Doug Sweetser
Doug Sweetser | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Doing Physics with Quaternions |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, Mathematics |
Doug Sweetser (Douglas B. Sweetser) is an independent researcher and author known for reformulating physics using quaternions and for a related proposal to unify gravity and electromagnetism. He is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Work
Sweetser is the author of Doing Physics with Quaternions, a freely distributed text that rewrites standard results of classical mechanics, special relativity, and electromagnetism in the language of quaternions and hypercomplex numbers. He argues that expressing physical laws in quaternion form exposes structure that is obscured in the usual vector and tensor notation.
Building on the electromagnetic case, he has proposed treating a term normally discarded from the Maxwell action as a gravitational field, leading to what he describes as a testable theory of gravity based on a "space-times-time" invariance. This unification programme, which he continues to develop, lies outside mainstream theoretical physics. His current work is collected at quaternions.com.