Dr Charles Buhler takes people through his lab in a new video. He explains more about how they developed and detected a new force from large electrostatic pressure differences. They claim this force can test theories of physics related to gravity and a macroscale casimr effects. This is highly controversial but if this proves out then we could get the equivalent of Star Trek impulse drive and something like antigravity.
Buhler thinks his new force and work would suggest that Le Sage’s theory of gravity could be more correct than Einstein. Gravity is an area of physics that is actually not conclusively understood.
Le Sage’s theory of gravitation is a kinetic theory of gravity originally proposed by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in 1690 and later by Georges-Louis Le Sage in 1748. The theory proposed a mechanical explanation for Newton’s gravitational force in terms of streams of tiny unseen particles (which Le Sage called ultra-mundane corpuscles) impacting all material objects from all directions. According to this model, any two material bodies partially shield each other from the impinging corpuscles, resulting in a net imbalance in the pressure exerted by the impact of corpuscles on the bodies, tending to drive the bodies together. This mechanical explanation for gravity never gained widespread acceptance.
The theory posits that the force of gravity is the result of tiny particles (corpuscles) moving at high speed in all directions, throughout the universe. The intensity of the flux of particles is assumed to be the same in all directions, so an isolated object A is struck equally from all sides, resulting in only an inward-directed pressure but no net directional force (P1).
Although matter is postulated to be very sparse in the Fatio–Le Sage theory, it cannot be perfectly transparent, because in that case no gravitational force would exist. However, the lack of perfect transparency leads to problems: with sufficient mass the amount of shading produced by two pieces of matter becomes less than the sum of the shading that each of them would produce separately, due to the overlap of their shadows (P10, above). This hypothetical effect, called gravitational shielding, implies that addition of matter does not result in a direct proportional increase in the gravitational mass. Therefore, in order to be viable, Fatio and Le Sage postulated that the shielding effect is so small as to be undetectable, which requires that the interaction cross-section of matter must be extremely small (P10, below). This places an extremely high lower-bound on the intensity of the flux required to produce the observed force of gravity.
Dr. Charles Buhler and Exodus Technologies claims that systems with electrostatic pressure differences or electrostatic divergent fields gives systems with a center of mass with non-zero force component (aka generate movement). Buhler is NASA’s subject matter expert on electrostatics. They want to move to demo the system in orbit. These kinds of claims are controversial but the work seems to be thorough. It will only cost about $500k to $1M to create a rideshare mission into orbit to test the system. The mass of an early orbital system would greatly exceed the active materials of the propulsion, which would reduce performance. High performance space propulsion would need to increase the active materials as a percentage of the mass of the craft.
Dr. Charles Buhler discusses an experimental propulsion results based on asymmetrical electrostatic pressure, in a device described in International Patent# WO2020159603A2. The device is described as a system and method for generating a force from a voltage difference applied across at least one electrically conductive surface. The applied voltage difference creates an electric field resulting in an electrostatic pressure force acting on at least one surface of an object. Asymmetries in the resulting electrostatic pressure force vectors result in a net resulting electrostatic pressure force acting on the object. The magnitude of the net resulting electrostatic pressure force is a function of the geometry of the electrically conductive surfaces, the applied voltage, and the dielectric constant of any material present in the gap between electrodes.
Dr. Buhler has experience working with electrostatic discharge and ESD safety for the Space Shuttle Program, the International Space Station Program and the Hubble Space Telescope Program. He was also a Co-Investigator for three NASA Research Announcements funded by the Mars Exploration Program, and is currently working on NASA’s Dust Project focused on utilizing electrostatic methods to remove dust from personnel and equipment that will be sent to the Moon through NASA’s Constellation Program.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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It’s worth noting that a lot of theories of gravity include an aether. To which people will respond, the “Michelson-Morley experiment” showed a “null” result. But this is NOT TRUE. It is false. It’s a lie. I have read a copy in a university library of the exact report. It shows, (I think this number is correct), a 8k/s difference. Furthermore, hundreds of test by Dayton Miller and others showed the same. During his lifetime, he was always able to counter arguments that he was wrong, but after his death papers were written that said he was mistaken. The arguments in the paper used the same arguments that he had refuted earlier when he was alive. Conveniently, he was dead and could not defend himself.
