Eine Proto-Theorie Über die wahre Natur der Materie Teil-2; A proto-theory about the true mature of matter part-2
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Eine Proto-Theorie Über die wahre Natur der Materie Teil-2; A proto-theory about the true mature of matter part-2 |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Eduard Bardas |
| Keywords | Aether, Anti-Aether, Matter, Antimatter, Atomic Structure, Yin-Yang, Presocratics |
| Published | 2011 |
| No. of pages | 14 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The paper carries no separate abstract. It is written in German and was published by the author through www.prototheo.de. It is the second part of his Proto-Theorie, following Eine Proto-Theorie über die wahre Natur der Materie Teil-1 (Bardas, 2011).
Overview
Bardas argues that the entire universe is built from exactly two primordial substances, standing in opposition to one another, and that everything else — atoms, planets, stars, galaxies, states of matter, weather, heat, light, electricity, magnetism — is a consequence of their interplay. One is the Aether (Äther), which he holds responsible for repulsion; the other he calls the anti-aether (Anti-Äther), responsible for attraction, and which he identifies with what modern cosmology calls Dark Matter and Dark Energy. His starting move is an appeal to the principle of cause and effect: nature manifestly runs on opposites — warm and cold, bright and dark, more and less — and two opposed forces must, he reasons, have their origin in two opposed sources.
The departure from the standard account is total and explicitly stated. Bardas holds that subatomic particles do not exist. The claim that matter is composed of countless particles demonstrable only with expensive apparatus is, in his words, "probably the greatest error that science has demanded in the history of mankind". There are no protons; there are only atoms, and atoms are not composite objects but a core of one primordial substance surrounded by a shell of the other. Much of the paper is not physics argument at all but an exercise in intellectual archaeology: Bardas reads the Presocratics and the Daoist canon as encoded records of a lost knowledge of these two substances, corrupted by translation and by the destruction of ancient libraries. He also holds that the Michelson-Morley Experiment and Einstein's relativity banished the aether from science "wrongly" (fälschlicherweise).
The argument
Two primordial substances
The opening section, Die Gegensätze ("The Opposites"), sets out the scheme. Attraction, familiar as gravitation, keeps us on the ground and keeps the Moon in orbit, and the same attraction operates at the atomic scale, stronger in solids than in liquids or gases. Repulsion prevents the universe from collapsing into a single lump of matter, and — Bardas stresses the inversion — is smaller in solids than in liquids or gases. Two opposed forces, two opposed sources. The aether he takes in the Aristotelian sense of the fifth, supraterrestrial element, later recast in the modern era as the carrier medium for electromagnetic waves. The anti-aether he equates with dark matter, quoting Wikipedia's definition of it as a hypothetical form of matter that emits or reflects too little radiation to be directly observed and which announces itself only gravitationally. On this one point he says he must agree with contemporary science: dark matter is a real constituent of the universe.
The lost knowledge
The longest stretch of the paper, Das verlorene Wissen, reads the Presocratics as witnesses. Thales of Miletus is credited with the insight that all being has a common primal ground. Anaximander's apeiron — the boundless, from which the concrete appearances emerge by a separating-out of opposites, first cold and warm, then fluid and solid — Bardas reads as an accurate description of cosmogenesis, with the cold corresponding to anti-aether and the warm to aether. Heraclitus' primal fire and logos he glosses as, respectively, the apeiron or God and the law of God, that is, the laws of nature; the strife of opposites is the interplay of aether and anti-aether. Empedocles supplies the pair of moving forces, Love and Strife. Anaxagoras' spermata — infinitely various seeds, set into vortex motion by Mind, never wholly separated, so that everything contains all seeds and is characterised only by which predominates — is the passage Bardas leans on hardest, since it gives him a criterion: where aether predominates, matter forms; where anti-aether predominates, antimatter forms. Democritus is credited with atoms proper, differing in shape and size, moving eternally by collision.
He then turns to Daoism, taking the Dao De Jing chapter 25 and Zhuangzi chapter 12 as parallel testimony. The Dao is the apeiron, the primal fire, the logos; the polarity of Yin and Yang emerging from the featureless Wuji into the polar Taiji is the emergence of the two substances. Yin, dark and cold, is anti-aether; Yang, bright and warm, is aether. He offers the Yin-Yang symbol as, in effect, the theory's central diagram: "were the Yin-Yang symbol a mathematical formula, one could call it the true world formula".
Matter and antimatter
The symbol is then read structurally. Split into its two halves, the bright side with the dark dot describes matter: an anti-aether core producing attraction, wrapped in a shell of condensed aether producing repulsion. The dark side with the bright dot describes Antimatter, with the two substances exchanged. Bardas extends the reading from atoms to galaxies: reports of a dark galaxy some 50 million light-years away, detected by radio telescopes in Cheshire and Puerto Rico, containing a large rotating mass but no stars, he interprets not as a dark-matter galaxy but as an antimatter galaxy, whose light and radiation have properties not yet investigated.
From this he derives a temperature scheme. The radiation temperature of the solar surface is about +5800 K; a comparable star in an antimatter galaxy would show about −5800 K. At the boundary between a matter galaxy and an antimatter galaxy — the line between light and dark in the Yin-Yang symbol — the temperature is 0 K, and there matter and antimatter dissolve, "a state of existence between two worlds".
