Coulomb’s Law of Colliding Rockets

The following story illustrates how Coulomb’s law can be seen as an expression describing collisions between particles in the aether. It may be of help in understanding how a strict particle model of the aether can be used to explain this law.

Spherical space stations

Imagine two spherical space stations with a limitless supply of rockets. Each space station sends out rockets in straight lines in all directions. The rockets are all of equal size and cruising at constant and equal speeds. The space around the space stations is soon full of rockets moving in straight lines.

Keep in mind that the space stations are metaphors for Coulomb’s point charges used in actual experiments. According to the theory in this book, neutrinos that come in contact with such point charges will stream back into space with a footprint that causes attraction or repulsion on collision with similarly charged neutrinos. These neutrinos are the rockets in our story.

Probability of collisions

To calculate the total number of collisions happening between our rockets over a given period, we first consider the size of our rockets. Big rockets will result in more collisions than small rockets.

Let’s call this size factor k.

Next thing we have to recognize is that anything related to probability is calculated by multiplications. If the rate at which rockets stream out of space station one is q₁, and the rate at which rockets stream out of space station two is q₂, then q₁ times q₂ reflects the number of collisions happening.

This gives us k times q₁ times q₂ when we include the size factor into our expression.

Inverse square law

Finally we have to recognize that it matters a great deal how far the space stations are from each other. If they are far enough from each other, there are hardly any collisions at all. If they are close together, we get a lot of collisions. The way this tapers off with distance is the inverse square law.

We have to take our probability equation and divide it with the square of the distance between the space stations to get the final result. If that distance is r, and the result is called F, we get:

We have arrived at Coulomb’s law of colliding rockets!