Claude Poher
Claude Poher | |
|---|---|
 Poher speaking at the National Press Club, Washington DC, 2007 | |
| Born | February 19, 1936 Brittany, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Known for | The "universons" theory of quantum gravitation; founder of GEPAN |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astrophysics; space research; aeronautics |
| Institutions | Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) |
Claude Poher (born 19 February 1936) is a French astrophysicist and space researcher, known within the dissident literature for the "universons" theory — a corpuscular, "pushing" model of gravitation in the Le Sage tradition — and known publicly as the founder of GEPAN, the French space agency's unit for the scientific study of unidentified aerospace phenomena. He is listed in Jean de Climont's Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Career
Poher was born in Brittany and holds degrees in space-research engineering and electronics together with a doctorate in astrophysics. He joined the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) in the 1960s and spent some three decades there in space research and aeronautics, rising to direct the Rockets and Probes division and, by 1976, the division of Scientific Systems and Projects. He contributed instruments and experiments to NASA's lunar programme and to planetary exploration missions.
In May 1977 he established and directed GEPAN (Groupe d'Études des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés) in Toulouse — the first official, government-funded scientific body charged with investigating unidentified aerospace phenomena. He began with a secretary and built the group to about ten scientists and engineers. He took a sabbatical on 30 December 1978 and ceased official work on the subject, though he has continued to follow it privately. The unit itself survived under later names and remains part of CNES.
The universons theory
Poher's theoretical work, developed from the 1990s and set out at length in his 2003 book Gravitation: les universons, énergie du futur, proposes a quantum model of gravitation built on hypothetical massless particles he calls universons.
In his account, universons pervade space as a dense, isotropic flux travelling at the speed of light, each carrying a small linear momentum. Ordinary matter briefly absorbs and re-emits them. Because a body shields the flux arriving from the direction of another body, the resulting imbalance in momentum transfer pushes the two together, and this net push is gravitation. This makes the theory a modern, quantised descendant of the kinetic or push gravity of Le Sage, a tradition well represented on this wiki.
Two consequences follow that Poher has pursued.
The first is energetic. If space is permeated by a dense momentum-carrying flux, that flux represents an enormous reservoir which might in principle be tapped and converted to usable energy — a claim that places the theory alongside this wiki's new energy material.
The second is experimental. Poher has reported laboratory work in which small masses were observed to accelerate during low-energy electric discharges, which he interprets as the emission of momentum-bearing gravitational quanta, and he has taken out patents on devices based on the effect.
Publication history
Poher's attempts to publish the theory in conventional journals form part of the story as it is usually told.
A peer-reviewed article appeared in the European Physical Journal of Applied Physics in 2010 and was subsequently withdrawn by the journal's editor. Poher objected that the withdrawal came without debate, writing that "arbitrary censorship … can temporarily claim to silence truth."
On 30 October 2011 he published "The Theory of Universons" in the journal Applied Physics Research, accompanied by video of the laboratory experiments.
Assessment
Poher's professional standing is not in question: a doctorate in astrophysics, thirty years at a national space agency, instruments flown on lunar and planetary missions, and the founding of a scientific unit that outlasted him. Whatever one makes of the universons, they are not the work of someone unfamiliar with experimental physics, and his willingness to build apparatus and publish video of it is more than most of this literature offers.
The theory nonetheless inherits the difficulties that have attended every Le Sage model since the eighteenth century, and the papers do not resolve them.
Drag. A flux dense enough to press bodies together must also resist motion through it. An orbiting planet would lose energy and spiral inward. Planetary orbits are known to be stable to very high precision over long baselines, so the drag must be shown to be negligible while the gravitational push is not — and the two scale together in the obvious models.
Shielding and saturation. If gravity arises from mutual shadowing, then matter behind matter is already shielded, and gravitational force should grow more slowly than mass for large bodies, and depend on internal structure. Measurement shows it tracking mass to high accuracy, with composition dependence constrained by Eötvös-type experiments to about one part in 10¹³.
Heating. Momentum absorbed from a flux deposits energy. A body absorbing enough momentum to account for its weight must dispose of the corresponding heat, and the required rate is the standard quantitative objection to Le Sage models — Maxwell and Kelvin both pressed it.
The discharge experiments. Small accelerations observed during electrical discharges are exactly the regime in which mundane explanations are hardest to exclude: electrostatic forces on the apparatus, ion wind, thermal expansion, magnetic interaction with laboratory fields, and vibration. Establishing a novel cause requires those to be ruled out explicitly, with an error budget — the same standard that resolved the electrogravitic "lifter" claims documented elsewhere on this wiki as ordinary electrohydrodynamics.
The withdrawn paper. The 2010 retraction is a fact and is recorded here as such. It is worth noting that journals withdraw papers for a range of reasons, that the reasons are not always made public, and that a withdrawal is not by itself evidence either of suppression or of error. Readers should weigh the 2011 publication and the primary sources rather than the episode's framing.
External links
- Universons.com — the author's site
- "Universons, a possible key to interstellar exploration" (NASA ADS)
See also
- Georges-Louis Le Sage — the ancestor of push-gravity models
- Gravity, Aether
- Duncan W Shaw — a contemporary flowing-aether account of gravity
- Category:Push Gravity, Category:New Energy