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We find that none of the masses involved in the experiment were charged with electricity. Which amounts to, the law of universal gravitation may or may not apply to charged masses. This explains why ions stream out of the Sun, despite the Sun’s huge
gravitational force. However up till now, we had assumed that charged masses were subject to gravitational forces, so the ion streaming from the Sun is a mystery.
But what is charge? Sir Isaac Newton had no idea about charge, no clue about electricity. Cavendish may have had some idea, for his apparatus was a large torsion balance, used to measure electrostatic forces. We will go into the details of electrostatics
in the next instalment. That will be the prelude to expressing the equation of universal gravitation in electrostatic terms.

The cause of gravity – 5
The fundamentals of electrostatic attraction leading to the structure of the atom
To recapitulate the thesis: “The formula for universal gravitation is well known to be, as the force F acting between two masses m and M, parted by a distance r from their centres of mass, as F=GmM/r^2, where G is the gravitational constant found by
experiment. Recently the author has updated this formula to F=BnN/r^2 where B is a constant, and n and N are the number of protons or electrons in the masses m and M. It is obvious that as n and N are proportional to m and M, this is essentially the same
formula with the difference that instead of masses, the new formula involves charges. Thus the gravitational force is expressed electrostatically, as a manifestation of electrostatic force. In other words, there is no difference between electrostatic
force and gravitational force.”

We have dealt with the development of gravitational force at some length, in the earlier instalments. To validate the thesis that there is no difference between electrostatic force and gravitational force, let us see how the electrostatic force was
developed to the point where it could be seen as being deeply involved in the basic elements of matter, that is, atoms.
From the second volume of the revered Halliday and Resnick, we learn that Thales of Miletus, in 600 BC, knew that a rubbed piece of amber will attract bits of straw. This results from electrostatic forces. Prior to this, it was known that certain
naturally occurring “stones” (magnetite) will attract iron. This is magnetism. These two sciences developed quite separately until 1820, when Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) observed that an electric current in a wire can affect a magnetic compass
needle. This discovery led to the entire new science of electromagnetism.
For our purpose, to show that there is no difference between electrostatic force and gravitational force, the sciences of magnetism and electromagnetism are not relevant. We will concentrate upon electrostatics, first by presenting the historical
background.
If we suspend a glass rod, and rub it with silk, remove the silk stuck to it, then bring near it a second glass rod also rubbed with silk, we will find that the rods repel each other. The American Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was the first to
distinguish between positive and negative charges. The former related to the kind of charge on the rod; the latter to the kind of charge on the silk. In its normal or neutral state, all matter (that is, what is measured as mass) contains equal amounts of
positive and negative charges. When material bodies like glass and silk, or rubber and fur, are rubbed together, a small amount of charge is transferred from one to the other, upsetting the electric neutrality of each.
From the point of view of electrostatics, matter is of two types – conductors and insulators. A conductor – usually a metal – is what will not develop a charge when rubbed, unless it is attached to an insulator like glass or rubber, and the
conductor is not touched by the hands in the rubbing process. Metals, the human body, the Earth are conductors of electricity as the charges can move in such conductive matter. Charges cannot move in insulators like glass, hard rubber, plastic, mica.
The Hall effect shows that only negative charges are free to move in conductors, but in electrolytes both positive and negative charges can move. It is now known that the actual charge carriers in metals are free electrons, but this was not known to the
early experimenters, who had no clue even about atoms let alone electrons. What they knew was that if an insulated conductor was contacted with a charged insulator, then the charge would be transferred to the insulated conductor and spread all over the
surface evenly. They knew that the charge would be passed on, and halved if an equal sized uncharged conductor would be touched by a charged conductor (both being insulated!). It is with such a background that the torsion balance was devised to measure
the quality and quantity of the electrostatic forces by Charles Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806). (We have already seen how Cavendish used a much enlarged torsion balance to find the gravitational constant G in 1797-98.) Thanks to Internet, we can easily
get details from such sites as: http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/104_2012_web_projects/cicely_shankle/Page%202%20-%20Coulomb%27s%20Experiment.html
which explain and extol the ground-breaking work he did in 1785. Coulomb’s first experimental results show that the force between charges is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, that is F ∞ 1/r^2. These forces act as
per Newton’s third law, that is, act on the line joining them but pointing in opposite directions. Further he showed that the force was proportional to the quantities of charge q1 and q2 on the charged spheres such that overall the formula for force,
known now as Coulomb’s law, is F∞ q1*q2/r^2. With a proportionality constant k, this becomes
F=k*q1*q2/r^2, and is the fundamental formula for electrostatics.
