Jump to content

Cynthia Kolb Whitney: Difference between revisions

From Natural Philosophy Wiki
← Older edit
No edit summary
ClaudeBot (talk | contribs)
Bots
22,927 edits
Show calculated age in infobox for living subject: use {{birth date and age}}
 
(5 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown)
Line 3: Line 3:
| image = Cynthia Kolb Whitney 226.jpg
| image = Cynthia Kolb Whitney 226.jpg
| alt = Cynthia Kolb Whitney
| alt = Cynthia Kolb Whitney
| birth_date = 1941
| birth_date = {{birth date and age|1941|7|11}}
| fields = [[Physicist]], [[Editor of Galilean Electrodynamics]]
| nationality = American
| residence = Arlington, MA, United States
| fields = [[Physics]], [[Electrodynamics]]
| nationality = USA
| workplaces = Charles Stark Draper Laboratory; [[Tufts University]]; Space Time Analyses, Ltd.
| known_for = [[Electrodynamics]]
| alma_mater = [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]]
| known_for = Editor of ''[[Galilean Electrodynamics]]''; criticism of [[special relativity]]; the [[Sagnac Effect|Sagnac]] argument; algebraic chemistry
}}
}}


Dr. Cynthia Kolb Whitney is an American Scientist specializing in physics and electrodynamics and is the Editor and Publisher for the physics journal [[Galilean Electrodynamics]], and former Editor for the Proceedings of the [[Natural Philosophy Alliance]], now the [[John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society]]. She is currently the Chief Scientist of the [[John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society]].
'''Cynthia Kolb Whitney''' (born 1941) is an American physicist, editor and dissident-science author. She is best known as the longtime Editor and Publisher of the alternative-physics journal ''[[Galilean Electrodynamics]]'', a role she held from 1997, and as an editor of the Proceedings of the [[Natural Philosophy Alliance]] (now the [[John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society]]), of which she has served as Chief Scientist. Trained in physics and mathematical physics at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]], she developed a body of work critical of mainstream twentieth-century physics, particularly [[special relativity]], and proposed alternative treatments of electrodynamics, quantum mechanics and chemistry that lie outside the scientific mainstream.


==Education==
==Biography==


She earned three degrees at M.I.T. (S.B. Physics, S.M. Electrical Engineering, Ph.D. Mathematical Physics), and had a long career in the American defense industry, much enriched by supervising engineering thesis students at M.I.T., and by a time as a Visiting Industry Professor in the then-active Electro-Optics Technology Center at Tufts University.
===Early life and education===


==In Her Own Words==
Whitney was born on 11 July 1941. She has described her father as a self-educated chemist who rose to a senior position at the Celanese Corporation of America, and her mother as an artist who had studied at the Maryland Institute of Art. She became interested in science as a high-school student in the late 1950s, a period she has credited to the educational reforms that followed the launch of ''[[Sputnik]]''.


I am now a person in retirement, which means I am busier than I ever was when employed. I am the Editor of Galilean Electrodynamics, the slightly offbeat physics journal that invited me to take over in 1997, and of The Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, the slightly offbeat society that invited me to start publishing its papers in 2004.
She was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned three degrees. Her S.B. in physics carried a thesis in computational chemistry, supervised by Walter Thorson of the Chemistry Department; working on the hydrogen molecule with two-centre exchange integrals, punched cards and reams of printout, she concluded that she wanted to study the subject again but by some other means. Entering MIT graduate school in 1963 alongside her husband Dan, she took his advice to pause on the way to the physics doctorate and take an S.M. in electrical engineering, on the grounds that it would make her employable whatever happened; the thesis was in statistical communication theory, in the intellectual line of Norbert Wiener, Y. W. Lee and Martin Schetzen.


I am also deep into physics research. It turns out that physics made some unnecessarily limiting decisions in the early twentieth century, and as a result has not yet done all it really should do with classical theories. So I am now trying to do my bit with respect to atoms and molecules.
Two encounters in electrical engineering proved lasting. Parry Moon taught her field theory and tensor algebra, and through him she came to know [[Domina Eberle Spencer]]; it was decades, she later wrote, before she fully appreciated "what wonderfully radical people they were." The habit Moon drilled into her — be patient, read the tensor indices, do what they specify — underlies her much later argument that Maxwell's equations can be made Galilean-invariant by admitting two further tensor index positions beyond the familiar covariant and contravariant.


It has been quite a long journey. Like a chameleon, I have appeared as computational chemistry student, electrical engineering student, relativity student, optical engineer, atmospheric scientist, industrial engineer, control theory engineer, somewhat dissident physicist, and now again a computational chemist. The following paragraphs give a more detailed story of the journey.
Returning to the physics track, she was taken on by Laszlo Tisza, who set her to work expressing [[special relativity]] more elegantly by means of 2×2 complex Pauli matrices. She received the Ph.D. in mathematical physics in September 1967 for a thesis titled ''Pauli Algebra Techniques in Special Relativity''. Too young, by her account, to be intimidated by how august Tisza was, she argued with him freely about the matrices, and drew from it what she called her first lesson from the field: always go ahead and argue.


I was born in 1941, the only child of parents I now recognize to have been quite unusual. My Dad was a totally self-educated chemist who rose to a respected position in Celanese Corporation of America.  My Mom went to Maryland Institute of Art, but dropped out before graduation because of the Great Depression. She was an amazing artist before, during, and after.
Years afterwards Tisza told her of conversations he had overheard among the MIT physics faculty at a departmental tea — discussions not of the mathematical formalism of special relativity but of its actual substance, in which the professors voiced private doubts. One of them remarked that it was going to take decades to correct all of Einstein's mistakes.


