A Matter of Definition
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | A Matter of Definition |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Greg Volk |
| Keywords | matter, Temperature, mathematics, Rotation, entropy, energy, field, mass, aether, light, philosophy of science |
| Published | 2011 |
| No. of pages | 17 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Many significant problems in physics remain unsolved not merely for lack of clever mathematics or even a good theory, but for lack of a proper paradigm behind the mathematics. Therefore, this paper examines the definitions of several fundamental properties such as space, time, energy, field, force, mass, entropy and temperature, suggesting fundamentally new ways of understanding them all. Also the quadratic nature of energy defined as relationship naturally leads to a distinction between self energy within objects and interaction energy between objects. This distinction admits new definitions of entropy and temperature, based on the unavoidable cross terms inherent in any quadratic formulation. Further, the foundational concepts of the circuit and rotation are shown to be intimately connected with the very existence of particles and their structure. Certainly rotation plays a foundational and still overlooked role in explaining the energy relation E = mc2 as well as the very nature of light as an interaction between particles.
Overview
Greg Volk wrote this as an editor of the World Science Database, and it opens with an unusually frank appraisal of the dissident community he served. He reports reading endless submissions in which "Einstein was wrong, Maxwell was wrong, Newton was wrong, their former physics professor was wrong, and they are right," many announcing a theory of everything "based on one simple concept overlooked by everyone until now." His diagnosis is not that these authors are crazy — he says most of their ideas have merit — but that they are talking past each other because they use the same words to mean different things. Words like "aether," "neutrino," "zero point energy" and "Maxwell's Equations" trigger reflexive agreement or reflexive rejection before any content is heard.
From that observation the paper builds a much larger claim: that getting the definitions right "is a BIG DEAL — so big that it may be in fact THE problem with physics today." The organising distinction is between things and properties. You cannot buy a truckload of angular momentum or eat a temperature sandwich; these are properties, measures of relationships. Volk's contention is that energy, mass, light, space and time have all been silently promoted to the status of things — that physics is systematically committing what amounts to reification — and that many of its standing puzzles dissolve once they are demoted back to properties. This places the paper squarely alongside the wiki's treatment of energy as a concept rather than a substance, and Volk himself draws the parallel explicitly to the eighteenth-century caloric theory of heat.
The argument
Matter, motion, space and time
Two assumptions are declared unprovable and adopted: that something exists, which he calls matter, and that matter moves only relative to other matter. He traces the relational tradition from the Greeks through Leibniz's objection to Newton's absolutism, Berkeley, Euler and Bošković, to Ernst Mach — the idea being what is now called Mach's Principle. He then makes an unusual charge: the widespread belief that Einstein settled the matter in favour of the relational view is a misconception, because "Einsteinian observer-based physics is kinematic, not relational or dynamic." Frictional effects are relative to the matter producing the friction, not to an observer; and Einstein's physics still treats it as meaningful to compare velocities of objects in wholly different environments. Ironically, he notes, most Einstein critics accuse Einstein of relationalism when his treatment of space is closer to absolutism.
Space is then "a place for matter," with no other properties. It cannot be bent, expanded or quantized, though the matter in it can. All measures of space derive from matter: the cubit from elbow to fingertip, the foot from a foot, the metre from the Earth's quadrant and now from c. Time is treated the same way — we measure it by comparing cyclic motions of matter with standard cyclic motions called clocks. That a caesium clock in orbit runs differently means the physical clock is differently stressed, not that time dilates: "You would never say that time itself slows down just because your watch runs slow." He rejects four-dimensional spacetime outright, tracing it to the assumption, rarely recognised as one, that light travels through space along a Minkowski cone independent of matter.
Field, energy and a definition of aether
Borrowing Smolin's sentence analogy, Volk makes things the words and energy the relationships between them: "energy measures the relationship between elements of matter." A ball on a hill has potential energy by virtue of its relation to the Earth; remove the Earth and both its potential and its kinetic energy become meaningless.
To quantify relationship he needs the field, and here he is deliberately deflationary. A field exists at each point because it tracks the position and motion of matter elsewhere; following Charles William Lucas, "the field is permanently attached to matter." Whether one calls the field real or a fictitious accounting system is, he argues, academic — every detector is made of matter, never of fields, so we never access fields directly and the dispute is unresolvable in principle. Gauss's law supplies the connection between matter and field without any time dependence; the rest of Maxwell's Equations describe how fields behave.
Energy is then given a Poynting form: energy density as the dot product of two vector fields, integrated over all space. Volk's claim to novelty is that for over a century the interaction has always been taken between an object's fields and themselves — the square of the field — which measures only self energy and says nothing about the object's relation to its environment. He writes the general form as E = D·E + H·B, object fields against environment fields, noting that only in the self-energy case are they proportional (D = ε0E, B = μ0H) and only then does the familiar factor of one half appear.
