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| experimental predictions, but of its very logic. Many of its predictions, such as the slowing of time | experimental predictions, but of its very logic. Many of its predictions, such as the slowing of time | ||
Revision as of 20:48, 5 August 2007
Herbert Dingle (1890–1978) was an English astronomer and president of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is best-known for his claim to have found an inconsistency in the theory of special relativity.
Born in 1890, Dingle was educated at Plymouth Science, Art and Technical Schools and Imperial College, London. He was a member of the British government eclipse expeditions of 1927 and 1932; and became Professor of Natural Philosophy, Imperial College in 1938, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, University College London in 1946–1955 and President of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1951–1953. Appointed Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science in 1955, he died in 1978.
Originally a supporter of Einstein's work on the theory of relativity and an author of the textbook Relativity for All (1922), Dingle came to doubt its foundations after reading an account of the so-called twin paradox. According to this, a clock that moves relative to another will appear to run more slowly as judged by the stationary clock and inversely. Dingle claimed that Einstein's results were inconsistent with those worked out using a "commonsense" method. However, other experts — notably the astrophysicist Sir William H. McCrea — disagreed. The arguments between Dingle and McCrea in Nature are well-known A recent biographical sketch of McCrea has labeled these friendly but heated exchanges as "part of the legend of the early days of relativity", and Dingle's claim is no longer an active area of debate within the mainstream physics community.
References
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Dingle, H. (October 14 1967). "The Case against Special Relativity". Nature: 119.
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McCrea, W.H. (October 14 1967). "Why The Special Theory of Relativity is Correct". Nature: 122.
{{cite journal}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - Williams, Iwan (2003). McCartney, Mark and Whitaker, Andrew (ed.). Physicists of Ireland: Passion and Precision. IOP Publishing Ltd. pp. p. 252. ISBN 0750308664.
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Will, Clifford M. (2006). "Special Relativity: A Centenary Perspective". In T. Damour, O. Darrigol, B. Duplantier and V. Rivasseau (ed.). Einstein, 1905-2005: Poincaré Seminar 2005. Birkhäuser Basel.
Over the years, special relativity has been subjected to a series of tests, not of its experimental predictions, but of its very logic. Many of its predictions, such as the slowing of time on moving clocks, were deemed to be so strange, so beyond normal experience, that there had to be something wrong with the theory. The idea was to find "paradoxes", simple situations where the theory could be shown to be logically inconsistent. Of course, there are no paradoxes! To be sure, the idea of time dilation may be hard to understand or to swallow, but there is absolutely nothing paradoxical about it.
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- A Misunderstood Rebellion: The Twin-Paradox Controversy and Herbert Dingle's Vision Of Science by H. Chang, Studies In History and Philosophy of Science, Vol 24 (1993), pp 741-790.
External links
- "Science at the Crossroads" by Herbert Dingle.
- "Challenging Einstein's Special Relativity: Herbert Dingle — Science at the Crossroads" This article links two PDF files: The body and the appendices of Herbert Dingle's book "Science at the Crossroads".
- "Cosmology: Methodological Debates in the 1930s and 1940s"from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- "Symmetrical Experiments to Test the Clock Paradox (PDF file)" Published in Physics and Modern Topics in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering 1999.
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