The Maxwell-Heaviside Equations Explained by the Theory of Informatons
researchgate.net
researchgate.net
1. Himself, four times,
2. A mathematician for a restatement of Stokes' theorem (which he introduces kind of mysteriously in the first place), and
3. Three non-peer reviewed books from 1893(!), 1968, and 1992
so this pretty much goes to 11 on the crank scale
(Yes the 1893 is Heaviside and yes I've cited fundamental results that old but he's already hanging by a thread here)
I'm not going to conclusively pass judgement on the paper above, but I think anything that approaches the idea of big problems in fundamental physics from an informational point of view is highly interesting.
Does that sound too general for you? What I mean by that is: information is itself a fundamental entity of reality perhaps underlying many others. Not in an abstract way, but in a physically 'real' way. That information, is the fundamental unit. And not in a thermodynamic entropy / microstate ensembles / useful description type of way, but in an 'the is actually the underlying basis and opens up new physics' kind of way.
I'm not sure how the above paper approaches it (I have not read it), but what would a theory of mass, light and gravity rewritten in terms of information, maybe with shades of Shannon, look like?
I encourage readers of this comment to resist the tempting but easy path of curtailing a strawman of possible meanings of that into something you think is dumb for a mere self-satisfying fake pay off, but rather to take the interesting and curious path of it as a leaping off point of inspiration to open your imagination about what it could be. Good luck! :)
The paper (and related papers) aims to unify classical electromagnetic (Maxwell equations) and gravitational forces (Newton laws) in a new proposed framework, the informatons.
Assuming the maths check out, my understanding is that the author proposes the informatons, and successfully rewrites Newton and Maxwell's equations in terms of the informatons.
If I understand correctly, the author believes informatons are a better theory because electromagnetic and gravitational fields are mathematical constructs, just like informatons, but with the informatons you have one framework capable of explaining both phenomena. It sounds to me like a unification theory for both gravitational and electromagnetic fields.
Having one theory for all fundamental forces has been a goal of theoretical physics for a long time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction
There are four forces to be unified (strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic and gravitational). The weak and electromagnetic forces have already been unified (awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979). The electroweak unification has been experimentally proven. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction
It seems to me the author aims to unify gravity and electromagnetism. The proposed theory may be mathematically correct but to my understanding it has two big limitations:
(1) there is no experimental setup devised to verify the existence of these informatons
(2) classical electromagnetism has already been unified with the weak nuclear force.
There have been several attempts to unify classical forces (electromagnetism and gravitational), but since the electroweak unification in 1979 physicists do not tend to focus much on a electromagnetic-gravitational unification. And physicists have a reason: If you already have the electroweak unification, why would you want to find a theory that allows you to merge electromagnetic and gravitational forces without considering the weak nuclear force?
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/462122/unificati...
It is hard for me to find the author contributions valuable without:
(a) A focus on how informatons should be experimentally validated, just like it happened with the electroweak unification. This is a major problem for this theory, in my opinion.
(b) How does the author deal with previous proven unification work, for instance the electroweak unification?
(c) In general, the author does not seem to be able to put his work in context of other unification theories. This is usually a red flag to the community because it implies that, as a reviewer, I can't assume the author knows the state of the art of the field.
Having said this, I am no theoretical physicist and I am no expert, so I will be very happy to be corrected.
Any physicists who can break it down?
Given that half of his eight references are to his own papers, and the other half are textbooks or the Heaviside's original work, I think we can assume that he's doing some very niche work or a crank.
Just gave it a cursory look, but looks like crank nonsense to me. The paper makes no effort to give any context on what an informaton at a level that physicists would understand.
The "theory of informatons" is a conceptual framework introduced by Antoine Acke to explain gravitational interactions through the emission of hypothetical entities called "informatons." According to this theory, material objects emit informatons—massless and energy-less particles—that propagate at the speed of light, carrying information about the position and velocity of their source. The accumulation of informatons in space forms a cloud that represents the gravitational field of the emitting object.
In the article "Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation Explained by the Theory of Informatons," Acke proposes that the gravitational force between two masses arises from the interaction of their informatons clouds. This perspective offers an alternative explanation to Newton's law, suggesting that gravitational attraction results from the exchange of information via informatons rather than a direct action-at-a-distance force.
The second article, "The Gravitational Interaction Between Moving Mass Particles Explained by the Theory of Informatons," extends this concept to dynamic systems. It posits that moving masses emit informatons that not only convey information about their position and velocity but also about their motion. The interaction of these informatons clouds between moving particles leads to gravitational effects that depend on both the masses and their relative velocities.
This approach aligns with the idea that gravitational interactions can be understood through information exchange, resonating with concepts in information theory and entropy in physics. While the theory of informatons is not widely adopted in mainstream physics, it represents an innovative attempt to conceptualize gravitational phenomena through the lens of information transfer.
For a more detailed exploration of these ideas, you can refer to Acke's publications:
"Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation Explained by the Theory of Informatons"
SCIRP
"Gravitation Explained by the Theory of Informatons"
Vixra