The structure of the atom
The mechanism is hydrostatic. Both substances strive to distribute themselves uniformly through space. Release a drop of aether into an empty room and it spreads evenly; release more and the density doubles, trebles. Release a drop of anti-aether into an aether-filled room and it must displace the aether to spread — and that displacement is the strife of opposites Heraclitus described. This, Bardas says, is the birth of an atom, a planet, a star or a galaxy, differing only in scale, with the character (matter or antimatter) fixed by which substance is in excess.
Within a matter atom, the anti-aether core strives to expand, generating an outward force proportional to the core's density and displacing part of the surrounding aether. The aether tries to close the gap, condensing in the region adjoining the core and generating an inward force proportional to the core's size. As the core expands its density falls, so the outward force falls while the inward force rises; the two balance and fix the atom's size. The condensed outer shell blends continuously into the ambient aether. Attraction between atoms acts core-to-core and has long range; repulsion acts shell-to-shell and prevents matter from collapsing into a single lump. Weight, rigidity, electrical and thermal conductivity, even the light a substance reflects or emits, are all attributed to the interplay of these two forces alone.
Heat, super-atoms and mini-atoms
Temperature is recast as aether content. Compressing a gas raises the interatomic aether pressure and creates an aether surplus, which is why compression heats; rarefying a gas creates an interatomic vacuum, an aether deficit, and that deficit is what we feel as cold. At +1 K aether predominates, at −1 K anti-aether predominates, and at 0 K the two are in equilibrium and neither matter nor antimatter exists. Matter atoms subjected to extreme cold and pressure can be fused into a single "super-atom" — which Bardas identifies with the Bose-Einstein condensate, first realised in a magnetic TOP trap on 5 June 1995 and recognised by the 2001 Nobel Prize to Cornell, Ketterle and Wieman — and these super-atoms are extremely unstable.
The final physical claim concerns accelerators. Since there are no subatomic particles, Bardas asks what the accelerators have been detecting. His answer is that the tubes accelerate whole atoms rather than nuclei, that whole atoms rather than protons collide in the detectors, and that the collisions produce not particles but "mini-atoms" — very small, extremely light fragments flying off in all directions, penetrating detector elements and leaving energy traces. The tracks recorded are the flight paths of these mini-atoms, which are hard to find because they disperse quickly. He suggests, as experiment, trying to confine them in a vessel or to alloy them into materials with novel properties.
Assessment
What is distinctive here is the ambition of the reduction and the consistency with which Bardas holds to it. A two-substance ontology in which attraction and repulsion have separate physical carriers, and in which the equilibrium radius of an atom follows from a competition between a density-dependent outward push and a size-dependent inward one, is at least a mechanism rather than a postulate — it says why atoms have a definite size rather than asserting that they do. The reading of temperature as aether surplus or deficit likewise has the merit of connecting compression heating, rarefaction cooling and absolute zero under one picture, and the identification of 0 K as the balance point between the two substances is at least internally coherent with the rest of the scheme. The historical sections, whatever one makes of the thesis, are readable and the Presocratic sources are quoted accurately.
The difficulties are fundamental and mostly of one kind: nothing in the paper is derived. There is not a single equation in fourteen pages. The core forces are said to be "proportional to" density and to size, but neither proportionality is given a constant, a functional form, or a numerical check against any measured atomic radius, binding energy or elastic modulus. Consequently the theory makes no prediction that could fail. The one place where a number appears — the claim that a star in an antimatter galaxy would radiate at −5800 K — is not a physical statement at all: thermodynamic temperature is a measure of energy per degree of freedom and is bounded below by zero. Negative absolute temperatures do occur in bounded-spectrum systems, but they are hotter than any positive temperature, not colder, which is the opposite of what the argument needs.
The conflicts with established measurement are direct and numerous. That there are no protons is refuted by deep inelastic scattering, where the angular distribution of scattered electrons off hydrogen reveals pointlike charged constituents inside a proton of measured radius. The "mini-atom" account of collider tracks cannot accommodate the fact that the LHC's proton beams are prepared by stripping hydrogen of its electrons and are steered by magnetic fields whose required strength follows from a charge-to-mass ratio measured to many digits — a neutral or atomic beam would not bend. Nor can it accommodate particle lifetimes, the measured muon lifetime of 2.2 μs and its dilation with beam energy, or the resonance widths from which particle masses are read off. On the astrophysical side, an antimatter galaxy adjoining a matter galaxy would produce a characteristic 511 keV annihilation line and a diffuse gamma-ray glow at the boundary; the absence of such emission at the intergalactic scale is a long-standing and quantitative constraint. The dark-galaxy report Bardas cites — a starless rotating mass some 50 million light-years away, found with radio telescopes in Cheshire and Puerto Rico — was itself contested in the astronomical literature and later re-analysed as a tidal feature rather than an independent galaxy.
The methodological difficulty is the deepest. The Presocratic and Daoist texts are treated as evidence, but the interpretation runs only one way: Anaximander's cold and warm become anti-aether and aether by fiat, and no alternative reading is considered or excluded. A text that can be made to mean the theory cannot also confirm it. The same holds for the Yin-Yang symbol, which is offered as a "world formula" while being, on the paper's own account, a picture rather than a formula. The closing appeal — that it now rests with "the international science lobby" and the established scientists whether humanity continues to chase hypothetical particles — locates the obstacle in institutions rather than in the absence of a calculation, and that is precisely where the paper's own gap lies. Judged as what its title says it is, a proto-theory, it is a sketch of an ontology awaiting the quantitative work that would let it be tested.