1980d

The following is a paper by H. Aspden published in Speculations in Science and Technology, v. 3, pp. 114-116 (1980).

SPECULATIONS IN GENERAL, PLUS SOME OF MY OWN

Commentary: There is reference here to Millikan's account of the foresight of Jeans in 1904 in suggesting that there could be mutual annihilation of an electron and its anti-particle as a basis for convertibility of mass and energy as needed to explain the enormous amount of sustained energy radiation from stars.

Then the discussion extends on Heaviside's view that, before one could explain gravitation, one needs to study the seat of energy and how this same theme was pursued by Leon Brillouin in his book 'Relativity Reexamined'.

This leads into the pre-Einstein research of Paul Gerber and this author's own theme that anomalous electrodynamic ion acceleration tells us how the high translational speeds of the stars were established when they were created by the onset of gravitational action and the resulting gravitational coalescence of protons followed by the retarded inflow of electrons.

It is noted that this author's theory of gravitation, based as it is upon the analogy of ferromagnetism appearing upon cooling through the Curie temperature, requires gravity to 'switch on', as it were, as the cosmic dust of the universe cooled down in a sequence of events at the time the universe was created. Big Bang theories assume that gravitation has always existed as a feature of what physicists regard as 'curved space-time' but they do not contemplate that it arises as a secondary event from the onset of order as the aether develops its crystal-like lattice structure. They prefer to picture their 'space-time' as a mathematical formalism devoid of step functions and quantum features but G, the constant of gravitation, is not seen as temperature-dependent, in spite of that clue that ferromagnetism has such a dependence.