Historical research guide · 1026 · 2022
The Pioneer Effect: A New Physics with a New Principle
Russell Bagdoo
In one minute
For two decades the tracking of Pioneer 10 and 11 showed something small and stubborn: the radio signal came back very slightly blue-shifted, as if a constant tug of about 8.65 times ten to the minus ten metres per second squared were pulling the probes back toward the Sun. Russell Bagdoo proposes that the tug is not a force on the spacecraft at all but an effect of the vacuum on the radio link — an induced gravitational interaction on the S-band signals, arising from the electromagnetic properties of the zero-point radiation filling the outer Solar System as it interacts with matter. To carry that he builds a wider framework he calls the theory of Relation, in which the universe is two interpenetrating structures, one of gravitational condensation and one of electromagnetic expansion, and a new principle of Compensation converts the slowly falling negative energy of the second into the positive gravity of the first. His own claim for it is precise: Compensation is to the electromagnetic metric what the equivalence principle is to the gravitational one.
Connection
The site’s spine is that gravity is induced by the vacuum rather than fundamental — chapter 3’s Sakharov and Puthoff line — and Bagdoo is one of the few authors who tries to turn that idea into a number attached to a specific tracked object. Chapter 13 keeps it as a worked example of how a vacuum-density gradient would show up as a metric effect on a signal, and of what would have to be measured to tell such a mechanism apart from a spacecraft-thermal one.
From the source
The measurement the paper starts from, as reported by Anderson and colleagues from twenty years of radiometric data on Pioneer 10 and 11, Galileo and Ulysses: an apparently constant sunward acceleration of about 8.65 times ten to the minus ten metres per second squared, showing up as a steady frequency drift of about six times ten to the minus nine hertz per second — roughly one and a half hertz over eight years one-way — which is the same quantity as a clock acceleration of about 2.88 times ten to the minus eighteen seconds per second squared.Introduction, equations 1 to 3, citing Anderson and colleagues, Physical Review Letters 81, 2858
The proposed mechanism is an effect on the signal, not a drag on the probe. The anomaly is read as an induced gravitational interaction on the S-band signals travelling between the probe and the Earth, arising from the electromagnetic properties of the outer Solar System vacuum zero-point radiation interacting with matter; the induced forces are of quantum vacuum origin and act in addition to ordinary gravitational forces.Abstract; Section 3.1, Principle of Compensation in empty EM space
The new principle is stated as a conservation law across two structures. Compensation says that the permanent loss of negative electromagnetic energy carried by the expanding wavelength of spacetime induces a proportional and opposite gain of positive gravitational energy — so that where the vacuum’s minimal energy density falls with distance from matter, gravity is induced in its place, and the energy of both systems is conserved. The author’s own summary is that Compensation is for the electromagnetic spacetime metric what the principle of Equivalence is for the gravific spacetime metric.Abstract; Section 3.1
The consequence the author draws for general relativity is explicit and limited. Holding gravitational and inertial mass equal, the observed inertial term is smaller than the gravitational one, which he reads as a measurable influence of gravitational potential inside a freely falling frame and therefore as a violation of the equivalence principle in supposedly field-free space. His conclusion is that Einstein’s theory is incomplete rather than wrong, and that the gravitational interaction carries, in addition to the Einsteinian spin-two part, the effect of a second long-range field belonging to the electromagnetic structure.Section 3, equations 6 to 12; Conclusion, page 24 of the preprint
The work is built onto the zero-point-field account of inertia rather than against it. Bagdoo takes up Haisch and Rueda’s quantum vacuum inertia hypothesis — inertia as a reaction force arising from the interaction between the electromagnetic zero-point field and the charged constituents of matter, following Sakharov’s conjecture — calls the approach promising, and argues that deep space is precisely where the reaction force and gravity stop balancing, leaving less inertia than gravity as the vacuum’s positive density thins out.Section on the Principle of Compensation and the zero-point fluctuations, equations 19 to 25
A prediction is offered that a mission could check. Going outward, the anomalous sunward acceleration should get dimmer with distance and time — less clock acceleration, less blue shift, a longer interval between signal pulses — unless the probe meets an attractive body or an unexpected pocket of lower vacuum level. On the same reasoning the author reads the global expansion as decelerating rather than accelerating, and treats the Pioneer deceleration in deep space as an experimental sign of it.Section 3.6, Predictions, equation 18
The way in
https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/ntpsr/v1/1959bHow to cite it
Russell Bagdoo (2022) The Pioneer Effect: A New Physics with a New Principle doi:10.9734/bpi/ntpsr/v1/1959b