Gabriel Chardin, Luc Blanchet, and Philippe Pajot:
a very particular conception of scientific integrity.
April 4, 2017
Here is the cover of the April issue of the magazine "La Recherche":
A bold headline pointing to statements by Gabriel Chardin, from the CNRS General Directorate
and Luc Blanchet, research director at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics.
interviewed by the magazine’s journalist, a young mathematician:
in an article titled:
If, as the Spartans said.
Philippe Pajot devotes four full pages to the statements of these two researchers, whom I vainly tried to meet, just as I did with the journalist: my emails went unanswered. The same failure occurred when I attempted to present my Janus cosmological model in a seminar at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, despite the fact that these works were duly published in two high-level, peer-reviewed journals:
Astrophysics and Space Science
and
Modern Physics Letters A
There is a crown to be worn by whoever opens a new path in fundamental research concerning this great absence in cosmology: primordial antimatter. If the antimatter that Chardin and his team are about to test in the lab—sufficiently slowed down to be sensitive to Earth’s gravitational field—falls downward, then the Nobel Prize is assured, certainly. Indeed, several laboratories are already engaged in this race (Gbar, AEGIS, Alpha-g experiments).
The theoretical foundation is provided by Luc Blanchet. His article, examined in detail below, is, for anyone who can see, a complete jumble, filled with conditional considerations. Today’s theoretical research consists in writing a Lagrangian, supposedly endowed with all virtues. This approach has the appearance of exorcism. Blanchet’s Lagrangian accounts for three types of matter: baryonic matter, plus two types of dark matter (...). All of this is “coupled” via a mysterious “gravivector field,” implying the existence of a particle mediating this force, a “graviphoton.” It’s as if, before Torricelli’s thesis, someone had explained the rise of mercury in a barometer using a “baryon vector” field, expressing “the horror of vacuum,” and implying the action of a particle, the “barometerion.”
To achieve this, Blanchet must revive an approach initiated in 1939 by Fierz and Pauli, which involves giving the graviton a mass (though we have no model of the graviton). However, as noted in 1998 by Boulware and Deser, such an approach leads to a calculational instability that they named in 1972—45 years ago—“ghosts” (“phantoms” in English). Blanchet therefore hopes his ad hoc construction will be “ghost-free.” In reality, in this mess, there is nothing but words strung together, ending with the invention of two more words: “gravivector” and “graviphoton.”
Pages 74–75, here is what Blanchet tells us:
Note the key sentence:
- But it so happens that in one formulation (which one?) of this theory, everything behaves as if there were two different ways of measuring distances—two spacetimes and two “metrics.” In each spacetime, one can have particles, and since the two metrics behave differently (with a single coupling term between them), particles in one of the spacetimes may appear to have negative mass when measured relative to the other spacetime. Thus, we have an antigravity effect (2).
How does Blanchet derive these sentences, which describe, word for word, the main features of my Janus model, from the cited references supporting these claims (including his own article):
(1)
A. Benoit-Lévy and G. Chardin, A&A, 537, A78, 2012
(2)
C. de Rham et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 231101, 2011
(3)
L. Blanchet and L. Heisenberg, Cosmo. Astro. 12, 26, 2015
(4)
R.H. Price, Am. J. Phys, 61, 216, 1993
- The first reference is an article by Benoit-Lévy and Gabriel Chardin, presenting this “Dirac-Milne cosmological model.”
- The second is an article by scientist Claudia de Rham, currently at Imperial College, London.
- The third is a paper by Luc Blanchet and L. Heisenberg.
- The fourth is an article by R.H. Price.
I examined these four documents carefully (see below). The conclusion is that nothing in them allows linking to the sentences in the article, which are nothing more than a clumsy attempt to claim credit for someone else’s work, reflecting a very particular conception of scientific honesty on the part of the trio Chardin–Blanchet–Pajot.
My Janus cosmological model is obviously far more structured and elaborate than these confused improvisations. It rests on two coupled field equations, the first of which reduces to Einstein’s equation near the solar system. The hardest thing to get across is such a paradigm shift. It’s like tossing a bottle into deep space.
Indeed, everything boils down to the ... “equations of Jean-Pierre Petit.”
No one else ... goes this far. If I am right, it will be difficult to get this accepted. Although this theory has been published in several high-level, peer-reviewed journals (Astrophysics and Space Science and Modern Physics Letters A, 2014–2015), no popular science journal has (and will) echo this work, even though from these equations one can derive solutions to all current cosmological and astrophysical problems, including, for example, the phenomenon of accelerated expansion, in the form of an “exact solution,” free of ingredients synonymous with a host of free parameters: six in the mainstream Lambda CDM model with cosmological constant and cold dark matter (it sounds like a cooking recipe). No more need for dark matter or dark energy.
