decades with R. L. Kirkwood and L. O. Heflinger — the universe consisting of exactly three things: Newton's absolute space, Newton's absolute time, and this fluid. Particles are localised rarefactions or compressions of it; waves are ripples in it; charge, electric energy, magnetic energy and gravitation are all specific kinds of deformation in it. The departure from the mainstream is total and deliberate: no curved spacetime, no point particles, no quantum indeterminacy at the fundamental level (quantum mechanics is demoted to the role statistical mechanics played for thermodynamics), and — most strikingly — no forces. "In the ether, there are no forces. Particles flow 'downhill', i.e. from more to less compacted ether regions."
The argument
The three-component universe and the ether datum
Space is unwarpable and Euclidean; time is "the sequence of events, not as they are measured but as they occur." The fluid fills all space, is conserved, has no linear momentum, and does not obey Newton's laws. In empty space its datum density is φd = 8.9876 × 1020 "descartes" (Heaviside-Lorentz units). Absolute density φa is always positive; the physically interesting quantity is the increment φ = φa − φd, which may be of either sign. An electron/positron pair is made by removing ether from one region and depositing it in another — the depleted region is the electron, the compressed one the positron.
Longitudinal sustaining waves
Such a displacement would immediately ooze back to the datum, so something must hold it. Dishington's answer is that the ether propagates both transverse (t) and longitudinal (l) waves, and that l-waves carry no energy. During pair production an "energyless, longitudinal sustaining wave" runs from electron to positron and holds both bulk displacements in place for as long as the particles exist. Every particle except photons and neutrinos is one or more spherical shells of bulk ether deformation pinned by such waves. Because the medium responds differently to bulk deformation and to l-waves, the field variables split, φ = φ̄ + φ̇ and V = V̄ + V̇, and two sets of equations are needed.
Maxwell's equations recovered as the bulk equations
The bulk equations are wave equations in φa and φaV with source ρ. Identifying φ with Maxwell's scalar potential and the flow vector φaV with the vector potential through A = φaV/co, these become Maxwell's equations in potential form. This is the paper's central technical claim: "at last, the meaning of Maxwell's equations has been established as the bulk equations of motion of the ether." Crucially, the ρ appearing here is not a count of whole charged particles per unit volume but a smoothly distributed ether distortion existing inside particles — the "surrounding function" ∇2φ, the ratio at each point of the average surrounding ether density to the density at the point.
Ether conservation as the root law
The fluid obeys the ordinary continuity equation ∇·(φaV) = −∂φa/∂t. Substituting the identifications above shows that this is the Lorentz gauge condition — so the Lorentz gauge, usually chosen for convenience, is on this view the only gauge with physical meaning. Everything that follows is an argument that other conservation laws hold "because, and only because, ether is conserved."
Charge, electric and magnetic energy
Taking the divergence of one bulk equation plus the time derivative of the other yields a continuity equation for distributed charge distortion, valid because the ether-conservation term ξ vanishes. Electric energy density is the "gradient-squared" distortion, εe = ½(∇φ)2 in the static case, always positive, and is the only energy in the rest and kinetic energies of layered particles. Solving the field equations for a positron at rest gives concentric shells of ρ and εe with different peak radii, integrating to e+ and Eo. For the same particle in uniform motion the φ contours expand laterally into oblate spheroids and the integrated energy rises to γEo — so kinetic energy is simply excess gradient-squared distortion, and a uniformly moving charge has a magnetic field but no magnetic energy.
Magnetic energy is only partially localisable and comes in two forms: a vortex term and a flow-acceleration term. Since the frictionless ether has "angular persistence", a vortex once formed persists forever; but Dishington insists the vortex term counts as energy only where work was required to make the vortex and is recoverable in stopping it. Particle spin vortices therefore store no energy. The transformer effect is the second term at work, carrying energy in transit between εe and vortex energy.
Poynting's theorem restricted
Following Butler (1969), Dishington argues that although Poynting's theorem is an identity derived from the field equations, S and ε cannot be read as energy flow and density unless they form a covariant 4-vector — which requires the total absence of free charge. "So only in the case of radiation will [these] represent conservation of energy." He treats radiation as a purely magnetic phenomenon (φ = 0), with the vortex and acceleration amplitudes equal and each carrying half the energy at every plane of the wave.
Photons, neutrinos and gravitation
An orbiting atomic electron sets up a vortex on the nucleus; during radiation the combination of orbit vortex and outgoing transverse wave produces a travelling cylindrical vortex of spin 1, laterally about the size of the orbit — that combination is the photon. Ordinary antenna radiation has no spin vortex and is therefore not quantised. The neutrino is the propagating spin vortex alone, stripped of any transverse wave component, which is why it interacts so weakly.
