The Field Beneath Everything:

Is a Rock Trapped Light?

Thomas Lee Abshier, ND · Nov 14, 2026

An essay prompted by the MSN video “The field beneath everything: how physics keeps finding motion where it expected matter.”

The question under the question

The video I watched asks a question I have carried for most of my life: the closer we look at the world, the less stuff we find. We expect to arrive at little hard pieces, and instead we find motion: fields vibrating, circulating and interacting. So how does motion become a rock?

The video’s answer, built up across 2,600 years of history, is that matter may be energy moving in a field that has closed back on itself, a vortex ring or torus. Light is a wave in the field running free; a particle is the same kind of wave caught in a loop. I want to walk through that history, separate what is established from what is suggestive, correct a few places where the video simplifies too far, and then add a possibility of my own that I am still working through: that the photon itself may have a toroidal shape.

Two magic stones and the problem of action at a distance

The story begins with two stones known to the Greeks of Thales’ time, around 600 BC. The lodestone, a dark iron ore, pulls on iron. Amber, fossilized tree resin, attracts chaff and lint after it has been rubbed. Neither touches what it moves. That is the first great puzzle at the root of physics: how can one thing act on another across empty space?

The ancients answered with the analogies they had. Thales is reported to have said the magnet has a soul, since it moves iron, and only living things initiate motion. Later thinkers reached for the other invisible thing that acts at a distance: smell. In the effluence theories (Empedocles’ pores-and-emanations idea, later developed by the atomists and set out by Lucretius) the stone throws off streams of fine particles. Those particles fit the pores of iron but not those of wood, and so they move one and pass by the other. The video’s picture of key-shaped particles fitting matching holes is a fair cartoon of that tradition.

A third analogy was suction. Plato’s Timaeus groups the cupping glass, the attraction of amber and the pull of the Heraclean stone together, and argues that none of them is a true attraction. There is no void, he says, so the motion of one body shoves the surrounding medium around in a circle until something is pushed toward the stone. (The video places this a few hundred years after the effluence theories. In fact Plato wrote before Lucretius, and the two ideas ran side by side.) In China the compass needle was understood in terms of qi, the breath or vital energy of the earth flowing through the land.

What strikes me is that every one of these pictures is an attempt to make the invisible influence mechanical: something has to go from here to there. That instinct never left physics. It only became more precise.

Gilbert: the experiment enters

In 1600 William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth I, published De Magnete. Gilbert distrusted the inherited stories and tested them. He found that magnetic force passes undiminished through paper, glass, water and other materials placed in its path, and cannot be blown aside. He carved a lodestone into a sphere, his terrella or “little earth,” and showed that a small compass moved over it behaved as compasses do over the earth. His conclusion was that the earth itself is a great magnet. He described the region around a magnet where its influence reaches as an orbis virtutis, an orb of virtue: a structured sphere of power with the same form whether the magnet is a pebble or a planet.

Amber behaved differently. Its attraction was hindered by moisture and by material placed in the way, and it affected all sorts of light bodies, not just iron. Gilbert concluded that this was a different force and coined the Latin electricus, “like amber” (from the Greek elektron). He still thought of the electric influence as a material effluvium, while he treated magnetism as a formal power of the body, not an emission. So at the start of modern science we had two invisible forces, and they seemed to be different kinds of thing.

Gray and the electric fluid

In 1729 Stephen Gray found that the electric “virtue” could be conducted. Rubbing a glass tube, he noticed that the cork in its end also attracted feathers. He extended the effect down a thread to an ivory ball, and eventually over hundreds of feet of thread supported on silk, which he found did not carry the effect away. Some materials conduct and some insulate.

An emanation that runs along a wire does not behave like a smell, so a new analogy took over: electricity as a weightless fluid that flows like water in a pipe. Du Fay proposed two fluids (vitreous and resinous), and Franklin in the 1740s argued for one fluid whose excess or deficit makes positive or negative charge. Magnetism remained a shape, a pattern of force around a body. Electricity became a flow.

Ørsted and Faraday: two forces become one family

In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted, a Danish professor, saw a compass needle deflect when he connected a wire near it to a battery. An electric current makes magnetism, and the magnetic force circles around the wire rather than pointing toward or away from it. That circling pattern is the first appearance of the vortex shape in this story.

Michael Faraday took the next step. In 1831, after a decade of related experiments, he showed the reverse: moving a magnet near a coil makes a current flow in the coil, with no battery and no contact. A changing magnetic influence creates an electric one. Faraday pictured both influences as lines of force filling the space around magnets and charges, real physical structures in space rather than mathematical conveniences. The video says that Faraday’s result proved the electric force must be a field because the magnetic force is. That compresses the history, but the direction is right: after Faraday, electricity and magnetism were no longer a substance and a shape. They were two aspects of one structured condition of space.