The two articles in question:
J.P. Petit & G. D’Agostini: Negative mass hypothesis in cosmology and the nature of dark energy. Astrophysics and Space Science, A9, 145–182 (2014)
J.P. Petit & G. D’Agostini: Cosmological bimetric model with interacting positive and negative masses and two different speeds of light, in agreement with the observed acceleration of the universe. Modern Physics Letters A, Vol. 29, n° 34, November 10, 2014:
These invisible components of the universe become perfect copies of those we know, but with negative mass and negative energy.
This scheme also provides the answer to the absence of observed primordial antimatter and completes the model proposed by Andrei Sakharov in 1967: particles with negative mass emit photons with negative energy, which our eyes and telescopes cannot detect.
Since scientific seminars, where I could present and defend this model, are closed to me, and no popular science magazine or TV program will give any attention to my work (after long negotiations, the management of the Palais de la Découverte in Paris has just today refused to publish an article about my work), I have therefore decided to create
this series of videos “Janus”
to escape this unacceptable ostracism.
The real reason for such rejection: cosmotrouille.
Instead of asking, “How does the Janus model fit into the framework of General Relativity?” it becomes necessary to reverse the question: “How does the General Relativity model fit into this new Janus framework?” A claim that is very difficult to accept.
There is a fact on which others continue to stumble: the impossibility of introducing negative masses into General Relativity, discovered and emphasized by Hermann Bondi in 1957. Indeed, any attempt within the Einsteinian framework leads to intractable interaction laws:
- Positive masses attract everything
- Negative masses repel everything
This leads to the paradox:
RUNAWAY
. If two particles with opposite signs are brought together, the positive mass flees, uniformly accelerated, pursued by the negative mass. And the total kinetic energy of the system remains... zero, since the 1/2 m V² of the negative mass is... negative!
The Janus model provides the solution, at the cost of a major paradigm shift: moving to two coupled field equations. This amounts to considering that the spacetime hypersurface has... a front and a back. Then, the interaction laws derived via what is called the “Newtonian approximation” become:
- Like-signed masses attract according to Newton’s law
- Opposite-signed masses repel according to “anti-Newton”
In the papers by Chardin and Blanchet, one finds only clumsy gymnastics involving massive gravitons, a new force field—the “gravivector”—a new particle, the “graviphoton,” or even the abandonment of the equivalence principle.
Nowhere in the cited articles can one find justification for the sentences:
... everything behaves as if there were two different ways of measuring distances—two spacetimes or two “metrics.” In each spacetime, one can have particles, and since the two metrics behave differently (with a single coupling term between them), particles in one of the spacetimes may appear to have negative mass when measured relative to the other spacetime. Thus, we have an antigravity effect.
No matter how one looks at it, these sentences refer solely to my Janus model and nothing else. “Their bimetric” has nothing to do with mine.
Regarding this additional force field, Blanchet writes on page 47:
- One of the motivations for CERN experiments on antimatter fall is to test for the presence of an additional field (called the “gravivector,” whose mediating particle is the “graviphoton”) added to the field of General Relativity. This additional field would create a distinction between the motion of particles and antiparticles, which could then be observed. Thus, for interpreting the experiments, the orthodox approach is to say that General Relativity is correct, but that there are additional fields.
We are now in full-blown “pixie dust” territory, whose key particle is the “perlimpinpino.”
That said, these people are free to consider whatever they want. That’s part of the game of research. But what is not normal is refusing to listen to those with different theories. Like Chardin, Blanchet, and a long line of other “experts,” Damour has denied me access to the seminar at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette for over ten years, where he acts as gatekeeper.
His only response:
- Your work does not interest me.
For six months I have contacted all the “figures” in the field (18 researchers) and all relevant laboratories (fifteen).
I received no negative response: these people simply did not reply. To this must be added the silence and non-responses from science journalists, the latest being Philippe Pajot. So, for the past ten weeks, I have begun presenting my work to the public through a series of videos, which are now receiving significant attention. Currently, it’s the “general public” version. Later, I will create “videos bis” at the math sup level, aimed at tens of thousands of students and engineers, and I will produce English, Russian, and Chinese versions.