He then defines aether "embarrassingly simply" as the energy density function itself — not a second kind of matter. He is explicit that aether-as-substance theories "sweep problems under the rug" the way multiverse and alien-origin theories do. Force follows as the negative gradient of that density, integrated: F ≡ −∫∇P dτ. Newton's F = ma is a marvel, he says, but not fundamental — it is what the integral reduces to when the body is rigid and the field roughly uniform over it. He adds the pointed remark that taking the gradient of an already-integrated total energy is "technically nonsense," though it usually works.
Mass, E = mc2, and superconductivity
Mass, he argues, cannot be both amount of substance (gravitational mass) and resistance to motion (inertial mass). He takes it to be strictly the latter, citing his own The Meaning of Maxwell's Equations for the result that two chunks of matter with diverging fields naturally repel; attraction is therefore not inherent in matter but arises from its motion, via Ampère-law and Bernoulli-type effects. Objects hold together by a balance of natural repulsion against attraction due to relative motion.
Why then does inertia behave like an amount of stuff? Because, on his account, two objects with the same amount of matter but more internal interaction are denser and smaller "like a compressed spring" — a proton having the same amount of matter as an electron but far more internal interaction, hence far greater resistance to an external field. Neutron decay involves no creation or destruction of matter, only a change of dynamic structure; the mass deficit is a change of interaction, and the neutrino is, he suggests, an invention needed only if one insists on billiard-ball accounting.
E = mc2 then "essentially quantifies what I've been saying" — resistance to motion is proportional to internal interaction energy — and since both E and m are properties of the object, c2 must be a property of matter, not of space. Relativistic mass increase becomes the case where environmental stresses become comparable to internal ones. To the usual γ he adds a rotational factor δ, giving E0 = δmIc2 and E = γδmIc2. The asymmetry matters: γ ≥ 1 always, since a body cannot translate less than not at all, but a bound particle can rotate less than it would in isolation, so δ may fall below unity. At low enough temperature γδ may too — the whole becoming less than the sum of its parts — and Volk submits that this is the condition for superconductivity. Zero point energy is likewise recast as the self energy remaining when environment is removed, so that tapping it means capturing energy released when a structure changes state; he suggests materials with a dipole-free state higher in energy than the dipole state, which is why water and ferromagnets recur in that research.
Entropy and temperature
Volk lists twenty-six properties any acceptable definition of entropy must satisfy — additivity, Boltzmann's kB log W, Shannon's form, Q/T, Carnot efficiency, the third law, the Gibbs paradox, Trouton's rule, the arrow of time — and proposes a single covering definition: "entropy compares the whole to the sum of the parts," written S = kBΣγnδn or with (γδ − 1). Its root is the quadratic nature of interaction: if the total field is A + B, the total energy goes as (A+B)2, the separate self energies as A2 + B2, and the cross term 2AB — attributable to neither alone — is the entanglement. He draws out consequences: entropy requires finite particles to exist at all, it depends on the level at which objects are defined, and "Why does entropy exist?" reduces to "Why do particles exist?"
Temperature receives the mirror treatment. We attribute mass to objects but never to fields, and temperature to fields but never to matter; both are forms of energy and should be attributable to both. Temperature becomes T = (ETotal − ESelf)/NkB, with enthalpy H = ETotal − ERest, heat Q = ST and Gibbs free energy G = H − Q. The distinction between self energy and rest energy (differing by δ) is what lets him explain why temperature does not rise during melting or boiling while enthalpy and entropy do. The perfect gas law follows under two approximations — nearly rigid structures, and binding energy small against self energy — and Dalton's law of partial pressures follows from billiard-ball additivity.
Circuits, rotation and the nature of light
Since matter fundamentally repels and attraction comes from motion, and since finite structures cannot let matter flow off to infinity, matter in a finite structure "simply must circulate." Particles exist because matter must circulate to have finite structure; the circuit is primary. He offers William Harvey's discovery of the circulatory system as the historical parallel — the shift from static function to recycling process.
Earnshaw's 1842 theorem, that no collection of static point charges can be in stable equilibrium, is accepted as correct, and identified as the real root of Feynman's insistence that particles cannot be explained classically. Volk's answer is that point charges are a fiction: real particles are dynamic structures stabilised by their own circulation. Stability requires fields that change direction but not magnitude, the orthogonality condition dA/dt · A = 0, and he invokes Hicks and Hill's nineteenth-century result that the only two stable flow structures are toroidal and spherical. Spherical rotation is illustrated by an aircraft flying pole to pole while the Earth turns beneath it, tracing a figure eight — the 2:1 ratio he identifies as the source of the 4π cycle of spinor rotation.
