Friends, family and everyone else. Welcome to my website. I am completely responsible for all its content. As if some physics professional would take credit for this heresy! First, a few words about me, the author. I was born on my father’s birthday, and named after him. My nom de plume is Salvatore Valentino II. These were names on his birth certificate, but his name was changed when he was a child. That’s my secret identity, and that’s all I have to say. You wouldn’t believe the rest if I told you, so I won’t. Besides, I want the discussion to be about my theory, not my back pages. And they are harder to believe than the possibility that a century old staple of physics is about to be toppled. Trust me. Let’s just say that there is a potential violation of causality involved. It’s either that, or an enormous amount of serendipity. The theory is based on pure math, logic and identities. It is simple in comparison.

I will provide the backstory of the theory, however. It starts in the 50’s, when I was in grade school. One of my favorite pastimes was reading from my father’s night school text books. I especially enjoyed his CRC Handbook of Tables for Physics and Chemistry. Not the actual tables, but the Appendix, which was a Glossary of many mathematical terms (Yeah, I was THAT kid). One which really caught my attention was the Trigonometric Hexagon. I did not know it at the time, but this was my first introduction to the fundamental differential equation of special relativity. Most physicists will not know what I am talking about, because for them special relativity is derived from two assumptions based on observation. To them, math is not physics. When I got to high school, it bothered me that relativity was so inscrutable. It did not make sense, but the “experts” said it wasn’t supposed to make sense. So, I tabled my efforts to understand it. In college, I was able to understand it, but it still didn’t make sense. I resolved to find a way to interpret it that would be clearer. Still no success, and then I took Dr. Leary’s advice, and turned on, tuned in and dropped out.

Many years later, a friend loaned me his copy of “The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics”. Here were hundreds of pages of material like the Appendix I used to enjoy reading. I rediscovered the differential equation that defined the trigonometric hexagon, except in the Encyclopedia it was used to define a spiral on the globe. A very special spiral it was. This curve, called a loxodrome, is known to all sailors as a constant-compass course. It is the curve that results from plotting a straight, rhumb, line from a Mercator Projection onto the surface of the sphere. This is the map that, for 4 centuries, was the primary tool of navigation, until the modern inventions of radar and GPS. All loxodrome spirals with tilt angles to the meridian of less than 90 degrees stretch from one pole to the other. But depending on the tilt angle, the arclength of the spiral varied according to the secant of the tilt angle.

Unlike normal spherical triangles, which have great circle arcs for sides, the triangles formed by a section of a loxodrome, and sections of meridians and parallels were right triangles, and the parallel arcs and meridian arcs were sine and cosine projections of the loxodrome arc. So, although there is only 1 shortest distance between the poles, a meridian, the distance along a tilted loxodrome could be anything. So if a unit of measure is a loxodrome spiral, the separation between the poles had to shrink if a fixed arclength unit were tilted. As it turned out, the relationship between the length and the tilt angle was the same as the relationship between Einstein’s time dilated units and length contracted units and the parametric angle that defines relative velocity. Here was a geometric model that behaved exactly like units in special relativity, and made sense.

Some years later, when I decided that I wanted to finish my degree before the end of the century, I wrote a Java program, as an extracurricular activity, which animated this spiral, and allowed the user to interactively change its appearance, simulating the effect of relative velocity. Although it worked reasonably well for a first attempt, I had a hard time including the reciprocal relationship required by switching frames of reference. So, it was back to the drawing board. But now that I had a target, I continued to collect information from hundreds of sources. Gradually, I built up a bigger, better picture. I came to realize that relativity was hard to understand because it is based on false assumptions. It would not be enough to merely create a better graphics program. The whole thing was rotten to the core. This made me very unpopular with the relativity cult. I realized that to argue against relativity, Einstein’s relativity, I would have to understand it at a nuts and bolts level. I started with Einstein’s own books, and other texts. I finally realized that Einstein had inadvertently extended principles of Newtonian physics into velocity regions where they were no longer valid. And to cover up this error, he was forced to invent the illusions of time dilation and length contraction. This did not improve my popularity with the cult.

Over time, I had developed a pretty coherent picture based on math, only to be told, “So what?”, “Math isn’t physics.” Or some other variation of the “If it works, don’t fix it” syndrome. I found myself arguing with both camps, the ones who agreed that the properties of time dilation and length contraction were illusions and their opposites who swore that they were physical, but somehow not contradictory. I decided I had to look harder. One of the features of a new theory, aside from the fact that it must explain everything that the old theory explained, is that the new theory explains some things that cannot be explained by the old theory. Since my version produced all the same results, it wasn’t clear that I would find any new behaviors. In reviewing my work, I realized that the differential equation that had started the quest a lifetime ago actually was a common explanation for all existing features of special relativity. And as I explored deeper, I found that this diffeq also explained things that were merely assumptions in the Einstein Interpretation. I could mathematically explain why there was an apparent ultimate speed limit, and at the same time explain why it was not a true ultimate limit. I found an explanation for why relativistic momentum is different from Newtonian momentum, and what is the source of the myth of relativistic mass, other than Einstein’s speculation that “perhaps momentum is not proportional to velocity.”

Now, I am an old man. I have spent most of my life researching this theory, longer than most of the skeptics have had careers. And their careers were spent mostly following their employers’ agendas, so the fact that they have degrees in physics doesn’t automatically make them more qualified on the subject of relativity. Most of them, like Einstein, are not mathematicians. I collected my writings on the subject here, even though it is still an unedited work in progress. Better to have published a rough draft than to wait too long to publish something that is perfect. It is my deepest wish that others will carry on my work. To me it is more than philosophy to be found correct. I believe that the narrow-minded rules of conventional physics stand in the way of the advancement of science. If the speed of light is not the ultimate speed limit as claimed, then the possibility of FTL travel is still an open question. Modern physics is gaga over the Alcubierre drive, which is about as likely as finding a planet full of unobtainium. More sinister is the possibility that all such research is suppressed because a power technology that could generate FTL velocities could just as easily be bolted to the ground and used to generate all the power that any country on Earth could possibly need until the end of time. There is a huge amount of money to be lost by corporations that are getting richer every day as they destroy our home. And FTL flight opens that last frontier, so governments would lose that one element of control that they currently possess, that if you don’t like it here, there is nowhere to go. Even if I am totally correct, it might take another century to find the combination of design and materials that can make it happen. If we listen to crackpot mainstream scientists, we will never even take the first baby step.

Salvatore Valentino II