Stanley Jeffers
Stanley Jeffers | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Residence | North York, Ontario, Canada |
| Nationality | English Canadian |
| Alma mater | Imperial College, University of London |
| Known for | Founding organiser of the Vigier Symposia; experimental tests of the B(3) field; critical assessment of consciousness-anomaly claims |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Experimental physics, optics, foundations of quantum mechanics |
| Institutions | Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Toronto |
Stanley Jeffers is an English-Canadian experimental physicist, Associate Professor (now retired) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University in Toronto. He is best known in this field not for a theory of his own but for having built the principal international forum in which heterodox interpretations of quantum mechanics are argued: he was the executive local organiser of the Vigier Symposia, and co-editor of the volumes that came out of them.
His position is an unusual one among the figures documented on this wiki, and worth stating plainly. Jeffers is a conventionally credentialed experimentalist who has taken heterodox claims seriously enough to organise conferences around them, edit their proceedings, and in several cases test them in the laboratory — while frequently reporting results that do not support the claim in question. He is at once a builder of the dissenting community's institutions and one of its more exacting critics.
Education and career
Jeffers took his B.Sc. in Physics with Special Honours (A.R.C.S.) at Imperial College, University of London, in 1963, and his Ph.D. (D.I.C.) in opto-electronics at the same institution in 1968. He spent his academic career in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University in Toronto, where he taught undergraduate courses including The Nature and Growth of Scientific Thought.
He is a member of the International Astronomical Union and has served as an associate editor of the World Scientific Series in Contemporary Chemical Physics.
The Vigier Symposia
Jeffers' most consequential contribution has been organisational. In August 1995 more than seventy physicists met at York University for a three-day symposium in honour of Jean-Pierre Vigier, the French physicist who, with Louis de Broglie, developed the causal and stochastic interpretations of quantum mechanics in opposition to the Copenhagen orthodoxy. The meeting arose from discussions between Jeffers and colleagues on the international organising committee, and Jeffers acted as executive local organiser.
That symposium became a series. The Vigier Symposia have since provided a recurring venue in which causal, stochastic and realist readings of quantum theory can be presented and criticised in a formal academic setting — a rarity for this material. Jeffers co-edited the resulting proceedings:
- The Present Status of the Quantum Theory of Light (1997), proceedings of the 1995 symposium in honour of Vigier
- Causality and Locality in Modern Physics (1998)
- Jean-Pierre Vigier and the Stochastic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2000), with Bo Lehnert, Nils Abramson and Leonid Chebotarev, published by Apeiron in Montreal
The B(3) field
The claim associated with Myron W Evans that a circularly polarised classical electromagnetic field carries a longitudinal, constant component — the B(3) field — was among the most disputed proposals in late twentieth-century electrodynamics. Jeffers was involved on both sides of it.
He was a co-author, with Evans, Jean-Pierre Vigier and S. Roy, of The Enigmatic Photon, volume 3, Theory and Practice of the B(3) Field. But he also undertook experimental checks of the proposal, and his review "The Status of the Experimental Evidence for the B(3) Field" (1997) is a deliberately sober assessment: it surveys the experimental evidence for the proposed longitudinal component and outlines the experiments that might provide more convincing evidence — the clear implication being that what existed at the time did not.
Related to this, Jeffers analysed interference and diffraction using Maxwell's equations, obtaining amplitude, phase and Poynting-vector spatial distributions for a range of geometries, and used that analysis to refute the claim that a pulsed microwave double-slit experiment might challenge complementarity.
Quantum realism and the Popper experiment
With Geoffrey Hunter he presented "Realism and the Realized Popper Experiment" at the Fourth Vigier Symposium in Paris in 2003, addressing Karl Popper's proposed experiment on entangled particles — designed by Popper to test whether quantum mechanics could be given a realist reading — and what its eventual laboratory realisation does and does not establish.
Claims of anomalous effects and consciousness
Jeffers has also worked on the boundary between physics and parapsychology, and here his conclusions are consistently sceptical. "Physics and Claims for Anomalous Effects Related to Consciousness" (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2003) reviews the physical claims made for consciousness-related anomalies. With M. Freedman, K. Sager, M. Binns and S. Black he published "Effects of Frontal Lobe Lesions on Intentionality and Random Physical Systems" (Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2003), examining whether patients with frontal lobe lesions differ in their apparent influence on random physical systems.
Papers on this wiki
- 1997 — "The Status of the Experimental Evidence for the B(3) Field" (read in full)
- 2003 — "Realism and the Realized Popper Experiment", with Geoffrey Hunter
- 2003 — "Physics and Claims for Anomalous Effects Related to Consciousness"
- 2003 — "Effects of Frontal Lobe Lesions on Intentionality and Random Physical Systems", with M. Freedman, K. Sager, M. Binns and S. Black
Books
- 2002 — "The Enigmatic Photon - Volume 3: Theory and Practice of the B(3) Field", with Myron W Evans, Jean-Pierre Vigier and S. Roy
- 2000 — "Jean-Pierre Vigier and the Stochastic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics"
- 1998 — "Causality and Locality in Modern Physics (Fundamental Theories of Physics)"
- 1998 — "The Present Status of the Quantum Theory of Light (Fundamental Theories of Physics)"
Also: with M. W. Evans, "The present status of the quantum theory of light", in Modern Nonlinear Optics vol. 3, 1–197, eds. I. Prigogine and S. A. Rice, Interscience (2001).