TOWARD A NEW ELECTROMAGNETICS PART III

-- Virtual and Observable Aspects --

We must also examine some aspects of "virtual" and "observable."
For example, we construct several spatial vector summations in Figure 13. The "resultants" of these spatial vectors are all equal. However, the actual sums, even though equal, are quite different, because their internal "stresses" (substructure forms) are quite different.

When the time aspects of the vector systems of Figure 13 are considered, one can easily understand the problem. That is, the resultant of each of these "systems" is zero, and so one can say that the vectorial "magnitude" of the system is zero since the magnitude of the resultant vector is zero. However, in each case the "action" represented by each vector element actually occurs in a finite tiny Δt. So: (1) The zero resultant must exist for a finite Δt, and (2) all the actions indicated by the system component vectors actually occur in that Δt. The absolute value of the "activity per unit time per unit volume" of such a zero-resultant system thus has physical meaning, and one may refer to this notion as the "stress" on spacetime²⁵, or the "electrostatic scalar potential" of the system. Note that this differs from the present definition of electrostatic scalar potential, which becomes just a special case of the more fundamental potential defined here.²⁶
The derivatives of this spatiotemporal stress also have physical meaning. The time derivative is indicative of the stress on the flow of macroscopic time at a fixed spatial point, and the spatial derivative is indicative of the stress on space. Here one is confronted with the fact that what we call "space" and "time" are continually being created, directly in the physical observing/detecting apparatus itself.²⁷ That is, rigorously, "detected physical reality" exists totally in and of the mass-changes of the observer's mass or his detecting instruments. In the fundamental detection process itself, there is a flow of the rate of creation of spatial lengths and a flow of the rate of creation of time lengths. Indeed, to a linear observer the stress on the creation of the flow of time controls the flow of the creation of space, and the stress on the creation of the flow of space controls the flow of the creation of time. The change in the stress on 4-space (ordinary Minkowskian space-time) controls the "curvature of that spacetime" in the fifth dimension. The change in the stress on 5-space controls the "curvature of that 5-space spacetime" in 6-space, and so on. Development of these facets of the new concepts is beyond the scope of this paper.)

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