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Cynthia Kolb Whitney

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Cynthia Kolb Whitney
Cynthia Kolb Whitney
Born1941
NationalityAmerican
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forEditor of Galilean Electrodynamics; criticism of special relativity; 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 in 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: a Bachelor of Science (S.B.) in physics, with a thesis in computational chemistry; a Master of Science (S.M.) in electrical engineering, with a thesis in statistical communication theory; and a Ph.D. in mathematical physics, with a thesis in special relativity theory.

Career

In 1967, Whitney took her first permanent position at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (then part of MIT), where she worked in support of the Apollo program. There she was assigned to work on the ring laser gyroscope, a device based on the Sagnac effect. According to her own account, her efforts to reconcile the behavior of the gyroscope with special relativity planted a lasting doubt in her mind about the theory, and marked the beginning of her long move toward dissident physics.

Over her career she 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, a small journal devoted to alternative treatments of relativity and 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.

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.

A recurring theme in her work is the finite speed of signal propagation and its consequences. Inspired in the late 1970s by an exhibit showing a spiral pattern forming in a spinning fluid, she proposed that a finite speed of gravity propagation could account for the spiral structure of galaxies, modeling barred-spiral and disc galaxies as arising from a two-body background potential field. She was unable to publish this work in mainstream astrophysics journals.

In the domain of electrodynamics she examined the Liénard–Wiechert potentials and fields, arguing that the standard treatment rests on a nineteenth-century assumption about the speed of light. She proposed a model in which light-signal propagation occurs in two stages, expansion from the source followed by contraction to the receiver, with the leading or trailing tip of the signal momentarily traveling at twice the conventional speed of light; she argued that this reproduces the mathematics demanded by the Sagnac effect and yields a "revised and extended" special relativity.

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," which she applied to the pattern of ionization potentials of the elements, and she also published on the neutron in the Hadronic Journal.

Selected publications

Whitney is the author of the book Minimum Contradictions Everything (2009) and an editor of The Theory of Density (with Mohammad Javanshiry and Anna Kalapurakkal). She has published numerous papers in alternative-physics venues including Galilean Electrodynamics, Physics Essays, the Hadronic Journal and the Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance.

Abstracts

  • 2013 - "[[How Electrodynamics with Statistical Mechanics

Can Imply Gravitation]]" (Read in full)

]]" (Read in full) 

 ]]"

Books

External links

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