That left a sharp question. When I move a magnet, does a distant compass feel it instantly, or does the change travel outward through space and take time to arrive?

Maxwell’s machine

James Clerk Maxwell set out to answer it, and in 1861–62 (On Physical Lines of Force) he built one of the most remarkable mechanical models in the history of science. He imagined space filled with tiny rotating cells, molecular vortices, whose spin is the magnetic field. Neighboring vortices touching each other would grind against each other, since adjacent gears turning the same way rub at their contact. So Maxwell placed small “idle wheels” between them, like ball bearings, which let every vortex turn the same way. The motion of those idle particles was the electric current. Spin one vortex, and the rotation passes through the bearings to the next, and the next: a disturbance travels through the medium as a wave.

The video explains well how Maxwell then got the speed of that wave. The speed of a wave in any medium depends on two properties: how stiff the medium is (how hard it springs back) and how heavy it is (how much it resists being set in motion). Speed equals the square root of stiffness divided by density. Maxwell identified the “heaviness” with the inertia of the spinning vortices. That inertia shows up in the laboratory as inductance: current in a circuit cannot start or stop instantly, because the magnetic field it builds resists change. The stiffness was the medium’s elastic resistance to electric displacement, the same springiness you feel pushing two charged balloons together. One small correction: in Maxwell’s model the elasticity belonged to the vortex cells themselves, which deform under electric stress, not to the ball bearings as the video says. The bearings carried the current.

Both numbers were already known from measurements of electrical units (Weber and Kohlrausch had measured their ratio in 1856). When Maxwell put them into the wave formula, the speed that came out was within the experimental error of the measured speed of light. He wrote that we can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists of undulations in the same medium that causes electric and magnetic phenomena. In 1865 (A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field) he dropped the gears and bearings, kept the equations, and gave the unified thing its name: the electromagnetic field.

In 1887–88 Heinrich Hertz confirmed it. A spark across one gap made a spark jump across a separate, unconnected gap across the room. A rapid movement of charge disturbs the field, the disturbance travels at the speed of light, and when it reaches the second loop of metal it drives charge across the gap. Light, radio and every electromagnetic wave are ripples in one field.

Helmholtz, Kelvin and the vortex atom

While Maxwell was building his equations, Hermann von Helmholtz proved in 1858 something remarkable about vortices in an ideal, frictionless fluid: a vortex line cannot be created or destroyed by the fluid’s own motion, it moves with the fluid, and a vortex closed into a ring persists. A smoke ring is the everyday example. It holds its shape, carries momentum, and resists being pushed, because its circulating motion drags the surrounding fluid along with it. Two rings interact: they can attract, repel or leapfrog depending on their relative sense of rotation. When rings collide they can reconnect and split into smaller rings while the total circulation is kept.

William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, a friend of Maxwell, saw Peter Guthrie Tait’s smoke-ring demonstrations and in 1867 proposed the vortex atom: atoms are not little hard balls but permanent knotted vortex rings in the ether. Different knots would be different elements. Tait’s attempt to tabulate the possible knots became the foundation of mathematical knot theory.

The vortex atom was abandoned by the end of the century. Nobody could show that such rings were stable enough, or derive the spectral lines of the elements or the pattern of atomic masses from them. The idea was not wrong in spirit (the video is right that it was ahead of its time), but no one had the tools to carry it through. It is worth remembering that Kelvin’s rings were in a fluid ether, not specifically in Maxwell’s field. The video merges the two.

The toroidal electron

What would a vortex in the electromagnetic field look like? A light wave carries electric and magnetic fields at right angles to each other and to its direction of travel. Bend that wave around so it chases its own tail, and the energy circulates without end. The magnetic field now circulates around the inside of the tube and loops through the center and around the outside, like the field of a bar magnet. If the geometry is right, a static electric field points inward or outward everywhere: from far away, that looks like a charge. Reverse the sense of circulation and you reverse the sign of the charge.

This line of thought has a longer history than the video suggests. A. L. Parson proposed a ring-shaped “magneton” electron in 1915, and Arthur Compton entertained a ring electron around 1919. In 1930 Schrödinger found that Dirac’s equation implies a trembling motion of the electron at the speed of light (Zitterbewegung), which many people since, David Hestenes among them, have read as a sign of light-speed circulation inside the electron. In 1997 John Williamson and Martin van der Mark published “Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology?”, which proposed that the electron is a single wavelength of light confined in a doubly looped torus.

