>Developing Models for Energy and Matter

>Thomas N. Lockyer

>Thomas Lockyer is 74 and retired as Supervisor of Engineering Standards from

>(the now defunct) Ford Aerospace Corporation. Mr. Lockyer has written and

>self published two books, since retiring. The latest, Vector Particle and

>Nuclear Models (ISBN 0-9631546-8-0), outlines mathematically consistent

>models for the structures of energy and matter, making it possible to

>calculate the mass and magnetic moment of particles and the binding energies

>(mass defects) of atomic nuclei.

>

>Thomas will attempt to show the failure of the 20th century physics theories

>to satisfactorily explain the nature of matter. The theoretical experiments

>of the last 60 plus years have been an expensive exercise, with little or no

>tangible results. It is the author's contention that we must be willing to

>abandon the failed efforts of the last century and fundamentally change our

>methods of theory development, for progress to be made in the brave new

>millennium.

Early in his talk, Lockyer explained that he got into the subject of how sub atomic particles fit together by looking over the textbooks that his son had left him after the guy got his Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford U. He saw a lot of complicated stuff, and felt that the theories were confusing, much more so then the natural world usually turns out to be. In his dabbling, he came up with some ideas that fit together quite well, and he tried to talk them over with the physicists at various local Universities.

According to his theories, all of the fundamental units of matter had been discovered by the late 1940's. At the time the people working on the Atom Bomb exploded their first one, they didn't even know if it would cause the atmosphere to explode in a further chain reaction. Once they knew enough to make those work reliably, they felt like they knew enough that theoretical physicists could ride the gravy train into the future for a long time. Charmed quarks, colored quarks and all that stuff amount to double talk for the lay audience. Mother nature has much simpler answers than those that work.

From his work he figured out that starting with the basic particle called the photon, it is possible to derive all the other particles that known substances are based on. The write-up on his website gives an introduction to his argument. Please see: http://www.best.com/~lockyer/ . The work is quite intricate, and parts of it that I understood did fit together, but he went over lots of physics and high order math in a short period. As proof, he showed that the binding energy of Deuteron, Tritium, He3, and He4 that were measured in the lab were very similar to the values predicted by his model.

There was some discussion about how hard it is to get a system that likes complication to buy into a simple theory that works. For a possible result that falls out of the theory with large commercial potential, he showed that adding a slow proton to an Li6 atom would produce more energy per kilogram than can be gotten from Uranium. The main difference is that this is not a chain reaction, meaning that the reaction must be continuously fed to keep it going.

Tian Harter