It is immediately clear that this formula is structurally similar to F=G*m1*m2/r^2, the law of universal gravitation, which by 1785 was more than 100 years old. However it was also noted that the force of gravitation was much weaker, and always
attractive. In other words, the attraction between two masses, with charge, would vary with design – but in the case for gravity, the attraction would always be the same. This realisation placed gravity as an entirely separate force, and to this day
this remains the standard scientific standpoint.
Before I prove my thesis in the next instalment, let us study the development of atomic structure from an electrostatic point of view. John Dalton proposed his atomic theory in 1803, a fair while after Coulomb’s experiments. Not being chemical in
nature, the atomic theory was irrelevant to the development of electrostatics and its possible relationship with the force of gravity. However, its impact led to the realisation that charge, like atoms, could also be indivisible and finite and thus a
group (when static) or flow (when moving) of “corpuscular” particles as found by J J Thomson in 1897. The term we use today for Thomson’s corpuscle is electron. It had been coined by G. J. Stoney in 1891, to denote the unit of charge relating to
passing electric current through chemicals. Thomson’s colleague Joseph Larmor also used that term, in his theory that the electron was an aetheric component – not a part of an atom (for that would mean violation of the atomic theory which held that
atoms could not be further divided). (Aether is the fundamental component of the universe, supporting all radiation from all sources as the medium for electromagnetic waves, being an infinitely fine, infinitely elastic solid through which all matter
flows without resistance. – my definition, following 19th century natural philsophers.)
The site https://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/electron/jjelectr.htm gives details about J J Thomson’s experiments with cathode rays in cathode ray tubes. In brief, a cathode ray tube is just a glass tube with electrodes at both ends. When a high
voltage difference is applied to the electrodes, and the gas in the tube taken out (like any light bulb) there is a glow in the tube, following from a flow of current which meant that charge was flowing through the near-vacuum, causing picturesque
effects. The general consensus was that these “cathode rays” were like light rays propagating through aether. However, the cathode rays could be deflected by magnetic fields, unlike light rays. The rays also passed through very thin foil – unlike
light. Scientists Perrin, Wiechert and Lenard found out respectively in 1896-1897 that the cathode rays carried a negative charge; the ratio of their mass to charge was over a thousand times smaller than the hydrogen ion; if the rays were particles they
were extremely small as they had a good range despite material obstructions. Thomson made his breakthrough when he made a near perfect vacuum for the cathode ray tube. Previous experiments had failed to bend the cathode rays in an electric field, which raised the suspicion that they were not charged particles after all. He
surmised that the remaining gas is the tube was being made conductive by the cathode rays; so acting as a sheath to the cathode rays. Charged particles do not bend to an electric field when they are enclosed in a conductive sheath. After evacuating the
gases from the tube, Thomson found that indeed the electric field was bending the cathode rays (incidentally this is the science behind the old television sets). This was the final proof – negatively charged “corpuscles”, very small in size,
constituted the cathode rays. Thomson stated that as his first hypothesis; the second was that these corpuscles are constituents of the atom; the third was that the corpuscles are the only constituents of the atom.
The second and third hypotheses met with scepticism. While the second hypothesis has been accepted (with difficulty by the scientists of his time, for it violated the atomic theory – it was easier to visualise massless fluid charges associated with
indivisible atoms) the third has not been accepted. How could atoms be built up from these “corpuscles”? Where was the positive charge? Thomson co-proposed an atomic model, known as the “plum pudding” or “raisin cake model”: thousands of tiny,
negatively charged corpuscles swarm inside a cloud of massless positive charge. In insulators, these corpuscles were more or less stuck unless rubbed off. In conductors, they moved. Under electric voltage (in evacuated tubes) they moved in free space.
