Post
by sathearn » Sat Sep 27, 2008 12:52 am
StevenO - Glad to find someone on this site who is aware of and indeed knowledgeable about the ideas of the late Dewey Larson (1898-1990). I for one think that all those concerned to reexamine the foundations of conventional physics in search of weak spots - in the effort to bring to light those parts of theory which "have not been thought through carefully, but are held in the comfortable belief that some one must have examined them at some time" (P.W. Bridgman, as quoted by Larson) - could do no better than to become acquainted with Larson's work. Regardless of how his own theoretical system is ultimately assessed, he was certainly a very astute critic of conventional ideas. Frank A. Anderson, the founding chair of the department of chemical engineering at Mississippi State, once called Larson "one of the most brilliant and devastatingly logical thinkers I have run across in my 40 years of work as a scientist-engineer-educator." The well-known essayist on Peak Oil, Richard Heinberg, wrote more recently ("The Smartest Person I've Met," July 2007) that "the books, lectures, and articles that Dewey Larson left behind offer exhilarating food for thought even for readers with modest scientific training. His writings challenge us to think critically and not take anything for granted."
As for Larson's own contributions to theory, while they remain largely unknown (in contrast, incidentally, to those of his classmate Linus Pauling), they have attracted the interest of a number of engineering-types, including the late Hans Wuenscher, an assistant director of NASA, who served on the board of the organization founded to promote Larson's work, and including some who specialize in electrical engineering (e.g. Dr. Rainer Huck of Salt Lake City). Phil Porter, in a presentation that seems to be currently offline, reminisced as follows:
"It started for me when I came in one Monday morning sleepy-eyed into one of my electrical engineering classes, third year undergraduate. It was analog circuits. And the professor walked in, and he made some kind of announcement like: 'Today I'm not going to talk about circuits. I want to tell you about the book I read this weekend. It was so compelling I could not put it down' - or words to that effect. And he proceeded to talk about New Light on Space and Time by Dewey Larson, that he had just read. And boy, by the end of that class, I was awake and listening. I'd never heard anything so exciting to me as such an all-encompassing, simple theory."
Which leads me to Stepaside's comment: "As an electrical engineer ...
I find it very hard to accept the separation of charge from the electron. But, To each his own." Not meaning to impugn your knowledgeableness of electrical matters, no doubt far better than mine, but regarding the the point at issue, might we have here another case of "comfortable belief" - like the nuclear atom hypothesis, or the belief that fusion of light elements is the source of stellar energy? Apropos of Heinberg's comment above, (though unfortunately not so self-contained as Heinberg's own selections) consider the following passages from Larson's New Light on Space and Time:
"However, the general acceptance of this theory that current electricity is simply static electricity in motion has been based on the discovery of points of similarity between the two phenomena, not on any plausible explanation of the observed points of difference. The behavior of static charges in motion is not the same as that of an electric current, and the behavior of a conductor raised to a high electric potential from a source of current is not the same as an object with a large static charge. For example, the inductive effects of a potential from a current source are very minor compared to those that would be experienced from an equivalent static charge. Then, again, static charges repel each other and are therefore located on the surface of the charged object, whereas the direct relation of the conductivity of a conductor to its cross-sectional area indicates that no such effect is present in current electricity. This latter point is, in itself, strong evidence that the particles which constitute the current are not charged.
"At this juncture it may legitimately be asked why these arguments, none of which is actually new, should carry any more weight now than they have done in the past.... Up to this time there has been only one plausible theory available, and the question has been, Is there enough support for this theory to justify accepting it and utilizing it for the time being? Obviously, this question had to be answered in the affirmative, as there are many items of evidence that lend credence to the charged particle theory. Probably the most convincing of these, aside from the magnetic effects previously mentioned, is the fact that where a current originates in an electrolytic solution, passes through a conductor, and returns to a solution, the current moving through the solution is undeniably being transferred by charged particles, or charged units of some kind. From this it seems reasonable to assume that a movement of charged particles also exists in the external conductor.
.... One of the most significant conclusions of this new development [Larson's theory] is that the electrons move _through the atoms of matter_, not through the space between the atoms. In this connection, it does not seem to have been recognized that there is a serious weakness in the present-day theory that views the electrons as moving through the interstices between the atoms, since this does not explain why the current is confined within the conductor. If the electrons can move readily in the spaces between the atoms then there is no visible reason why they should not move through the spaces between the outside atoms of the conductor and thus escape out into the surrounding space. An attempt has been made to explain this situation by means of another demon (that is, an _ad hoc_ force invented for this specific purpose). It has been postulated that a 'potential barrier' at the surface of the conductor prevents the escape of the electrons, and the existence of surface forces which keep the atoms of a liquid confined within the aggregate until they acquire a certain minimum amount of kinetic energy is often cited as an analogy which supports this hypothesis....
"The flaw in this analogy is that there is a known force which accounts for the 'barrier' to evaporation - the cohesion between the molecules of the liquid, which is effective not only at the surface but throughout the liquid aggregate, as can easily be demonstrated by suspending a liquid drop from a solid surface - but there is no known force of cohesion between the electrons. Indeed, they should repel each other if they are charged, and in that event the 'potential barrier' comparable to that which exists in the liquid should be negative. Neither is there any evidence of a force of cohesion between the electrons and the atoms of matter, nor could there be any such force without offering the same resistance to passage of electrons _through_ the conductor as _out of_ the conductor." (pp. 157-59)
Steve A
