David Bryan Wallace
David Bryan Wallace | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | March 30, 1944 New Jersey, United States |
| Residence | Cape Coral, Florida, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Carleton College; University of Louisville; Florida Gulf Coast University; University of Central Florida |
| Known for | alternative to Einstein's relativity |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | mathematics |
David Bryan Wallace (born March 30, 1944) is an American mathematics instructor and independent researcher who has developed a critique of and proposed alternative to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. A retired teacher based in Cape Coral, Florida, he has argued that several observations commonly cited in support of special relativity in fact falsify it, and he questions elements of modern cosmology such as Big Bang theory.
Biography
Wallace grew up in New Jersey. His father was an electrical engineer employed by ITT Labs, and his parents and three sisters all completed college or university studies. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in biology from Carleton College in 1966. He worked as a mathematician in the United States Air Force from 1969 to 1971, and was a self-employed businessman from 1972 to 1990.
He returned to formal study in the 1990s, earning a Master of Arts in Teaching in the natural sciences from the University of Louisville in 1992, where he first studied modern physics. He later completed a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics at Florida Gulf Coast University in 2004 and a Master of Science in mathematics at the University of Central Florida in 2005. Wallace worked as a teacher from 1992 to 2009.
In 2008 he married a Finnish-born psychologist and novelist. He is retired and lives in Cape Coral, Florida.
Scientific contributions
Wallace has worked intermittently since about 1991 on an alternative to Einstein's theory of relativity. In his writing he emphasizes a falsificationist view of science, arguing, following Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that the scientific community can be reluctant to abandon a theory once observations contradict it.
Wallace contends that a number of results cited as confirmations of special relativity are better understood as falsifications of it. He points to Willem de Sitter's analysis of binary stars, the Sagnac effect, and the reported measurement of one-way light-speed anisotropy by National Bureau of Standards scientists Torr and Kolen (1982) as evidence against the postulate that the speed of light is the same relative to every inertial reference frame. He also questions aspects of modern cosmology, suggesting that the cosmological red shift may result from wavelength-dependent attenuation rather than expansion of the universe, that the cosmic microwave background may be black-body radiation from cold matter, and that the observed bending of starlight near the Sun may be refraction by the solar corona.
These views are outside the scientific mainstream, which regards special and general relativity as well-supported by experiment and observation.
Publications
- Wallace, David Bryan (2023). "Remembering what it Means to be Scientific, (Because Some of us Appear to have Forgotten)." Journal of Physics & Optics Sciences 5(6). [1]
External links
- Physics Fixes — author's website
- "Remembering what it Means to be Scientific" (2023), Journal of Physics & Optics Sciences