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Those two giants, Galileo and Newton, together established the idea of an indestructible essence called "energy" and so before going further
I will try and give some idea what this concept means. We are talking about the "something" which needs to be supplied, for example, to lift a weight or to throw a ball. The something which comes out of a fuel to propel a car and finally ends up heating the atmosphere a little. The something we feel as heat radiated from a fire or the light from a lamp.
Objects themselves, however, are also
made out of energy. This may seem a strange statement since objects are normally considered as being made from mass, the quantity of matter determined by weighing. But as Einstein showed, mass and energy are equivalent and so it is equally permissible to consider them as being made from energy: their "rest energy" or "mass energy". This does not need relativity for proof, however, it also comes out naturally from Newton's three laws as shown in the APPENDIX.
So an object is made out of rest energy when it is standing still. Extra energy has to be added, however, to speed it up and this is called "kinetic energy". So the motion is also made from energy and the two can be added together to make up "total energy". It follows that a fast-moving object will be slightly bigger and heavier than when it was standing still. Clearly energy is the ultimate substance forming all that is.
The
Extended Newtonian
I call my own approach the "Extended Newtonian" because it depends on refinements of the old Newtonian laws of motion and the previous statement covers one of them. Newton used only the rest mass. This change gave the important equations of Special Relativity, the same "gravitational red shift" and the correct prediction for orbits like that of Mercury. To obtain a totally satisfactory theory of gravitation, however, it emerged that not only did an Ether of space have to exist, this had to be slightly compressible. This compressibility produced the same doubling of the deflection of starlight as Einstein's curved space-time. And so it transpired that the other checks, so beautifully described by Will, could be satisfied as well.
The force of gravity is, however, of an attractive nature and this could not be explained if the Ether was constructed only of the positive kinds of energy previously considered. So the Extended Newtonian had to include an opposite kind as well
- negative energy. Its meaning will emerge later.
Of major importance for what follows is that the Ether needed to consist of minute objects made in two varieties from such opposite kinds of energy. These can be appropriately called "cosmons" a name coined by a French Canadian, Adolphe Martin, who described sub-atomic particles in terms of flow patterns arising in a gas formed from a seething mass of cosmons (of positive energy only). In the present theory only very slightly more than half the cosmons are made from positive energy whilst the rest are of negative energy.
Positive and negative energies, in the new theory, therefore provide the ultimate particles from which all else is made. They are the "Yin and Yang" of all that
is. They are the very gist of what you call the "pre-physical" alias the Ether. Because matter is dominantly made from positive cosmons the only kind of energy to which we can relate directly is positive. Hence the negative sort, though
ever-present, is hidden from our gaze.
In the first book
I assumed that when opposite cosmons collided they would annihilate to leave nothing. Hence they seemed to need continual regeneration by some obscure means, but at the time no satisfactory solution to this problem emerged. Then in November 1991, just after presenting the gravitational theory to the Students Physics Society of Cambridge University,
I started to look into the collision interactions of cosmons. The end result was the startling discovery which is the main theme of this
lecture.
All collision interactions depend on two so-called "conservation laws" one for energy and the other for "momentum". So before
I go further I need to describe what is meant by momentum and to show also what is meant by its conservation. A good way of doing this reverts to the simple experiments Galileo tried about 400 years ago.
Galileo's
Experiments
Galileo is regarded as the father of the scientific age because he joined tip experimentation with mathematical analysis. He started off simply by rolling cannon balls down ramps, large balls and small balls to see which would roll fastest. Which would any of you think would win? I see somebody mouthing, "The big one". and that is what everybody else thought before Galileo tried it out. So lets try it and see.
I have here a simple cardboard ramp and two "pretend" cannon balls (the shops don't stock real ones nowadays!).
I am actually using two high bounce solid balls as I find these best for demonstrations and one is about five times as heavy as the other.
I now release them:
Both keep in exact step with each other as they accelerate down the ramp!
It meant that the gravitational acceleration had to be the same for all objects, a fact which Newton was to put to good use later when he formulated his equation of gravitation.
But I placed two identical pucks at the bottom of the ramp and the one struck by the large ball has been moved about five times as far as the one struck by the small ball. "Well, so what?" I hear you think, "what else would you expect?"
