So apparently attractive forces are explained as an interference with a general arena of expansion. At the same time the degree in which a body’s velocity is decremented (the acceleration it apparently acquires, if gravitating) is independent of its inertial mass. It is the velocities that have priority; inertial mass is stamped upon a particle by virtue of its recession from the surrounding universe. (This explanation is roughly similar to Mach’s principle.)
As a by-product of decremented recession, we have to consider the recession lines connecting particles whose mutual recession has been slowed. These lines are still attempting to express their legitimate rate of expansion. There is something analogous to pressure upon them. A new class of effects is indicated, and to this we may assign electromagnetism.
An intriguing feature of magnetism is its similarity, in relation to electric force, with gyroscopic precession. In order to give an account of magnetism analogous to gyroscopic action, I concocted the notion of pseudospin described in Chapter 10. With a simple set of selection rules it becomes possible to give such an account, though the recession lines are treated as quasi-material. Also, the diagrams for electric attraction and repulsion become indistinguishable from already familiar lines of force.
The “particles” spoken of so far are conceived of as a simpler form of neutron. The retarding of recession converts a part of its mass to positive charge so that it becomes a proton. This is followed by the creation of countervailing negative charge to make a neutron. The negative charge is then ejected to become an electron. Hydrogen is born.
The recessive hypothesis is so full of holes that it can be (and has been) dismissed as “blind invention”. My strategy has been to get as much change out of it as possible, skirting difficulties and leaving them as unconquered fortresses in the rear, anyone of them cogent enough to blow the conjecture’s backside off. Just the same, it bears upon a sufficient number of additional questions, many of them previously unconnected, to make me think there might be a grain of truth in it. To mention a few:
1. Space is a continuum only along lines of recession. Across the grain, so to speak, it has discontinuous properties. Interesting from the point of view of the wave/particle dichotomy, and also because radiant energy consists of transverse waves.
2. A difficulty in the way of unifying the forces of nature has been that it is hard to imagine how one continuum could transmit them all. The recessive hypothesis offers a hierarchy of interpenetrating “spaces” constructed of different sets of recession lines: (1) a space consisting of a single absolute velocity—the velocity of light—emanating from the matter at the limit of the Hubble sphere; (2) a dynamic space of relative velocities and gravitation; (3) a subordinate space conveying electric force.
3. The hypothesis gives a physical basis to the idea of the inertial system. For argument’s sake we can take an object’s inertial framework to consist of the distant sphere of particles receding from it at the velocity of light. If it is accelerated to a new velocity then associated with that velocity will be a similar framework composed of a different set of particles Gust as a galaxy anywhere finds itself at the centre of a symmetrically expanding system; the object, however, will be displaced from the centre of its system)—so it continues in its state of motion. Without recession, dynamics might be what Aristotle thought it was: applying a force produces not acceleration but a uniform motion, which stops when the force stops.
4. It is possible to save the perfect cosmological principle, which requires that the distribution of the galaxies should be roughly the same at any epoch. The primary recession is an interaction antecedent to time or spatial distance. It is therefore conceivable that the equation between time and distance is not applicable at very long range. The farther galaxies could be receding from us without getting any farther away.
5. It is an appealing idea that recession leads both to gravitation and to the universal property of dispersal we know as the second law of thermodynamics. It would mean that water falling through a water turbine is answering to the same principle as steam expanding through a steam turbine.
6. Attributing the two forms of electric force to the two directions of pseudo spin explains the breakdown of parity in some experiments. The mirror image of a negative charge is a positive charge. Parity is conserved if the signs are switched.
7. Finally, the recessive hypothesis is the answer to the paradoxes of Zeno on the impossibility of motion. I will not repeat them here (for an illuminating discussion of them, see G.J. Whitrow’s The Natural Philosophy of Time) but the three relevant paradoxes “prove” that (1) a fast runner cannot overtake a slow one, (2) an arrow cannot reach its target, and (3) the arrow can’t move at all anyway.
From the point of view of the recessive hypothesis, Zeno’s paradoxes aren’t paradoxes at all. They are demonstrations that what we see as motion is impossible. Therefore it must be something else.
What the arguments do is to destroy the concept of place: the idea that a physical object occupies a location in a receptive space and can move “through space” to another such location. In the recessive hypothesis space is purely relational; there is no “place” except where a physical body is. When such a body appears to “move” in relation to another, it is the space between them that is modified. The objects stay in the same “place” i.e., they simply remain themselves.
The same insight is admirably expressed in the zen aphorism: “Nothing moves; where would it go?”