The massless positive charge (the pudding or cake) never moved, of course. When the corpuscles were squeezed out, by physical pressure or electric potential, the atoms showed their positive charge; which remained so until the absorption of the missing
corpuscles to regain charge neutrality. In this way, the natural phenomena relating to electrostatics were adequately explained. For this atomic model, J J Thomson got the powerful support of another Thomson, Lord Kelvin, the venerable scientist after
whom the Kelvin temperature scale is named. It was Lord Kelvin who had proposed the “plum pudding” atomic structure in 1902. J J Thomson worked on substantiating this model from 1903 to 1907.
The Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka proposed an alternative model in 1904 – here the atom resembled the solar system or the planet Saturn, with rings of electrons surrounding a concentrated positive charge. (Ency. Brit. 15th ed. Vol 14, p347). This
is in fact the contemporary atomic model minus the quantum theoretic add-ons following Bohr, but it was rejected on the grounds that by radiating continuously the electron would gradually lose energy and spiral into the nucleus. No electron could thus
remain in any particular orbit indefinitely. This is, evidently, specious reasoning . The Earth does not lose energy by spinning around the Sun. The kinetic energy remains constant, both for the Earth around the Sun and the electron around the nucleus
under normal conditions; so there is no question of energy loss. Just as the Earth does not fall into the Sun, thanks to its continuously-changing-in-direction tangential velocity, thus “falling into” the Sun from gravity as much as it “falls out”
of the Sun due to its tangential velocity, thus keeping the orbital radius fixed; so does the electron does not fall into the nucleus – here instead of the gravitational force there is the electrostatic attraction between the positively charged
nucleus and the electron with its continuously-changing-in-direction tangential velocity.
Had it not been for the discovery of radioactivity, we could have retained the “plum-pudding” atomic model to this day. In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity – rays emanating from certain minerals fogged unexposed photographic plates.
His student Marie Curie discovered that only certain chemical elements gave off these rays of energy, and provided its name, radioactivity. In 1899 Ernest Rutherford discovered and named a component of radioactivity, alpha rays. It turned out that they
were positively charged particles – now we know them as Helium nuclei with two protons and two neutrons.
No one knew what caused the emission of energy from minerals – that phenomenon certainly violated the law of conservation of energy, and also showed that positive charge could move upsetting previous thinking. They wondered as to how the energy from
the Sun was generated – some form of radioactivity? If someone then had derived the kinetic formula relating mass and energy on a non-destructive basis, which I found in 1999, human history would have taken a very different turn for the better.
Rutherford upset the “plum pudding” atomic model in 1911, with his famous gold foil experiment which validated the Hantaro Nagaoka model. With his assistants Geiger and Marsden he beamed alpha particles through a 0.00004 cm thick gold foil and
detected them as flashes on a screen. It was found that 1 in 20,000 alpha particles were deflected by an angle of 45 degrees or more, while others went straight through. The straight-through-going particles could mean that alpha particles could punch
through the positive “pudding” in the Thomson atoms, or that atoms consisted of mainly empty space offering no resistance. However the deflections of the very few particles indicated that they were getting near some heavy positively charged mass,
which formed the nucleus of the atom. What kept these charges together – why did they not fly apart? The accepted theory now is that there is a certain “strong force” operating entirely within the nucleus and not outside, that keeps the positive
particles along with the neutral-charge neutrons together. Rutherford held that the positive particles (now known as protons, or Hydrogen nuclei) were held together by electrons. Thus according to him a Helium nuclei, or an alpha particle, is four
Hydrogen nuclei (protons) held together by two electrons.
For my purpose, that is, to provide an electrostatic explanation for the force of gravity, and to deduce the new equation F=BnN/r^2 (details given earlier) this much information is enough. Later developments of the atomic model by Bohr and others are not
relevant, for as of today no one seriously questions that electrons orbit a much heavier positively charged nucleus in the atom.
In the next instalment the logic and derivation for the abovementioned equation will be provided. To recapitulate; gravity is considered nothing electrostatic as it is very weak, always attractive, always steady, has nothing positive or negative relating
to force-field, has everything to do with just uncharged masses, and has a very long range. I don't know what the odds will be upon me, to provide a most convincing explanation, completely iron-clad.
Arindam Banerjee, Hampton Park, Melbourne, 7 May 2020

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