Polarizable Vacuum - Related Work

Related Work

Antecedents of PV and more recent related proposals include the following:

1. A proposal in 1921 by H. A. Wilson to reduce gravitation to electromagnetism by pursuing the formal analogy between "light bending" in metric theories of gravitation and propagation of light through an optical medium having a spatially varying refractive index. Wilson's approach to a unified field theory is not considered viable today.
2. An attempt (roughly 1960-1970) by Robert Dicke and Fernando de Felice to resurrect and improve Wilson's idea of an optical analogue of gravitational effects. If interpreted conservatively as an attempt to provide an alternative approach to gtr, rather than as work toward a theory unifying electromagnetism and gravitation, this is not an unreasonable approach, although most likely of rather limited utility.
3. The 1967 proposal of Andrei Sakharov that gravitation might arise from underlying quantum field theory effects, in a manner somewhat analogous to the way that the (simple) classical theory of elasticity arises from (complicated) particle physics. This work is generally regarded as mainstream and not entirely implausible, but highly speculative, and most physicists seem to feel that little progress has been made.
4. In a series of papers, Bernard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda have proposed that the inertia of massive objects arises as a "electromagnetic reaction force", due to interaction with the so-called zero point field. According to mainstream physics, their claims rest upon incorrect computations using quantum field theory.
5. Recent work, motivated in large part by the discoveries of the Unruh effect, Hawking radiation, and black hole thermodynamics, to work out a complete theory of physical analogues such as optical black holes. This is not work toward a unified field theory, but in another sense can be regarded as work towards an even more ambitious unification, in which some of the most famous effects usually ascribed to general relativity (but actually common to many metric theories of gravitation) would be seen as essentially thermodynamical effects, not specifically gravitational effects. This work has excited great interest because it might enable experimental verification of the basic concept of Hawking radiation, which is widely regarded as one of the most revolutionary proposals in twentieth century physics, but which in its gravitational incarnation seems to be impossible to verify in experiments in earthly laboratories.
6. The 1999 proposal by Keith Watt and Charles W. Misner of a scalar theory of gravitation which postulates a stratified conformally flat metric of the form, given with respect to a Cartesian chart, where φ satisfies a certain partial differential equation which reduces in a vacuum region to the flat spacetime wave equation . This is a "toy theory", not a fully fledged theory of gravitation, since as Watt and Misner pointed out, while this theory does have the correct Newtonian limit, it disagrees with the result of certain observations.