In a few days, I will install the twelfth video in the series, where, finally, I present the foundations of my Janus model, after a long “artillery preparation.” In the final video, I will discuss the implications for interstellar travel. People will then understand all the details and consequences of this forty-year endeavor, which in fact centers on this pivotal point, with an obvious link to the ultimate taboo subject: the UFO dossier.
Returning to the article in La Recherche and the project of Gabriel Chardin and Luc Blanchet, I say that
their laboratory antimatter will simply fall downward, just like its matter sister.
I predict it, and I commit to it.
Nature is indifferent to press releases. It will decide.
How far can one think too far?
What will happen afterward, I don’t know. However, you should note a sentence from the article:
... everything behaves as if there were two ways of measuring distances ...
Between two stars, there are indeed two possible distances, depending on whether the vehicle traveling between them is made of positive or negative mass. Recently, I calculated this difference in distances between two stars, depending on whether one travels on the “front” or “back” of the hypersurface. By taking the back of the universe, after the ship has inverted its mass, the distance becomes a hundred times shorter, and in this frame, the speed of light is ten times greater. The ship does not need a “propeller.” Inverting the mass causes the energy conservation constraint to make the craft acquire a “different materiality” (to a positive-mass observer, it seems to “dematerialize”). In fact, travel through the “negative sector” can only occur at relativistic speeds, so as to rejoin the “land of familiarity” with its atomic environment (adaptation of “Compton lengths” via Lorentz contraction). With such a distance ratio, mass inversion leads to rematerialization in the negative sector almost at the speed of light in that sector—i.e., 3 million km per second. Thus, while in the positive-mass world it requires a tremendous amount of energy to merely reach relativistic speed, when the ship crosses into the negative-mass world, braking would be prohibitively expensive in energy. Ideas I have already developed and published in a high-level journal in 2015 (in Modern Physics Letters A).
To stop, one simply inverts the mass a second time. Pass the pepper. Concepts of acceleration and deceleration then cease to apply. One reappears in the world of positive masses, “rematerializing” while recovering the initial kinetic parameters of the craft. Travel time to reach a planet 15 light-years away: just three short months.
Even in the hands of people who refuse any implication of their actions, the idea is gaining ground. The “light barrier” is about to collapse, just as we approach the near discovery of substances like methane and free oxygen on planets astonishingly close to Earth.
Now you understand why our epistemic Tartuffes act this way:
- Hide this Janus model from me, I cannot see it ...
Reference (1)
"Introducing the Dirac-Milne Universe" by A. Benoit-Lévy & G. Chardin:
The model revived is Milne’s, proposed in 1933, which sets the right-hand side of Einstein’s equation to zero. Since this term accounts for the energy-matter content of the universe, this technique assumes two contents: one corresponding to positive energy-matter, the other to negative energy-matter, canceling each other out.
The authors then list the underlying assumptions:
1 – The existence of a mechanism enabling separation of matter and antimatter. The universe structure invoked is then that of an emulsion, with the two entities occupying separate domains “the size of the known universe.”
2 – It is assumed that a repulsive force exists between matter and antimatter. Two references are cited. But in this separation process, annihilation at the boundary between these two domains would emit gamma rays, which are not observed—contradicting observation.
3 – However, one attraction of Milne’s model is that it provides an alternative to inflation theory to explain the remarkable homogeneity of the early universe. The authors assume that the contribution of radiation to the “stress tensor” is negligible at all times.
Various aspects of Milne’s model are then reviewed. Temperature varies inversely with time. Calculations then focus on microphysical phenomena arising from this model (nucleosynthesis, helium synthesis).
In section 5, the authors acknowledge that the model does not account for expansion acceleration or deceleration. The article analyzes supernova data through the Milne model, concluding that both models (the Einstein-Sitter model plus CDM plus cosmological constant, and the Milne model) lead to equiprobable conclusions, with a slight advantage for the Milne model for nearby supernovae. This effectively denies the 2011 Nobel Prize result.
The next section deals with acoustic oscillations in the CMB.
As a conclusion, the authors write: “If the Lambda CDM model agrees well with observation, its theoretical foundation remains weak.” The focus is on resolving the cosmological horizon problem. A balance sheet is drawn regarding nucleosynthesis. The disagreement with observation concerning the phenomenon of cosmic acceleration, which the Milne model does not handle, is noted. It is also noted that the model does not provide a mechanism capable of ensuring separation between matter and antimatter.
