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Ching-Chuan Su

From Natural Philosophy Wiki
Ching-Chuan Su
ResidenceHsinchu, Taiwan
NationalityTaiwan
Known forLocal-Ether Model, Quantum Electromagnetics, Aether, Relativity, Electrodynamics
Scientific career
FieldsElectrical Engineering, Physics, Electrodynamics
InstitutionsDepartment of Electrical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

Ching-Chuan Su (also published as C.-C. Su) was a Taiwanese professor of electrical engineering at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, best known for the local-ether model of electromagnetic wave propagation and its corollary theory, Quantum Electromagnetics. In a series of papers published between 2000 and 2006, and in his 2008 book Quantum Electromagnetics, he set out a fully worked alternative to Einstein's Special Relativity and General Relativity founded on the classical principles of absolute time and three-dimensional Euclidean space. He died in about 2007, and the website he maintained for the theory at National Tsing Hua University has since been taken down.

Biography

Su was a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan; that affiliation appears on his papers, including his 2001 European Physical Journal C article. Much of his published output was in mainstream electrical-engineering and physics venues — the Journal of Electromagnetic Waves and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Electronics Letters, the European Journal of Physics, Europhysics Letters, Foundations of Physics Letters, and the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium — together with presentations at American Physical Society March and April meetings in 2000, 2001 and 2002.

He maintained a website devoted to the theory at qem.ee.nthu.edu.tw, which collected his papers under the heading "Quantum Electromagnetics". According to James Marsen, who has compiled and promoted his work, Prof. Su died in approximately 2007; the university website was subsequently removed, though much of it survives in the Internet Archive. No further biographical details — birth date, education, or academic career history — appear to be available in accessible public sources.

Scientific contributions

The local-ether model of wave propagation

Su's starting point was the observation that the Sagnac Effect — as it appears in the Global Positioning System, in intercontinental microwave links, and in interplanetary radar — is naturally described by a classical propagation medium, provided that the reference frame of that medium is allowed to switch according to the location of the wave. From this he proposed that electromagnetic waves do propagate in a medium, as in the discarded nineteenth-century theory, but that the ether is not universal.

Instead, in any region under sufficient gravitational influence of the Earth, the Sun, or another celestial body, there forms a local ether which is stationary with respect to the gravitational potential of that body. For earthbound propagation the medium is therefore at rest in a geocentric inertial frame (the ECI frame); for interplanetary propagation it is at rest in a heliocentric inertial frame. An electromagnetic wave propagates at a constant speed with respect to its associated local ether, independent of the motions of both source and receiver.

The crucial structural feature is that a local ether is carried with, but does not rotate with, its celestial body — exactly like the gravitational potential field it is tied to. The local ethers are nested: the Earth's sits inside the Sun's, which sits inside that of the galaxy, each extending out to the point where a more massive body's gravity becomes dominant. Within its sphere of influence, each local ether constitutes the unique preferred frame for wave propagation.

Two consequences follow that Su regarded as decisive:

  • The Sagnac effect is a receiver-motion effect, not a rotation effect. Because propagation is referred to the non-rotating local-ether frame, a receiver moving through that frame measures an altered effective propagation speed. Su showed that a single formulation accounts consistently for the Sagnac corrections applied in GPS, in the intercontinental microwave link, and in interplanetary radar — a consistency he presented as strong evidence for the model.
  • The Michelson-Morley null result is expected. A terrestrial interferometer is very nearly at rest in the Earth's local ether; the only residual "ether wind" is that due to the Earth's rotation, of order a few hundred metres per second at mid-latitudes rather than the 30 km/s orbital speed assumed by universal-ether models. Since the predicted fringe effect goes as the square of the velocity, it is smaller by a factor of thousands and lay far below the sensitivity of the classic experiments.

To test the model, Su proposed a one-way-link rotor experiment. He also applied the model to the constancy of the speed of light from a moving source, the Kennedy-Thorndike and one-way fiber-link experiments, Roemer's observations, the CMBR dipole, Fizeau's experiment with a moving medium, Barnett's experiment, and railgun recoil forces.

Galilean-invariant electrodynamics

A second strand of Su's work reformulated electromagnetism so as to be invariant under Galilean rather than Lorentz transformations. Rather than obtain the invariance of force by transforming space and time, he proposed a force law given in terms of augmented potentials, derived from the electric scalar potential by incorporating the velocity difference between the interacting particles, with the propagation of the potentials following the local-ether model. From this he derived modifications of the Lorentz force law and of Maxwell's equations, and in related papers reconsidered the singularity of the static Green's function, derived rather than assumed the Lorenz gauge, and examined the relationship between the Riemann and Lorentz force laws.