They were both bimodal too. My Dad was also talented at writing, and wrote all the reports that his employees couldn't manage. My Mom was also intuitively talented at mathematics, and could generally see through complicated geometry, financial foolery, or whatever.
===Draper Laboratory and the Sagnac effect===


I got both sets of abilities. I was developing the Mom batch all through the very conservative 1950's, until the moment our whole nation got its big epiphany in the form of the Sputnik launch.
In 1967 Whitney took her first permanent position at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, then part of MIT and later independent, working among the engineers who were sending men to the Moon. She was assigned to the ring laser gyroscope — a device whose operating principle is the [[Sagnac Effect|Sagnac effect]].


All of a sudden, our high school got big improvements; for example, we got a physics course out of MIT, through the Physical Sciences Study Committee. All of a sudden, there were no barriers to anybody who could manage to do science. All of a sudden, even a girl was wanted as a scientist. So I got really turned on with science. I took every course offered, did every science fair project possible, etc., etc.
She thus arrived at the Sagnac effect from the most favourable position imaginable for defending Einstein: a fresh MIT doctorate in special relativity itself, applied to a real instrument. The engineers around her did not believe in the theory. She set out to persuade them. Her own summary, given in the 2013 John Chappell Memorial Lecture, is unsparing:


Then I thought, for the fun of it, I would apply to MIT. Well, I got in. Fast, too. So I neglected to fill out any other applications. So my horrified parents had to let me go to MIT. And I loved it. I met my husband Dan there, and I got three degrees there. The first was a bachelor of science in physics with a thesis in computational chemistry; the second was a master of science in electrical engineering with a thesis in statistical communication theory. The last one was a PhD in mathematical physics, with a thesis in special relativity theory (SRT).
<blockquote>The engineers did not believe in SRT. Some of them, including myself, were dealing with ring laser gyroscopes, which are based on the Sagnac effect. For SRT, the Sagnac effect is a very inconvenient physical truth. But I argued with those engineers for quite a while. In fact, I argued for a whole decade. And I lost.</blockquote>


In 1967 I got my first permanent job at Draper Lab (then part of MIT) where the engineers were doing all sorts of things in support of the Apollo Program. It was not in so many words, but their message was: ?OK smarty pants, have a look at this. It's what you will be working on. It's a ring laser gyroscope.  It's based on the Sagnac effect. The Sagnac effect violates SRT.  What do you think of that??
That defeat &mdash; her first application of her doctoral subject to a working instrument &mdash; is the origin of her subsequent career in dissident physics. Much of her later theoretical work can be read as an attempt to build a model of light propagation that delivers the mathematics the Sagnac effect demands without the assumptions she had come to reject.


Well, I resisted and resisted.  I was sure I could make that gyro do the right thing without upending SRT.  But a seed of doubt had been planted in my mind.  Indeed, my whole education was in doubt.  So I resisted for a good ten years ? way beyond the end of the gyro project.  But then came my personal epiphany.
===Career===


One fine winter day in the late 1970's, I was in the Boston Science Museum with our two little sons, and we saw a display involving a sort of pearlescent fluid in a circular disc that the viewer could spin and thereby cause the fluid to develop a spiral pattern, looking much like a spiral galaxy.
Over her career Whitney worked in the American defense industry, supervised engineering thesis students at MIT, and served as a Visiting Industry Professor in the Electro-Optics Technology Center at [[Tufts University]]. She has variously described her professional roles as including optical engineer, atmospheric scientist, industrial engineer, control-theory engineer and computational chemist.


At that moment, I felt I had been hit over the head with a two-by-four. I had an out of body experience. I saw myself from a few feet above, standing there with my eyes popping out and my jaw dropped open.
In 1997 she was invited to take over as Editor of ''[[Galilean Electrodynamics]]'', the journal founded by [[Petr Beckmann]] in 1989 for work critical of relativity and mainstream electromagnetism, published through Space Time Analyses, Ltd. (ISSN 1047-4811). In 2004 she also began editing and publishing the Proceedings of the [[Natural Philosophy Alliance]], the organization that later became the [[John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society]], where she served as Chief Scientist. She has credited [[Domina Eberle Spencer]], Parry Moon, [[John E Chappell]], [[Francisco J. Müller]] and Peter Graneau with creating the environment in which such work could continue at all.


As a practicing engineer, I knew that the finite speed of signal propagation through the medium in the disc made the spiral pattern develop.  So, did a finite speed of gravity propagation cause the spiral pattern of galaxies to develop?  We all raced up to the museum library and searched all over it.  There was no evidence whatever of any such idea ever having been considered.
==Scientific contributions==


I could not put this idea down.  I worked on it for years, throughout the remainder of the 70's and early 80's.  This was early in the computer revolution, and I would get up at 4 or 5 am, when our boys were not occupying our one-and-only personal home computer, to work on this idea. It really took over my life.
Whitney's work centers on a critique of what she regards as unnecessarily limiting assumptions adopted by physics in the early twentieth century, and on developing classical alternatives to them. Her ideas are not accepted within mainstream physics.


I could compute all sorts of things. If a pair of black holes made a two-body system, at the center of a galaxy, then the background potential field they would create for the other little stars to orbit in would certainly have a bilateral spiral shape to it. Not only that, but there would be a graceful little bar in the middle, matching what is called a ?barred spiral galaxy'.  And the little stars would be thrown steadily outward, forming a flat disc galaxy.  And a greater density of older darker stars would be at the outer edge of the galaxy. It all fit.
===The spiral galaxy epiphany===
A recurring theme in her work is the finite speed of signal propagation and its consequences. Visiting the Boston Museum of Science with her husband and their sons David and Karl in the late 1970s, she saw an exhibit in which a spinning disc of pearly liquid formed patterns strikingly like the arms of a spiral galaxy. It struck her, she wrote, "like a 2X4 over the head" that the liquid might form spirals because information about the disc's rotation propagated through it at a finite speed &mdash; and that spiral galaxies might look as they do because gravitational signals arrive with a propagation delay. She modelled barred-spiral and disc galaxies as arising from a two-body background potential field. The astrophysics journals, in her words, "swatted it away without comment."