Gravitation is the least developed part, because the l-wave equations are incomplete. Using Kirkwood's theory, a large neutral spherical mass is given a zero-time-average standing wave: φ̇ = φd√(3GM/r)·cos ωt with a matching radial V̇. Net bulk flow and mean velocity are zero, but the mean acceleration field is not — it is inward and equal to −GM/4πr2·r̂. "The natural state of any object is to move to oppose its time average acceleration with respect to the ether." Motion follows Newton's second law augmented by a Kirkwood force, with the primary inertial system defined by the free-fall velocity field Ve = ±√(2GM/r)·r̂; Dishington reports that this machinery reproduces all the particle, clock and light-bending predictions of general relativity "without invoking warped space or tensor analysis."
Newtonian potential energy as bookkeeping
The most pointed result concerns free fall. A body dropped from infinity stays at rest in the primary inertial system the whole way down: γ = 1, and it undergoes no physical change. After the inelastic collision its energy is γsEo, so it has gained δsEo — plus an equal amount of heat, a total of 2δsEo appearing at impact, which "clearly comes from the source, not the test body." Dishington concludes that all these energies are electric, localised in the bodies, and conserved, and that Newton's kinetic and potential energies "are just artificial bookkeeping tricks to allow easy calculation of the heat energy generated."
Particle taxonomy and baryon number
Particles come in exactly two classes: layerons (spherically symmetric layered distortion distributions — positron one layer, pion two, proton three; only electron/positron and proton/antiproton truly stable) and c-ons (photons and neutrinos, stable only at c). Baryon number conservation is then reinterpreted: since P and P̄ have opposite φ patterns, P + P̄ adds zero net ether increment while P + P adds a large one. The permitted reaction P + P → P + P + P + P̄ conserves ether; the forbidden ones do not. "What is conserved in these interactions is ether."
Assessment
The genuine attraction of this paper is its ambition and its refusal to be satisfied with formalism. Dishington is asking a legitimate question that most textbooks decline to ask, and his central move — that a single conserved substance underlies every conservation law — is the kind of unifying hypothesis that, if it worked, would be worth a great deal. Several individual observations are sharp. The identification of the continuity equation with the Lorentz gauge is elegant and gives a physical reason for a choice usually made for convenience. The restriction on Poynting's theorem, borrowed from Butler, is a real and under-appreciated point about when S and ε may legitimately be read as flow and density. The insistence that microscopic charge density is not a particle count, and that the Lorentz force equation is strictly macroscopic with "no replacement" at the level of distortion elements, is an honest identification of a genuine gap in classical electrodynamics. And the free-fall analysis, whatever one makes of the ether, correctly notes that the Newtonian potential-energy account glosses over where the energy physically resides.
The difficulties are severe and largely structural. First, almost the entire load is carried by a citation. The claim that the theory "gives gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces a single physical mechanism", derives all of atomic physics from Newton's laws and planetary analysis, and reproduces general relativity's predictions is referenced to Dishington's own 1989 book and papers, marked "[7]", rather than shown. The reader is asked to grant the framework and evaluate only the conservation corollary. Second, the l-wave equations — the half of the theory that pins particles together and generates gravitation — are admitted to be missing. The gravitic field solution is obtained not by solving them but by assuming zero vorticity, zero potential, radial symmetry and zero net bulk flow until the equation collapses to something that "is satisfied by at least one simple solution". That is an existence demonstration, not a derivation, and other solutions are not excluded.
Third, the concept of energyless longitudinal waves is asked to do a great deal of work — sustaining every particle in the universe — while remaining exempt from the conservation law that is the paper's subject. If l-waves carry no energy, it is not explained how they exert the sustaining constraint, and Dishington himself concedes at the end that "until solutions of accelerating l-wave fields are available, it is premature to say they cannot transmit energy." Fourth, the baryon-number argument is the weakest specific case: it is a plausibility sketch about net ether increment which, taken at face value, would forbid or permit reactions purely on a charge-conjugation-like symmetry, and it makes no attempt to address the reactions that actually discriminate baryon number from charge — nor the conservation of lepton flavour, strangeness, or the weak interaction's parity violation, none of which is mentioned.
Against measurement, two conflicts stand out. The model's particle taxonomy — layerons as one, two or three concentric charge shells — makes the proton a three-layer object and offers this as the counterpart of three quarks, but it does not engage with deep inelastic scattering, where the measured structure functions and Bjorken scaling require point-like constituents carrying definite fractional charges, not smooth concentric shells. Second, the claim that circular orbits are stable and non-radiating "if no other ether condition disturbs the flow", with radiation from excited states attributed to zero-point buffeting, predicts an atom whose spectrum depends on the ambient fluctuation environment; the observed sharpness and universality of atomic line spectra, and the measured Lamb shift, are precisely calculated by QED and are not addressed here.
Read on its own terms, the paper is best understood not as a self-contained result but as a programmatic essay: a statement of what a fully deterministic ether physics would say about conservation, offered by an author who had spent fifty years building the machinery elsewhere. Its argument is internally consistent given its premises; whether the premises can be made to work is a question this paper explicitly leaves open.