The last Michelson-Morley experiment type experiment was done in a cave and did show null, but earlier experiments showed that matter interfered with the experiment and there was speculation that aether was dragged by the matter in the earth
Here’s Wikipedia article that shows some of the other experiments. Note they prejudice you by stating at the very beginning that any measurements were wrong by saying, “the result was negative within the margins of error”, yet their own charts they show below on “Upper Limit on V aether” show different. They consistently show a difference. Note, MIller, and others, did hundreds and hundreds of experiments over many years of time and got differences. Many values seemed to be affected by planetary orbits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment#Subsequent_experiments
Another argument is that GPS would not work correctly if there were a difference
but
“…[Ronald]Hatch, a former president of the Institute of Navigation and current Director of Navigation Systems Engineering of NavCom Technologies, is one of the world’s foremost experts on the GPS. Concerning the question of whether the operation of the GPS proves the validity of SR, he has come to conclusions diametrically opposite from Clifford Will’s. In Relativity and GPS[29,30], he argues that the observed effect of velocity on the GPS clocks flat out contradicts the predictions of special relativity…”
[29]
Ronald R. Hatch, Relativity and GPS, Part I, Galilean Electrodynamics 6, 3 , p. 51-57 (1995)
[30]
Ronald R. Hatch, Relativity and GPS, Part II,Galilean Electrodynamics 6, 4 , p. 73-78(1995)
[31]
A.A. Michelson, E.W. Morley, On the Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether, Am. J.Sci. 34, p. 333-345 (1887)
[32]
Dayton C. Miller, The Ether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth , Reviews of Modern Physics 5, p.203-241 (July 1933)
In order to make progress the idea that, 100% aether has been proven to not exist, has to go. Maybe it has, but that has not been proven factually. We need a space based test in high earth orbit.
Here’s a link that has a lot of facts in it. Don’t complain that some of the other links from it are not to your liking. Me neither, I don’t agree with some of the stuff on the site, but this page has a fairly decent listing of facts and references to the subject.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040722035351/http://www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm
I add that a theory worth looking at is Dewey B. Larson’s “Reciprocal System of physical theory”.
“…Larson presents an alternative paradigm of the universe where space and time are simply the two reciprocal aspects of the basic component of the universe—motion. In other works, Larson enumerates the shortcomings of modern physical science, including critiques of relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nuclear theory of the atom…”
Before you poo poo this Larson is able to derive the periodic table and it’s properties, (very important, all the properties follow from simple first principal actions of his theory). He postulated astronomical objects “before” they were found. I can’t remember which, I think neutron stars??, not sure. It has some of the same ideas, but different, that Tyler Abeo Jordan above noted. He says that there are two universes, with matter from ours flooding into the other and matter from others flooding into ours. A lot of abnormalities that astronomers see and can’t explain easily, or at all, are easily explained by Larson’s theory. It really explains a vast amount of things we see that don’t have really clear explanations for now.
https://reciprocalsystem.org/dewey-b-larson
What really impresses me is he is able to explain a vast amount of things with just a few ideas. Physics today seem to me, not even close to an authority, to be a huge bag of math tricks that are piled on top of each other like Ptolemaic epicycles. Even if he’s wrong, there’s something to be said for his model that explains so much, with so few postulates. Maybe it will lead somewhere.
My hypothesis, fluid-space hypothesis or “flace” hypothesis, for lack of a better name, envisions a plank-scale particle field (within which EM radiation travels). As an ocean is to a ship & waves, flace is to matter & EM radiation. We swim in it and it drags us along with it. So far you’re probably thinking, so what, that’s just the old “ether” idea … yep, close enough, but from there I’m going to add a source and a sink:
Flace flows into our universe from the cosmic horizon (white hole) that exists between another universe and our own and it flows out through holes in ours, holes which I believe are gluons – and electrons are effectively vortexes of flace. These gluon/holes are linked to another universe in the same manner. We could imagine universes stacked on top of each other and flace flowing like water into one, down through holes in each layer-stack down into the next.
The strong force emerges due to flace flowing at a higher rate of speed as it nears it’s exit hole/gluon. Think of this as you would think of water flowing faster near a submerged drain.
As bodies of matter get close to each other the flace is drained out of our universe in-between them at a faster rate than other directions and so matter clumps together – giving us emergent gravity.
Just as flace drags matter around, matter can create waves in flace giving us EM radiation and magnetic fields.
The speed of flace can exceed the speed of light in the same way that a a stream of particles can move faster than the waves traveling within it.