But I couldn't do what I wanted to do with these calculations. No mainstream astrophysics journal would publish the information. Why? Because all of present day gravity theory is modeled on present day electrodynamic theory, and that in turn is based on an assumption that was introduced in the 19th century (this was before ever Einstein said anything) that there was such a thing as ?the speed of light', and that it had the unambiguous value c = 3 X 108 m/sec. And when you work out the electrodynamic potentials and fields under that assumption (the Lienard-Wiechert potentials and fields), the Coulomb electric field comes out pointed in a direction such that it acts as if there were no signal delay.
===The Liénard–Wiechert problem===
Directed by MIT colleagues to electrodynamics to see why her galaxy idea could not work, Whitney found what became the technical core of her critique. The [[Liénard–Wiechert potential]]s and fields, derived for a rapidly moving source, rest on an assumption made without comment by their nineteenth-century originators and later stated explicitly by Einstein as the second postulate. She credits Einstein with noticing that there was an assumption there at all.


Does that result sound paradoxical to you? It should. But it didn't strike 20th century physicists as odd, because that's what the math does, given the assumption used, and ever since Einstein almost everybody has used that assumption.
Her objection is a ''reductio''. For a source in combined inertial and small high-frequency oscillatory motion, the Liénard–Wiechert fields put the radiation and the Coulomb attraction or repulsion on '''different directions''': the radiation arrives along the retarded direction, while the Coulomb term lies along a direction that is essentially the ''present'' position of the source. She regarded a theory that has radiation coming from one direction and force from another as untenable, and concluded that if the mathematics was sound then the hidden assumption behind it &mdash; the second postulate &mdash; had to be wrong.


Fortunately, around that time, there were some not-so-main-stream journals and societies, either rather newly launched, or soon to be launched. I am very thankful for journals like Journal of Scientific Exploration, Hadronic Journal, Galilean Electrodynamics, Apieron, Physics Essays, and for societies like the Society for Scientific Exploration, the Natural Philosophy Alliance, and the British Society for Philosophy of Science. They made it possible for me to go on.
She put the difficulty to J. D. Jackson, author of the standard graduate text on classical electrodynamics, in repeated correspondence. His reply in 1988 read in part:


For a long time in the 80's, I hunted for mathematical errors in the derivations of the Lienard-Wiechert potentials and fields. There are indeed some of those in the modern re-derivations. The errors have to do with overly-casual use of generalized functions, like the Heaviside step and Dirac delta, which lack the mathematical property of uniform convergence, and so do unreliable things whenever mixed up with operations like ?integrate' or ?differentiate'. But so what?  The original Lienard and Wiechert derivations just used pedestrian algebra, and they were correct, given the assumption used.
<blockquote>...You are being disingenuous, if not deliberately dishonest. ... the business is a triviality. ... Do not waste my time or your own on such nonsense. ...</blockquote>


For another long time in the 80's, I hunted for implications of signal delay in the micro domain of quantum mechanics. There is a big one. Planck's constant need not be regarded as an independent constant of Nature. It is a consequence of a balance between two effects. One is well known: radiation damping. When an electron goes in a circle around a nucleus, it produces radiation, and this eats up its orbit energy.  The other effect was previously unrecognized: if you consider any reasonable variation on the Lienard-Wiechert model, then signal propagation delay causes internal torquing within the system, and it can create an energy gain mechanism that can counter the effect of radiation damping. This makes for a revised and extended quantum mechanics (QM).
By her account the rebuff only encouraged her. Jackson was right, she granted, that if one believes Einstein in all particulars then one must accept the Liénard–Wiechert behaviour; she simply found the behaviour unbelievable, and so declined to believe Einstein in all particulars.


For a little while in the late 90's, I hunted for exactly what kind of assumption about light propagation should replace the simple speed c assumption. It turned out that the Sagnac effect provided a formal answer. Given the details of that effect, there is only one possible mathematical formulation about light propagation that can work. You may not know why light propagation is that way, but that's definitely the way it is. And it makes for a revised and extended SRT.
===A revised model of light propagation===
Whitney's positive proposal replaces Einstein's one-sentence postulate with a signal model derived in the manner she argues nineteenth-century applied mathematicians would have used: differential equations, a family of solutions, and boundary conditions. The equations are Maxwell's four first-order coupled field equations; the solution family consists of Gaussian field pulses developing into Hermite-polynomial wavelets; the boundary conditions are that no energy flows back behind the source and none overflows beyond the receiver, enforced by zero electric field at both.


For the rest of the 90's and early 00's, I developed an idea about the 'why' of it. I think the reason is that light signal propagation is not a simple matter of a well-defined pulse traveling from 'here' to there'. Instead, signal propagation happens in two steps: expansion from the source, followed by contraction to the receiver.When expansion is happening, the mid point of the light signal is traveling at c, but its leading tip is traveling at 2c. When contraction is happening, the mid point of the light signal is traveling at c, but the trailing end is traveling at 2c. Simple. And this simple physical model produces the mathematical model that the Sagnac effect demands.
The resulting signal starts half a wavelength wide at the source, spreads as it travels and piles up on arrival, so that no single speed characterises it. Its energy median leaves the source at ''c'' relative to the source and arrives at the receiver at ''c'' relative to the receiver, with a transition between &mdash; a two-stage propagation in which the leading or trailing tip momentarily moves at twice the conventional speed of light. This resolves the Liénard–Wiechert direction problem, since radiation and Coulomb force are both referred to the same half-retarded direction, and she argues that it reproduces the mathematics demanded by the [[Sagnac Effect|Sagnac effect]] while yielding a "revised and extended" special relativity.


