THE IMPETUS FORCE

Newton's penetrating mind paved the way for us to understand physical realities. He claimed matter is real, undergoing changes which we conceive as movements in space; space and time being real forms. To deny the physical reality of space is like trying to denying the law of inertia, its preposterous. We know that acceleration of mass is real, therefore, space must be conceived as real within which acceleration is produced.

This is the reason Newton called space "absolute." Besides space and time to his mind there was a third independent reality, the force acting between two material bodies that depended only on the distance between them. He conceive this force as a condition associated between particles.

Physicists after him considered there existed only two kinds of matter. Matter that could be weighed and matter called electricity. Matter acted upon each other under Newton's law of gravity, a force inversely proportional to the distance between them. The particles of electricity acted under the law of Coulomb forces, also inversely proportional to the distance between them. However, there existed no law regarding the forces that existed between particles that could be weighed and particles that were considered electrical. I intend to bring to light the force that exist between so called weighty particles and electrical particles.

Space was only considered as the stage upon which material occurrences played a role. Empty space was not believed to be a carrier for physical changes and processes. Newton conceived light as material particles moving through empty space by means of a special force acting between ponderable matter. Moreover, even in the eighteenth century it was already clear from experience that light traveled in empty space with a definite velocity, a fact which obviously fit poorly into Newton's theoretical system, for why on earth should light particles not be able to move through space with any arbitrary velocity?

Furthermore, the Huygens-Young-Fresnel wave theory of light over threw Newton's theory that light was a particle. Their theory indicated that the light waves caused the appearance of interference and diffraction. In fact, this theory upset the view that everything real can be conceived as the motion of particles in space. Light waves, were, after all, nothing more than undulatory states of empty space, and space thus gave up its passive role as a mere stage for physical events. I intend to show that even ponderable matter is nothing more then undulations in empty space.

The ether was invented, penetrating everything, filling the whole of space, and was admitted as a new kind of matter. The ether was considered to be a sort of matter which could nowhere be removed. It was to some degree identical with space itself; that is, something necessarily given with space. Light was thus viewed as a dynamical process undergone, as it were, by space itself. In this way the field theory was born as an illegitimate child of Newtonian physics, though it was cleverly passed off at first as legitimate.

Faraday was the man who became fully conscious of this change in outlook. He instinctively revolted against forces acting at a distance. In his experiments with electricity, he claimed, if one electrified body attracts or repels a second body, this was for him brought about not by a direct action from the first body on the second, but through an intermediary action. The first body brings the space immediately around it into a certain condition which spreads itself into more distant parts of space, according to a certain spatial-temporal law of propagation. This condition of space was called "the electric field." The second body experiences a force because it lies in the field of the first, and vice versa. The "field" thus provided a conceptual apparatus which rendered unnecessary the idea of action at a distance. Faraday also had the bold idea that under appropriate circumstances fields might detach themselves from the bodies producing them and speed away through space as free fields: this was his interpretation of light.

Maxwell then discovered the wonderful group of formulae which seems so simple to us nowadays and which finally build the bridge between the theory of electro-magnetism and the theory of light. It appeared that light consists of rapidly oscillating electro-magnetic fields.

After Hertz, in the '80s of the last century, had confirmed the existence of the electro-magnetic waves and displayed their identity with light by means of his wonderful experiments, the great intellectual revolution in physics gradually became complete. People slowly accustomed themselves to the idea that the physical states of space itself were the final physical reality, especially after Lorentz had shown in his penetrating theoretical researches that even inside ponderable bodies the electro-magnetic fields are not to be regarded as states of the matter, but essentially as states of the empty space in which the material atoms are to be considered as loosely distributed.

There exists among physicists a dissatisfaction with the dualism of a theory admitting two kinds of fundamental physical reality: on the one hand the field and on the other hand the material particles. Material particles as structures in the field, that is, as places where the fields were exceptionally concentrated. Any such representation of particles on the basis of the field theory would have been a great achievement, but in spite of all efforts of science it has not been accomplished. It must even be admitted that this dualism is today sharper and more troublesome than it was years ago. This fact is connected with the latest motivation of developments in quantum theory, where the particle field theory verses the discontinuous particle structure.