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Charles F. Brush: central claims

Source gap

Updated after QE (verdict MINOR). Only brush-rexresearch.pdf (Nature 1911, Lodge letter, APS 1929 paper, bibliography) has a real text layer. Every other PDF was read from OCR of rendered page images, and all but one (the 1927 newspaper clipping) now also have digests. How each was read:

  • The 1922 Proc. APS paper (PDF pp.184-204 of a 349-page volume) and the 1917 Physical Review paper (PDF pp.241-249 of a 615-page volume) were each read complete. The rest of each volume is other authors' work and is unrelated, except the Gregorio priority exchange in the 1922 Minutes (PDF pp.328-335), which now has its own deep read (Gregorio's letter of 20 July 1922, read 3 Nov 1922; Brush's reply, read 1 Dec 1922). The 1893 and 1895 Gregorio originals are not in the folder, so the priority claim is unchecked. The 1922 paper got a full deep read (bob matching, air controls, drop apparatus). The APS meeting pages for the steel paper (PDF pp.94-97) were deep-read and carry no Brush abstract, only his title.
  • The 1914 Discussion (29 pp.): printed pp.1-16 read from OCR; the handwritten pp.17-29 (a draft abstract of the same paper) were deep-read from page images. They contain no formula or number for x, so the Mercury and Moon claims are verbal hopes only.
  • The 1928 Franklin Institute address: pp.4-7 deep-read. It contains no calorimeter design or heat data, and the Bureau of Standards sentence reports work in progress only.
  • The Brush-Miller letters: pp.4-7 deep-read. Miller's only reply on the Eotvos proposal (2 March 1926) is interested but non-committal; nothing in the file shows the test was run or refused.
  • Remaining limits: the 1927 newspaper clipping was read from page images only (no text, no digest). Plates VII-VIII (photographs) of the 1922 paper were not examined.

Not obtained: Brush's 1921 first paper (Proc. APS 60(2)), the 1923 and 1924 "Some New Experiments in Gravitation" papers (the drop-apparatus data), the 1926 and 1927 calorimetry papers, the 1928 Proc. APS paper, the 1915 first hardened-steel paper (Proc. APS 54(217)), any Bureau of Standards report on the Sandusky clay or nickel-cobalt silicate, and any independent replication or contemporary test of the pendulum or drop experiments. The raw tables of the falling-container and calorimeter results are therefore missing, and the heat-generation claim (5) rests on Brush's qualitative statements and one set of second-hand numbers in the 1929 paper.

Later steps should say plainly when a conclusion rests on [memory] alone (for example, modern equivalence-principle limits, the explanation of Mercury's perihelion, and the physics of steel quenching). QE reports earlier pendulum tests (Southerns 1910, Potter 1923) from a Wikipedia table [web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle]; those are not in any Brush document and were not re-checked in this step.

Central claims

  1. The energy a falling body gains comes from the aether, which holds vast intrinsic kinetic energy, not from "potential energy of position" stored in the body.
  2. Gravitation is a push: the aether carries isotropic, highly penetrating waves, every atom casts an inverse-square "energy shadow" in them, and two bodies are driven together by the unbalanced wave pressure on their outer sides (a wave version of Le Sage's shadow theory; Brush defended its novelty against a 1922 priority claim by the Marquis de Gregorio, who says he proposed an ether-pressure, ether-absorption theory in 1892 (printed 1893; Brush read the 1895 Atti papers in translation). Brush's reply says his isotropic inverse-square wave-flux postulate is original, and objects that Gregorio never explains how the pressure deficit persists or where a falling body's energy comes from. The Le Sage label is an outside interpretation; those words do not appear in the exchange).
  3. Because bodies absorb energy from the waves as they accelerate, gravity is not exactly inverse-square for accelerating bodies: the force varies as 1/D^(2+x) with x "very small", positive for infall and negative for outward motion, and Brush hopes this explains Mercury's perihelion advance and lunar irregularities. No formula or value for x is given anywhere in the folder (the 1914 draft abstract is verbal only). Gravity may also propagate at about the speed of light without wrecking the moon's orbit (a retardation of "a very few seconds of arc" per century).
  4. Weight is not exactly proportional to mass: equal masses of different materials are pulled slightly differently by gravity. Reported figures: about 1 part in 32,000 in pendulum period for zinc versus bismuth (1922; revised from an uncorrected 1/35,000 in 1921, with the corrected short-pendulum values 20-40% lower than the long ones and some runs reversed), bismuth falling slightly faster than zinc in twin containers (1922, about 1e-5 s over about 120 cm, no data given), and about 1 part in 4450 for the material alone for barium aluminate (1929, falling containers; the raw figure is 1 part in 11,000 at 40% loading). Brush's own vane tests show air inertia of the same size as the claimed pendulum effect, and he never ran a vacuum test.
  5. Some rocks, complex silicates and similar materials continuously generate small amounts of heat (not from radioactivity; no exclusion method is given), the same materials show the "impaired" fall relative to lead, and this correlation is the experimental evidence that heat and the gravity effect both come from the aether waves. The 1928 address gives no heat data, and the Bureau of Standards is only said to be checking.
  6. Recently quenched steel spontaneously gives off heat for days to weeks (a precursor result, mainstream-compatible; not tied to gravity in the 1917 paper), and Brush later cited it as part of the same programme.
  7. The Eotvos torsion-balance experiments, which found equal gravitational and inertial mass, are flawed or too insensitive (asserted in a 1926 letter to Dayton Miller, with a suggested lead versus sulphur or selenium test). Miller's reply was interested but non-committal and no later letter shows the test was run; in 1929 Miller still asked for Brush's help "in behalf of the ether".