The origins of POAMS (the Pope Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis) go back to the early 1950s, when, independently of each other, Viv Pope and Herman Bondi discovered that Einstein’s basic Second Postulate, that light has a constant velocity c in space, is unnecessary for the purposes of the theory. They later concurred on a new and far simpler approach to Relativity Theory which revealed that it is more logical and conceptually economical to dispense with the ‘velocity’ interpretation of c and, instead, treat c as a pure constant interrelating conventional units of distance and time in the observational measuring of space.

The knock-on effect of this discovery, for Pope, was to reveal, by the same method of logical analysis, that many other historical conceptions of physics could be simplified and economised in that same way. This led, in 1985, to a collaboration with Anthony Osborne, of the Mathematics Department of Keele University, UK, resulting in the development of what has since been named the Pope-Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis (for which a colleague has coined the acronym ‘POAMS’).

Physical science has not got to where it is today through a steady unbroken line of logical deduction. Its history has been, for the most part, a trail of circuitous, inductive meanderings based on chance discoveries made in different and mostly unrelated observational circumstances.

The working-conceptions that have been forged to explain these discoveries, illustrious though they undoubtedly were in their day, have been mostly ad hoc and circumstantial, with not too much concern for overall logical or philosophical coherence. Early physicists believed in pure ‘facts of observation and experiment’ which they assumed were self-explanatory, with no need of theoretical interpretation. It was therefore supposed that with a sufficient number of these ‘facts’ at our disposal, all ‘theories’ and ‘hypotheses’ would eventually disappear, leaving nothing but a completely scientific inventory of ‘plain unadulterated facts’. Let that be called the empirical ideal of pure physics.

Unfortunately, that empirical ideal has not been realised. Indeed it is now clear that even in the most hard-nosed ‘experimentalist’ areas of modern physics, hypotheses, theories and interpretations far outweigh anything that can be confidently claimed as ‘empirical fact’. What is also clear is that among all this proliferation of theoretical interpretations there is no overall logical coherence that anyone could sensibly call an understanding. What has happened is that the original empirical ideal of the logical sufficiency of ‘plain observation and experiment’ has failed and has produced, in the end, nothing but a runaway eclecticism in which any expectation of ‘overall sense’ is regarded as signifying a lack of competence in matters of ’science’.

However, it can be demonstrated that in retrospect there is a distinct logical thread running through these discoveries which is much clearer when examined in hindsight than was ever seen at the time. POAMS presents for public scrutiny the net results, over the last half-century, of this retrospective logical analysis. To the studious and open-minded reader it reveals that many of the circumstantial interpretations and explanations of phenomena produced in their day are now not only logically redundant but are, more than anything, a barrier to any possibility of realising their natural logical coherence. This has produced, in the name of ‘Modern Physics’ a plethora of ‘theories’ and ‘theories about theories’, many of which – even some of the most famous of them – now serve as no more than conventional clutter in the path of scientific progress.

POAMS, then, is not to be seen as some ‘new theory of physics’. To see it that way is completely to misunderstand it. In fact, like the original empirical ideal of observational physics, it is more anti-theory than theory. This is insofar as it makes maximum use of ‘Ockham’s razor’ in shaving-off all the current and traditional rationalisations that prove, on logical analysis, to be surplus to requirements. Undoubtedly, some scholars will see this as a scurrilous ‘attack’ on our scientific traditions. They will be offended by what they may regard as a lack of proper respect and veneration for our intellectual heritage. Indeed, some of these ‘concept conservationists’ may regard what POAMS proposes as tantamount to blasphemy. One professor has even declared it ‘immoral’ (on the grounds that it presents a threat to the norms of the Academic Establishment).

Sooner or later, however, what can be done will be done. (’Truth will out,’ as it is said.) The following is the distinct logical thread that POAMS has uncovered, running straight through all the loose and obscuring metaphysical ‘fluff’.