Now for another long while I have been hunting for more implications in the micro domain.  It turns out there is a whole boatload of them in chemistry. Have a look at data about ionization potentials of the elements ? first order ones, and higher-order ones too. That data looks like it was created with a random number generator. It wasn't. There is a dramatic regular pattern to it that emerges when it is studied from the viewpoint of the extended QM.
She has also argued that the choice of an infinite plane wave as the implicit model for Einstein's light signal was the root error: an infinite plane wave carries no information in the sense of information theory, having no discernible before-and-after, whereas only a finite-energy entity such as the photon can serve as a signal. Information theory did not exist in 1905, and Einstein, who worked on special relativity and the photoelectric effect at nearly the same moment, did not connect the two.


For another little while, in the summer of 2008, I ?drilled in' on the source of my postulated expansion/contraction propagation model. It turns out to be simple. It should have been expected for a light signal pulse in the 19th century, and confirmed for a photon in the early 20th century. The main thing about a light signal pulse, or a photon, is that it has finite energy. So it has to be bounded in all three spatial directions. Now everybody knows what happens as a result of boundaries in the two directions transverse to propagation: diffraction happens. That means fringes, rings, and focal spot spreading in the transverse directions. Now what about boundaries in the longitudinal direction? Isn't it obvious that spreading must happen in that direction too? In fact, you can track the evolution of the spreading through Maxwell's coupled differential equations for E and B. The inevitable spreading turns a sharp pulse into a spread-out Gaussian. This accounts for the expansion from the source that I had asserted. And since the process of absorption by a receiver is just the time-reversed version of emission by a source, the mechanism also accounts for the contraction to the receiver that I had asserted.
===Quantum mechanics and algebraic chemistry===
In quantum mechanics she argued that [[Planck constant|Planck's constant]] need not be regarded as an independent constant of nature, proposing instead that it results from a balance between radiation damping and an energy-gain mechanism produced by signal-propagation delay. She extended these ideas to chemistry in a program she called "algebraic chemistry," based on numerical patterns in the ionization potentials of the elements, which she argued permits many chemical scenarios to be evaluated without heavy computation. She applied the framework to cold fusion and to "Brown's gas," proposing that a linear isomer of heavy water leaves protons, deuterons or tritons exposed and so encourages fusion. She also published on the [[neutron]] in the ''Hadronic Journal''.


There is probably also a boatload of implications in elementary particle physics. I have recently made one foray into that in Hadronic Journal. Its founder R.M. Santilli had pointed out that there is a big problem about the neutron: it is really too massive for its seeming constituents (proton and electron) to account for in any reasonable way. A lot still remains to be done to really understand the neutron.
===On being heard===
Whitney has written as much about the sociology of dissident science as about its content. Her 2013 John Chappell Memorial Lecture, subtitled around a series of "Swat Stories," distils her experience into practical advice: reverse the order of presentation so that applications come before foundations, since a publisher who rejected her book proposal accepted it at once when she put chemistry first and deep physics last; "nail the numbers"; restrain reductionism; question any quirkiness and chase it to resolution; and revisit earlier research whenever a new mathematical tool is learned. She concluded that she is "interested not only in Physics itself, but also in the communication problems that clearly impede its progress. People who entertain novel ideas are often swatted down, and do not get to be heard."


It is now 30 years since my science-museum epiphany. The little children I had with me on that day now have little children of their own, and science museums of their own to visit. Grandma is doing OK. Now a cadre of chemists not only allows, but even invites, my papers, because they solve problems that are of practical concern in chemistry.
==Selected publications==


The whole story, being 40 years from the planting of doubt in my mind, through my conversion by epiphany, up to my present state of resolution, strikes me as being similar in scope to a biblical one. And if you go back 60 years, to when I was an artist, you can see how I tie it all together in my mind: I feel like the Grandma Moses figure in my own peculiar mental landscape!
* ''Pauli Algebra Techniques in Special Relativity'', Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 1967.
* ''Minimum Contradictions Everything'' (Hadronic Press, 2009).
* ''Algebraic Chemistry: Applications and Origins'' (Nova Science Publishers, 2013). ISBN 978-1-62257-861-0.
* "Better Unification for Physics in General Through Quantum Mechanics in Particular", chapter 7 in ''Theoretical Concepts of Quantum Mechanics'', M. R. Pahlavani, ed. (InTech, 2013).
* "On the Dual Concepts of 'Quantum State' and 'Quantum Process'", chapter 17 in ''Advances in Quantum Mechanics'', Paul Bracken, ed. (InTech, 2013).
* "New Theory Applied to Important New Technologies", ''Infinite Energy Magazine'' '''17''', issue 101, pp. 14&ndash;21 (2012).
* Editor, ''The Theory of Density'' (with Mohammad Javanshiry and Anna Kalapurakkal).


==Personal Life==
She has published numerous papers in ''[[Galilean Electrodynamics]]'', ''Physics Essays'', the ''Hadronic Journal'' and the Proceedings of the [[Natural Philosophy Alliance]].
Dr. Whitney is married and currently lives in Arlington Massachusetts. She welcomes e-mail contact at: Galilean_Electrodynamics@comcast.net.