The video says this model reproduces “all the properties of an electron” from shape alone. That claim goes too far, and the distinction matters. As I understand their paper:

• Spin one-half comes out naturally. The double loop means the field pattern must go around twice to return to its starting state, which is the hallmark of a spin-½ object.
• Charge comes out close to the elementary charge, not exactly. Their own estimate fell short by roughly nine percent, and later workers have tried to close that gap.
• Mass is not derived. It is put in. The model chooses the trapped photon’s wavelength to equal the electron’s Compton wavelength, and the mass follows from that choice by E = mc². Why light should be trapped at that wavelength and no other is exactly the question a true theory of the electron would have to answer.
• The magnetic moment comes out approximately right, including an estimate of the small anomalous part.

It is a serious and beautiful semi-classical model. It does not yet reproduce the full quantum behavior of the electron or its weak interactions, and it has not been accepted by mainstream physics. Its real contribution is showing how much of what we call a “particle” can come out of a field shape.

The video’s claim about what E = mc² means is sound. Picture light bouncing inside a box of perfect mirrors. The box with the light in it is harder to accelerate than the empty box, by exactly the trapped energy divided by c². Confined energy has inertia. If an electron is light confined in a loop, its mass is the inertia of that confinement. That much is standard relativity, not speculation.

What we found when we looked inside matter

The experimental record that the video assembles is largely correct, and it points the same way.

The atom is almost entirely empty. Rutherford’s gold-foil experiments (1909–1911) showed that nearly all of an atom’s mass sits in a nucleus about one hundred-thousandth the atom’s width. By volume the atom is far emptier than the video’s “99.99999%”. The nucleus fills only about a millionth of a billionth of the space.

The electron is a tiny magnet. In 1922 Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach sent silver atoms through a non-uniform magnetic field. The beam split cleanly in two rather than spreading out. Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit explained it in 1925 as electron spin. The usual caution applies: if the electron were literally a small spinning ball, its surface would have to move faster than light to produce the observed magnetism, which is why textbooks call spin “intrinsic” and stop there. A circulating-field model is one attempt to say what that intrinsic spin actually is. Permanent magnets are, as the video says, vast numbers of electron spins held in alignment (by a quantum effect called exchange), so that their tiny fields add up to one you can feel.

Most of the mass of ordinary matter is field energy. The quarks inside a proton contribute only about one percent of its mass through their own rest masses. The other ninety-nine percent is the energy of the quarks’ motion and of the gluon field that binds them. Since protons and neutrons make up nearly all the mass of a rock, it is fair to say that the weight in your hand is mostly energy of motion in a field.

Light becomes matter and matter becomes light. Carl Anderson discovered the positron in 1932, and in 1933 Blackett and Occhialini photographed electron–positron pairs created by gamma rays near atomic nuclei. The reverse happens too: an electron and positron annihilate into gamma rays (usually two of them, each carrying 511 thousand electron-volts). As the physicist quoted in the video says, gamma rays are just light at a frequency we cannot see. Charge and mass appear and disappear in pairs, and the energy goes back into the field as a free wave. If an electron is trapped light, annihilation is the trap coming undone.

The strong force forms tubes. When we try to pull quarks apart, the field between them does not spread out as an electric field does. It squeezes into a narrow tube of roughly constant energy per unit length. Pull far enough and the tube snaps, and the energy stored in it becomes a new quark–antiquark pair, one at each broken end, so a lone quark never comes out. The vortex language here is not just poetry. One leading picture of confinement (the “dual superconductor” picture) explicitly compares these flux tubes to the magnetic vortex lines that thread a superconductor.

Where the video overreaches

I think the video’s direction is right, and I share its conviction. But since this site is meant to be a careful account of physics, I want to state its weak points plainly.

• “A rock is trapped light” is a thesis, not a finding. What experiment has established is that most of the mass of ordinary matter is field energy in motion, and that light and matter convert into each other. Whether the electron itself is a looped photon is an open proposal. In the Standard Model the electron’s mass comes from its coupling to the Higgs field, not from confinement.
• “Every time it took the shape of a vortex” is too strong. The magnetic field around a current circles, flux tubes appear in the strong force, and toroidal electron models exist. But the nucleus, the proton and the atom were not found to be vortex rings. The torus is a recurring and promising shape, not a demonstrated universal one.
• The toroidal electron does not yet derive the electron’s mass. It derives spin, approximate charge and approximate magnetic moment once the size is supplied.
• Some of the history is compressed or reordered, as noted above: Plato’s suction theory and the effluence theories, the role of Maxwell’s ball bearings, Kelvin’s ether as distinct from Maxwell’s field.

None of these points undermines the central observation. They only mark where observation ends and proposal begins.