The closing section makes the paper's boldest proposal. Just as the eighteenth century wrongly took heat to be a substance, caloric, moving from body A to body B, Volk suggests we wrongly take light to be a thing travelling from A to B at speed c. If heat measures relative translation of particles, light may measure relative rotation. He concedes that Rømer, Bradley, Fizeau, Michelson, Sagnac and Ives all show that something propagates at a speed near c, but argues that none of these proves light is a thing. On this reading c could be "the speed of matter" — the finite circulation speed required to bind particles — a property of particles like h, e, m and kB, and thus constant in all frames without any redefinition of space and time. He attributes a similar conception to Poincaré just before 1905. Seeing an object in a given direction means the rotational contributions of everything behind and beside it cancel exactly; where they fail to cancel we get reflection, refraction and "Doppler shifts." Particles lapping each other at differing frequencies produce nodes, so light can be wave-like and particulate at once "without appeal to metaphysics" — "and we find the seat of the wave in the rotating particle, not in space itself."
Assessment
The paper's genuine strength is its diagnosis, and it is one the wiki's own readers should take seriously. Volk identifies reification — treating a bookkeeping quantity as a substance — as a systematic failure mode, and applies it evenhandedly. He does not exempt his own side: aether theorists come in for the sharpest criticism in the paper, for introducing "a second kind of thing" without ever saying what it is or quantifying it. The caloric analogy is used precisely and not as a slogan, and the observation that a Poynting energy density is always computed as a field against itself — so that the cross terms describing an object's relation to its environment simply never appear — is a real and checkable point about how the formalism is normally used. The thing-versus-property distinction also does honest work: his treatment of the neutron mass deficit as a change in structural interaction rather than a conversion of "stuff" is coherent on its own terms, whatever one makes of the physics.
The paper is also, by the standards of the genre, candid about its status. Volk repeatedly flags what he is not doing: "this is not a rigorous mathematical treatment," "this is not a full attack of Einsteinian relativity," and the entropy and superconductivity results are deferred to a "soon-to-be-finished" companion, Theory of Entropy. That candour is a virtue, but it is also the paper's central difficulty. Almost every quantitative claim is a promissory note. The entropy definition S = kBΣγδ is offered as satisfying twenty-six listed criteria, and then only two — additivity and, partially, the logarithmic forms — are addressed, the latter by acknowledging that W ≠ N and referring the reader elsewhere. Since criteria 2 and 3 are exactly where a linear sum of γδ factors faces its hardest test, the claim is asserted rather than shown, and the paper's most radical proposal rests on work not presented.
Several steps are similarly asserted. That "a proton has the same amount of matter as an electron" is stated without argument and is load-bearing for the whole account of mass, yet it sits awkwardly beside the roughly 1836:1 inertial ratio it is meant to explain — the explanation reduces to saying the proton's internal interaction is 1836 times greater, which is a restatement rather than a derivation. The rotational factor δ is introduced without a rule for computing it, so the superconductivity criterion γδ < 1 cannot be evaluated for any actual material or compared against measured critical temperatures. The claim that diverging fields naturally repel, which is what forces attraction to come from motion, is likewise sourced to another paper.
The largest conflict with measurement lies in the treatment of light and of the neutrino. Suggesting the neutrino is an unnecessary invention conflicts with direct detection: solar neutrinos were counted by Homestake, Kamiokande and SNO, reactor antineutrinos by Reines and Cowan, and neutrino flavour oscillation is now measured, not inferred from a missing-energy budget. Light-as-relative-rotation faces a harder problem still: the cosmic microwave background arrives from directions where no rotating source lies, gamma-ray bursts and supernova light curves arrive with propagation delays across intergalactic distances, and the Fizeau and Michelson results Volk cites are treated as consistent with his picture without any calculation showing that they are. He asks only that the possibility be explored, which is a defensible request, but the paper offers no mechanism by which relative rotation would produce the observed retardation, polarization or interference.
Finally, the argument that "we never access fields directly, so whether they are real is academic" cuts against the paper's own project. If the reality of a field is undecidable because all detectors are matter, the same argument makes the reality of the energy density function — which Volk names the aether — equally undecidable, and it is not clear why a definition that is admitted to be unfalsifiable should be preferred to the one it replaces. Read as what it announces itself to be — a paper about definitions rather than a theory — A Matter of Definition is a valuable and unusually self-critical contribution, and its central warning against mistaking properties for things is sound whether or not any of its specific proposals survives.