Reference (2) –
The article by Claudia de Rham
"Resummation of Massive Gravity" ("Resuming the question of massive gravity") starts from the foundational article on “massive gravity,” corresponding to the Fierz-Pauli model (1939), based on the hypothesis of gravitons with mass, spin 2. The approach relies on constructing a Lagrangian. She recalls that this approach immediately revealed an instability, which Boulware and Deser (1972) named “ghost,” “phantom.”
Efforts were then directed toward eliminating this instability. A first theory emerged (she cites her own 2010 work), where a suitable choice of coefficients could eliminate the said instability in the linear approximation. The 2012 article extends this method to the nonlinear case. The term “negative mass” does not appear in the article. There is neither a metric, nor a field equation, nor interaction laws.
Although Gabriel Chardin says at the bottom of page 46: “After decades of research, physicists showed in the 2010s that there is a way to extend General Relativity to give the graviton a mass, by taking into account the full nonlinear structure of the theory. Indeed, in this theory... etc.”
Chardin will have to explain how one can, from the papers by Claudia de Rham, Blanchet, or his own, establish a link with the second part of his sentences:
... everything behaves as if there were two different ways of measuring distances—two spacetimes or two “metrics.” In each spacetime, one can have particles, and since the two metrics behave differently (with a single coupling term between them), particles in one of the spacetimes may appear to have negative mass when measured relative to the other spacetime. Thus, we have an antigravity effect.
(3)
The article by Blanchet and Heisenberg
"Dark matter via (massive) bi-gravity":
In this 2015 article, the two authors focus on Milgrom’s MOND theory, where gravity transitions from a 1/r² law when the gravitational field remains below a threshold value, to a 1/r law beyond that. They then consider two species of dark matter, each associated with its own metric. These two “sectors” are supposed to be linked by a force field. The emphasis is on the desire to avoid the “ghosts” inherent in “massive gravity” theories (with massive gravitons). Various schemes are considered.
Ultimately, the authors suggest a scheme for the possible existence of a “ghost-free” model that could (conditionally!) account for the modified gravity of Mordechai Milgrom, mentioned above, at galactic scales.
Page 2, for these authors, “bimetric theories” have been widely developed as an extension of the Fierz-Pauli model (nothing to do with the bimetric of the Janus model!).
They recall: “The first models of bigravity were tainted by the phenomenon of ‘ghosts,’ ‘phantom solutions,’ and thus could not qualify as viable theories.” As in de Rham’s paper and many others, the analysis focuses on constructing a “Lagrangian,” at the cost of numerous assumptions. The article refers to prior work (de Rham, Heisenberg, 2014–2015). An “effective metric” is introduced.
The authors suggest possible forms of this interaction and mention a “mini-superspace of the new kinetic term” (?...). Then arises the question of whether this mini-superspace will or will not be subject to “ghost instabilities” (“The problem is that we have too many kinetic terms” (...).
Section VI: “Thus, the dark matter model proposed in reference (45) is not viable.” (See an article by Bernard and Blanchet, presented on ArXiv in 2014). The Lagrangian (31) then represents a proposal for “dipolar dark matter.”
In this model, three matter densities:
b for baryons, ordinary matter, and
g and f for two species of dark matter. In this expression, numerous hypothetical mathematical objects, with the central object being a field A subscript mu. It is this field that ensures the coupling between the different metrics.
I quote, page 6, the conclusions of the article:
VII Conclusions:
We explored the possible candidates for relativistic dark matter models in bimetric extensions of General Relativity, that hopefully will provide modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) at galactic scales while giving rise to an expansion at cosmological scales. A promising road comes from the ghost-free constructions of dRGT massive gravity [15, 16] where the interactions between two metrics are tuned in a way that the Boulware-Deser ghost remains absent. Furthermore, the important studies of possible consistent couplings to matter fields [52–54] are beneficial to us, since for the model to work, we have to consider two different species of dark matter particles that couple separately to the two metrics while an additional internal vector field couples minimally to an effective metric built out of the two. The vector field links together the two sectors of the dark matter particles and plays a crucial role for gravitational polarization and MOND [45, 46]. For the ghost absence the question of allowed kinetic interactions is mandatory. We showed that the kinetic Lagrangian containing three kinetic terms immediately gives rise to the introduction of the ghost and we therefore concluded that only two kinetic terms are allowed.
In a future work [55], we will study in detail the covariant equations of motion of the new model, derive the non-relativistic limit and see if the polarization mechanism for dark matter works in the same way as in the originally proposed model. We will investigate in detail the possible danger of ghostly interactions in the matter sector and constrain further the model. We intend also to check if the parametrized post-Newtonian parameters are close to the ones of GR in the solar system, and to investigate the cosmological solutions in first order perturbations.
