EPOLA: A New Approach to the Fine Structure of Matter and Space
  Menahem Simhony
  Retired Associate Professor, Physics Section 5, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Article 5

THE MICHELSON-MORLEY
"NO ETHER WINDS THUS NO ETHER" VERDICT
AND ITS IMPACT ON REPLACING PHYSICAL EXPLANATIONS
BY CALCULATIVE AND POSTULATORY TRICKERY

1. The Physical Results of the Michelson-Morley (M&M) Experiments.   In 1887, A.A.Michelson (1852-1931) and E.W.Morley (1838-1923) published the results of their very precise measurements of the effect of direction on the speed of light emitted by earthly sources. The measurements were made in the direction of earth's motion around the sun, in a direction opposite to earth’s motion, and in directions perpendicular to earth’s motion. They were repeated at various seasons, during several years, at increasing accuracy, and showed that
        the speed of light is undoubtedly one and the same in all directions.

This is the one and only direct physical result of the measurements. We may generalize this direct result to say that
        the velocity of light, emitted in our space by an atomic body,
        is independent of the velocity of the emitting body
.

The secondary result follows from the direct result, and tells them, who "know" that the velocity of a moving vehicle adds to the velocity of objects thrown from the vehicle, them who therefore believe that the velocity of the emitter of light "must" add to the velocity of light, that
        the velocity of an atomic emitter of light
        does not add to the propagation velocity of light in our space
.

The tertiary result tells them, who "know" that material bodies and media are dense and continuous, them who therefore believe that motion of bodies in a material medium, carrying the light-waves, "must" push, pull, bulldoze, or otherwise cause winds in the medium, that
        motion of atomic bodies in the light-carrying medium
(if any)
        does not make winds in it.

2. Physics to Explain the M&M Results.   All these results agree with Faraday’s dielectric “no winds” model of the ether. This material carrier of EM fields and radiation consisted of yet unidentified separate ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ electrically charged particles, which were elastically bound to one another. These and all other experimental results concerning EM fields and radiation are physically explained by our electron positron lattice (epola) model of space. Unfortunately, Faraday’s model was not accepted by mathematicians in physics, even in its mathematical form, developed by Maxwell. By 1887, twenty years after Faraday’s death and 8 years after the death of Maxwell, some mathematicians started to accept the Maxwell Equations, but sterilized them of any shred of Faraday’s physics.

Michelson and Morley might have not known of Faraday’s model, or did not want to know. There was also nobody around to tell them about it, even if they would be willing to listen. They could not know in 1887 (nor did Einstein in 1905) what became known after the Rutherford Experiments of 1911, that the emission of light by atomic bodies is governed by the sub-atomic structure of these bodies. They also could not know in 1887 what became known from the Rutherford Experiments of 1911, that all their apparatuses, the earth itself, and
        all atomic bodies are in their sub-atomic structure
        not “dense and continuous”, as perceived
        but are rare networks of nuclei and electrons,
        50,000 nuclear radii apart from one another.

So far apart that these networks of nuclei and electrons are physically unable to push, pull, or make winds in Faraday’s dielectric ether (the more so - in our electron positron lattice, the epola).

3. On the false but faithful “No Ether Winds, thus No Ether” Verdict.  From the absence of any difference in the velocity of light in the different directions, Michelson and Morley (M&M) derived that the moving Earth is not pushing, pulling, or making winds in the ether. They solemnly believed, as did and still do all scientists and teachers, that motion of those “dense and continuous” atomic bodies, planets and earth, must cause winds in any material medium present in space, such material being “clearly”, “obviously”, and “necessarily” continuous, too. Hence they decided that there is no ether. But even for them at those times, the other logical conclusion would be that, else, the carrier of light, if any, cannot be continuous. This would also agree with Faraday’s model.

Unfortunately, people were (and still are) generally unable to imagine a non-continuous (discrete) material, with its particles apart from one another. Thus the “no ether” verdict still endures, though it is based on a popular belief, and is not the result of the experiment, hardly a third-hand derivative of it. Nevertheless, in our teaching and texbooks, the “no winds - no ether” verdict is presented as the direct result of the experiment. It is simply stated that “the M&M experiment proved that there is no ether”, and this is what people usually remember out of their study of this chapter of science (if at all). Such a statement is not just a mispresentation but a lie.

4. Need in an Ether and Trials to Save it. Though the pre- and post-Faraday ether was massless, thus immaterial, and could exist only in our imagination, it still was an "as if" or quasi physical model of radiation- and energy-carrying space, providing some physical explanations to most of then known facts. At those times, the ability to explain phenomena was the criterion to distinguish a science from a non-science, so that the ether concept was very important to physics. The M&M denial of its existence made physics unable to explain itself, turning it into a science in distress.