So a black hole may be a gluon star wherein the waves of light are carried out of our universe faster than they can propagate back in. The event horizon is the boundary layer where flace moves faster than the light waves it carries.
Protons and neutrons may also simply be event horizon’s surrounding quarks and gluons. Many supposed ‘particles’ may simply be vortexes or similar phenomena that emerge from the flow of flace.
So flace hypothesis perhaps unifies EM, the strong force, and gravity.
I’m only a hobbyist, but have been thinking about this for 30+ years and have developed it over this time period. I’m also not a math guy, so haven’t done anything much to test the ideas here in that regard. There are of course many other hypotheses and theories and one that has been tested, which I am a fan of even though it competes with my own silly ideas, is Quantized Inertia #QI — it’s creator is Dr. Mike McCulloch (@memcculloch on X). Unlike myself he’s a trained physicist so I think his theory is much more likely to be correct than mine. But I enjoy speculating on such things and it’s hard to let go of ideas you’ve had for most of your life. 😉
Thanks for reading!
Tyler Abeo Jordan @The_DarkPill on X
I know it brings in clicks, but giving airtime to this stuff just lowers your credibility. The idea that an electrostatic configuration can violate conservation of energy and momentum is absurd on its face. We understand electrodynamics phenomenally well, sufficient to calculate the anomalous g factor of the electron and compare successfully with experiment to many decimal places, and that theory supports conservation laws.
Funnily, there is a French guy promoting a theory of his similar to Le Sage’s theory.
Claude Poher, a retired engineer from the CNES, the French government organization dedicated to researching UFOs, says that gravity comes from imbalances or the ‘shadows’ of massive bodies over lightly interacting particles hitting every massive particle from all directions, usually cancelling out their forces. Except near the shadow of massive bodies, or in some particular conditions like strongly accelerated charges.
Of course, he says to have a way to increase the interaction of these particles in one desired direction, to get acceleration and project gravity-like beams.
He even has a web page, with not very pretty format, but surprisingly detailed and legthy information of his experiments with electrical discharges over disks of various materials throw several years.
Every top physicists who studied this theory dismissed it. People like Feynman, Maxwell. Also no peer-review articles published with solid proof. It is basically pseudo-science, but people with no physics background can easily fall in the trap.
Heat Problem:
Le Sage’s theory posits that gravity results from the bombardment of matter by high-speed corpuscles. The continuous absorption and scattering of these particles would inevitably lead to significant heating of objects. The amount of energy transferred to matter from these collisions would cause celestial bodies to heat up to unsustainable temperatures. This level of heating is not observed in reality, which is a significant issue for the theory.
Drag Problem:
According to Le Sage’s theory, the motion of objects through space would cause a drag effect as they move through the sea of corpuscles. This drag would slow down the motion of planets and other celestial bodies. However, observations show that planets move through space with minimal resistance, contrary to what Le Sage’s theory would predict.
Gravitational Shielding and Non-linear Effects:
Le Sage’s theory includes the concept of gravitational shielding, where objects partially block the flux of corpuscles, creating a shadow effect. This would result in non-linear additive properties of gravitational mass, meaning that the gravitational force between two masses would not be simply proportional to the product of their masses. However, experiments and observations consistently show that gravitational forces are linearly additive, in line with Newton’s law of universal gravitation.
Cross-section of Interaction:
For Le Sage’s theory to work, the interaction cross-section (the probability of corpuscles interacting with matter) must be extremely small. This implies an incredibly high flux of particles to account for the observed gravitational forces. The required intensity of this flux is astronomically high, which presents practical difficulties in explaining why such a massive flux has not been directly observed or detected.
Violation of the Conservation of Energy:
The theory implies that corpuscles lose energy when they interact with matter, leading to a net force (gravity). However, in classical mechanics, any force must conserve energy, and a continuous loss of energy from corpuscles would imply a violation of this principle. This makes the theory inconsistent with the established laws of physics.
It’s also worth noting that corpuscular theory has a really hard time explaining the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, which falls right out of Einstein’s theory of gravity. And gravity waves, which have been experimentally detected.
I agree with Brett. So called “corpuscular” theory can not explain how we see the universe operate. We’ve long had difficulties with connecting Einsteins POV with quantum mechanics. Honestly, so called “corpuscular theory” seems to make that even harder to do. And honestly? It was already very hard enough.