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[Don’t miss the heads-up for the next post, at the end of this one. I think you’ll find it interesting.]
As I said in my last post, I plan here to walk you through the scientific basis for Frame Invariance of Inertial Rest Mass - why a particle/object’s resistance to acceleration is the same when measured in that object’s rest frame (the state of motion relative to which it is ‘at rest’) no matter how fast that state of motion may be relative to anything else.
This is of course a knock-on (excuse the pun) from the Special Theory of Relativity (SR), which states that fundamental physical laws (so also quantities) apply identically in all inertial states of motion (without ever actually explaining how that can be). This in turn necessitates the feat of mental gymnastics referred to as the Higgs-Field/boson mechanism said to be responsible for inertia - see my previous post for observations on that, including a full derivation of Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence relationship without any reference to SR or Higgs bosons (simply cause-and-effect commonsense).
The intention in this post is to provide a cogent well-reasoned alternative to the prevailing view of material reality, which requires ever more exotic concepts, fields and particles to make it hold together. In support of this aim you’ll find below a fairly simple rationale - just a bit of Senior High School algebra - showing exactly why rest-mass is measured as invariant over all inertial states of motion (without any exotic concepts, fields or particles).
Laying the Ground
First, though, I need to share with you a link to a fully-formed scientific paper: “A Radical New Perspective on Special Relativity”. Those of you familiar with my earlier work will be accustomed to the information in this paper, which details findings on ‘evidence’ for the conventional view on SR and how all proposed ‘effects of SR’ can be fully explained without resorting to that take on reality (which is itself still lacking any sort of explanation as to causation). This paper was submitted to a leading physics journal for possible publication but turned down on the grounds that I didn’t detail “how [it] relates to current discussions in the foundations of physics” (no criticism or comment on the paper’s scientific content). Not really surprising, since ‘A Radical New Perspective’, virtually by definition, does NOT relate to current discussions - i.e. the usual stuff that others are talking about.
No matter, if talking the same talk as the incumbent scientific community is now a pass-or-fail criterion for journal publication there’s little point in me submitting my work. So instead I’m publishing this paper, and others, on my own website, along with supporting material. You’ll find this one at https://r.ihs.ac/radical_relativity.pdf. Apart from other things, this paper establishes the Lorentz Transformation as a subjective experience quite independently of SR - a result which plays a significant part in confirming measured frame invariance of rest mass later in this post.
Setting Down Markers
I’m also publishing there copies of my two papers published some years ago in the leading peer-reviewed systems-science journal Kybernetes, on Special and General Relativity respectively. They were well received, to the extent that the second was explicitly requested as an invited paper for their 40th anniversary edition. They can be retrieved at https://r.ihs.ac/k1.pdf and https://r.ihs.ac/k2.pdf.
Antimatter: A Back-to-the Future Dead Giveaway!
Talking of dead giveaways, I’ve decided on reflection not to provide a free download of my antimatter paper, since this constitutes a significant stand-alone study in its own right; rather I will be offering it for sale (£7.50) on that download page (it’s also included in my book Atoms of Light, with much other scientific info, for just £14.95; an overview of this perspective on antimatter can be seen in my substack post here; there’s also a detailed PowerPoint presentation, The Right-Handed Universe, free to download for members (membership is free) at Transfinitemind.com).
This is a paper I prepared eleven years ago, on proposed structures for particles and their antiparticles. This was submitted but rejected as being too speculative - which I feel was fair at the time as the concept of photon-formed particles was still in the melting-pot on the wider scientific scene. In the time since then science has moved on, both in terms of my own findings and in terms of mainstream discoveries - not least the large-scale realisation of the Breit-Wheeler Process in 2021 at RHIC; formation of elementary particles from photons of electromagnetic energy - light - can now be taken as a given, rather than being purely speculative. This paper can be purchased at https://r.ihs.ac. One exciting point that I’ve added to that paper, since its original publication in my book Atoms of Light and The Relativity Myth, is a clear explanation for Time Symmetry, indicated by quantum mechanics but not explained in terms of causation. So this paper not only explains very clearly why CP (Charge & Parity) symmetry doesn’t hold universally, it also makes it very apparent why CPT (Charge, Parity & Time) symmetry (which includes time reversal) is a universal principle. This validates the whole comprehensive scientific rationale for antimatter given in this paper beyond any shadow of a doubt.