The non-existence of the ether was not easily accepted by the scientific community, and much work was done to save the ether. Hundreds of physicists were (some still are!) working on experiments (real and Gedanken) to prove its existence. Their failure opened the field for mathematicians, whose way to save the ether was by twisting well established physical definitions and laws.

For example, in 1893, G.Fitzgerald suggested that the ether can be saved by assuming that fast-moving bodies shorten their dimension in the direction of motion. This is the alleged "length contraction". The ether could also be saved by the alleged "time dilation", derived by H.A.Lorentz. This effect would cause time to run slower in fast moving vehicles. It yields the imaginary clock- or twin-effect, by which a fast moving clock would show an earlier time than an identical clock left home at rest, and a fast moving twin should be younger on return than the twin who stayed home. At super-high speeds, time and clocks run backward (time reversal), and the traveler twin grows younger. H.Poincare in 1901 and Lorentz in 1904 introduced the ideas of the ”universal” (???) constancy of the speed of light and of the “non-constancy of mass of moving bodies.

Curiously, all these inventions did not revive the ether. On the contrary, they were used by Einstein in 1905 to revive Newton’s absolute emptiness of space. None of these effects was ever proven experimentally. They are accepted because they provide some working mathematical solutions. Solutions achieved at the price of twisting well established physical concepts and laws.

To cope with the false “no ether” result, A.Einstein introduced in 1905 his postulates of special relativity. They state that space is absolutely empty and there is no material carrier of light; that the speed of light c is always and everywhere the same, and is a “universal constant”, here and in all other universes, past, present, and future to come. The postulates were never proven by direct experiment. Their "proof" rests on some satisfactory results provided by relativistic calculations. On them, and by the extermination of alternatives, three generations of physicists were educated in belief that relativity is the whole and only truth. Thus one is forced to believe that empty space is deformable, has and carries energy, magnetism, electric charge, and other explicit properties of physical bodies, as required by calculators to make their results fit observables and/or ideologies. This approach in ‘new physics’ lead to the Big Bang absurd and to the declaration that “Nature is Absurd” (R.P.Feynman, in the book “QED”, 1985 - 88 editions)

5. On the “No Absurd” Nature of Some Important Things to Know. The truth is that the velocity of light, once emitted, depends only on the physical conditions in the region of space where it propagates. Light does not ‘remember’ its previous velocities, nor the velocity of its source, and the speed of light does not depend on them. Light always reaches us with the same speed c, not for being a “universal constant”, but because the physical conditions in our space are the same everywhere around us, causing the velocity of light here to be equal to c.

In our natural system of orientation, time is a coordinate, in which to order events as they occur. It is the independent coordinate, flowing at its constant rate. Time is considered in normal life to flow smoothly and uniformly, independent of what we are doing, whether we work, move or rest, and whether our clocks work. We do not worry about saving the ether, or the emptiness of space, or any other fictions, and do not introduce dilations, twin effects, or other speculations about the basic concept of time. Time will run at the same rate for travelers at the highest speeds of 100 km/s, achievable by atomic bodies in our space (i.e., the Solar System and its neighborhood), as for those who watch the voyage on TV at home.

We know that the dimensions of a body change only when there is an internal or external action on it. If the length, or width, or height of a body shortens due to motion, then this could occur only because of a physical or chemical interaction between the body and the medium in which it moves. We thus keep our orientation system as it was established, i.e., with independent time, and three space coordinates or dimensions of bodies.

6. On Particles, Waves, and Their Postulated Duality.  Max Planck in 1900, and Albert Einstein in 1905 revived Newton's corpuscular theory of light by postulating that light represents streams of energy quanta or photons. Photons were pronounced particles of the fictitious emptiness. They have mass only when they move with the velocity of light; otherwise they are massless, thus immaterial.

It was found that though light is a wave process, its quanta or photons have momentum and may act as real particles. Unable and unwilling to find the physical reasons for this ‘duality’, new physics canonized it by the "particle-wave duality principle." The principle states, without explanation, that waves may have particle properties, and particles may exhibit wave properties. This is a "no answer answer", typical for new physics.

In nature, waves and particles are strictly opposed to one another. Particles transfer matter along their paths, waves don’t. Waves propagate through one another, but particles can’t. Particles cannot penetrate through holes of smaller sizes, while thousands of waves can squeeze their ways together through a hole or tunnel (e.g., in our ears) that is hundreds of times smaller than their wavelength "sizes".

