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Su-CC: central claims (Fact-finder, Step 1b)

Project: Ching-Chuan Su, professor of electrical engineering, National Tsinghua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan ("Quantum Electromagnetics", the local-ether wave equation). All papers are by Su himself; he is the originator and an interested party, so his descriptions of special relativity, GPS practice and other authors' experiments are his characterisations. The statements below record what the documents claim; they are not verdicts.

Source gap: none for the papers. All 14 distinct documents have a readable text layer or OCR (f4a, f5a, f5b, f8b are OCR scans; their equations were read from page images by the deep readers, and the digest equations for f4a and f5b were corrected there). Coverage note: the book "Quantum Electromagnetics" (2005) is present only as an outline and a web summary, not in full; Su's earlier papers that carry several derivations (Europhys. Lett. 56, 170 on Michelson-Morley; JEWA 14, 1525 on second-order radar echo time; the 2000-2001 IEEE/APS abstracts) are cited but not in the folder; and none of the experimental papers Su cites as support (Brillet and Hall, Saburi et al., Krisher et al., Staudenmann et al., Mandelberg and Witten, Cedarholm et al., Champeney et al., Turner and Hill, Hay et al.) is in the folder. Where a comparison with those experiments is made in the review files it rests on Su's citation or on [memory] unless a later step obtains the paper.

