Quiton/Perceptron Physics: A Theory of Existence, Perception, and Physical Phenomena
Thomas E. Bearden · US Army Materiel Command, Redstone Arsenal
Abstract and summary · read the original at the source
In one page
This is the earliest document on the site by twenty-seven years, and it is the root the later Bearden papers grow from. Its subject is not a device but a medium. The report builds a model in which what we call empty space is a fluid of unmeasurably small non-particles it names quitons, in which a mass is not a lump of stuff but a rate of switching activity — a definite number of operations per second, and the report gives the number — and in which the familiar laws of motion and gravity come out of the interaction between the two. The parts worth a reader's time are the ones with numbers and mechanisms attached: a definition of mass as a rate, a derivation of the inverse-square gravitational law from a shadowing effect in a flux of the medium, and a careful answer to the standard objection that any such flux would drag on a moving body. The philosophical apparatus the report wraps around them is not the part this page teaches.
Why it matters hereChapter 2 is about the road from empty space to a structured medium, and this report is an unusually literal example of taking that road: it sets out to build every mechanical law from a fluid vacuum and shows its working. Chapter 3 gets the part that bites — a derivation of Newton's gravitation from flux shadowing, together with the reason its author gives for why such a flux need not slow the planets down, which is the one objection that has sunk every ether-drag model since Le Sage and the one a reader will raise first.
What it claims
01The model's foundational move is to define mass as a rate rather than a quantity. The report treats a mass as a pile of activity — quanta of action being assembled from the medium and broken back down into it — and writes the mass as the sum of those two rates, in operations per second. Setting the threshold quantum at h over two and equating one kilogram with its rest-mass energy, it works the number out explicitly: one kilogram is stated as 17.053 times ten to the fiftieth of these operations per second. Whatever one makes of the picture, the definition is a definition with a number in it, and that is what makes it checkable rather than decorative.Section III, Mass and Space, equations 24 to 29
What to watch02Empty space is modelled as a fluid, and the report is careful about what kind. The non-action continuum is described as a sea of quitons — sub-threshold fragments that carry zero mass because mass is defined by the switching a detector can perform and these are below the threshold at which any switching happens. A quiton is offered as a quantum of space, or of ether. The report reads the Michelson and Morley result accordingly: as evidence against a perceivable ether that the Earth moves through, and as leaving untouched an ether each body carries with it — the report's own phrase is that objects do not move through an ether but carry their own along, so that one space moves through another.Section III, Mass and Space, and section IV A, Michelson-Morley Experiment
What to watch03The Michelson and Morley experiment itself, as a measurement, is settled ground and the report states its outcome correctly. The apparatus found no fringe shift attributable to motion through a light-carrying medium, and any shift seen was within experimental uncertainty. The report's reading of what that outcome rules out is its own proposal; the null result is not.Section IV A, Michelson-Morley Experiment
Settled physics04The gravity argument is the most concrete thing in the report and it is a shadowing argument. A flux of medium disturbances crosses every point in space and is very nearly isotropic, because the sources are far away; two bodies each subtract from the flux reaching the other, so in the zone between them the pressure is reduced in proportion to the product of the two masses, while the solid angle each subtends falls off as one over the separation squared. Multiplying the two factors returns the product of the masses over the square of the distance — the form of Newton's law of universal gravitation, with the two bodies driven together. The report gives the geometry in a single figure.Section IV B, Gravitational Attraction, equation 35 and Figure 8
What to watch05The report meets the standard objection to every shadowing model of gravity head on, and its answer is the part worth carrying forward. Feynman's lectures state the objection: a flux dense enough to push the planets together should also drag on them and slow their orbits, which is not observed. The report's reply is a distinction between velocity and acceleration in the medium — a massless fluid exerts no resultant force on a body moving at constant speed through it, because the assembling and disassembling forces balance, whereas an accelerating flux does produce a resultant. It then applies that to a circular orbit: no tangential acceleration of the flux, so no tangential drag, but a steady radially outward acceleration of flux through the orbiting body, which the report identifies with the centrifugal term. The claim is testable in exactly the place it is made, and the measurement that settles it is an orbital-decay budget.Section IV B, footnote 2 on the mass-shadowing explanation and the Feynman objection
What to watch06The report also states, in a single line and without developing it, the step that everything later in this author's work depends on: that electromagnetic waves in space are disturbances in this same medium, and that the energy carried is the energy of medium fragments broken off at one place and reassembled at another. That sentence is the ancestor of the dipole and energy-flow argument the site holds in its mature form, written twenty-seven years afterwards. What would connect the two is a quantitative bridge, and this report does not attempt one.Section III, Mass and Space, the passage on electromagnetic waves as quiton wave disturbances
What to watch
Read it · abstract
Thomas E. Bearden, Quiton/Perceptron Physics: A Theory of Existence, Perception, and Physical Phenomena, Technical Report AD 763 210, SAM-D Project Office, US Army Materiel Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, 5 March 1973. Approved for public release, distribution unlimited; reproduced by the National Technical Information Service. Read for this sheet from the Internet Archive's DTIC collection copy, DTIC_AD0763210. Also indexed as DOI 10.21236/ad0763210 and, without full text, as ERIC ED141091.
