On the Motion of Matter
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | On the Motion of Matter |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Michael J Vaicaitis |
| Keywords | matter, motion, wave-particle duality, physical constants, helical precession, aether, push gravity |
| Published | 2012 |
| No. of pages | 11 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The central revelation contained in this paper is the discovery of the fundamental modality of the motion of matter. A genuine understanding of the mechanism by which matter moves and travels through space, connects also, to an awareness and appreciation of the underlying fabric of space itself. From this, the actual physical origin and meaning of several physical constants become easily discerned and the illusion of wave-particle duality is clarified. With the benefit of these realisations I attempt an initial analysis of gravity, charge, light and electromagnetism. This reveals an elegant picture of the fundamental operating dynamics of the universe that is both consistent and understandable.
Overview
Vaicaitis begins from a single philosophical premise, quoted at length from Newton's letter to Bentley: action at a distance is "a ridiculous and absurd impossibility". If nothing can act where it is not, then space must be filled with something that carries the action — "a field of invisible, undetectable particles". Vaicaitis calls this an aethereal field rather than an aether, to signal that he claims nothing about the particles beyond their being real material bodies in real motion, colliding rarely, passing mostly straight through matter, with momentum density uniform across the universe. This is recognisably the Fatio–Le Sage kinetic model of gravity (see Category:Push Gravity), and the paper explicitly takes on the four standard objections to it: forward-face drag, thermodynamic catastrophe, secular weakening of gravity, and the need for superluminal propagation to keep orbits stable.
The paper's claimed novelty is not the field but a mode of motion Vaicaitis says follows from it: helical precession. Electrons and protons spin; a spinning body struck off-centre precesses about the point of force; therefore a spinning particle immersed in a randomly moving field is permanently precessing, and permanently tracing a helix. From this one mechanism he then attempts to read off mass, gravity, charge, light, electromagnetism, and the meaning of h, c and the fine structure constant. The departure from the mainstream account is total: there are no electromagnetic waves, no wave–particle duality, no intrinsic quantum uncertainty, no interference, no mass–energy convertibility, and no field without a particle at its centre.
The argument
Gyroscopes as the model case
The paper's physical intuition is drawn from a gyroscope resting loosely on a free-standing tower. The spinning gyro does not fall, does not push the tower sideways, and falls immediately if its precession is blocked. Vaicaitis reasons that since the tower is not pushed sideways and the system's weight is unchanged, the whole gravitational force must be transmitted straight down through the pivot. He describes the disc as two halves, one "spinning down with gravity" and one "spinning up against gravity", the asymmetry in their inertial response producing an impetus that throws the disc up and in the direction of spin. He extracts three slogans used throughout: "a pivot point is a point of force, and, a point of force becomes a pivot point, and, the greatest instantaneous force is the pivot point at any given instant." Inertia itself is defined as "motional hysteresis" — the lag while an externally applied force propagates through a body's internal structure.
Helical precession and the constants
Applied to a spinning sub-atomic particle in the field, the forward-most point of the particle is where collisions are hardest; that is a point of force, hence a pivot, hence the particle precesses; and because the forward-most point keeps moving, the trajectory is a helix. Vaicaitis calls this the "inherent" helix, traversed at c — so c becomes "the constant velocity of electron precession", and possibly the speed of the field itself. An external influence (charge, gravity, collision) does not push the particle directly; it merely aligns the precession, converting it into a larger secondary helix — "a helix within a helix" — which is what we mistake for straight-line travel. Consequently "rectilinear motion is an illusion", and linear speed cannot exceed the inherent precessional speed, which is his account of the light-speed limit.
He then reinterprets the standard relations. The de Broglie wavelength λ = h/mv is the pitch of the electron's precessional helix; the classical electron radius re = αħ/(mec) is its radius of curvature; Planck's constant is "the energy of a single electron precession" and tells us about electrons, not photons. The fine structure constant is then declared to be "the ratio of the curvature and pitch length of the electron precession helix":
α = 2πre / λe
He also gives several equivalent forms for the Coulomb factor, e2k = (re/λe)hc = αħc.
Uncertainty, gravity, charge, light
Because an approaching electron occupies a curve rather than a line, it "can approach both slits at the same time" without going through both; probability is real but "the uncertainty belongs entirely to the observer and not to the object in motion". Diffraction is attributed wholly to interaction with slit edges — "there is certainly no interference involved".
Gravity and mass are the same thing: to keep spinning, particles continuously absorb field momentum, leaving a permanent deficit in momentum density directed away from them, so that neighbouring bodies each shield the other and are pushed together. His bookkeeping is "Field In = Field Out + Charge + Spin", with spin the term that is both mass and gravity, and protons massive because they remove more momentum. Charge is the return leg: precessional motion gives momentum back to the field as "a helix of momentum travelling at c", a charge photon, spherically distributed into a "sphere of influence". Attraction and repulsion follow from helix chirality — like-handed helices meeting head-on pivot particles apart, opposite-handed ones pivot them together. Light is a second species of photon, emitted when the secondary helix changes: "an aethereal momentum fluctuation with a helical geometry", explicitly not an electromagnetic wave. Because such helices erode with distance, Vaicaitis says photons are "progressively redshifted out of existence", so that "Hubble's discovery solves Olbers' Paradox" — a tired-light position.
