The Dynamic Theory - A New View of Space-Time-Matter
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| Author | Pharis E Williams |
|---|---|
| Published | 2011 |
| Publisher | Williams Research |
| Pages | 467 |
| ISBN | 978-0615447117 |
The Dynamic Theory - A New View of Space-Time-Matter (2011) is the full technical statement of the theory Pharis E Williams developed over some thirty years. At 467 pages it supplies the derivations behind conclusions he had published piecemeal since 1981.
The book's full subtitle states its programme outright: the thermodynamic foundations of a five dimensional universe requiring currently known physical theories as subsets is presented along with new physics.
Its governing ambition is unusually austere. Williams starts from the three laws of classical thermodynamics — nothing else — and argues that Newtonian mechanics, relativity and quantum mechanics all follow from them, together with a series of predictions the standard theories do not make.
The argument
Entropy and a limiting velocity
The first move joins the First and Second Laws to produce entropy for mechanical as well as thermodynamic systems. Williams reads entropy physically, as "energy that becomes unavailable", and finds that it becomes infinite as velocity approaches a universal limiting velocity.
This is the book's characteristic manoeuvre, and its appeal is easy to see: the speed of light appears not as a postulate imposed on the theory, as in special relativity, but as a consequence of thermodynamics. The limiting velocity in turn introduces velocity-dependent forces that vanish as that velocity is approached.
Systems of constant entropy are then the most stable that can occur in nature — and systems whose mechanical entropy stays constant are shown, on Williams's derivation, to obey quantum mechanical equations.
Five dimensions: space, time and mass
The greater claim follows from including thermodynamic and mechanical forces in the laws simultaneously. Williams observes that classical engineering thermodynamics — the design of steam engines — conserved mass, and that doing so reduces a five-dimensional First Law to a four-dimensional statement. The fifth dimension was there all along, suppressed by an assumption made for convenience.
Restoring it gives a universe of space, time and mass. The gauge function required of fundamental particles depends on all three, and the resulting fields are five-dimensional and quantised.
Quantising general relativity
The connection to Einstein's theory is made by reversing the reduction. Restricting the five-dimensional universe to four dimensions by imposing conservation of mass requires that the four-dimensional surface embedded in the five-dimensional one have a curvature specified by Einstein's field equations.
Since the five-dimensional isentropic states are described by a five-dimensional quantum mechanics, imposing conservation of mass on those states yields, Williams argues, a quantisation of general relativity — the problem that has resisted the standard approaches for a century, obtained here as a by-product rather than as a target.
The gauge function and its consequences
The gauge function depends exponentially on space, time and mass, and each dependence carries a physical prediction. This is where the theory becomes testable, and where its interest for this wiki lies.
- Long range in space — reproduces the classical inverse-square behaviour of gravitational and electric fields.
- Short range in space — departs sharply from orthodoxy. Classical fields are singular: they tend to infinity as separation goes to zero, the divergence that makes quantum field theory require renormalisation. Williams's five-dimensional gauge fields are non-singular, and must return to zero as separation vanishes. He argues this yields a description of nuclear phenomena now attributed to the nuclear forces, and predicts new ones.
- Dependence on time — shows up over long intervals, and produces the theory's cosmological results.
- Dependence on mass — the fifth dimension, and the source of the redshift prediction below.
Redshift, quasars and the debt to Arp
The prediction most likely to interest readers of this wiki concerns the light of distant stars. To first order, Williams's shift reproduces the Hubble redshift. But the full prediction does more:
The full prediction shows that more massive stars may have much larger red shifts than their distance alone would require which would allow for the much larger red shifts of quasars without great distances.
— Pharis E. Williams, The Dynamic Theory
That is a mass-dependent, non-cosmological component of redshift — and it arrives at the position Halton C Arp argued for on purely observational grounds, from an entirely different direction. Arp's discordant quasar–galaxy associations are the standing observational challenge to redshift-as-distance; Williams offers a mechanism, derived from thermodynamics, by which a quasar could show a large redshift without being remote. See Intrinsic redshift and Quasar.
