Solve The Universe

Pressure-Based Theory — a mechanical, unified account of gravity, electromagnetism, spin, and entanglement

Catalog: Disproven / Falsified Theories

Ideas that were seriously proposed by real scientists, then directly ruled out by real evidence — not just unfashionable or superseded, but actually contradicted by experiment or observation. Each entry below states what was proposed, what specifically falsified it, and — where a modern descendant claims to route around that falsification — an honest link to that descendant’s own catalog status, rather than pretending the original idea was never really refuted.

The Luminiferous Aether (Fixed Aether)

What was proposed: 19th-century physics assumed light, like sound, needed a medium to propagate through — a fixed, universe-filling “luminiferous aether” at rest relative to absolute space, with Earth moving through it.

What falsified it: the Michelson-Morley experiment (1887) used an interferometer to look for a difference in light’s measured speed depending on direction relative to Earth’s motion through the supposed aether. The result was null — no detectable difference — to a precision far exceeding what the aether hypothesis predicted. The experiment has been repeated many times since with steadily increasing precision (modern versions using optical resonators push the null result down by many more orders of magnitude), and the null result has held every time.

Why this matters for this site: Einstein-Aether Theory — the real, peer-reviewed framework PBT’s own $u^\mu$ field is built on — is explicitly not a revival of this fixed aether. It’s a dynamical field, meaning it responds to and is shaped by the same physics it participates in, rather than sitting as a fixed, detectable background the way the 19th-century aether did. That distinction is the entire reason Einstein-aether theory isn’t simply pre-refuted by Michelson-Morley — but it’s worth being direct that PBT’s papers describe their own aether in similar dynamical terms without independently re-deriving why that specific move avoids the original falsification; they’re relying on Einstein-aether’s own published reasoning for that, not offering new reasoning of their own.

Classical Le Sage / Push Gravity

What was proposed: Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1690s) and later Georges-Louis Le Sage (1748) — the paper PBT’s own Paper 1 cites directly as reference 1 — proposed that gravity is caused by a constant flux of tiny particles bombarding all matter from every direction. A body shadows part of that flux, so nearby bodies get pushed toward each other by the resulting imbalance — mimicking Newtonian attraction without a genuine “pull.”

What falsified it, specifically:

Both problems are documented in Pushing Gravity: New Perspectives on Le Sage’s Theory (Edwards, ed., 2002) — the same volume PBT’s own papers already cite as reference 3, alongside Le Sage’s original 1748 work as reference 1.

Where PBT picks this up, and what’s actually been verified about it: Paper 1 states its resolution directly: drag “eliminated by $v\to\infty$” and heating “mitigated by infinite-speed jumps to ‘outer bounds.’” This is a real, stated mechanism, not silence on the problem — but it’s worth being plain about its status: an idealized infinite particle speed is a mathematical limit, not something demonstrated to actually occur or to fully resolve the drag/heating calculations the way the papers assert. Paper 4 computes a specific drag figure ($a_{drag}\approx9.8\times10^{-16}$ m/s², after the 2026-07-21 correction to Paper 2’s original number) and calls it “below detection” — a real, checkable number, but a check of the drag formula’s magnitude, not an independent proof that the underlying $v\to\infty$ idealization is physically sound. This remains open, not resolved, and this page will be updated if that changes.

Others (index only — pages not yet written)