Magnetism arises when free electrons are constrained to loop, so their charge photons are emitted in a disc rather than a sphere, producing poles; "an electrical wire is effectively a long thin bar magnet", and what travels along it is not energy but "a signal of free-electron alignment" passed like dominoes. Amperes are read as the x–y energy and volts, being joules per coulomb, as "energy per energy", a ratio giving the z-axis component, so that P = IV.
Orbits
Against the fourth objection, Vaicaitis denies that gravity acts along the line of centres at all: it acts "by a helical curve between travelling objects in motion", so the aberration argument does not bite. As an illustration he treats the Sun's motion as a helix, taking a galactic speed of about 230 km/s and a vertical oscillation of period ~65 Myr and amplitude ~225 light-years, giving a pitch of 4.718×1020 m and "an alpha of approximately 0.0283". Planets, carried along, trace "a helix within a helix" — "and, at the same time, a visible de Broglie wave."
Assessment
The paper is unusually clear about what it is doing, and its central move has real appeal: rather than positing a force, it posits that motion is already there and that forces only steer it. Newton's First Law is then not an axiom but a description of an ongoing collisional process, and the classic Le Sage objections are answered as a set rather than one at a time. The reading of inertia as "motional hysteresis" is a genuinely mechanical proposal, and the observation that a helical trajectory has three independent lengths — pitch, radius, arc — is a legitimate geometric handle to hang de Broglie's λ and re on.
The arithmetic, where it is checkable, is mostly correct but not doing the work claimed for it. The relation α = 2πre/λe is exact — but it is exact because it is an identity, not a discovery. The paper itself writes re = αħ/(mec) two lines earlier, and the Compton wavelength is λC = 2πħ/(mec); dividing one by the other returns α by construction. The same holds for e2k = αħc, which is simply the definition of α rearranged. No physical content about helices has been extracted; a definition has been renamed. The solar helix arithmetic checks out too — 65 Myr at 230 km/s is 4.72×1020 m, and 2π×(225 ly)/λ = 0.0283, matching his quoted α — though the radius he prints, 2.219×1018 m, is a transposed-digit slip for 2.129×1018 m (225 ly); the quoted α is computed from the correct figure. Note also that this "alpha" is 0.028, four orders of magnitude from 1/137, which rather undercuts the suggestion that the ratio means anything universal.
More seriously, the geometry is internally inconsistent. The paper asserts that a helix's arc length per turn is 2π times its pitch. For a real helix of pitch p and radius r, the arc per turn is √(p2 + (2πr)2). If α = 2πr/p ≈ 1/137, then 2πr is 137 times smaller than the pitch and the arc length is p to within one part in 40,000 — essentially a straight line, not 2πp. The two statements cannot both be true, and the picture of the electron sweeping a full circle of circumference 2πre per wavelength is not the geometry the numbers describe.
Several central steps are asserted rather than derived. The factor ½ in the kinetic energy is attributed to unspecified "loss of collisional efficiency" mediated by the field, with no calculation; E = mc2 is obtained by declaring that "energy is mass times velocity squared" and that photons "receive the full benefit" of c. The gyroscope analysis — that one half of the disc "experiences low inertia" and the other "experiences inertia" — is not the standard torque-and-angular-momentum account, and no equation of motion is offered to show it reproduces the observed precession rate Ω = mgr/Iω. Handedness is assigned to electrons and protons by fiat; nothing explains why a proton, 1836 times heavier, carries exactly the same charge magnitude, even though charge here is a momentum-return rate that ought to scale with the particle.
The conflicts with measurement are direct and specific. "Photons cannot be directionally affected by gravity" contradicts the deflection of starlight at the solar limb, measured to about 1.7 arcseconds and confirmed to better than 0.02% by VLBI, and contradicts gravitational lensing of quasars and clusters. "There is certainly no interference involved" in the two-slit experiment contradicts Tonomura's electron-biprism experiment, in which single electrons arriving one at a time build up a fringe pattern with no slit edges in play, and contradicts neutron and large-molecule interferometry, where fringe spacing tracks λ = h/mv quantitatively. "Mass does not vary with velocity" contradicts the momentum–energy relation used daily in synchrotrons and the measured dilation of muon lifetimes in flight (see Time Dilation). The claim that light erodes with distance faces the standard tired-light difficulty that no scattering-like loss mechanism preserves image sharpness, and must also explain the (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves, which the paper does not address.
Finally, the treatment of electricity conflates definitions. Coulombs are not "a measure of energy"; charge and energy have different dimensions, and the argument that amperes are therefore energy and volts "energy per energy" follows only from that first misidentification. As presented, the paper is a programme sketch rather than a theory: it is consistent in its narrative and refreshingly explicit about its premises, but nothing in it yet yields a number that was not put in by hand.