The standpoint from which this analysis is undertaken is that of Normal Realism. This is a form of radical empiricism, or phenomenalism (akin to the original ideal empiricism of observational science) according to which physical phenomena, if properly interpreted with an absolute minimum of theoretical and metaphysical overlay, simply explain themselves. In other words, Normal Realism is a logical holism. It holds that, whether we perceive it or not, everything in nature must be logically connected and coherent. It is obvious that nature cannot misinterpret itself, so anything we see as puzzling or paradoxical has to be an illusion on our part, a matter of either misinterpretation of sensory/instrumental information or misuse of language, or both.

In any event, not even for the most meticulous of observers, do things in nature reveal themselves readily named or labelled, replete with instructions as to how they should be logically identified and classified. This has to be done inductively, by creative guesswork, subject (ideally) to continual revision in the light of advancing experience. Things such as ‘electrons’, ‘photons’, ‘quarks’, ‘quasars’ and so on are therefore, at first flush, more items of human language than of nature.[1] If they behave as our language leads us to expect, then for that moment we are lucky. However, no logical or mathematical form of language that has yet been devised has maintained its logical integrity for long. History reveals the extent to which even the very best, most promising projections of scientific genius have been prone to the necessity of review, and perhaps even radical revision, in the light of ongoing experience. (Conspicuous examples of this are, of course, the radical shifts in thinking that were caused by the well-known discoveries of Columbus, Copernicus and Galileo.

Normal Realism and conventional science, therefore, work in literally opposite directions: science from the past towards the future, and Normal Realism – as a preparation for the future – from the present to the past. (As it is said, ‘Step back to leap the further.’) This means returning to historical ’square one’ so as to contemplate from then on an alternative, historically unencumbered way forward. Socrates used to say that he had no ideas, opinion or theories of his own, but that by a process of dialectical analysis he would examine the beliefs of others and point out, for their benefit, any logical gaps or contradictions in those beliefs. As he might have said (in the modern idiom), ‘I don’t know what is right, true or real, but I sure as hell know what isn’t.’ And that, in a nutshell, is the defining maxim of the Normal Realist. In short, Normal Realism resurrects what used to be called ‘The Search for Truth’, and any modern sophist who declares that there is no such thing as truth is asked to explain how that statement can possibly be true without contradiction.

What, then, is this truth that, by its Socratic process of theoretical elimination, Normal Realism and its minimalist mathematical spin-off, POAMS, have uncovered? The fine details of this uncovering are available elsewhere (see Seminal Publications). For the moment, the following provides a schematic overview of what POAMS has achieved so far.