That subdomain has a list detailing all the documents published there, with a brief description of each. Just go to https://r.ihs.ac .
And so to . . .
Dispelling That Mass Hallucination
It’s well accepted that effective mass of a particle or object is dependent on its state of motion; a particle or object in motion will take a greater force to induce a particular rate of acceleration than that same object/particle when static or moving more slowly. This follows on from Einstein’s mass-energy relation, E = mc squared, and the obvious fact that a moving object embodies more energy (including energy of motion) than one which is moving more slowly or static. This will be so irrespective of whatever inertial reference frame (i.e. uniform state of motion free of gravitation) the observer or instrument doing the measuring may themself be in, relative to whom/which that particle/object is moving.
That’s rather different, though, from the rest mass of that particle or object, i.e. its mass as measured by an observer or instrument co-moving with it, for whom/which that object is in effect static. According to SR that rest mass will measure the same within any inertial reference frame - essentially because, according to SR, all such reference frames are equivalent and so fundamental properties, such as the rest-mass of any entity, will be identical in all such frames. For this reason invariance of rest-mass is taken as clear confirmation of the principles of SR.
It should be noted, though, that rest mass is essentally a measurement - equivalent to the force needed to induce a specific rate of acceleration. As such it’s dependent on whatever procedures are applied to measure both force and rate of acceleration - and whether or not those factors, those measurements, are susceptible to being influenced by a state of motion in those observers or devices doing the measuring. As we’ll see, a particle (& so also a multi-particle object) ‘at rest’ in any inertial reference frame will be measured in that frame as having the same ‘rest mass’ as in any other such frame - notably as in the unique objectively static reference frame (considered in SR not to exist, but shown by the cyclic-photon understanding of material particle formation to be the only frame in which such particles are truly static). This finding is shown to be independent of SR.
[The following is a summary of the analysis, which appears with diagrams and full mathematical detail in Atoms of Light and The Relativity Myth, pages 118-123. A copy of those pages can be retrieved from https://r.ihs.ac/rest_mass.pdf.]
We’ll base our analysis on the well-accredited energy-momentum relation (note that from the cyclic-photon perspective, momentum is simply the component of energy-flow in a particle’s direction of motion reduced by a factor c; this of course includes momentum of a photon). We’ll use principles of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, which apply equally in SR and spun-light/cyclic-photon physics (note that in the latter, conservation of momentum corresponds to conservation of energy-flow component in the direction of motion - or in any other chosen linear direction).
[Note:
1. ‘mass’ refers to rest-mass throughout, unless explicitly referred to as ‘effective mass';
2. Speeds u, v, w are fractions of light speed c, giving muc, …, mwc as momentum terms.]
First we’ll consider a photon with energy E hitting a particle of mass m moving with initial speed u in the same direction as the photon, from the viewpoint of an observer at rest in the objectively static rest frame, R, which we’ll also take to be the laboratory frame*. This gives rise to a Compton Scattering event in which the photon is reflected back in exactly the opposite direction, with reduced energy e, and the particle gains energy giving it a new increased speed v in its original direction. Conservation of energy & momentum gives us two equations from which we can eliminate e, giving us an expression for E in terms of m, u, and v (including Lorentz factors for those two speeds). This result is identical for those two perspectives (SR and spun-light) in this one unique frame, since both agree on the status of the observer in this frame and of motion as observed from this frame. [* For simplicity we’ll take the photon as having been emitted from a source static in R; this minimises the algebra around Doppler effects later.]
We’ll next consider this same scenario as perceived by an observer moving at speed u in the same direction as the particle; for this observer the particle will initially appear static - indeed, from the SR perspective it is initially static in the observer’s reference frame, since in the SR view any such reference frame may validly be considered static.
In SR terms, then, the photon source is moving away from the static observer and initially static particle, impacting on the particle with energy we’ll refer to as E’ to give it velocity w. w is of course the difference between v and u, or more precisely the final velocity seen as v in the lab frame but from the perspective of the observer frame whiuch is moving at speed u with respect to the lab frame. We must therefore apply the SR addition (subtraction) of velocities formula: w = (v - u)/(1 - uv).
