Unified Fields

All these multifarious activities took a lot of Einstein s energies but did not keep him from his physics research. In 1922 he published Ins first paper on unified field theoiy, an attempt at incorporating not only gravitation but also electromagnetism into a new world geometry, a subject that was his main concern until the end of his life. He tried many approaches none of them have worked out. In 1924 he published three papers on quantum statistical mechanics, which include his discoveiy of so-called Bose-Einstein condensation. This was his last contribution to physics that may be called seminal. He did continue to publish all through his later years, however. 

As he gi ew older, Helmholtz became more and more interested in the mathematical side of physics and made noteworthy theoretical contributions to classical mechanics, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics and electrodynamics. He devoted the last decade of his life to an attempt to unify all of physics under one fundamental principle, the principle of least action. This attempt, while evidence of Helmholtz s philosphical bent, was no more successtul than was Albert Einstein s later quest for a unified field theory. Helmholtz died m 1894 as the result of a fall suffered on board ship while on his way back to Germany from the United States, after representing Germany at the Electrical Congress m Chicago in August, 1893. 

W.J. Popendorf, Advances in the unified field model for reentry hazards, in Dermal Exposure Related to Pesticide Use Discussion of Risk Assessment, ed. R.C. Honeycutt, G. Zweig, and N.N. Ragsdale, ACS Symposium Series 273, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, pp. 323-340 (1985). 

That I am using terms such as Philistine and sophisticated in ways to provoke the reader can be seen by the fact that on this usage Einstein was an unsophisticated Philistine. He was so unsophisticated that he was able to solve problems that generations of the best minds in the world had failed to solve. He retained this optimism for the rest of his life as he tried to provide a unified field theory, a quest that his more sophisticated contemporaries found foolish. 

Alchemical thinking helped lead the Society to interpret the implications of modem atomic theory in a way that emphasized the unity of matter (and even of energy) that saw oneness, rather than disunity and distinctness, as a major substratum of atomic theory and that pushed to spiritualize this principle. This grasping for ever simpler and more basic unity is, of course, not so uncommon an impulse in twentieth-century physics. (Consider unified field theories, and even the Theory of Everything in more recent physics.) Alchemy allowed the scientists and Hermeticists of the Alchemical Society to re-enchant science by positing the origins of the modem scientific push for unity in ancient Hermetic spirituality. 

Karl Pribram was no prosaic scientist. He was a visionary who hungered for a unified theory of behavior, just as Einstein struggled in vain to create a unified field theory. Today, equally obsessed physicists and mathematicians strive for a theory of everything. If someone succeeds, I suspect that it will defy, rather than enhance comprehension for most of us. 

Benedict Anderson (1991 43-5) showed how the development of print in Europe stimulated national consciousness through creating unified fields of exchange , a new fixity which could be made to appear... 

The prediction of a heavy boson has received preliminary empirical support [92,96] from an anomaly in Z decay widths that points toward the existence of Z bosons with a mass of 812 GeV 1 33j [92,96] within the SO(l) grand unified field model, and a Higgs mechanism of 145 GeV4gj3. This suggests that a new massive neutral boson has been detected. Analysis of the hadronic peak cross sections obtained at LEP [96] implies a small amount of missing invisible width in Z decays. The effective number of massless neutrinos is 2.985 0.008, which is below the prediction of 3 by the standard model of electroweak interactions. The weak charge Qw in atomic parity violation can be interpreted as a measurement of the S parameter. This indicates a new Qw = 72.06 0.44, which is found to be above the standard model pre-... 

B. 0(3) EM Is a Subset of Sachs Generalized Unified Field Theory... 

In Sachs great generalization of a combined general relativity and electrodynamics, we are also speaking of spacetime curvature functions, and a unified field theory. See also Sachs chapter on symmetry in electrodynamics from special to general relativity, macro to quantum domains in this series of volumes on modern nonlinear optics (Part 1, 11th chapter). 

At least two nations appear to have weapons programs in this area, but that is beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, a good theoretical basis for such systems can be taken from the Sachs unified field theory approach presented by Sachs in this series and other places. 

Indeed, classical U(l) electrodynamics is modeled as a field theory on a flat spacetime. In the more rigorous and general Sachs-Evans unified field approach, this is falsified. In that more fundamental model, EM waves and fields can propagate only through curved spacetime. 

T. E. Bearden, EM corrections enabling a practical unified field theory with emphasis on timecharging interactions of longitudinal EM waves, paper presented at INE Symp. Univ. Utah, Aug. 14-15, 1998, published in J. New Energy, 3(2/3), 12-28 (1998). 

In the unified field theory approach being used [41-45] in spacetime all energy is simply a special curvature of that spacetime, regardless of the form of the energy. (This is believed to resolve the foundations issue pointed out by Feynman [46] It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no... 

M. W. Evans, Precise statement on the importance and implications of 0(3) electrodynamics as a special subset of Sachs unified field theory, (in press). 

Supersymmetry will be investigated, and may lead to unified field theories llidt include gravity,... 

Similarly, Eq. (643) can be developed into an inhomogeneous equation of the unified field. First, raise indices in the Riemann tensor and field tensor ... 

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