The central claims

A local ether, not a universal one, carries light. Light travels at c relative to a "local ether" at rest with the gravitational potential of each celestial body: the geocentric inertial (ECI) frame for earthbound propagation, the heliocentric frame for interplanetary propagation. Consequently earthbound phenomena (GPS, intercontinental microwave links, loop interferometers) depend on Earth's rotation through the first-order Sagnac effect but not on Earth's orbital motion, and the Michelson-Morley null result is explained within present precision. (the Eur. Phys. J. C 2001 local-ether paper, f1a duplicate, f2a, f3a, f3c, outline, summary.) Su admits one open problem: annual stellar aberration, once Earth's local ether is included.
Gravity is an optical index, not curvature. A gravitational index n_g = 1 + 2GM/(c^2 r) gives light speed c/n_g and reproduces solar light deflection (4GM/c^2 b, 1.75 arcsec), the one-way GPS gravitational delay (about 43-60 ps) and the interplanetary radar delay (about 230 microseconds for Earth-Venus) without space-time curvature; gravitational redshift becomes a lowering of atomic transition frequencies by gravitational potential. Su writes one universal formula for every clock transition (f = f0(1 - Phi_g/c^2 - v^2/2c^2), derived only for hyperfine spin-flip transitions); but he also says the redshift 'originates from a quantum nature of the matter wave bound in the involved atom' and 'can be different in some other interaction', and the outline lists its 'quantum origin and transition-dependence' among his predictions. He gives no form or size for any such dependence and no number comparable with clock-comparison tests of redshift universality. (A deep reader's own extension of Su's eq. 24 to electronic transitions gives a species difference of about 1.4e-9 at Earth's surface; that is the reader's calculation, not Su's.) The outline also predicts a gravitation-induced stellar downshift depending on the mass of the star (no formula or number; its weak-field limit would be the same Phi_g/c^2 term). (f5b, f5a, f6, f5c, outline.)
Matter waves obey the same preferred-frame equation, and mass is a frequency. A Klein-Gordon-form equation with a particle "natural frequency" omega0, referred to the local-ether frame, gives m0 = hbar omega0/c^2 (inertial and, with gravity added, gravitational mass identical), the de Broglie and Lorentz mass-variation relations with speed referred to the ECI frame, and atomic transition frequency f = f0 sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2). Su says this accounts for Hafele-Keating, GPS clock rates and synchronism, Hughes-Drever isotropy, the Ives-Stilwell, ammonia-maser and Mossbauer-rotor experiments, Davisson-Germer and neutron interferometry (Sagnac, gravity), and Compton scattering (read as wave scattering from a mixed matter-wave state). Two further items in the folder: Su says his ECI-frame speed argument accounts for Hughes-Drever isotropy 'whatever the dependence of nuclear magnetic interaction on mass and speed' (the deep read finds the agreement comes from the ECI speed being constant under Earth's rotation, not from a calculation of the nuclear coefficient); and in Sagnac loops he offers the n-dependences of the Earth-rotation and loop-rotation terms (loop term as n^2 for a stationary medium, Earth term independent of n) as a test, though the deep read finds both coefficients match first-order special relativity (Post 1967). (f4a, f5a, f6, f7, f8a, f8b, f8c, f3a.)
Magnetism can be Galilean. A force law built from "augmented" potentials (scalar potential multiplied by 1 + v_es^2/2c^2, vector potential -v_es Phi/c^2) reduces, for neutralised currents at low speed, to the Lorentz force with the current density, time derivative and effector velocity referred to the matrix frame. Su concludes the Lorentz law holds only under hidden restrictions, the modified Maxwell equations follow, the moving-medium phase speed c/n + v(1 - 1/n^2) (Fizeau, Fresnel drag) arises from polarisation current rather than ether drag, and Sagnac loops with comoving or stationary media follow the standard first-order formulae. The law carries three extra 1/c^2 force terms; one of them, F2, is a conservative electric force on a charge at rest beside a neutral loop with steady current, quadratic in the current and independent of its direction. Su calls it 'difficult to observe' and does not cite experiments. Related experimental record found in the QE deep read: Edwards, Kenyon and Lemon (Utah State University, Phys. Rev. D 14, 922, 1976) reported an unexplained potential on a superconducting coil quadratic in current (n = 2.02 +/- 0.05, sign of the carriers); in their parametrisation Su's F2 has kappa = 1/2 and, for uniform current, is 24-320 times smaller than the signal they measured (a current-crowding factor alpha, not measured, would have to make up the difference); later tests (Lemon, Edwards and Kenyon 1992; Bartlett and Maglic 1990) were not read. (f2a, f3a, f3c, f4a.)
The model makes testable predictions that differ from relativity. Stated by Su: a 62 Hz quadrupole beat term in a 3.39 micron He-Ne/Fabry-Perot cavity at 40 deg latitude (one old measurement showed about 34 Hz peak-to-peak attributed to a spurious signal; Su: "too early to make a decisive conclusion"); a sinusoidal turntable phase variation in a one-way link or Kennedy-Thorndike apparatus; a -2v^2/c^2 transverse second-order radar Doppler shift (a few Hz for a 10 GHz low-orbit satellite); a constant -11.5 Hz deviation at 2.3 GHz in interplanetary spacecraft links; no drag in a moving purely magnetic medium; about 1 degree difference in neutron Bragg angle between symmetric crystal orientations (the one comparison with published neutron data, Staudenmann et al. 1980, he calls "not good quantitatively"); a third-order orientation anisotropy in the Mossbauer rotor; and no Sagnac term from Earth's orbital motion. Further predictions on the outline's list (p.8) that no folder paper sizes or derives: a gravitational redshift that depends on the transition (quantum origin; see claim 2), a stellar downshift depending on the star's mass, an effect of relative motion between the deflection yokes and the accelerating electrodes in magnetic deflection (the deep read of f2a finds about w/u = 3e-7 for 30 m/s at 25 kV, the same to first order in special relativity), and a 'stronger second-order effect' in atom-radiation interaction (no equation or size; candidate source arXiv physics/0208083, not read in depth). Su also proposes a second-order measurement of the CMBR temperature anisotropy as a crucial test (EPJC pp.11-12; he gives no amplitude; (v/c)^2 for 300 km/s is about 1e-6, a few microkelvin, the reader's arithmetic). Most of his comparisons with existing experiments (Hafele-Keating, GPS, Fizeau, loop Sagnac, Ives-Stilwell, maser, rotor at second order) reproduce standard results; the deep reads note that these numerically coincide with special plus general relativity computed in the ECI frame.
The same gravity-as-potential idea explains discordant quasar redshifts. If some high-redshift quasars are ejected from low-redshift galaxies (Arp, Burbidge), their redshift can be gravitational, z = sqrt(1 + 2 Phi_g/c^2) - 1, set by the potential of the quasar's own gas cloud; for a quasar near NGC 7319 (0.7 arcsec, 300 million ly, assumed density 6e-11 kg/m^3) this gives z = 2.07 against the observed 2.114 with surface gravity under 1% of Earth's; repeated halving by fragmentation predicts preferred redshifts (6.08 ... 0.71, 0.49, 0.33, 0.22, 0.14, 0.09, 0.06) close to the Karlsson peaks except that 0.60 is replaced by 0.71 and 0.49. Su cites for ejection and for abrupt redshift boundaries, all second-hand: NGC 7319 (quasar 8 arcsec from the nucleus, V-shaped filament; Galianni et al. 2005), Arp 220 (z = 0.018, companions z about 0.09, H I stream; Arp 2001), NGC 3628 (z = 0.0028, quasars z = 0.995 and 2.15; Arp et al. 2002), NEQ3 (z = 0.1935, 0.1939, 0.2229; Gutierrez and Lopez-Corredoira 2004), the M82 field (Arp and Russell 2001), NGC 383 (Arp 2001), and the abrupt boundaries MCG 7-25-46 (z = 0.003 to 0.098, no overlap; Lopez-Corredoira and Gutierrez 2005) and NGC 7320 (Gutierrez et al. 2002), for which he records that the observers' own alternative is a projection effect. His argument that an abrupt boundary supports one 'exclusive' potential is a model postulate fitted to the observation, with no test separating it from projection. (f5c.)