The point is that this just re-enforces common sense. But Galileo went further to try and find the ground rules and express them in precise mathematical language. He wanted something to express tile effort needed to stop a moving ball and clearly both the higher its speed or the greater its mass the greater the effort needed. This was the ball's "inertia" He decided to multiply the mass by its speed and call this product "momentum". Later it was realised that the direction of motion also needed to be taken into account, so the idea of "velocity" was conceived which specified the motion of any object as a combination of both speed and direction. Hence the final definition of momentum became:
Momentum equals mass X velocity.
Then Galileo turned his attention to pendulums. It is surprising how much of the laws of mechanics can be gleaned by watching such simple devices.
I have here two pendulums. Their bobs are just identical high bounce balls each fixed to a thread about 60 centimetres long and both hang from this small block (about 8 cms long) With the block one way up the two
pendulums hang well apart. Then as I make one swing by a large amount without bumping the other, as you see, this swings a small amount but both keep in exact step. They both take the same time for each swing even though one is swinging much further than the other This means that when the bobs reach the centre their speeds must be proportional to the "amplitude": the horizontal distance of the half-swing. This is a useful result which we can use to analyse what happens when
I turn the block over. Now the two pendulum bobs when hanging still, just touch one another.
I let one swing into the other, which is hanging stationary, so that they make a head-on collision. The motion of the "driver" is killed and it stops dead but the one originally stationary bounces away and reaches the same amplitude of swing as the driver started with.
Hence although the driver lost all its momentum, the other gained the same amount. Hence momentum was only transferred and none was lost. Momentum is said to have been conserved. This in fact is what any law of conservation means. The sum total of a property is the same after an interaction as it was at the beginning.
Now let us look at an angle shot resulting in some sideways scatter
- very important is this! I let the driver ball swing from an angle of about 45 degrees from the initial line of ball-centres. If you look along the line of sight of the initial swing you see both balls bounce sideways by equal amounts. What you are seeing is their sideways "velocity components".
The motion can be seen more accurately in the plan view drawn to scale in FIG.5A.
(I cover up the lower FIG.5B) Here I have drawn a line of length 10 units in the "forward" direction which is that of the initial swing of the driver. The length is proportional to the speed so this was initially 10 speed units and since the direction is also given by this line
I have really set off a measure of the driver ball's velocity at the point of impact. This is marked
V1 and similar "velocity vector", as they are called are marked off for the resulting motions
of both balls after impact.
Each ball can he considered to be of one mass unit in this special case so momentums are given by simply measuring velocities.
By using this pair of dividers from my drawing instruments which I am holding. I
am going to measure off the velocity component the driver ball left with after the collision. The direction in which
I am measuring this is not that of its actual motion. Instead it is parallel to that of the initial swing. I am measuring its forward velocity component labelled
Vx. Then I add this to the forward velocity component of the driven ball labelled
Ux. Now let us see how this sum total compares with the initial velocity vector
V1.
You see they are equal. The sum of the final momenta in the direction of the initial line of motion equals the momentum the driver had at the start. Hence forward momentum has been conserved.
But what about the sideways direction? I measure these labelled
Vy and Uy. I find them both equal to 5 units. So you think momentum conservation has been violated in the sideways direction do you?
Not so. We have not taken account of
sense of direction. If I arbitrarily say the driver ball deflects off in a positive sideways direction, then
I have to assign the other a negative sense because it goes the opposite way. So the sum becomes:
-5 momentum units + 5 momentum units = 0
Since zero was the initial sideways momentum component of the driver ball, momentum has also been conserved in the sideways direction as well as in the forward direction. If
I took any other case and with balls of unequal masses I would also have found the law of conservation of momentum to have been exactly obeyed whatever direction
I chose to take.
The law of conservation of momentum is one of the most basic laws of physics; one of the two on which the new theory of the Ether is totally dependent. But another very important observation has also just been made:
Although sideways momentum has been conserved, each ball, considered separately, has gained some sideways momentum from nothing. One gain was positive, the other gain was negative.
