The Attraction Theory of gravity and other forces

The Attraction Theory of gravity.   Though long ignored by physics, most non-physicists still think of the correct explanation of Gravity as being that all bodies attract each other.

The Attraction Theory of Gravity is basically that all bodies emit some gravity signals which other bodies respond to by moving themselves towards the source of the signals.

Attraction physics is a distinguished alternative to the various proposed mechanical push physics, and its replacing A pushes B, with B responds to A, maybe makes Attraction Theory less a pushing masculine physics and more a communicating feminine physics ?

Isaac Newton used much Attraction Theory description in his major work Principia and elsewhere. In Principia's significant 'Axioms or Laws of Motion' scholium Newton first deals with mechanical push motion and then shows that attraction motion fits the same mathematical laws (and actually quotes an attraction experiment with magnets demonstrating his three laws of motion).

The Emergence of Attraction Theory.

Many people wrongly believe that the Attraction Theory of Gravity was produced by Isaac Newton, but it was another earlier English physicist William Gilbert who actually produced Attraction Theory. Newton was publicly neutral on explanations of gravity and other forces, advocating a blackbox position allowing both mechanical push and attraction explanations as possible options while committing to neither. (Most physicists of his time seemingly believed that Newton privately favoured attraction theory, yet they mostly publicly claimed that Newton privately favoured mechanical push theory.)

In fact attraction theory physics was produced by one of the first real experimental physicists William Gilbert around 1585, though it was only given its more substantial mathematical form much later by Newton. Gilbert in his 1600 De Magnete, published shortly before his death, applied signal response theory chiefly to magnetism and to electricity - though his De Mundo published long after his death did also apply his signal attraction theory to gravity with Gilbert prefering to call it Magnetical Theory. The theory covered attraction, repulsion and other signal response motions, and only regarding gravity is it commonly called Attraction Theory.

Before being taken up by and being mathematicised by Isaac Newton, the notable astronomer Johannes Kepler derived a mechanical push forcefield type gravity theory from some of Gilbert's ideas but that push theory was firmly disproved by Newton.

Signals and Robot Atoms.

The basics of most push physics theories were discussed by Rene Descartes in his 'The World', and the basics of attraction physics theory was discussed by William Gilbert in his 'De Magnete'. The rigid essentials of Descartes mechanical physics are that all bodies occupy space and no two bodies can occupy the same space, so that body motion must involve pushing action. This requires waves to be waves of bodies and does not allow of energy being separate from bodies, which are not requirements of Gilbert's less rigid signal attraction theory. This may be why mechanical physics did not seem to impress Isaac Newton.

The attraction signals of at-a-distance forces like gravity, magnetism and electricity were termed 'effluvia' by William Gilbert. He concluded that attraction/repulsion signals for different at-a-distance forces must have different properties, with some less penetrating forces possibly involving solid particle signals and with more penetrating forces possiblly involving non-particle signals. (Later supporters of forcefield physics made a similar claim of different forces involving different types of forcefield.)

Attraction Physics of course requires that matter can move itself in response to signals, so requiring self-moving robot atoms, and it has no requirement for any actual contact or any actual solidity or any exclusive-space-occupancy. It can also cover apparently mechanical forces and phenomena, as in taking 'contact collision' as being actually proximity repulsion. (No microscope even today being strong enough to observe any actual atom contact.)

This is the main difference between Attraction Theory and forms of mechanical push physics, which do require actual contact and actual solidity and exclusive-space-occupancy, though with only inert dead non-self-moving atoms and no separate energy.   Two main basic natural philosophy positions were summarised in "No matter ? Never mind ! ", generally regarding the ideas of Rene Descartes and George Berkley. From this, attraction-physics can be viewed as "No matter physics", and the various forms of push-physics as 'Never mind physics'. Newton saw them as two possible hypotheses for which the same mathematics seemed to hold so that neither could be really proved or disproved. But modern physics has failed to even consider these issues.

Attraction Theory Disproved ?

Many considered that the philosopher Rene Descartes had disproved attraction theory when he proposed his own mechanical push physics. But some like Newton did not accept that, and he produced clear disproofs of some significant parts of Descartes' physics including Descartes' planet orbit push mechanism.

Later some assumed that Albert Einstein had disproved attraction theory in supposedly disproving 'Newton physics', though Einstein did not directly address Newton's basic blackbox theory and seems only to have disproved some inessential bits of that. Einstein also did not directly address attraction theory at all. In reality almost the only physicists to even discuss attraction theory directly are William Gilbert and Isaac Newton, and they certainly produced no disproofs of it.   Of course more has been learnt about natural phenomena in recent years, some of which it is claimed cannot be explained by any classical physics. But no real attempt has actually been made to develop Gilbert signal physics to see if it might cover such newer phenomena. And while much modern physics rests on ill-defined 'observers' with information located in them or in physical bodies, their theories contain no observers within the physics only outside the physics, unlike Gilbert-Newton attraction physics where most physical bodies are observers and anything can be a signal relative to some observer body that can respond to it, and anything can be an observer relative to some signal body to which it can respond.

The immedate causal mechanisms of gravity and other at-a-distance forces, or indeed of even the simplest push force, have not been directly observed - and may never be directly observed. While most modern physics theories have to support self-contradictory 'duality' for everything to explain seemingly contradictory behaviours of light and of particles, a signal physics can have these as just different responses to a non-contradictory signal source. And the lack of any good direct or indirect disproof of signal response Attraction Theory seems to leave it standing as a physics disapproved yet not disproved.

See William Gilbert and Attraction Physics

Knol by Vincent Wilmot (en Francais - La theorie de l'attraction de la gravite) (in der Deutschen - Die Attraktivität Theorie von Schwerkraft und andere Kräfte)

See a brief autobiography at Vincent Wilmot