Williams pursued the practical question of separating the two contributions in Using the Hubble Telescope to Determine the Split of a Cosmological Object's Redshift (2001).
Dark matter, dark energy, and no Big Bang
The time dependence of the gauge function implies a gravitational field that weakens over time, which Williams argues accounts for the phenomena now attributed to dark energy and dark matter without introducing either — the subject of New Time Dependent Gravity Displays Dark Matter and Dark Energy Effects (2008).
The non-singular space dependence, meanwhile, "predicts a cosmology with expansion properties without a big bang beginning". An expanding universe with no initial singularity places the theory among the alternatives catalogued at Big Bang and Cosmology.
The author's summary
Williams states the book's claim plainly, and the emphasis on economy is the point:
The book presents detailed derivations of numerous applications of the classical thermodynamic laws with the result that phenomena currently covered by Newtonian, relativistic and quantum mechanics are predicted by these three laws. This is a significant reduction of the number of required fundamental assumptions in the description of these phenomena. Additionally, many new phenomena are predicted that lead to new views of the universe.
— Pharis E. Williams, The Dynamic Theory
The argument is not that the standard theories give wrong answers, but that they rest on more assumptions than they need — three thermodynamic laws in place of Newton's laws, plus Einstein's postulates, plus the quantum postulates.
Independent testing on this wiki
Unusually for a theory documented here, the Dynamic Theory has been taken up and tested by another researcher — and against the classical tests of general relativity, which is the fairest available trial.
Ioannis Iraklis Haranas, an astronomer with a doctorate from York University, worked out the theory's observational consequences in three papers catalogued on this wiki:
- The Deflection of Light in the Dynamic Theory of Gravity (2004) — computes the deflection of a light signal and compares it with general relativity, using a line element that modifies the Newtonian one by a negative inverse radial exponential term.
- Radar Time Delays in the Dynamic Theory of Gravity (2004) — calculates radar signal travel times and delays for the major planets and compares them with general relativity. Published in the Serbian Astronomical Journal.
- Pressure Calculation of a Constant Density Star in the Dynamic Theory of Gravity (2005) — derives an analytic expression for stellar pressure from hydrodynamic equilibrium, and asks whether the resulting changes in central pressure, radius and redshift are "of some detectable magnitude".
Haranas's summary of the theory is a useful independent gloss: through Weyl's quantum principle it yields a non-singular electrostatic potential, and treats the gravitational field as a gauge field linked to the electromagnetic field in a five-dimensional manifold of space-time and mass.
This work matters for the theory's standing. A proposal that has been carried to the point where someone else can compute Mercury-orbit-style tests from it, and publish them in refereed astronomical journals, has passed a bar most alternative gravitation never reaches.
Assessment
The Dynamic Theory's attraction is its economy: if the derivations hold, a great deal of modern physics follows from three laws that no one disputes, and several long-standing puzzles — quantising gravity, the singular short-range field, non-cosmological redshifts, dark matter and dark energy — dissolve together rather than needing separate repairs.
Its difficulty is the same thing viewed from the other side. A claim this broad rests entirely on whether 467 pages of derivation are sound, and that is not something a summary can settle. The book was self-published, and the central derivations have not been checked in print by the wider physics community. Williams's supporting papers on the thermodynamic foundations did appear in the refereed journal Entropy, and Haranas's applications in refereed astronomy journals, but the core claim — that relativity and quantum mechanics are consequences of thermodynamics — has attracted no sustained scrutiny either way.
The honest position is that the theory is unusually well developed, unusually testable, and largely untested. Williams's own 1981 paper described it as "a newly proposed, and as yet unverified, theory"; thirty years and one large book later, that description still holds.
Related work by Williams
- Mechanical Entropy and its Implications (2001) — the thermodynamic foundation, in Entropy
- The Arrow of Time in the Dynamic Theory (1981) — the earliest statement, on time asymmetry and quasar redshifts
- New Time Dependent Gravity Displays Dark Matter and Dark Energy Effects (2008)
- Fifth Force (2013) and Physical Time (2012)
- Physics - Against the Odds (2008) — the non-technical companion volume