[Note that this formula also applies in the spun-light understanding, since it follows from the Lorentz transformation, which has been shown to hold in this view.]
We can now apply conservation of energy and conservation of momentum principles to this different perspective. We take the rest mass in this frame as m’ (not assuming that it’s necessarily the same as m) then again combine those two conservation equations to eliminate e’ (energy of reflected photon in this frame) to give E’ in terms of m’ and w (including Lorentz factor for w). We then replace w by the formula given above (including in its Lorentz factor) to give E’ in terms of m’, u & v. If we combine this with the equation for E as derived in the static frame, eliminating v, we get:
The latter term on the right-hand side is the original photon energy E, adjusted for first-order and second-order Doppler shift for an emitter that’s receding from a static receiver - which is how this situation is seen in SR. So the correct relationship between emitted energy E from the receding photon emitter and the received energy E’ impacting on the static particle is given by m’/m = 1, or m’ = m.
This appears to provide clear confirmation of SR, since both this analysis & empirical evidence support the notion of frame invariance of a particle’s rest-mass. But we need to dig a little deeper, see what we get if we don’t assume SR’s frame symmetry, i.e. if we view things from the standpoint of a unique static frame R from which all other states of motion are measured - represented here by the lab frame.
If we analyse this scenario from the perspective of the lab frame, then we have energy E from a static emitter being absorbed by a particle that’s initially receding at speed u. i.e. here it’s the emitter that’s static and the receiver that’s receding, rather than the other way round. The first- and second-order Doppler shift for this situation give us:
In other words, the combined Doppler shift for the cyclic-photon understanding of matter is identical to that given by the SR interpretation (though for effectively the opposite reason). So this also leads to the result m’/m = 1, or m’ = m, in any ‘rest frame’, without need for the SR notion of frame equivalence. Put simply, a reality in which there is one unique absolutely static reference frame (R) leads to so-called rest mass of a particle or object being experienced as identical in every inertial reference frame - so supporting the illusion that there is no such unique frame, that every inertial frame may equally validly be considered at rest in cosmic terms: Special Relativity.
To summarise: both Special Relativity and spun-light physics are fully consistent with the notion that the apparent rest-mass of a particle in motion is identical to the rest-mass of that particle when static (SR considering the terms ‘in motion’ and ‘static’ to be interchangeable, whilst spun-light physics shows them to be truly objectively different).
Only the latter of these two perspectives, however, is able to show at the same time how this apparent identity springs fully consistently from an asymmetric reality – one in which the energy content of a particle in motion, as applicable in that state of motion, is not the same as the energy content of that particle in a state of absolute rest, as assessed from that rest-state.
This finding could have significant implications for energy resources as well as for cosmic calculations of both dark matter and dark energy. It may also reveal new insights into conventional matter at all scales from an elementary particle to a cluster of galaxies.
Most significantly of all, it quite definitively overturns the principle of objective inertial frame symmetry – the foundation stone of conventional Relativity Theory - whilst at the same time being fully consistent with experimental findings that appear to confirm that principle by mimicking it as a subjective experience.
Next up:
A Parable For Our Times: Hidden In Plain Sight
The world’s leading physicists are falling over each other in the race to be the first to spot something so elusive - or to prove it doesn’t exist. They stare out, looking for it, through super-powerful telescopes billions of light years into the furthest clusters of galaxies (and so also billions of years into the past); they smash particles of matter into ever smaller bits at ever higher speeds in ever more powerful supercolliders in the hope of finding it among the debris - or proving it’s not there. Some are saying it’s time to stop looking, they’re never going to find it, they’ve proved by now that it doesn’t exist.
They’re looking in the wrong place. What they’re so avidly searching for is right in front of their eyes, right under their noses. They’d find it in the wind, in the clouds, in the thunderstorm. It’s in the primroses and the violets all over the banks of the river rushing its crystal-clear water down to the sea (they’d find it there, too); it’s in the trees and the rocks, silent sentinels of the landscape that has it on display everywhere, if only they’d care to look.
What is it? No it’s not Lewis Carroll’s Snark - though this does seem remarkably reminiscent of a snark-hunt. It’s actually the key to the future of our species. If you’d like to know more, be sure to sign up for the next post, and those that follow.
See you there!