Quantum Electromagnetics

The corollary theory Su called Quantum Electromagnetics is built on a single local-ether wave equation, constructed in compliance with Galilean transformations and referred specifically to the local-ether frame, which governs both electromagnetic waves and de Broglie matter waves and which incorporates the electrostatic and gravitational potentials. From it he derived a time-evolution equation representing a modification of Schrödinger's equation.

The programme was to show that phenomena routinely cited as confirmations of relativity are instead physical consequences of the quantum nature of microparticles interacting with electromagnetic and gravitational potentials:

  • Mass variation with speed. The dispersion of matter waves yields a speed dependence of a particle's effective inertial mass, with respect to the local ether, of exactly the Lorentz mass-variation form — obtained as a quantum property rather than as a kinematic consequence of the Lorentz transformation.
  • Atomic clock rates. The quantum energy of electrons bound in atoms depends on the atom's speed through the local ether and on the local gravitational potential, so the emitted frequency — the "tick rate" of an atomic clock — varies accordingly. Su applied this to the Hafele-Keating circumnavigating-clock experiment, to GPS clock corrections, and to interplanetary spacecraft microwave links, treating the effect as a real change in atomic transition frequencies rather than as time dilation.
  • Gravitational effects on light. Refining the wave equation with the gravitational potential makes the propagation speed a function of that potential — in effect a gravitational index of refraction. This yields the deflection of starlight grazing the Sun, gravitational lensing, and the Shapiro radar-echo delay as ordinary refraction phenomena, without curved spacetime.
  • Gravitational redshift, including the Pound-Rebka experiment, follows from the potential dependence of atomic quantum energies.
  • Interference and scattering experiments, including Ives-Stilwell, the ammonia maser, the Mössbauer rotor, two-photon-absorption heterodyne measurements, Davisson-Germer Bragg reflection of matter waves, and neutron loop interferometry with Earth's rotation and gravity. In a separate paper he reinterpreted the Compton effect as interference between electromagnetic and matter waves.

Su further argued that the wave equation supplies a common account of the origin and identity of inertial and gravitational mass, so that quantum mechanics, electromagnetics and gravitation are unified within one classical-time framework. His most speculative application proposed a mechanism, based on the local-ether theory, for the intrinsic redshift and its reported preferred values in quasars.

Reception among dissident researchers

Su's work is significant on this wiki because it constitutes one of the most fully developed and quantitatively detailed ether-based alternatives to relativity in the modern literature, and because it converges independently on an idea already advanced within the dissident community. Petr Beckmann, the Czech-American professor of electrical engineering whose Einstein Plus Two (1987) helped launch the dissident revival of the 1990s and the journal Galilean Electrodynamics, had proposed a local-ether propagation model in 1986 — light propagating with respect to the dominant local gravitational field. Su, apparently working independently and from the direction of GPS and radar engineering, arrived at the same basic postulate in 2000 and developed it far further, into a nested hierarchy of gravitationally defined frames with an accompanying quantum wave equation. That two electrical engineers reached the same conclusion by different routes is frequently cited by ether researchers as evidence that the idea is a natural reading of the propagation data.

James Marsen, the Columbia-trained engineer and CNPS member who developed the Tron Theory, has been the principal promoter of Su's work in the English-speaking dissident community. His paper "The Local-Ether Model and Quantum Electromagnetics Theory of Prof. Ching-Chuan Su" (2021) compiles Su's papers with their abstracts and links, expressly "to promote the work of the late Prof. Ching-Chuan Su", and argues that Su's framework represents the new direction physics needs — accounting for the same body of evidence as relativity and quantum mechanics do separately, while achieving unification and preserving absolute time and Euclidean space.

Marsen has also pressed Su's model toward a decisive test. Because a ground-based interferometer is essentially at rest in the Earth's local ether, he argues, no terrestrial Michelson-Morley experiment can settle the question; the apparatus must be flown. A Michelson interferometer in low Earth orbit would move at roughly 7.5 km/s with respect to the ECI frame and should give a signal some 400 times larger than the terrestrial one, and an instrument in solar orbit some 7,000 times larger, where relativity predicts null results in both cases. Marsen has additionally suggested that the persistent non-null residual reported and set aside as spurious in the 1979 Brillet-Hall laser experiment may already be the predicted local-ether signal.

Discussed in CNPS talks

Su's model has been presented to the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society by James Marsen:

Works

Book

  • 2008 - Quantum Electromagnetics: A Local-Ether Wave Equation Unifying Quantum Mechanics, Electromagnetics, and Gravitation, National Tsing Hua University Press, Hsinchu, Taiwan. ISBN 9789574110971

Selected papers

External links

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