Blog Ekkehard Friebe

By R.A. WALDRON 
Head of School of Mathematics, Uuter Polytechnic, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland.

THE BALLISTiC THEORY OF LIGHT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR SPACE TRAVEL
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Vol. J2. pp. 95-98. 1978

An outline of the ballistic theory of light is given (for a full account see Waldron 1971). The theory is able to explain those phenomena of modern physics hitherto held to be explicable only by Einstein’s theory of relativity, such as the mass defect of atomic nuclei, positron-electron annihilation and pair production, Doppler effect, Compton effect, etc.  

The theory is next applied to rocket travel, and it is shown that although it is possible in principle to accelerate a rocket to speeds greater than the velocity of light the ratio of payload to initial mass rapidly becomes small for quite modest increases in speed. It is concluded that even with technology far in advance of anything conceivable to-day, the region of the universe open to rocket exploration, while greater than would be expected if velocities were always less than that of light in accordance with the orthodox relativity theory, would not be more than an order of magnitude greater.

1. INTRODUCTION

ACCORDING TO THE THEORY of relativity nothing can travel faster than light. Thus if we are to send a spacecraft out to a star n light-years away, we must wait at least 2n years for its return. The visible part of the universe (out to a radius such that spectrum lines are red-shifted to zero frequency or, if the red-shift be interpreted as a velocity of recession, the radius at which this velocity becomes equal to the velocity of light) has a radius of some 16 x 10^9 light-years.

It is evident that, if relativity theory is right about the limitation on velocity, only a small part of the visible universe can be explored in any reasonable time.

For a variety of reasons, however, there are still many scientists who do not accept the theory, either rejecting it completely or not accepting some of the conclusions drawn from it. My own position is that I reject the theory outright because I believe the postulate of the invariance of light to be untenable. My reasons for this belief lie outside the scope of this paper, but are fully discussed elsewhere (Waldron, 1977). But if the orthodox theory of relativity is not accepted, another theory must be proposed to explain the various experimental facts of modern physics, and it is conceivable that according to such a theory the restrictions on space travel may be less limiting than those deduced from the orthodox theory. In the above reference I have proposed an alternative theory; some account of it will be given below, and its implications for space exploration will be studied.

The orthodox theory, due to Einstein, is based on the principle of relativity and the postulate of the invariance of the velocity of light; from these, the Lorenz transformations are obtained, and these latter may be taken as the basis for predicting observable effects. Lorentz, on the other hand, had previously developed a theory based on Maxwell’s equations and the interaction of charged particles with the aether.

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