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Latest revision as of 20:59, 20 July 2026

Harry Hamlin Ricker
Harry Hamlin Ricker
Born (1948-05-15) May 15, 1948 (age 78)
Newport News, Virginia, United States
ResidenceNewport News, VA, United States
NationalityUSA
Known forSpecial Relativity, Electromagnetism, History of Science, Philosophy of Science, Astronomy, Astrophysics
Scientific career
FieldsElectrical Engineer

Harry Hamlin Ricker III (born May 15, 1948), known to his friends as Harry, is an American electrical engineer, amateur astronomer, and dissident-science writer from Newport News, Virginia. After a career in radio-interference analysis, missile tracking, and satellite communications, he became a prolific critic of Einstein's special theory of relativity and a student of the history of electricity and magnetism. He is best known for his long "Herbert Dingle Was Correct!" series of papers, his analyses of the "Light Sphere Paradox" and the "irksomeness" of relativity, and his work popularizing the anti-Einstein arguments of Carl A. Zapffe and Louis Essen. He also writes on astronomy, cosmology, and American Civil War history, and takes part in the online Cosmology discussion sessions.

Biography

Harry Hamlin Ricker III was born in Newport News, Virginia on May 15, 1948. He attended schools in Newport News and graduated from Homer L. Ferguson High School in 1966. He entered Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University majoring in electrical engineering, following the profession of his father, who was a NASA engineer at Langley Field, Virginia. His interest in electronics was inspired by his childhood hobby of amateur radio, which later led to a lifelong passion for the study of electromagnetic theory, antennas, and radio systems. In 1971 he received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering. In 1970 he began graduate studies in electrical engineering at the University of New Hampshire, and received his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1972.

His first employer was I.I.T. Research Institute, a contractor for the Electromagnetic Compatibility Analysis Center in Annapolis, Maryland. His work there involved developing models for the analysis of radio interference involving radar and terrestrial communications systems. In 1975 he left to work at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory as a contractor doing missile tracking analysis. This involved working in the new field of tracking systems that would become the present GPS. In 1979 he went to work at Communications Satellite Corporation, where he worked on systems design for satellite communications. He continued in this business working for GTE Spacenet Corp from 1989 until 1994, when he retired from full-time employment and became an engineering consultant. His consulting business is New Millenium Electrodynamics. Ricker's expertise in digital communications stressed the setting up of clocks for system timing and the coordination of clocks, a discipline that would prove useful later in his studies of special relativity.

While working at Johns Hopkins and living in Columbia, Maryland, Ricker studied creative writing at the local community college. This initiated a lifelong interest in writing. He has written and published articles on the American Civil War, another of his hobbies. His particular interest is the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, and he has written an extensive historical analysis of the neglected Battle of Williamsburg of May 5, 1862.

Ricker's first dissident scientific paper was titled "Report on the Discovery of Interstellar Dust Filaments." It reflected his interest in astronomy and astrophysics, which had been stimulated by his astronomy classes in college. Over the years he has owned a number of telescopes and remains an active amateur astronomer. The paper on dust filaments was inspired by an interest in collecting astrophotographs and studying them. Morphology, the study of forms, had not been systematically applied to interstellar dust formations, and Ricker undertook such a study. The results were not well received, as they contradicted the accepted view that the interstellar medium is a diffuse gas with interspersed puffy clouds; Ricker argues that the dust filaments are more like cirrus clouds than the cumulus clouds required for star formation.

Around 1990 Ricker's interest shifted to electromagnetic theory. This was inspired by the papers of Ivor Catt that appeared in Wireless World, which suggested a different way to view the theory of electricity and magnetism. This inspired an investigation of the history of magnetism and electricity, a study that (in his view) revealed a number of new insights, including theories of magnetism in the pre-Socratic Greek period and the Middle Ages.

Around 1995, as a result of his studies in electricity and magnetism, Ricker began an investigation of the special theory of relativity and concluded that the theory did not really fit into electromagnetic theory as claimed by the textbooks. This initiated a detailed analysis of relativity which resulted in his rejecting the theory as false and misleading, and in his development of an alternative approach that he claims eliminates its contradictions, paradoxes, and conclusions he regards as absurd.

Views and research

Ricker is a prolific dissident writer whose work has been published on the Natural Philosophy Wiki and the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society (naturalphilosophy.org), the General Science Journal (gsjournal.net), mrelativity.net, and the Beyond Mainstream online magazine. His writing spans several recurring themes:

  • Special relativity. Ricker argues that Einstein's special theory of relativity is internally contradictory. In his "Light Sphere Paradox" papers he contends that the postulate of the constancy of the speed of light in all inertial frames leads to a self-contradiction, which he takes as evidence that the theory rests on "false mathematics." He describes the theory as "irksome"—individually plausible steps that, taken together, yield conclusions he considers irrational—and has written papers he titles as refutations of time dilation, length contraction, the velocity-addition law, and the Lorentz transformation as Einstein interpreted them.
  • Herbert Dingle. Much of Ricker's relativity work defends the physicist and philosopher Herbert Dingle, who argued that the reciprocity of the Lorentz transformation implies that each of two relatively moving clocks must run slower than the other, which he held to be impossible. In his multi-part "Herbert Dingle Was Correct!" series, Ricker argues that Dingle correctly identified an inconsistency in the kinematic part of Einstein's 1905 paper, and he has responded at length to physicists who defended relativity against Dingle.
  • Carl Zapffe and Louis Essen. Ricker has worked to publicize the anti-Einstein arguments of the metallurgist Carl A. Zapffe (including Zapffe's "Flying Interferometer" thought experiment and his epistemological critique of relativity) and of Louis Essen, the inventor of the atomic clock, who rejected relativity late in his life. Ricker has published commentary on Essen's correspondence with Zapffe.
  • Electromagnetism and its history. Following Ivor Catt, Ricker favors a transmission-line ("reciprocating energy") view of electricity over the conventional static-charge picture, and he engages with the "Catt Question" about where charge resides in a propagating electromagnetic step. He has written a series on the history of magnetism, from the pre-Socratic Greeks and William Gilbert onward.
  • Astronomy and cosmology. An active amateur astronomer, Ricker interprets photographs of the interstellar medium as showing thread-like "dust filaments" (which he likens to cobwebs), and he is skeptical of mainstream accounts of star formation, supermassive black holes, and standard cosmology. He presents talks on these subjects in the online Cosmology discussion sessions hosted on Roger J Anderton's YouTube channel.

Articles

Articles on Beyond Mainstream

Articles published on the Beyond Mainstream website (author archive):

Abstracts

Media

CNPS talks

He has presented in the CNPS online seminar series:

YouTube Videos

Talks presented in the Cosmology discussion sessions on Roger J Anderton's YouTube channel (@rogeranderton418):

External links

Retrieved from "https://wiki.naturalphilosophy.org/index.php?title=Harry_Hamlin_Ricker&oldid=306157"