• The discovery, with which Herman Bondi concurred in 1965, that the ‘velocity of light’, c, is not truly a velocity but is a scale constant for interconverting conventional units of metres and seconds in the measurement of observational space-distances.
• The further discovery that this non-velocity constant, c, automatically converts all three dimensions of space s in metres into time-measures s/c in seconds. This incorporates time as a natural fourth dimension in all descriptions of observational, or relative, motion.
• This reveals that a natural graph of relative motion is a four-dimensional time-triangle, whose hypotenuse gives, by Pythagoras’ theorem, the time-dilation of a moving body relative to the observer. From this elementary Pythagorean formula is automatically deduced the same formula for time-dilation as appears in Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. In this way, POAMS goes straight from Pythagoras to Einstein, bypassing all the theoretical superstructure of the conventional ’speed of light’ theory and all the intellectual puzzles associated with Michelson & Morley, etc. Indeed, POAMS bypasses the whole theoretical tradition of ‘electrodynamics’ as conceived during that era.[2]
• Frequency is, of course, the inverse of time. This suggests that there might be a direct logical, non-theoretical connection between the Pythagorean time-formula of POAMS and the formula for spectral frequencies discovered by Balmer and Rydberg. And so it transpired. The time-formula, expressed in terms of whole numbers, applied to quantum measures of action, do provide, by pure syllogistic, precisely the formula for discrete spectral frequencies that Balmer and Rydberg discovered by numerical trial and error.
• It was also discovered that Newton’s first law of motion is logically redundant. To declare, with one ‘law’ that all force-free motion is rectilinear and follow that with another ‘law’ (i.e., that of ‘universal gravitation’) to explain why nowhere do bodies obey that first law is completely circular and unnecessary. Moreover, it creates a whole plethora of invisible and undetectable – in a word, metaphysical – ‘field forces’ held accountable for what is observationally plain, that all natural free motion is orbital. Newton’s ‘first law’, therefore, that all free, ‘inertial’ motion is ‘momentum’ mv is false. What is true is that all natural free motion is angular momentum mvr. POAMS demonstrates this to be sufficient in itself to account for observed orbital motion without having to assume the presence of two opposing and therefore cancelling ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ (e.g., ’straight-line’ and ‘gravitational’) invisible forces. The fact that angular momentum is an overall-conserved quantity is then sufficient to explain why masses move in relation to one another in the correlated, paired and balanced arrangements they do around common centres of moment. This is for the simple reason that to move in any other way would be to disconserve the overall angular momentum. By the same token, the orbital parameters of spinning masses cannot be the same as those of non-spinning ones, so that masses (such as that of the so-called ‘electron’, the proportion of whose spin angular momentum to its orbital angular momentum is large), have to describe much tighter and more energetic orbits than ordinary planetary ones. Indeed, calculations prove that for a pair of pure masses, of the textbook values of the ‘electron’ and ‘proton’, respectively, the orbital parameters are precisely those ascribed by Bohr on classical ‘electrodynamical’ principles.
• Another direct logical connection was uncovered between the frequency formula of Balmer and Rydberg (see above) and the energy levels of the schematic Bohr atom. It was then discovered that the exact values of the mass constituents of the Bohr atom (the so-called ‘electron’ and ‘proton’) can be deduced from these same formulae. This deductive connection also included the standard (Bohr) orbital velocity and radius parameters of those masses. All this, again, was achieved without any involvement with traditional ‘electrodynamics’ and its associated in vacuo ‘forces’. This was by the simple process of cashing-out the static ‘charge’ of the ‘electron’, in coulombs, into mechanical units of joules, to identify the conventional ‘charge’ with the mechanical spin ascribed to the ‘electron’ by Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck.
