Historical research guide · 1144 · 1973
Quiton/Perceptron Physics: A Theory of Existence, Perception, and Physical Phenomena
Thomas E. Bearden · US Army Materiel Command, Redstone Arsenal
In one minute
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.
Connection
Chapter 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.
From the source
The 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
Empty 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
The 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
The 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
The 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
The 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
The way in
https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0763210How 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