Polarizable vacuum
| Claims | Gravitation can be described via a scalar theory of gravitation, using a stratified conformally flat metric, in which the field equation arises from the notion that the vacuum behaves like an optical polarizable medium. |
|---|---|
| Related scientific disciplines | physics |
| Year proposed | 1957 (R. H. Dicke), 1998 (H. E. Puthoff) |
| Original proponents | Robert Dicke, Harold Puthoff |
| Subsequent proponents | Harold Puthoff (see also Bernard Haisch and ) |
| Pseudoscientific concepts | |
In theoretical physics, particularly fringe physics, polarizable vacuum (PV) and its associated theory refers to proposals by Harold Puthoff, Robert H. Dicke, and others to develop an analogue of general relativity to describe gravity and its relationship to electromagnetism.
In essence, Dicke and Puthoff proposed that the presence of mass alters the electric permittivity and the magnetic permeability of flat spacetime, εo and μo respectively by multiplying them by a scalar function, K:
εo→ε = Kεo, μo→μ = Kμo
arguing that this will affect the lengths of rulers made of ordinary matter, so that in the presence of a gravitational field the spacetime metric of Minkowski spacetime is replaced by
where is the so-called "dielectric constant of the vacuum". This is a "diagonal" metric given in terms of a Cartesian chart and having the same stratified conformally flat form in the Watt-Misner theory of gravitation. However, according to Dicke and Puthoff, κ must satisfy a field equation which differs from the field equation of the Watt-Misner theory. In the case of a static spherically symmetric vacuum, this yields the asymptotically flat solution
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