Translation:
We explored possible candidates for relativistic dark matter models in bimetric extensions of General Relativity, which, we hope, will yield modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) at galactic scales while producing expansion at cosmological scales. A promising path comes from the ghost-free constructions of dRGT massive gravity [15, 16], where interactions between the two metrics are tuned so that the Boulware-Deser ghost remains absent. Furthermore, important studies of possible consistent couplings to matter fields [52–54] are beneficial to us, since for the model to work, we must consider two different species of dark matter particles, each coupling separately to one metric, while an additional internal vector field couples minimally to an effective metric constructed from the two. The vector field links the two dark matter sectors and plays a crucial role in gravitational polarization and MOND [45, 46]. For the absence of ghost, the question of allowed kinetic interactions is mandatory. We showed that a kinetic Lagrangian containing three kinetic terms immediately leads to the emergence of ghosts, and thus we concluded that only two kinetic terms are allowed.
In future work [55], we will study in detail the covariant equations of motion of the new model, derive the non-relativistic limit, and see if the dark matter polarization mechanism works the same way as in the originally proposed model. We will investigate in detail the possible danger of ghostly interactions in the matter sector and further constrain the model. We also intend to check whether the parametrized post-Newtonian parameters are close to those of GR in the solar system, and to investigate cosmological solutions in first-order perturbations.
In short, this is only “leads” (a word one often hears). Work done and to be done. Problems are raised, but not resolved. Everything rests on a mysterious field that Blanchet calls the “gravivector” in the La Recherche article, whose mediating particle would be a “graviphoton.” As usual, so-called novelties reduce to the creation of... new words. Nevertheless, in this article, as in the others cited, it is impossible to link to the sentences:
... everything behaves as if there were two different ways of measuring distances—two spacetimes or two “metrics.” In each spacetime, one can have particles, and since the two metrics behave differently (with a single coupling term between them), particles in one of the spacetimes may appear to have negative mass when measured relative to the other spacetime. Thus, we have an antigravity effect.
which, in fact, refer to my Janus model.
No matter how one approaches this issue, it seems to reflect a rather peculiar form of intellectual honesty.
But nature will decide. There will be no gravivector field, no graviphotons, and this incoherent, content-free work, a mere assembly of words, will join string theory in the trash bins of science.
(4)
What the Price article says:
"Negative masses may be a good distraction"
(...)
"Negative masses may be unphysical, but they can lead to interesting predictions." He then reiterates the distinction introduced by Hermann Bondi in his 1957 article, introducing the concepts of “active gravitational mass” and “passive gravitational mass” (according to the equivalence principle, they are identical). He then describes an image, depicting the behavior of negative masses in a gravitational field, describing a child holding a balloon by a string and “criticizing”: “There is a difference between negative mass and the balloon, in that if the string breaks, the balloon accelerates upward, while the negative mass falls downward. Things become different if we replace the child, responsible for this downward pull, with a positive-mass particle.” By playing with “these upward-pulling forces” and “these downward-pulling forces,” Price proposes a “gravitational glider” where the resultant force is zero.
This article does not deserve the label of scientific paper. One does not analyze the problem of negative mass using balloons and strings. In the Einsteinian model, there is a field equation. By linearizing it using a double approximation—treating a portion of spacetime weakly curved and where velocities are small compared to light speed—the field equation identifies with Poisson’s equation. The approximation simultaneously allows linearization of the geodesic equations. The interaction scheme emerges, which is simply Newton’s law, 1/r². But when Milne attempts to introduce a mixture of positive and negative masses, he arrives at the laws:
- Positive masses attract everything
- Negative masses attract everything
This immediately produces the intractable Runaway paradox: If two masses of opposite signs are brought together, the positive mass flees, uniformly accelerated, pursued by the negative mass. Both are in uniform acceleration. But energy is conserved (...), since the 1/2 mV² of the negative mass is... negative.
To escape this impasse, one must consider a profound paradigm shift. In General Relativity, the universe is a hypersurface with a single metric, generating a unique system of geodesics, the paths followed by particles. Mathematically, it is a four-dimensional manifold equipped with a Riemannian metric.
In the Janus model, we introduce two metrics associated with a single manifold, hence the confusion with the bimetric of massive gravitons. It has nothing to do with that. These two metrics are then solutions of the pair of field equations indicated above. Then, the Newtonian approximation yields a drastically different scheme:
- Like-signed masses attract according to Newton’s law
Opposite charges repel each other, according to "anti-Newton"
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