Einstein’s “Unitary Field Theory” --
Technologies Possibly Implied by a Successful Completion
Thereof.
Dear Reader,
Albert Einstein, whose work
anticipated, and often predicted, so many phenomena that were only observed or
confirmed long after his life time, spent the major part of his later years
working on a “Unitary Field Theory”. This was a theory that, extending Maxwell’s
field theory unification programme that led to the unification of magnetism and
electricity, was intended to reveal an undergirding unity of the fundamental
“force” manifestations of Nature, starting with a unification of
electromagnetism and gravity.
Standard accounts of Einstein’s
unitary field theory, including the many papers published on that theory by
Einstein, simply say that the theory “failed”.
Little discussion of the substance of that theory can be found in the
standard accounts, nor are the criteria defining such “failure” specified. It is hard to believe that Einstein’s
“unitary field theory” was entirely a failure; that it contained no
worthwhile insights or partial successes, or that today's myriad and untested "string" theories assimilated all that was of value in Einstein's work on unification.
For this reason, I have decided
to publish, here, the text below, authored by one of our readers, whose
conjectures and speculations might possibly point to an explanation for this wholesale
neglect of Einstein’s most mature work.
For more information regarding,
the Seldonian
insights
usually featured here, please see --
For ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian
insights -- specimens
of ‘dialectical art’ -- see:
¡ENJOY!
Regards,
Miguel Detonacciones,
Member, Foundation Encyclopedia
Dialectica [F.E.D.],
Participant, F.E.D.
Special Council for Public Liaison,
Officer, F.E.D.
Office of Public Liaison.
There were three key movements in the symphony of Albert
Einstein’s life’s work, in a performance the breadth of which, many belief,
might never be equaled: The Special
Theory of Relativity, the General Theory of Relativity, and “Unitary Field
Theory”, also known as “Unified Field Theory”.
In the latter, Einstein sought to reveal the hidden unity of
the two main fields of “force” recognized as such by physics at the time of
Einstein’s work -- the Universal Electromagnetic Field, and/with the Universal
Gravitational, or Gravitic [Asimov], Field”, in somewhat the way that James
Clerk Maxwell had earlier discovered field equations which revealed the
previously hidden unity of Electricity and Magnetism, and the
‘Electro-Magnetic’ nature of light radiations, both those visible and those invisible
to the human senses.
The standard view is that Einstein’s “Unitary Field Theory”
didn’t work. Einstein published systems
of equations attempting to formulate the hidden unity of Gravity and
Electromagnetism. But they “failed”.
I would not be surprised, although I presently do not have
evidence that such is the case, if the Einstein Unitary Field Theory Equations did,
at least partially, “work”, and “work” well enough to imply the possibility of
technological applications -- the possibility of an ‘electro-magneto-gravitic’
technology.
The U. S. government already had its eye on Einstein. A famous, approximate equation, arising in
his first ‘symphonic movement’, the Special Theory of Relativity, implied the
possibility of nuclear weapons, and Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt on that
subject had, at least in part, triggered the gigantic and hyper-consequential
Manhattan Project. J. Edgar Hoover and
the INS were endeavoring to deport Einstein because of Einstein’s “socialist”
views. The illustrious Kurt Gödel,
Einstein’s buddy at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, had discovered
an exact special solution to the system of ten “simultaneous” nonlinear partial differential
equations that formulate, in pre-tensor mathematical language, Einstein’s
General Theory of Relativity -- a solution that described paths through
space-time that could be interpreted as representing a kind of “time
travel”. There is ample evidence that
Gödel complained often that he, too, was under government surveillance, ever
since that discovery, a complaint “officially” dismissed as “paranoia”. It is now known that Gödel’s mail was
intercepted and opened, his phone tapped, and his home invaded by the U.S.
secret police. The same treatment was
afforded to Einstein.
Again, I would not be surprised -- though, again, I
presently have no evidence that such is the case -- if the Government had
therefore, because of its technological, including military, applications,
slapped a “top secret” sticker on all of Einstein’s further work on Unitary
Field Theory, withdrawing that work from further “public science” elaboration
and publication, and if Einstein acquiesced in that sequestration of his
Unitary Field Theory, e.g., to avoid deportation, to keep that work from
falling into Stalinist hands, etc.
It in conceivable, to my mind, that engineering work on the
technological applications of that Unitary Field Theory, and, perhaps, of
improved such theories, continued, in secret, under some kind of clandestine
government project, in some ways akin to the Manhattan Project.
It is also conceivable to me that this further work has led
to ‘electro-magneto-gravitic field machines’, capable of utilizing electromagnetic energy -- e.g.,
electrical currents -- to generate, or “translate” into, gravitational energy, possibly
including into negative
gravitational “forces” -- anti-gravity
“forces”, such as would be felt by bodies of “anti-matter” in a gravitational
field generated by “matter” per the Dirac theory -- that could be harnessed in
the form a propulsion system. It is thus
also possible, in my mind, that the U. S. military has already constructed a
fleet of inter-planetary anti-gravity-propulsion spacecraft, although I
presently know of no evidence that such is, in fact, the case, despite many
claims to that effect from questionable sources.
Recently, a world class physicist, now deceased, has claimed
to have achieved Einstein’s Unitary Field Theory -- and with a bonus that Einstein may never have
anticipated!
The physicists name is Mendel Sachs, and his work has been
all but ignored by the physics community, which may be just the typical treatment
accorded to new scientific theories, or which might possibly reflect a
government gag-order.
In the Preface to his 1982 book General Relativity
and Matter, Sachs writes of his resulting 16 field equations,
incorporating and extending the 10 field equations of Einstein’s General Theory
of Relativity --
“ ... The latter are 16 rather than 10 field relations at
each space-time point. ...”
“It is shown that this 16-component ... field incorporates
the equivalent of the 10-component field of Einstein’s original ... formulation
and a 6-component field that solves field equations of the form of Maxwell’s
equations for electromagnetism.” ...
“The matter field equations themselves are first order nonlinear differential-integral
equations that approach the form of [linear] quantum mechanics as a linear approximation. Thus, the formal...structure of quantum
mechanics appears in this theory of elementary matter only as a linear (low
energy) approximation for a general formalism that is based on the axioms of
general relativity, rather than the quantum theory.”
[COMMENT. This is the
“bonus” I mentioned above: Einstein
himself had, inadvertently, launched the “Quantum Revolution” in physics, with
his 1905 paper about “the photo-electric effect”, for which Einstein later won
a Nobel Prize, and which formed part of Einstein’s work in that “miraculous
year” in which he also published his Special Theory of Relativity. But Einstein remained at war with the,
still-prevailing, linear, probabilistic, acausal formulation of Quantum
Mechanics for the rest of his life].
“Summing up, the general approach to general relativity
theory that is developed in this monograph, which is strictly in accordance
with Einstein’s views of a unified field theory, leads to a unification of the
force manifestations of matter (thus far in terms of gravitation and
electromagnetism) and its inertial manifestations. Such a unification is derived in this
monograph in terms of a set of self-consistent, inter-dependent field
equations.” [pp. xvii-xviii].
Later books by Mendel Sachs on this theory include Quantum
Mechanics from General Relativity [1986], Relativity in
Our Time [1993], Quantum
Mechanics and Gravity [2004].
