Modern Physics as Non-Newtonian Crisis Physics

When modernity struck society at the turn to the 20th century boosted by rapid technological development, the pressure in arts and science to take a radical step away form classics mounted, posing in particular a challenge to leading theoretical physicists such as Planck and Lorentz firmly rooted in the deterministic rational world of Newton-Maxwell. How to become modern?

Planck was the first to surrender in his derivation of Planck's Law of blackbody radiation by resorting to statistics to show modernity.

Lorentz resisted longer faced with an apparent absence of a unique medium/aether for the propagation of electro-magnetic waves, which he approached with a Lorentz transformation between different Euclidean coordinate systems moving with constant speed $v$ with respect to each other, which transformed physical space-time coordinates $(x,t)$ into new "primed" coordinates  

• $(x^\prime ,t^\prime ) =\gamma (x-vt, t-vx)$ 

with $\gamma =\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-v^2}}$ with $v<1$ and 1 speed of light. 

Lorentz carefully pointed out that the "primed time" $t^\prime =\gamma (t-vx)$ with dependence on the space coordinate $x$ was not physical time. The Lorentz transformation was not between different expressions of real physics. 

In 1905 the young patent clerk Alfred Einstein picked up the Lorentz transformation with the bold assertion against Lorentz that $t^\prime$ was physical time and so formed his Special Theory of Relativity SR based on the idea of giving the Lorentz transformation a direct physical meaning resulting in the puzzles of "space contraction" and "clock retardation" and "relativistic mass" as real physics.

SR met the pressure of modernisation of physics by opening to a fundamental revision of Newtonian mechanics as the most formidable achievement of rational human thinking, behind the booming industrial society. A formidable challenge!

Nothing could be more revolutionary modern than to say that Newton's Law of gravitation does not describe the action of gravitation on all scales of the Universe as classic physics said. But such a bold plan fell short because SR said nothing about gravitation. Einstein came back in 1915 with his General Theory of Relativity GR with that message/plan:

• Newton's theory of gravitation must be replaced by GR.
• Newton must be replaced by Einstein.
• Modern physics = Einstein. Old physics = Newton.

The deep crisis of modern physics of today can be seen as the result of implementing this plan, while hiding that Newton is still used in all real contexts where always GR is useless.  

Let us then take a look at the main reason for replacing Newton by Einstein. We then find that the root cause presented by modern theoretical physicists is conceptual rather than experimental: 

• Newton's Law appears to involve instant-action-at-distance. 
• The gravitational forces between two bodies at a specific time instant $t$ appears to depend only on the distance between the bodies at time $t$. 
• It appears that there is no time delay as if gravitational force is instantly updated between moving bodies.  
• A concept of apparent instant-action-at-distance cannot be formed, because action-at-distance is transmitted by gravitons as force carriers necessarily traveling with finite speed. 

We next ask for experimental evidence that apparent instant-action-at-distance is not observed. Are there observations of apparent action delay? Physicists will tell you that the only direct evidence of delayed gravitation is the LIGO experiment (2015) claimed to measure the effect of a merger of two black holes to be a gravitational wave reaching the Earth after a delay of 1.3 billion years, as a change of distance of 1/400 of the size of a proton over 4 km, with a relative precision of $10^{-21}$. 

LIGO is thus the only direct experimental evidence contradicting apparent instant-action-at-distance (Mercury says nothing against). The smallness of the effect compared to the cause is beyond  imagination. It cannot be justified to replace Newton with anything/GR from this single measurement. Yet this is what is done, and no wonder that a crisis emerges.

How then to make sense of apparent instant-action-at-distance. Why emphasise apparent? In many posts I have tested the idea that the connection between gravitational potential and  mass distribution (through Poisson's equation) is not by a causality from mass to potential by instant-global-action, but the other way around from potential giving mass to a body by instant-local-action. Such an arrangement can give the apparent impression of instant-action-at-distance, while fundamentally it is not. 

The idea connects to the discussion in this recent post about the presence of a global gravitational potential defining global simultaneity. Here gravitational force is not transmitted by gravitons as force carriers but is instead carried by the gravitational potential ready to deliver it in instant-local-action. No gravitons have been detected.

Summary: The only direct evidence against a Newtonian theory of gravitation as instant-action-at-distance is a LIGO signal, which can be questioned because of the very high precision required to single it out from noise. The reason to dismiss Newton is conceptual in the sense of denying any concept of apparent instant-action-at-distance, and not practical since Newton is used in all forms of reality.

If Newtonian gravitation is kept, then the present crisis from incompatibility between GR and quantum mechanics evaporates and effort can be focussed on advancing modern physics instead of handling crisis. 

A modern theoretical physicist confronted with this evidence will react by surprise that something like that can even be expressed, trained to believe that only Einstein's GR theory of gravitation is truly fundamental with its curved spacetime and that Newton's theory is only a trivial toy version of GR, which is not at all fundamental. The training is so efficient that no argument appears to allow a change this conviction.   

Modernity is now more than 100 years old, and modernist fashions of cubism and atonal music are no longer modern. There is now good reason to replace the fashion of curved spacetime with a renaissance to Newton.