==Abstracts==
==Abstracts==


* 2013 - "[[How Electrodynamics with Statistical Mechanics
* 2013 - "[[How Electrodynamics with Statistical Mechanics Can Imply Gravitation]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_7185.pdf Read in full])
Can Imply Gravitation]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_7185.pdf Read in full])
* 2013 - "[[How Electrodynamics with Statistical Mechanics Can Imply Gravitation]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_7186.pdf Read in full])
* 2013 - "[[How Electrodynamics with Statistical Mechanics Can Imply Gravitation]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_7186.pdf Read in full])
* 2013 - "[[Lessons from the Field: The 2013 John Chappell Memorial Lecture
* 2013 - "[[Lessons from the Field: The 2013 John Chappell Memorial Lecture]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_7183.pdf Read in full])
]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_7183.pdf Read in full])
* 2012 - "[[About the Arrow of Time]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6629.pdf Read in full])
* 2012 - "[[About the Arrow of Time]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6629.pdf Read in full])
* 2011 - "[[A New Theory for Important New Technologies]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6111.pdf Read in full])
* 2011 - "[[A New Theory for Important New Technologies]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6111.pdf Read in full])
Line 87: Line 96:
* 2009 - "[[Maxwell's Maximum]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_1761.pdf Read in full])
* 2009 - "[[Maxwell's Maximum]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_1761.pdf Read in full])
* 2008 - "[[Electric and Magnetic Fields According to Hermann Minkowski]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_94.pdf Read in full])
* 2008 - "[[Electric and Magnetic Fields According to Hermann Minkowski]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_94.pdf Read in full])
* 2008 - "[[Mainstreaming: A Personal Progress Report]]"  
* 2008 - "[[Mainstreaming: A Personal Progress Report]]"
* 2008 - "[[The Neutron: A Challenge for Post-Maxwell Physics]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron Read in full])
* 2008 - "[[The Neutron: A Challenge for Post-Maxwell Physics]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron Read in full])
* 2008 - "[[Physics as a Building Project in Need of Design Review]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_66.pdf Read in full])
* 2008 - "[[Physics as a Building Project in Need of Design Review]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_66.pdf Read in full])
* 2007 - "[[Relativistic Dynamics in Basic Chemistry]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics Read in full])
* 2007 - "[[Relativistic Dynamics in Basic Chemistry]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics Read in full])
* 2007 - "[[On the Visual Images that Atoms Create ]]"  
* 2007 - "[[On the Visual Images that Atoms Create ]]"
* 2007 - "[[On the Visual Images that Galaxies Create ]]"  
* 2007 - "[[On the Visual Images that Galaxies Create ]]"
* 2006 - "[[?Algebraic Chemistry? Based on a ?PIRT?]]" ([http://www.physicsfoundations.org/PIRT_X/papers/WHITNEY%20PAPER%202006.pdf Read in full])
* 2006 - "[[?Algebraic Chemistry? Based on a ?PIRT?]]" ([http://www.physicsfoundations.org/PIRT_X/papers/WHITNEY%20PAPER%202006.pdf Read in full])
* 2006 - "[[Algebraic Chemistry: Parts I-V]]" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=r4zlAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=Algebraic+Chemistry:+Parts+I-V&source=bl&ots=hxve_XZyRJ&sig=g-ZuZz5jsvjr4orCWefr3qL_XgI&hl=en&ei=cCxsTZXCHsiRgQeForXMCg&sa=X&oi=book_r Read in full])
* 2006 - "[[Algebraic Chemistry: Parts I-V]]" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=r4zlAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=Algebraic+Chemistry:+Parts+I-V&source=bl&ots=hxve_XZyRJ&sig=g-ZuZz5jsvjr4orCWefr3qL_XgI&hl=en&ei=cCxsTZXCHsiRgQeForXMCg&sa=X&oi=book_r Read in full])
* 2006 - "[[On What Electromagnetic Systems Can Feel]]"  
* 2006 - "[[On What Electromagnetic Systems Can Feel]]"
* 2006 - "[[Essentials on Special Relativity Theory]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity Read in full])
* 2006 - "[[Essentials on Special Relativity Theory]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity Read in full])
* 2006 - "[[On What Optical Systems Can See]]"  
* 2006 - "[[On What Optical Systems Can See]]"
* 2005 - "[[GRT?s ?Flat Spot?]]"  
* 2005 - "[[GRT?s ?Flat Spot?]]"
* 2005 - "[[Planck's Constant: A Yin/Yang Balance]]"  
* 2005 - "[[Planck's Constant: A Yin/Yang Balance]]"
* 2005 - "[[SRT?s ?Rosetta Stone?]]"  
* 2005 - "[[SRT?s ?Rosetta Stone?]]"
* 2004 - "[[An Astronomy Model within an Infinite Universe]]" ([http://www.eitgaastra.nl/timesgr/part5/2.html Read in full])
* 2004 - "[[An Astronomy Model within an Infinite Universe]]" ([http://www.eitgaastra.nl/timesgr/part5/2.html Read in full])
* 2004 - "[[This is NOT Einstein's Postulate]]"  
* 2004 - "[[This is NOT Einstein's Postulate]]"
* 2003 - "[[Editorial Comments (of NPA Conference #10 Proceedings)]]" ([http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/matter_energy/energy_technology/ Read in full])
* 2003 - "[[Editorial Comments (of NPA Conference #10 Proceedings)]]" ([http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/matter_energy/energy_technology/ Read in full])
* 2003 - "[[Spectroscopy's 'Relativistic' Keystone]]" ([http://ijahsp.nova.edu/articles/Vol8Num4/holub_8_4.htm Read in full])
* 2003 - "[[Spectroscopy's 'Relativistic' Keystone]]" ([http://ijahsp.nova.edu/articles/Vol8Num4/holub_8_4.htm Read in full])
* 2002 - "[[Do Atoms Really Have 'States'?]]"  
* 2002 - "[[Do Atoms Really Have 'States'?]]"
* 2000 - "[[Begging the Questions ]]" ([http://www.padrak.com/ine/ Read in full])
* 2000 - "[[Begging the Questions ]]" ([http://www.padrak.com/ine/ Read in full])
* 2000 - "[[General Considerations about Mass Variation]]"  
* 2000 - "[[General Considerations about Mass Variation]]"
* 1998 - "[[Distinct Questions in Relativity Theory]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%C3%A9nard%E2%80%93Wiechert_potential Read in full])
* 1998 - "[[Distinct Questions in Relativity Theory]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%C3%A9nard%E2%80%93Wiechert_potential Read in full])
* 1998 - "[[SRT: About That Light in the Beginning]]"  
* 1998 - "[[SRT: About That Light in the Beginning]]"
* 1997 - "[['Light' is the Subject, not the Object!]]"  
* 1997 - "[['Light' is the Subject, not the Object!]]"
* 1997 - "[[Finding Absolution for Special Relativity Theory - Part III]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_special_relativity Read in full])
* 1997 - "[[Finding Absolution for Special Relativity Theory - Part III]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_special_relativity Read in full])
* 1997 - "[[A Quantum of Light Shed on Classical Potentials and Fields]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_616.pdf Read in full])
* 1997 - "[[A Quantum of Light Shed on Classical Potentials and Fields]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_616.pdf Read in full])
* 1997 - "[[The Twins, the Mesons, and the Paradox]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_603.pdf Read in full])
* 1997 - "[[The Twins, the Mesons, and the Paradox]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_603.pdf Read in full])
* 1996 - "[[Finding Absolution for Special Relativity Theory - Part I]]" ([ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagnac_effect Read in full])
* 1996 - "[[Finding Absolution for Special Relativity Theory - Part I]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagnac_effect Read in full])
* 1996 - "[[Finding Absolution for Special Relativity Theory - Part II]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_special_relativity Read in full])
* 1996 - "[[Finding Absolution for Special Relativity Theory - Part II]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_special_relativity Read in full])
* 1995 - "[[How Can Spirals Persist?]]"  
* 1995 - "[[How Can Spirals Persist?]]"
* 1994 - "[[Special Relativity Theory Aberrated]]" ([http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/44457625/Einsteins-Principle-of-Relativity-and-Doppler-Shift Read in full])
* 1994 - "[[Special Relativity Theory Aberrated]]" ([http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/44457625/Einsteins-Principle-of-Relativity-and-Doppler-Shift Read in full])
* 1993 - "[[Discussion Between C. K. Whitney and S. Marinov on Silvertooth's Experiment]]"  
* 1993 - "[[Discussion Between C. K. Whitney and S. Marinov on Silvertooth's Experiment]]"
* 1992 - "[[What's Wrong With Standard Relativistic Fields?]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%C3%A9nard%E2%80%93Wiechert_potential Read in full])
* 1992 - "[[What's Wrong With Standard Relativistic Fields?]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%C3%A9nard%E2%80%93Wiechert_potential Read in full])
* 1992 - "[[A New Michelson-Morley Experiment]]" ([http://physicsessays.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PHESEM000005000001000082000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes Read in full])
* 1992 - "[[A New Michelson-Morley Experiment]]" ([http://physicsessays.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PHESEM000005000001000082000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes Read in full])
* 1991 - "[[A Gedanken Experiment With Relativistic Fields
* 1991 - "[[A Gedanken Experiment With Relativistic Fields]]"
 