A further possibility: the photon itself as a torus

Watching the video, I asked a question it never raises. The toroidal electron starts with a photon and bends it into a loop. But what shape is the photon to begin with?

In the physics I have been developing (Conscious Point Physics, set out at the Hyperphysics site), space is not empty. It is filled with a sea of paired positive and negative charges, dipoles. A charge moving through that sea disturbs it in two ways. It pulls the members of the nearby pairs apart (what I call DP-separation, the electric effect), and it bends the pairs into arcs around its line of travel (DP-arcs, the magnetic effect). Both disturbances radiate outward from the axis along which the charge is moving. In my picture the photon is not a structureless ripple. It involves charge in motion, so it carries that disturbance pattern with it. The question is what shape that pattern takes.

Conventional electrodynamics gives a useful hint. Oliver Heaviside showed in 1888 that the electric field of a fast-moving charge is not a sphere. It flattens into a disk at right angles to the direction of motion, more sharply the closer the speed comes to that of light. Around the line of travel the magnetic field forms closed circles. So the field of a charge moving near light speed is a stack of magnetic rings wrapped around the axis, strongest near the axis and fading outward, squeezed into a thin region front and back: an envelope shaped very much like a doughnut threaded by the line of motion.

There is also experimental support for the idea that light can be toroidal. In 1996 Hellwarth and Nouchi found exact solutions of Maxwell’s equations, nicknamed “flying doughnuts,” in which a pulse of light travels at light speed with its magnetic field circling through the body of a torus and its electric field running over its surface. In 2022 a group at Southampton reported generating such toroidal pulses in the optical and terahertz ranges (Zdagkas and colleagues, Nature Photonics). These are classical pulses made of many photons, not single photons, so they do not settle the question. But they show that a toroidal configuration of light is something nature permits and the laboratory can make.

If the photon itself has a toroidal structure, the picture changes in an interesting way. The electron in the Williamson–van der Mark model would then be not a plain wave rolled into a ring, but a torus that has itself been wound into a torus, which is a self-confined circulation of a circulation. I do not yet know whether that layering helps. In particular I do not know whether it can supply the missing ingredient, a reason for the trapped light to settle at one size, the size that gives the electron its mass. Several questions have to be answered before this is more than a suggestive image:

• Does the disturbance around a moving charge actually close on itself into a true torus, or is it a set of open rings around a line, which only looks toroidal?
• What sets the size of the photon’s torus, and does it scale with wavelength as it must?
• How do polarization and the photon’s spin of one come out of the shape?
• How does a photon involve charge in motion while remaining electrically neutral overall? (A balanced pair of opposite charges is the obvious candidate.)

I am working on these questions now, and I will report what I find. I put the idea forward as a possibility worth testing, not a conclusion.

Conclusion

For 2,600 years the question has been the same: what is the thing that acts across space, and what is the thing that is acted on? The answers have moved from souls, to scents, to suction, to fluids, to fields, to the conviction that the thing acted on is made of the same field that does the acting. Experiment has steadily confirmed one part of this. Inside matter we find energy in motion, and light and matter turn into each other. Whether that motion always takes the form of a closed vortex is the open part. The video calls the torus the best analogy yet. I agree, and I would add one more step to look into: the light that is trapped may already be shaped like a ring.

Sources and notes

• MSN video, “The field beneath everything: how physics keeps finding motion where it expected matter” (the essay’s prompt).
• W. Gilbert, De Magnete (1600).
• J. C. Maxwell, “On Physical Lines of Force,” Philosophical Magazine (1861–62); “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. (1865).
• H. Helmholtz, on vortex motion in ideal fluids (1858); W. Thomson (Lord Kelvin), “On Vortex Atoms” (1867).
• J. G. Williamson and M. B. van der Mark, “Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology?” Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie 22(2), 133–160 (1997).
• R. W. Hellwarth and P. Nouchi, “Focused one-cycle electromagnetic pulses,” Physical Review E 54, 889 (1996).
• A. Zdagkas et al., “Observation of toroidal pulses of light,” Nature Photonics 16, 523–528 (2022).
• O. Heaviside, on the electromagnetic field of a moving charge (1888–89).
• The experimental history (Rutherford, Stern–Gerlach, Anderson, Blackett–Occhialini, quark confinement and the origin of nucleon mass) follows the standard textbook record.

A note on the limits of these sources. My account of the history and the experiments relies on the standard scientific record. The toroidal electron and the toroidal photon remain outside the mainstream, and I have tried to report what their proponents claim, what they have actually shown, and where the gaps are. I have not checked every primary historical text, so minor details of the early history may vary between sources.