Blog Ekkehard Friebe

by Dr. Yefim Bakman,  Tel Aviv University (Israel)

Abstract. 
Sjödin (1990) and Broekaert (2005) demonstrated that many redundancies of general relativity postulates may be eliminated by introducing a scalar potential instead of four-tensor to represent a gravitational field. The present paper provides further reduction of GR complexity. This is done by addressing physical nature of the phenomena for a static gravitational field. The physical interpretation is based on Einstein’s later conception confirmed by a large amount of published and unpublished manuscripts (Kostro, 2000).

1. Introduction
Many physicists are convinced that Einstein objected to the idea of the universal medium. For example, Smolin (2006) wrote “Einstein killed this particular idea with his own proposal for unification”, however this opinion is incorrect. In 1920 Einstein wrote in a deleted section of an article for “Nature”: “… in 1905 I was of the opinion that it was no longer allowed to speak about the ether in physics. This opinion, however, was too radical as we will see later when we consider the general relativity theory. It is allowed much more than before to accept a medium penetrating the whole space and to regard the electromagnetic fields and the matter as states of it …One can thus say that the ether is resurrected in the general theory of relativity”.

This ‘resurrection’ of ether in Einstein’s mind is confirmed by a large amount of published and unpublished manuscripts that have been collected in a book by Kostro (2000). It is clear from the quoted fragment that Einstein was compelled to hide his views. Quite probably that avoiding mentioning the medium has led to mathematical complication of the general theory of relativity (GR). It is the same as if one attempted to explain behaviour of waves on a water surface without mentioning the water.

As the mentioned paragraph was finally deleted from Einstein’s article, his optimism was premature. Probably today, when the number of conservatives in physics has decreased, and the vacuum is not considered emptiness any more, we may use the concept of universal medium to simplify GR. All the more Sjödin (1990), Broekaert (2005), Okun, Selivanov, Telegdi (2000) and others have already founded the base for such a revision.

It is only natural to consider that the universal medium state may influence the light speed which results in the delay of the radar echo when passing near the Sun (Shapiro, 1964, 1966). The same property explains the deviation of a light ray by the Sun. Thus, there is no necessity to introduce the concept of local time to explain the experimental results.

The reader will probably ask “What about the time delay detected in vicinity of massive bodies?” Indeed, some physicists consider acceleration of the standard caesium clocks when being lifted high as a proof of time acceleration. This happens because the theory of relativity presents no definition for the time notion (see Bakman and Pogorelsky, 2007), as a result any change of the standard clock rate is erroneously perceived as a change of the time rate. Actually, any standard can change and then it ceases to be the standard. For example, heating of the meter standard leads to its lengthening, but it does not mean that heating expands the space. Actually, any change of the standard clock rate (or the standard meter length) testifies only that the clock (or the meter) ceased to be the standard. By the way, a pendulum clock slows down its swings when placed on the top of a mountain.

The changeable light speed allows to get rid not only of the necessity of time dilation, but also of the space curvature. Sjödin (1990) and Broekaert (2005) showed that the geometry of space is a convention, so that for the description of the reality physicists may choose the Euclidean geometry.

They reduced the number of GR assumptions by introducing a scalar potential instead of the metric tensor of GR (10 arbitrary functions) to represent a gravitational field. They also showed, that their theories predict results of all classical experiments of GR.

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