Lorentz Aether Theory: A Medium Theory That Was Never Experimentally Refuted
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The Theory of NeoGravity states a physical cause for gravitation. Space is not an empty void; it is filled, everywhere, by the Ether Plenum. Every body gives off radiation without pause — the Sun, the Earth, a stone in the hand — most of it invisible, across the whole spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays. That radiation carries momentum outward, into the Plenum. The Plenum returns it, inward, on the body that sent it out; Newton’s third law allows nothing else. That returned load is gravity, the Radiative Undertow. It is compressive, so the Plenum settles denser toward a mass, and a body falls by answering to the state of the Plenum where it is. Nothing acts across empty space. In this account the curvature of a four-dimensional spacetime metric describes the Plenum’s settled profile and does not cause it: Newton’s potential, Einstein’s metric and the gravitational field are three names for one state of the Ether Plenum under load. The claim that the aether was disproven by experiment is, in one important case, demonstrably false. Hendrik Antoon Lorentz developed between 1892 and 1909 a complete electromagnetic theory of a stationary aether which reproduces, for every experiment ever performed, predictions identical to those of Einstein's special theory of relativity. The Theory of NeoGravity takes one thing from that: an aether theory that matched every measurement was never refuted but set aside, so the case against aether theories as a class was never made by experiment, and has to be made, if at all, one theory at a time. That is a formal result rather than a historical curiosity. Introducing length contraction and time dilation for all physical processes within a designated preferred frame yields the full Lorentz transformation, and therefore the same observable consequences. The Robertson–Mansouri-Sexl test theory makes that relationship precise, and is still used to quantify constraints on Lorentz invariance. Lorentz aether theory was not refuted. It was set aside on grounds of simplicity, because it posits an undetectable preferred frame that adds nothing to the theory's predictive content. The history runs from Lorentz's 1892 electron theory and its explanation of the Zeeman effect, for which Lorentz and Zeeman shared the 1902 Nobel Prize, through local time and length contraction to the full transformation of 1904. If a fully worked aether theory can be observationally indistinguishable from the theory that replaced it, then no experiment has excluded aether accounts as a class. Lorentz's immobile aether sits between the classical mechanical medium and Einstein's motion-free relativistic ether, and the Ether Plenum inherits part of that position and not all of it. A fully worked aether theory was set aside for simplicity rather than refuted, which establishes that no experiment has excluded aether accounts as a class. Five statements say what the Ether Plenum is. They are set down before any result, in one place, so that nothing can be slipped in afterwards to rescue a number that comes out wrong; that is their purpose, and the reader is entitled to hold the theory to it. The first two say nothing that is not already true of water, or of steel, or of air. The Plenum is neither created nor destroyed; and when it is pushed, it moves. Any physicist would grant those two of any material at all, and they cost the theory nothing. It is the three that follow that commit it. Squeeze the Plenum and it presses back, with exactly one third of the energy it holds; and that fraction is not chosen but forced, because whatever fills it has no mass. Twist it and it answers as a fluid does that remembers, for a moment, having been a solid: stiff against a quick disturbance, yielding to a slow one. And a body holds the Plenum about it denser than it is far away, by an amount fixed by the body’s mass; matter and Plenum trade momentum through that and through nothing else. This, then, is all the theory asks of its reader: five statements about the Ether Plenum, and no more. Everything else in the forty papers is drawn from those five, and where a step remains to be taken, the paper names it. Where the theory agrees with Newton and with Einstein it says so, and in the weak field, where nearly all the testing has been done, it cannot be told apart from either. Where it differs from them it names the measurement that would settle the matter, and where a proposal of its own has failed, the failure is kept in print beside the results, with the arithmetic that undid it. The theory is new, and it is the work of one independent researcher; these forty papers are its case, made as fully as the evidence allows. Every number in them is recomputed by a verification program that anyone may download and run: https://github.com/worldlibrary-hub/NeoGravity.
Author: Guagliardo, John
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204193910
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