Our explanation is that space contains bound electrons and positrons. Some vibrations of these particles form waves that we perceive as light. The wave properties of light are the properties of these real waves. The particle properties of light are those of electrons and positrons vibrating in the wave. The particle properties can be detected when the real particles, vibrating in the wave, hit free particles or particles of a target (detector).

When the motion of a body is unable to tear the ether particles off bonds (because, e.g., the binding between the ether particles is much stronger than between the particles of the body!) there are no “ether winds”. Then the velocity c of EM waves, caused by the motion, or of light waves, emitted by the moving body, and propagating in the free ether space, is determined by the strength of the elastic binding in the ether, divided by the inertia of its particles, and is not affected by the velocity of the emitters.

7. On the Electron Positron Lattice (Epola) Structure of Space. The almost undisturbed motion of alpha particles through atomic bodies, disclosed by Rutherford, means also that atomic bodies can move through collectives or networks of nuclear particles. Consider an electrically neutral network or lattice of electrons and positrons, elastically bound at inter-particle distances 50 times their radii. These distances allow the passage not only of alpha particles but also of nuclei of heavy atoms.

Epola Unit Cube
The Unit Cube of the Epola.  Tiny light and dark circles represent positrons and electrons;
99.9% of the area is open for passage of nuclear particles. For comparison, the central circle
shows the size of a proton or neutron, of radius 1.1 fermi.

An atomic body, moving not too fast in this lattice, can thus sweep the nuclei and electrons of its atoms through the interparticle distances. Each atomic nucleus and electron will then shift the bound electrons and positrons of space slightly apart, without tearing them off or sweeping them along, thus causing no winds but vibrations and waves in the lattice.

Atomic bodies are highly diluted networks of nuclei that are 50,000 nuclear radii apart from one another. Therefore the moving atomic body as a whole cannot “buldoze” the electron positron lattice, cannot push or pull it, nor can the body make winds or currents in it. Motion of atomic bodies causes only vibrations and waves in the electron positron lattice.

These waves appear as the "waves of matter" or de Broglie waves, introduced in quantum theory by L.V.de Broglie in 1924. Similarly, a moving net of thin cord and large eyelets does not cause currents in water, only wavelets around the nodes. Hence,
        motion of an atomic body makes no winds in space,
        because this is not a dense continuous wall moving in a continuous medium
        but a dilute network of nuclear particles
        moving in a rare lattice of such particles.

An atomic body moves undisturbed in space, if its velocity relative to the surrounding epola is much smaller than the speed of light. Each nuclear particle of the body creates then a de Broglie wave of energy much smaller than the binding energy of the particle in the body.


If you are interested to find out what the Epola model of space does and can do for the understanding of observed physical phenomena, I may recommend a close encounter with my book  Invitation to the Natural Physics of Matter, Space, and Radiation, World Scientific Publishing Co, 1994, (292 pages, ISBN 981-02-1649-1, can be ordered from Amazon.com  or Barnes & Noble).

All mathematical derivations can be found in my Paperback, The Electron-Positron Lattice Space, Cause of Relativity and Quantum Effects , Physics Section 5, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1990 (158 pages). The Paperback, as well as my popular Booklet, The Story of Matter and Space ,1999 (70 pages) can be ordered from Robi Guttman - guttmans@netvision.net.il


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Dr. M. Simhony, 33 Shoham Street, 34679 Haifa, Israel
Fax: 972 4 825 1681. E-mail: msimhony@hotmail.com


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More Articles:

1. Why are there: Inertia, Gravity, Quantization, the other "Unexplainable" Facts of Nature
and What is the Real Meaning of E=mc2
2. "Expanding Universe" - The Greatest Mathematical Deception in 20th Century Physics
3. The "Mass - Energy Equivalence" Deception, the Second Greatest in 20th Century Physics
4. The Direct Results of the Michelson-Morley Experiments and What do They Realy Prove
5. The Michelson-Morley “NO ETHER WINDS THUS NO ETHER” Verdict and its  Impact on Replacing Physical Explanations by Calculative and Postulatory Trickery You are here
6. The Alleged "Dependence of Mass on Velocity", Another Misinterpretation of Mathemathical Results that Ruined our Prospects to Understand Physics
7. Sublumic, Lumic, and Superlumic Motion of Nuclear Particles in our Region of the EPOLA Space
8. Velocity Limits of Atomic Bodies in our Region of the EPOLA Space,  and the Unreachability of yet the Proxima Star

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