  ]]"  
* 1990 - "[[If Sagnac and Michelson-Gale, Why Not Michelson-Morley?]]" ([http://renshaw.teleinc.com/papers/fizeau/fizeau.stm Read in full])
* 1990 - "[[If Sagnac and Michelson-Gale, Why Not Michelson-Morley?]]" ([http://renshaw.teleinc.com/papers/fizeau/fizeau.stm Read in full])
* 1989 - "[[Inner Products in Relativistic Field Theory]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%C3%A9nard%E2%80%93Wiechert_potential Read in full])
* 1989 - "[[Inner Products in Relativistic Field Theory]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%C3%A9nard%E2%80%93Wiechert_potential Read in full])
Line 133: Line 140:
* 1988 - "[[Multiple States in the Hydrogen Atom]]" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=zzxLTIljQB4C&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=quantum+hypothesis,+Planck%27s+constant&source=bl&ots=w9hRJGnZnK&sig=YD8AgKfZc4JpaqGkFxxNOBOUrn4&hl=en&ei=c0JsTcKDLo-dgQfd7-yHBA&sa=X&oi Read in full])
* 1988 - "[[Multiple States in the Hydrogen Atom]]" ([http://books.google.com/books?id=zzxLTIljQB4C&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=quantum+hypothesis,+Planck%27s+constant&source=bl&ots=w9hRJGnZnK&sig=YD8AgKfZc4JpaqGkFxxNOBOUrn4&hl=en&ei=c0JsTcKDLo-dgQfd7-yHBA&sa=X&oi Read in full])
* 1988 - "[[A New Perspective on the Hydrogen Atom]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant Read in full])
* 1988 - "[[A New Perspective on the Hydrogen Atom]]" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant Read in full])
* 1987 - "[[Distribution of Stars as Test Particles in a Two-Body Background Field]]"  
* 1987 - "[[Distribution of Stars as Test Particles in a Two-Body Background Field]]"
* 1986 - "[[Compressible Fluid Dynamics Study]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6199.pdf Read in full])
* 1986 - "[[Compressible Fluid Dynamics Study]]" ([http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6199.pdf Read in full])


==Books==
==Books==


* 2009 - "[[Minimum Contradictions Everything]]"  
* 2009 - "[[Minimum Contradictions Everything]]"
* 2004 - "[[Proceedings of the NPA, Volume 1]]" ([http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/npa-2004-spring-proceedings/10797686?productTrackingContext=product_view/recently_viewed/left/2 Read in full])
* 2004 - "[[Proceedings of the NPA, Volume 1]]" ([http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/npa-2004-spring-proceedings/10797686?productTrackingContext=product_view/recently_viewed/left/2 Read in full])
==See also==
* [[Sagnac Effect]] &mdash; the effect she worked on at Draper Laboratory
* [[Galilean Electrodynamics]] &mdash; the journal she has edited since 1997
* [[Special Relativity]]
==External links==
* [https://einsteinwrong.com/site/dr-cynthia-whitney/ Dr. Cynthia Whitney profile at einsteinwrong.com]
* [https://www.galilean-electrodynamics.com/ ''Galilean Electrodynamics'' journal]
* [https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n88604184.html Library of Congress authority record: Whitney, Cynthia Kolb, 1941-]
* [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2635676/ "Closing in on Chemical Bonds by Opening up Relativity Theory" (PMC)]