Further analysis could be made to see if energy was also conserved. No change in the sum total of their energies of motion would have been found for an ideal collision and so the sideways motion does not provide extra energy in the way extra momentum is added. (Indeed FIG.5B illustrates the point but is best left covered up as it adds too many new ideas to take in. At low speeds kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed and the square on the hypoteneuse of a right angled triangle Is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.)
Now
For the Crux Issue
This is when both balls are made from positive energy. If both balls had been made from negative energy, exactly the same responses would have been obtained since the negative effects cancel out. Hence no change in the sum total of either positive or negative energy would have arisen. Positive/positive plus negative/negative collisions, however, account for only half the total number of collisions taking place in a seething mass of cosmons keeping themselves apart in the main by bouncing off one another due to high speed impacts. A gas works in a similar way though now made up from atoms or molecules.
But half of the collisions within the cosmon "gas" are between positive and negative cosmons. So what will happen then? This is homing us onto the crux issue.
For positive cosmons, like any other object made from positive energy, the momentum is carried in the same direction as its velocity and can be represented by a forward-pointing arrow. For the negative cosmon, however, the momentum is carried in the opposite sense and so needs a backward facing arrow.
If a pair of opposite cosmons move in the same direction at equal speeds and merge together, then since they have equal and opposite momenta their sum total momentum is zero. Also they have equal and opposite energies so these total zero as well. Hence the cosmons will mutually annihilate to leave absolutely nothing. The energy balance for annihilation could be expressed by an example assuming each had 10 energy units as follows:
-10 energy units + 10 energy units
l 0
The probability of collision is, however, zero for cosmons moving in the same direction, just as cars on the motorway do not collide when following one another. If a car comes down the fast lane the wrong way the situation is quite different. This maximises the probability of collision. In the same way most cosmon collisions take place when they are moving In predominantly opposite directions.
But now with the negative cosmon turned round to move the opposite way, its momentum now points in the same direction as that of the positive cosmon it hits and so the two add up. It is impossible for their energies to mutually annihilate because their momentums would then be left attached to nothing. So the cosmons now have to pass right through each other for an exact head on collision. It also follows that the pure energy of the cosmon must be a super-dense liquid as the required deformations could not otherwise occur. These liquid drops will be held into spherical shape by surface tension.
The next step is the clincher! We consider oblique collisions which cause sideways scatter. Both move off with equal sideways speeds, but contrary to the pendulum we used, both now move in the same sideways direction so that each adds sideways momentum from nothing. But they still need to have the same forward momentum they started with. It now works out that in order to conserve sideways momentum as well, extra energy also needs to be created from nothing. This can now be achieved without violating the conservation of energy because, just as sideways momentum could be created from nothing, energy gains can be obtained from nothing provided the positive gain is matched by an equal negative gain. Indeed the gain is due to the same process
- sideways scatter.
When a rigorous computation is made taking into account the entire possible range of approach directions and scattering offsets and also including collision probabilities (proportional to relative velocity) it is found that, on average, for every incident energy unit about 1.1 energy units emerge from the collision of opposites.
I felt like jumping over the moon when this figure emerged. It seemed highly significant because it meant:
Cosmons breed like opposite sexes!
This pure creation can be expressed as an example in the form:
- 10 + 10
l -11 + 11 energy units
The net energy before and after is always zero yet individual energies increase. The cosmons grow in size with each pair-collision until they become so large that, just like drops of water, they break up into drops of smaller size and so they can exist only in a limited size range. The net effect, therefore, is that the cosmons continually grow in number.
From the initial start a ball of Ether is committed to eternal growth as it spreads out to colonise the void of nothiness outside. In any given volume inside the ball the number density, (the number of cosmons per unit of volume) will also steadily increase until an ultimate density is reached. The previous calculation assumed that only pairs of cosmons collided and then a steady creation had to be. However, when three or more collide together conditions for both the momentum and energy to simultaneously annihilate can be found. Such conditions develop as the density approaches the state of about 50% voidage and then creation and destruction can reach a balance. This is the ultimate density within the universe and represents Black Hole conditions. This is nothing like an Einstienian Black Hole, of course, with its central "singularity". A singularity is the impossible condition in which a mass, of perhaps millions of times that of the Sun, exists in a pinpoint of zero size with matter at infinite density.
