Historical research guide · 1044 · 2002
Polarizable-Vacuum Approach to General Relativity
Harold E. Puthoff
In one minute
This is Hal Puthoff’s polarizable-vacuum treatment of gravity as it appears in a book rather than a journal — a chapter in the 2002 Springer volume ‘Gravitation and Cosmology: From the Hubble Radius to the Planck Scale’. The argument is the one this library sets out in full on the journal page: do not start with curved spacetime and tensors, start with the vacuum as a polarizable medium whose electrical stiffness varies with position. A single number, the dielectric constant of the vacuum, then carries gravity. Where it rises, light runs slower and bends, clocks run slow, rulers and atoms shrink and effective mass grows, and the interval written in that one number turns out to be the ordinary metric tensor. The chapter version puts its weight on two things: that the picture gives you a physical grip on what a curved metric actually means, and that in strong fields the two formalisms stop agreeing — which is where an experiment could tell them apart.
Connection
Chapter 4 is about treating the metric as an engineering variable, and chapter 3 about the field that sets it; this chapter is where Puthoff put that case in front of a gravitation-and-cosmology audience in book form, and it is the version that states the strong-field divergence as an invitation to go and measure.
From the source
General relativity can be done a second way. Rather than treating its topics in tensor formulations in curved spacetime, the chapter presents an alternative approach based on treating the vacuum as a polarizable medium.Chapter abstract, first and second sentences
The approach earns its place by explaining as well as computing: beyond simply reproducing the standard weak-field predictions of general relativity, the polarizable-vacuum approach provides additional insight into what is meant by a curved metric.Chapter abstract, third sentence
One scalar does the work. The polarizability of the vacuum near a mass differs from its far-field value, and that single dielectric constant then fixes the velocity of light as c divided by it, the rate of clocks, the length of rods, the effective mass of matter and the frequency of emitted light.Chapter abstract, second sentence; the mechanism is worked in the author’s preprint at Section II, Equations 3 to 15
Where the two pictures have been tested, they agree exactly. Expanded to the order the three classical tests of general relativity require, the polarizable-vacuum metric tensor and the Schwarzschild metric tensor are identical, and the charged case likewise reproduces the Reissner-Nordstrom result.Chapter abstract, third sentence; the identity is worked in the author’s preprint at Sections III D and V B, Equations 41 to 46 and 66 to 71
What to watch is the strong-field case, where the two formalisms diverge in their predictions — and the chapter names that divergence as fertile ground for both laboratory and astrophysical tests, which is to say it is a difference someone can go and measure rather than a matter of taste.Chapter abstract, closing sentence
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-48052-2_44How to cite it
Harold E. Puthoff (2002) Polarizable-Vacuum Approach to General Relativity doi:10.1007/0-306-48052-2_44