The idea that the presence of matter in the universe gives meaning to position and velocity was first added to the scientific cannon by Mach. The principle in its simplest form states that motion should be measured against the background of the fixed stars. This is not an easy thing to do for motion in a straight line, but for motion involving rotation, it gives an absolute form of measurement. Some experiments such as Foucault's pendulum show that motion does not occur relative to the earth's surface because they reveal the rotation of the earth. (Foucault suspended a pendulum from a great height and set it in motion. He found that the direction the pendulums motion slowly rotated as the earth turned beneath it.) Einstein takes Mach's principle as one of the basic tenants of the General Theory of Relativity and modern cosmology now believes that the inertia of a mass depends on the total amount of matter in the universe.
Stasis theory is similar to Mach's principle, but different from it in that stasis theory is a natural part of the theory of magnetism. Electric currents in wires generate magnetic fields because of the movement of electrons within the wire. Every moving charge generates a magnetic field, but why. According to Einstein, it is because we observe the moving electric field of the electron. In other words it is the relative motion of the electrons to the observer who measures the magnetic field which is responsible for the magnetic field. I do not think this gives us an adequate explanation of the working of many electric machines in common use. In fact I am sure that the laws of electricity and magnetism require a concept of absolute motion.
Consider a universe which contains just two charges, one stationary and the other moving. The moving charge will be surrounded by a magnetic field given by the equation
Now it seems unlikely that the other charge should be stationary, so we will allow it move and take a more realistic view of the universe. (If one can take a realistic view of a hypothetical universe which contains nothing except two charges) The fact of the matter is that it is quite meaningless to measure the velocity in any way other than as a relative velocity of the one charge relative to the other. This gives us exactly the same value as when we imagined the other charge to be stationary.
Now lets imagine adding charges to our universe, first one, then another and so on until we have a good copy of the real universe. Lets consider the case where we have a total of three charges and we are looking at the magnetic field surrounding one charge. How are we to calculate the strength of the magnetic field. If it did not make any difference how far away from our charge that a single charge was, it seems unlikely that the magnetic field will double in strength if we introduce a third charge to our hypothetical universe. This is born out by our experience with magnets where the strength of magnet does not change when we take it away from the earth in an aeroplane or take it down a mine into the earth. The strength of a magnet is independent on the proximity of massive bodies.
What does alter as we introduce a third charge is that we no longer have a simple way of finding the velocity to use in the equation. Our charge now has a relative velocity with respect to each of the other charges, which do we use? Can we take an average? Should we find the centre of gravity of the three charges and measure the relative velocity from that. The second question can be answered quite simply by considering the initial case when we had only two charges. If we had measured the velocity from the centre of gravity of the two charges, the result would have been half what it should have been and the equation would have given the wrong answer. So we must leave the charge whose magnetic field we are considering out of any averaging process.
To answer the question of taking an average, we first need to understand that the simple way of finding an average of adding things together and dividing by the number of things is not the only way of finding an average. The question arises as to what happens if one of the other charges is near by and the other a long way off. Surely the velocity relative to the nearer charge must be more important that the velocity relative to the distant charge. We would like to think that the magnetic field produced by an electromagnet depends only on the velocity of the electrons within its wires. We would get quite alarmed if taking it on a aeroplane altered its strength because of it increased velocity relative to the earth. This is a bad example because any effects would cancel out and in any case the electrons are moving very fast compared with the aeroplane, but the principle is very sound. Stasis theory makes the bold assumption that the magnetic field is generated by the relative movement of the electric fields of the charges. It is then appropriate to take into account the various relative velocities of our charge with respect to the other charges according to the relative strengths of their electric fields in the vicinity of our charge. We then calculate a kind of average called a weighted average.
Now it could be argued that the energy densities interact in producing the magnetic field and that we should be raising the distance to the power four, rather than simply squaring it. If stasis did depend on such an inverse fourth power relationship, we would find that bodies with a mass of the order a kilogram or so created would exert greater influence than a nearby planet. An inverse square relationship seems best able to fit the known behaviour of nature. We can now extend our analysis to four five and more charges. We need to use a sigma notation to denote the large number of terms which we have to add. The velocity to be used is
to be the velocity of the i th charge as measured by the observer and we give the answer the special name stasis.
Stasis is dependent on an inverse square law just as gravity also depends on the inverse square law. There is however a difference in that when we are integrating the effects of gravity, we are dealing with a vector and we have to take direction into account, but there is enough similarity so that we can in general assume that stasis is influenced by the presence of massive bodies such as planets, moons and stars, according to the relative influence of their gravity at a point. This enables us to look at a situation such as the interior of an orbiting space station. Within the space station, the station has no measurable gravitational pull on its inhabitants and they appear to float around weightlessly. However, both the space station and its occupants are in circular motion about the earth and are accelerating toward the earth under the action of the earth's gravity. This means that the earth dominates stasis within the space station.
We can map out space in the region of the solar system and find that stasis is the velocity of the sun throughout most of this region. As we approach a planet, we find that it creates its own region of stasis and within this, its moons can create their regions of stasis. moving from the earth to the moon, an Apollo space craft moved through regions of varying stasis. The Mars explorer spent most of its time travelling through the sun's stasis as it travelled between the earth and Mars.
Stasis is the background zero velocity which we must measure velocities against when calculating magnetic fields. Consequently it plays an important part in the transmission of light and in a vacuum, light travels at a speed of 299792458 metres per second relative to stasis.