Our Black Hole is an unstructured fluid mass but this is not part of the Ether of greatest interest. It turns out that almost every possible density below the limiting value can exist in a stable condition with creation and annihilation in exact balance. Now the density is regulated by that of the surrounding Ether and being low at the edges of the growing ball but building up toward a possible Black Hole at the centre. But at these intermediate densities an elaborate structure develops spontaneously from the mathematics. Filaments of annihilation having zero porosity develop which are surrounded by breeding zones of much lower density. The breeding results in a radial inflow of cosmons of both kinds which then implode against one another from all radial directions in the manner ideal for annihilation. The filaments are therefore permanent liquid structures made of a balance of positive and negative energy in the process of' mutual annihilation. But as fast
as these energies vanish at the centre they are replenished from the outside. Regions of either spherical or cylindrical symmetry can arise and pack to create a stable structure. If spherical symmetry occurs at maximum packing density then about 26% of the total volume exists as space between the. For the hexagonal packing of cylinders, however, this figure reduces to 9% and so this is the more stable arrangement. If spherical packing arises then the asymmentries cause "whiskers" to grow which tend to join and so in the end only filaments remain with hemispherical ends -their growing tips. An end view, like an ordered crystal, is depicted in FIG.6 (LOWER) (Blot out upper figure for now) Again, like crystals from a solidifying melt, a randomness will arise as growth occurs from multiple centres and so filaments grow criss-crossing in all directions. All grow until an obstruction is met and in every case the obstruction will be another filament growing across its path. Hence all filaments end in Tee-junctions at both ends.
The resulting structure should look rather like a mass of chopped straw or a box of matches tipped out onto the table. It is illustrated by FIG.7
(LOWER) (Blot out upper figure for now). The scale is, of course, incredibly fine: millions of filaments would pack into the core of the tiny electron. As shown in the illustration, Tee junctions will be weaker than the rest of each filament so that breakages can readily occur to leave open junctions, as also indicated. Consequently junctions can exist in two stable states, closed or open.
They are bistable like computer switches! Furthermore in the open state some of the creation going on can be tapped off to create an energy imbalance on that filament. They act like the rectifiers of AC current though this time depending on random surges in the creation taking place all around them. So the system has Its inbuilt power supply. In fact all the ingredients are there from which a superfast computing system could develop.
 The tangled mass takes on the appearance of a brain structure. Then as junctions are triggered by shocks to change states they will trigger other junctions to switch. Like the resting human brain, switching waves will spontaneously arise and spread through the structure. They will provide the means of self organisation. Order arising from initial chaos just like the beautiful pictures generated by such masters as Professor Penrose. He shows how order can spontaneously arise from the mathematics of chaos. Indeed the grid structure will be capable of self organisation into a form very similar to the model "neural networks" which scientists are playing around with at the present time. And they have achieved considerable success. These networks exist as a mass of switches so arranged as to provide both excitatory and inhibitory functions. They have been shown to possess both learning ability and memory capacity as described by Geoffrey Hinton(I0) in a special edition of
Scientific American. Already neural networks can beat the conventional digital computer in roles of pattern recognition. Hence it is quite feasible that a mindless, machine-like computing system could develop by an evolutionary process to fill almost the whole of the ever-growing ball of Ether.
Ultimately even a conscious entity could arise. Indeed it can be argued that this is much more likely to have arisen at the level of Ether in the evolutionary manner outlined, than for the equivalent to have arisen in matter by biological evolution
- Darwin style. This is because living nerve cells with their "axons" need to evolve before they can have any useful purpose: they cannot be functional until refined into a working brain. So how could they arise in the first place? In the Ether, by contrast, the required network has already arisen spontaneously as a predictable mathematical consequence. Hence a supermind could exist in space as a sophisticated switching pattern of the pre-physical,
- of the Ether!
Can you imagine what it would be like to be a disembodied mind? Just think what life would be worth if all your limbs were paralysed and that you were blind and deaf and there was nobody else around with whom to communicate. It would not be an enviable position to be in. The supermind would need to -use its enormous creative ability to construct a higher reality upon its back so to speak as a housing, to provide itself with a meaningful environment. So
I am suggesting it created at least one universe of what we call "matter"
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