Eng Eckard Blumschein
Eckard Blumschein | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | German |
| Known for | Critiques of the foundational assumptions of relativity and the physical concept of time |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Electrical engineering, signal processing, foundations of physics |
| Institutions | Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg |
Eckard Blumschein is a German electrical engineer known for his critical essays on the foundations of physics, particularly assumptions concerning time. He taught fundamentals of electrical engineering for many years at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, and studied at the Technical University of Dresden. He is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Ideas
Blumschein argues that a number of "enigmas and suspected basic flaws" in physics stem from intuitive, pre-mathematical assumptions that escape ordinary mathematical scrutiny. He questions, among other things, the notion that the distinction between past and future is an illusion and that time is an a-priori dimension in which objects move as they do in space. Drawing on his background in signal processing, he has advocated the use of a real-valued cosine transform integrating only over elapsed (past) time as an alternative to the complex Fourier transform, arguing that this better reflects the asymmetry between past and future.
He set out these views in a series of essays for the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) essay contests, including "Questioning Pre-Mathematical Intuitions," and on the German site Kritik-Relativitätstheorie.de. His positions are contested and lie outside the mainstream of theoretical physics.