• In effect, then, POAMS circumvents, by pure syllogistic, and without any theoretical elaboration, all the customary theoretical paraphernalia of ‘electrodynamics’ and the ideas of ‘field-forces’ that were spawned by Newton’s illustrious but logically unnecessary creation of his two opposing ‘rectilinear’ and ‘gravitational’ laws. Thus, POAMS dispenses, at a stroke, with the chronic problem of ‘Unified Field’ by getting rid of all ‘fields’ and ‘field-forces’ altogether. It also uncovers another direct logical route from time-dilation in rectilinear ‘inertial space’ to time-dilation in natural force-free orbital motion. Expressing the standard time-dilation formula in terms of its v-squared and substituting the resulting expression for that v-squared in the angular momentum equation directly produces a formula for orbital time-dilation of the kind that is observed in GPS and other satellites. When fully articulated (by Osborne), the formula predicts, to an extent approaching a hundred percent accuracy, the adjustments that the GPS and GLONASS engineers have to make in their satellite clocks as compared with those on the earth’s surface. The formula also predicts the slowing of clocks and other time-processes as they approach large masses. This is in the same way that is predicted by Einstein’s General Relativity, but without involving any of that theory’s metaphysical rationale. Moreover, since angular momentum analyses-out to ultimately irreducible units of h/2pi, it is automatically quantised. This replaces the Einsteinian ’space-time continuum’ of General Relativity with an angular momentum discretum with metrical features similar to those described in that theory. This automatically disposes of the perennial problem of how to reconcile Relativistic continuity with Quantum discontinuity.
• In addition to this, the POAMS formulation predicts that the orbits of bodies are never closed but that they perform a ‘rosette’ pattern of precession, of the sort first observed with the planet Mercury. It also produces a formula, equivalent in angular momentum terms to the Schwarzschild radius, as the limit to which masses may approach one another without merging in what is conventionally alleged to be ‘gravitational collapse’.
  However, the POAMS formula produces no ’singularities’ (i.e., in ordinary parlance, absurdities) of that metaphysical sort, whether they be those of the alleged ‘black holes’ or the ‘Big Bang’. POAMS finds, for instance, that the dramatically described – but literally meaningless – ‘black holes’ can be adequately accounted for as the empty and therefore non-visible, non-material barycentres, or centres-of-moment between orbiting masses. Also, any necessity to believe in the excitingly named ‘Big Bang’ can be circumvented by a long-neglected logical alternative to the conventional ‘galactic recession’ interpretation of the Hubble redshift. This is based on an undeniable piece of logic. The fact that all recessional motions are accompanied by redshifts by no means necessarily signifies that observing a redshift is the same as observing a motion of recession. From this it follows that the almost universal assumption (among cosmologists) that observing galactic redshifts is the same as observing a universal ‘galactic recession’ is what any logic teacher might well exemplify to his students as a logical ‘howler’. In any case, to stick without question to something that is so clearly and demonstrably fallacious is, by definition, a dogma. This leaves, wide open, the logical possibility, which POAMS explores, that the redshift is a manifestation of relativistic time-dilations in distant galaxies due, not to any overall recessional motion or ‘universal expansion’ but to the increasing random velocities of those galaxies as, with increasing distance from the observer they approach the larger and larger non-local accumulated mass of the cosmos. Calculations made on the basis of the values given by astronomers for the average mass-density of intergalactic space support this.[3]
• Aside from these latter theoretical departures at the speculative edges of our astronomical observations, POAMS does all that both Special and General Relativity do, but in a single, logically unified and philosophically coordinated way. With its built-in quantisation, the synthesis also automatically includes the basis of the Quantum Theory of Planck and Bohr. This removes the long-standing ‘EPR’ conflict between quantum instantaneity and relativistic time-delay by presenting light as a logical combination of those two instantaneous and time-delayed components. This is by analogy with a movie, in which, without any suggestion of contradiction, the action consists of a time-delayed series of instantaneously occurring photographic frames or ’stills’. Also, POAMS provides a unique solution to the ‘unified field’ problem that defeated even the great Einstein. This is simply by getting rid of these metaphysical ‘fields’ altogether.