Abstract
The report's own abstract, reproduced in full. It is a US Government record in the public domain; see the rights note above for how that was checked.
A fundamental answer is attempted to the questions of being, time, space, existence, perception, and physical phenomena. Mass, empty space, reality, gravitational attraction, continuity, discontinuity, and relativity are among the "things" and "nonthings" for which relationships and explanations are provided.
Perception is defined as detection by a mass of change to itself and as a differentiating process. Perceived physical phenomena are revealed to be first derivatives of ultimate reality, and outputs of the physical perceiving device call the "perceptron." Using the operation of the physical perception process on action, the units of which are energy times time, an entirely different view is generated of both reality and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. When superposition is imposed as a condition, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is revealed to be a quantized statement. A concept of the absolute value of a dimensional molecule is advanced.
A reality model is constructed of an action continuum and a nonaction continuum separated by an operational threshold whose magnitude is given by an uncertainty principle. Perception is modeled as a process which switches atomic quanta of action and nonaction back and forth across the threshold. Mass is explained as perceptron switch activity rate, and a mass definition equation is generated. One kilogram mass is shown to represent 17.053 x 10⁵⁰ perceptron switches per second. From the model, Newton's laws of motion and gravity can be generated directly from the concept of the interaction of mass with space itself, space being taken as a massless fluid, or ether, composed of tiny nonaction particles called "quitons." Einstein's postulates of special relativity are also shown to follow from the model, and a statement of the equivalence principle is shown to be consistent with the model.
The concept of "lineception" as a causal chain of perceptron operations is advanced. "Inception" is developed as a noncausal modulation of lineception and as a distinguishing feature of a living system. The possibility is raised that inception could provide an explanation of the noncausal, statistical, ultramicroscopic universe and yet require large ensembles of ultramicroscopic events to conform to causality. Inception is shown to lead to karma. Perception is shown to be causal and to generate causality itself.
Some elementary philosophical implications of quiton/perceptron theory are pointed out and briefly discussed.
Contents of the report
Introduction · Existence, perception, observation, and physical phenomena · Mass and space · Impact on physics (the Michelson-Morley experiment; gravitational attraction; Newton's third, second and first laws of motion; the identity of length and time) · Elementary philosophical implications · Causality and its modification · Closing remarks. Forty-two pages, no references list.
(The body is not reproduced here — the only copy obtainable is a photographic scan whose machine transcription is unreliable, and the rights note explains why this page prints the report's own words only where they can be read with confidence. On this site, the derivation of Einstein's postulates that this report promises and a later companion delivers is at /library/stm-ffaf5100b0; the 1975 report on materialization and antigravity is at /library/stm-99adda6e72; the mature form of the same author's energy-flow argument is at /library/stm-d91921b5dc and /library/stm-63eadecd33, and the hardware at /library/stm-925ae07652.)
The way in
https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0763210WHAT THIS PAGE IS WRITTEN FROM, AND HOW THE RIGHTS WERE CHECKED ITEM BY ITEM. Technical Report AD 763 210, SAM-D Project Office, US Army Materiel Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, dated 5 March 1973, forty-two scanned pages, reproduced by the National Technical Information Service. This is a US Government technical report and it is in the public domain: its report documentation page carries the distribution statement approved for public release, distribution unlimited, and — unlike the author's three 1975 reports from the same arsenal — its supplementary-notes block, block 11 of the DD Form 1473, is BLANK. That was checked deliberately and not assumed. The same test was run across all eight of this author's Army reports on 2026-09-11, and the result is a clean split: every one of the four filed on 8 October 1975 (DTIC ADA020796 to ADA020799) prints an author copyright notice with a printed-by-permission line, and the 1977 and both 1979 reports carry a reproduced-by-permission-of-the-copyright-holder line, so all seven are author-copyrighted works carried by the Army with permission and belong at summary-only. This 1973 report is the only one of the eight with no such notice — none on the cover, none on the disposition-instructions page, none in block 11 — and it is therefore the only one of them carried here as a government record. The report's own abstract is reproduced verbatim below on that basis. The body is NOT reproduced: the only copy obtainable is a microfiche-era photographic scan whose machine transcription is unreliable line by line, and a reconstructed text would be this site's guesswork rather than the report's words, so the page sends the reader to the original instead. Read in full for this sheet on 2026-09-11 from the Internet Archive's DTIC collection copy, item DTIC_AD0763210, sha256 51eaa562d2c2ba885c5fb46643027103df3bc5a2bbc15c9f9f7cbcd1b1bf1412. ERIC indexes the same report as ED141091 but holds no full text for it, so the ERIC PDF address returns nothing; apps.dtic.mil was serving a scheduled-maintenance page on 2026-09-11 and could not be reached. Locators name the report's own numbered sections and figures, since the scan carries no usable line numbers.
How to cite it
Thomas E. Bearden, US Army Materiel Command, Redstone Arsenal (1973) Quiton/Perceptron Physics: A Theory of Existence, Perception, and Physical Phenomena. doi:10.21236/ad0763210
Where it sits in the curriculum