[[Category:Scientist|Whitney Cynthia]]
[[Category:Scientist|Whitney Cynthia]]
[[Category:Relativity|Whitney Cynthia]]
[[Category:Electrodynamics|Whitney Cynthia]]
[[Category:Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists]]

Latest revision as of 20:59, 20 July 2026

Cynthia Kolb Whitney
Cynthia Kolb Whitney
Born (1941-07-11) July 11, 1941 (age 85)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forEditor of Galilean Electrodynamics; criticism of special relativity; the Sagnac argument; algebraic chemistry
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics, Electrodynamics
InstitutionsCharles Stark Draper Laboratory; Tufts University; Space Time Analyses, Ltd.

Cynthia Kolb Whitney (born 1941) is an American physicist, editor and dissident-science author. She is best known as the longtime Editor and Publisher of the alternative-physics journal Galilean Electrodynamics, a role she held from 1997, and as an editor of the Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance (now the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society), of which she has served as Chief Scientist. Trained in physics and mathematical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she developed a body of work critical of mainstream twentieth-century physics, particularly special relativity, and proposed alternative treatments of electrodynamics, quantum mechanics and chemistry that lie outside the scientific mainstream.

Biography

Early life and education

Whitney was born on 11 July 1941. She has described her father as a self-educated chemist who rose to a senior position at the Celanese Corporation of America, and her mother as an artist who had studied at the Maryland Institute of Art. She became interested in science as a high-school student in the late 1950s, a period she has credited to the educational reforms that followed the launch of Sputnik.

She was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned three degrees. Her S.B. in physics carried a thesis in computational chemistry, supervised by Walter Thorson of the Chemistry Department; working on the hydrogen molecule with two-centre exchange integrals, punched cards and reams of printout, she concluded that she wanted to study the subject again but by some other means. Entering MIT graduate school in 1963 alongside her husband Dan, she took his advice to pause on the way to the physics doctorate and take an S.M. in electrical engineering, on the grounds that it would make her employable whatever happened; the thesis was in statistical communication theory, in the intellectual line of Norbert Wiener, Y. W. Lee and Martin Schetzen.

Two encounters in electrical engineering proved lasting. Parry Moon taught her field theory and tensor algebra, and through him she came to know Domina Eberle Spencer; it was decades, she later wrote, before she fully appreciated "what wonderfully radical people they were." The habit Moon drilled into her — be patient, read the tensor indices, do what they specify — underlies her much later argument that Maxwell's equations can be made Galilean-invariant by admitting two further tensor index positions beyond the familiar covariant and contravariant.

Returning to the physics track, she was taken on by Laszlo Tisza, who set her to work expressing special relativity more elegantly by means of 2×2 complex Pauli matrices. She received the Ph.D. in mathematical physics in September 1967 for a thesis titled Pauli Algebra Techniques in Special Relativity. Too young, by her account, to be intimidated by how august Tisza was, she argued with him freely about the matrices, and drew from it what she called her first lesson from the field: always go ahead and argue.

Years afterwards Tisza told her of conversations he had overheard among the MIT physics faculty at a departmental tea — discussions not of the mathematical formalism of special relativity but of its actual substance, in which the professors voiced private doubts. One of them remarked that it was going to take decades to correct all of Einstein's mistakes.

Draper Laboratory and the Sagnac effect

In 1967 Whitney took her first permanent position at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, then part of MIT and later independent, working among the engineers who were sending men to the Moon. She was assigned to the ring laser gyroscope — a device whose operating principle is the Sagnac effect.

She thus arrived at the Sagnac effect from the most favourable position imaginable for defending Einstein: a fresh MIT doctorate in special relativity itself, applied to a real instrument. The engineers around her did not believe in the theory. She set out to persuade them. Her own summary, given in the 2013 John Chappell Memorial Lecture, is unsparing:

The engineers did not believe in SRT. Some of them, including myself, were dealing with ring laser gyroscopes, which are based on the Sagnac effect. For SRT, the Sagnac effect is a very inconvenient physical truth. But I argued with those engineers for quite a while. In fact, I argued for a whole decade. And I lost.

That defeat — her first application of her doctoral subject to a working instrument — is the origin of her subsequent career in dissident physics. Much of her later theoretical work can be read as an attempt to build a model of light propagation that delivers the mathematics the Sagnac effect demands without the assumptions she had come to reject.

Career

Over her career Whitney worked in the American defense industry, supervised engineering thesis students at MIT, and served as a Visiting Industry Professor in the Electro-Optics Technology Center at Tufts University. She has variously described her professional roles as including optical engineer, atmospheric scientist, industrial engineer, control-theory engineer and computational chemist.

In 1997 she was invited to take over as Editor of Galilean Electrodynamics, the journal founded by Petr Beckmann in 1989 for work critical of relativity and mainstream electromagnetism, published through Space Time Analyses, Ltd. (ISSN 1047-4811). In 2004 she also began editing and publishing the Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, the organization that later became the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society, where she served as Chief Scientist. She has credited Domina Eberle Spencer, Parry Moon, John E Chappell, Francisco J. Müller and Peter Graneau with creating the environment in which such work could continue at all.

Scientific contributions

Whitney's work centers on a critique of what she regards as unnecessarily limiting assumptions adopted by physics in the early twentieth century, and on developing classical alternatives to them. Her ideas are not accepted within mainstream physics.