In all of this, any need for ‘theory’ in our observations of things is pared to an absolute minimum – to zero, in some cases. This does not mean that the theories that are taught to students of current Physics and Mechanics should now be consigned, en bloc, to history – as though that were even remotely possible, given the societal upheaval it would cause. For the sake of sheer pragmatic concern, therefore, the purely circumstantial ways in which the fine details of phenomena have been dealt with in the past, no matter how conceptually convoluted they may be, cannot be simply dispensed with ‘just like that’, as the comedian Tommy Cooper would say. For such reasons, the current textbook explanations would need to be retained until such time as the logical synthesis might be fully articulated to reach into all these specialised nooks and crannies. However, the knowledge that POAMS makes available, that there exists a clear logical bypass around the theoretical congestion that has now brought common understanding almost to a complete halt, might reverse the current trend in Education whereby Physics, once the most prestigious of university subjects, has been reduced to something like the least popular in the curriculum, with what many now see as catastrophic prospects for the future of our science-based Western society.

An analog to digital flipover. Most controversial – indeed, as some will undoubtedly see it, the most incredible – consequence of all, is that POAMS completely inverts the customary way of thinking of light-in-space to thinking of the space being in the light. When we come to think of it, it is perfectly plain that light, in its fullest spectral range, from deepest infra-red to farthest ultraviolet and gamma, without remainder, is the ultimate source of all our knowledge of nature, from ordinary commonsense to cosmology. It is no less plain that all the rest is interpretation or else just pure theory. Einstein’s Second Postulate which separates light as we see it from the seen objects (called ‘Einstein separation’) is just an other of those postulates that POAMS proves to be logically redundant. This is on the grounds that, as stated above, in its own intrinsic or ‘proper’ time (the same in POAMS as in conventional Relativity), each quantum of the light is instantaneous, hence is as much a constituent of the object as of our seeing it. The ’space’ we traditionally interpose between ourselves, as decoders of light-information, and the objects that are the ’sources’ of that information are therefore projections out of the information itself. Thus, the three spatial dimensions, plus the inter-dependent time dimension, with all our knowledge of the masses, movements and other characteristics of physical objects framed in those dimensions – including even the time-delay of light-information over distance, as traditionally conceived – are observational extrapolations out of the informational patterns and sequences of quantum light-pixels. This restores ‘relativity’ to the pre-Einstein meaning originally defined by Mach. In this phenomenological way, the quanta, to which all light-energy ultimately reduce, cease to be space-travelling particles (’photons’) and become, instead, the ultimate informational ‘pixels’ out of which, as informational decoder, the observer projects the world around him. With other inter-communicating observers doing the same, with all their ancillary instruments of observation, the objectivity of nature is then revealed as the projection, couched in human language, of a whole observational community. This replaces, with plain commonsense realism, the presumptuous ‘God’s-eye-view’ of classical science. which assumes a metaphysical standpoint of cosmic ubiquity that is forever inaccessible to actual observation.
This revolutionary approach to science and epistemology is therefore what might be called ‘objective empiricism’ – which, virtually is what Normal Realism is all about. The complete inversion, or revolution, that is thus implied is to base physical science on actual digital or quantum information rather than on classical analog intuitions about objects as ‘God’ might be presumed to see them. This shift from ‘analog’ to ‘digital’ in the POAMS approach to physics brings that subject into line with the Informational Revolution that is already gaining pace throughout all other areas of technology. All that has prevented this merger, so far, is the ‘Einstein separation’ that was theoretically interposed between the world and our seeing of it, which POAMS proves to be not only unnecessary but also a long-standing barrier to any commonsense understanding of true relativity and its natural relation to the quantum.

Humanitarian implications. Something else worth mentioning is what has been emphasised by several readers of the POAMS literature. This is that the switch from a mechanics-based to an information-based science removes the traditional barrier between material science and the humanities. No longer can communication be regarded as just a no-account ’spiritual’ spin-off from fundamental mechanisms. Instead, communication becomes the very essence of reality in all its forms, especially in observation-based, or relativistic, physics. Moreover, if the universe were a Machine, then since there can be no morality in a machine, and if we and our society were no more than parts of that Machine, there could be no morality in our society – or at least, any appearance of morality and responsibility for our actions would have to be an illusion. Whatever we did or decided to do would be determined by our atoms. And insofar as religion of some sort is always a part of human society – a very important part in some instances – that would have to be an illusion also, since it would make no sense to worship a Machine, far less make supplication to it in prayer.
So POAMS, as these commentators perceive it, cures the underlying schizophrenia, or split-mindedness, of our Western society, manifest as it now is on all hands, between its twin foundations, Materialist Science and Christianity. This, they judge, should restore to our society some measure, at least, of the commonsense morality and humanity that a total preoccupation with the purely material benefits of classical science and technology has now all but excluded.

Has POAMS, then, succeeded in exposing the truth which Socrates sought to uncover beneath all the accumulated and ingrained speculative beliefs (of theoretical physics and cosmology in our case)? Well, if this purely logical, minimalist interpretation of the actual phenomena is not the truth that Socrates sought, then please, show us what is?

Footnotes:

1. See ‘Existence, Science and Language’, NRIG (Normal Realist Interest Group) circular, see website www.NRIG.org.
2. See ‘A New Approach to Special Relativity’, by N. V. Pope and A. D., Osborne, Int. J. Math., Ed. Sci. Tech. 18, 2. 191-192 (1987). Accessible on the POAMS website www.poams.org .
3. See Viv Pope (2004) The Eye of the Beholder: the Role of the Observer in Modern Physics, publ. by Phi Philosophical Enterprises, available from the Welsh Books Council, page 56. (For details of the book purchase see the POAMS website.)

Viv Pope, 20/12/04