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Cynthia Kolb Whitney

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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

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