The spiral galaxy epiphany

A recurring theme in her work is the finite speed of signal propagation and its consequences. Visiting the Boston Museum of Science with her husband and their sons David and Karl in the late 1970s, she saw an exhibit in which a spinning disc of pearly liquid formed patterns strikingly like the arms of a spiral galaxy. It struck her, she wrote, "like a 2X4 over the head" that the liquid might form spirals because information about the disc's rotation propagated through it at a finite speed — and that spiral galaxies might look as they do because gravitational signals arrive with a propagation delay. She modelled barred-spiral and disc galaxies as arising from a two-body background potential field. The astrophysics journals, in her words, "swatted it away without comment."

The Liénard–Wiechert problem

Directed by MIT colleagues to electrodynamics to see why her galaxy idea could not work, Whitney found what became the technical core of her critique. The Liénard–Wiechert potentials and fields, derived for a rapidly moving source, rest on an assumption made without comment by their nineteenth-century originators and later stated explicitly by Einstein as the second postulate. She credits Einstein with noticing that there was an assumption there at all.

Her objection is a reductio. For a source in combined inertial and small high-frequency oscillatory motion, the Liénard–Wiechert fields put the radiation and the Coulomb attraction or repulsion on different directions: the radiation arrives along the retarded direction, while the Coulomb term lies along a direction that is essentially the present position of the source. She regarded a theory that has radiation coming from one direction and force from another as untenable, and concluded that if the mathematics was sound then the hidden assumption behind it — the second postulate — had to be wrong.

She put the difficulty to J. D. Jackson, author of the standard graduate text on classical electrodynamics, in repeated correspondence. His reply in 1988 read in part:

...You are being disingenuous, if not deliberately dishonest. ... the business is a triviality. ... Do not waste my time or your own on such nonsense. ...

By her account the rebuff only encouraged her. Jackson was right, she granted, that if one believes Einstein in all particulars then one must accept the Liénard–Wiechert behaviour; she simply found the behaviour unbelievable, and so declined to believe Einstein in all particulars.

A revised model of light propagation

Whitney's positive proposal replaces Einstein's one-sentence postulate with a signal model derived in the manner she argues nineteenth-century applied mathematicians would have used: differential equations, a family of solutions, and boundary conditions. The equations are Maxwell's four first-order coupled field equations; the solution family consists of Gaussian field pulses developing into Hermite-polynomial wavelets; the boundary conditions are that no energy flows back behind the source and none overflows beyond the receiver, enforced by zero electric field at both.

The resulting signal starts half a wavelength wide at the source, spreads as it travels and piles up on arrival, so that no single speed characterises it. Its energy median leaves the source at c relative to the source and arrives at the receiver at c relative to the receiver, with a transition between — a two-stage propagation in which the leading or trailing tip momentarily moves at twice the conventional speed of light. This resolves the Liénard–Wiechert direction problem, since radiation and Coulomb force are both referred to the same half-retarded direction, and she argues that it reproduces the mathematics demanded by the Sagnac effect while yielding a "revised and extended" special relativity.

She has also argued that the choice of an infinite plane wave as the implicit model for Einstein's light signal was the root error: an infinite plane wave carries no information in the sense of information theory, having no discernible before-and-after, whereas only a finite-energy entity such as the photon can serve as a signal. Information theory did not exist in 1905, and Einstein, who worked on special relativity and the photoelectric effect at nearly the same moment, did not connect the two.

Quantum mechanics and algebraic chemistry

In quantum mechanics she argued that Planck's constant need not be regarded as an independent constant of nature, proposing instead that it results from a balance between radiation damping and an energy-gain mechanism produced by signal-propagation delay. She extended these ideas to chemistry in a program she called "algebraic chemistry," based on numerical patterns in the ionization potentials of the elements, which she argued permits many chemical scenarios to be evaluated without heavy computation. She applied the framework to cold fusion and to "Brown's gas," proposing that a linear isomer of heavy water leaves protons, deuterons or tritons exposed and so encourages fusion. She also published on the neutron in the Hadronic Journal.

On being heard

Whitney has written as much about the sociology of dissident science as about its content. Her 2013 John Chappell Memorial Lecture, subtitled around a series of "Swat Stories," distils her experience into practical advice: reverse the order of presentation so that applications come before foundations, since a publisher who rejected her book proposal accepted it at once when she put chemistry first and deep physics last; "nail the numbers"; restrain reductionism; question any quirkiness and chase it to resolution; and revisit earlier research whenever a new mathematical tool is learned. She concluded that she is "interested not only in Physics itself, but also in the communication problems that clearly impede its progress. People who entertain novel ideas are often swatted down, and do not get to be heard."

Selected publications

  • Pauli Algebra Techniques in Special Relativity, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 1967.
  • Minimum Contradictions Everything (Hadronic Press, 2009).
  • Algebraic Chemistry: Applications and Origins (Nova Science Publishers, 2013). ISBN 978-1-62257-861-0.
  • "Better Unification for Physics in General Through Quantum Mechanics in Particular", chapter 7 in Theoretical Concepts of Quantum Mechanics, M. R. Pahlavani, ed. (InTech, 2013).
  • "On the Dual Concepts of 'Quantum State' and 'Quantum Process'", chapter 17 in Advances in Quantum Mechanics, Paul Bracken, ed. (InTech, 2013).
  • "New Theory Applied to Important New Technologies", Infinite Energy Magazine 17, issue 101, pp. 14–21 (2012).
  • Editor, The Theory of Density (with Mohammad Javanshiry and Anna Kalapurakkal).

She has published numerous papers in Galilean Electrodynamics, Physics Essays, the Hadronic Journal and the Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance.

Abstracts

Books

See also

External links

Retrieved from "https://wiki.naturalphilosophy.org/index.php?title=Cynthia_Kolb_Whitney&oldid=306126"