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Herbert Dingle

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Herbert Dingle
Herbert Dingle
Born(1890-08-02)August 2, 1890
DiedSeptember 4, 1978(1978-09-04) (aged 88)
ResidenceLondon, England
NationalityEnglish
Known forRelativity, the "Dingle question" on clock symmetry, Science at the Crossroads
Scientific career
FieldsAstrophysics, Spectroscopy, Relativity, History and Philosophy of Science
InstitutionsImperial College London; University College London

Herbert Dingle (2 August 1890 – 4 September 1978) was an English astrophysicist, spectroscopist and philosopher of science, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Imperial College London and later Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London. He was President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1951–53), a founder and President of the British Society for the History of Science (1955–57), and the founder of what became the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and of its journal, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Having begun as one of the most effective English-language expositors of special relativity, Dingle became, from the mid-1950s until his death, the most prominent academically credentialled critic of the theory in the English-speaking world. His challenge — that the theory requires each of two clocks in uniform relative motion to run slower than the other, while providing no means of saying which one is the slower — is remembered as the "Dingle question" and remains a touchstone of the dissident literature on relativity.

Biography

Dingle was born in Brixton, London, but spent his early years in Plymouth, where he was taken following the death of his father, and where he attended Plymouth Science, Art and Technical Schools. Due to lack of money, he left school at the age of 14 and found employment as a clerk, a job which he held for 11 years. At age 25 he won a scholarship to Imperial College, London, from which he graduated in 1918. In that same year, Dingle married Alice Westacott who later gave birth to a son. As a Quaker, Dingle was exempt from military service during World War I. He took a position as a Demonstrator in the Physics Department, and devoted himself to the study of spectroscopy (following his mentor Alfred Fowler), especially its applications in astronomy. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1922.

Dingle was a member of the British government eclipse expeditions of 1927 (Colwyn Bay) and 1932 (Montreal), both of which failed to make any observations due to overcast skies. He spent most of 1932 at the California Institute of Technology as a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar. There he met the theoretical cosmologist R. C. Tolman, and studied relativistic cosmology.

Dingle became a professor of Natural Philosophy at Imperial College in 1938, and was a professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London from 1946 until his retirement in 1955. Thereafter he held the customary title of Professor Emeritus from that institution. He served the Royal Astronomical Society as Secretary (1929–33) and then as President (1951–53). He was one of the founders of the British Society for the History of Science, and served as President from 1955 to 1957. He founded what later became the British Society for the Philosophy of Science as well as its journal, the British Journal for The Philosophy of Science.

Dingle was the author of Modern Astrophysics (1924) and Practical Applications of Spectrum Analysis (1950). He also wrote the essay Relativity for All (1922) and the monograph The Special Theory of Relativity (1940). A collection of Dingle's lectures on the history and philosophy of science was published in 1954. He also took an interest in English literature, and published Science and Literary Criticism in 1949, and The Mind of Emily Brontë in 1974. He died at Kingston upon Hull on 4 September 1978.

Scientific contributions

Astrophysics and spectroscopy

Dingle's professional reputation was made in astronomical spectroscopy, the field in which he trained under Alfred Fowler at Imperial College. Modern Astrophysics (1924) and Practical Applications of Spectrum Analysis (1950) were standard works of their period, and he contributed to the biography of Sir Norman Lockyer. His participation in the 1927 and 1932 eclipse expeditions and his year with R. C. Tolman at Caltech in 1932 turned his interests toward relativistic cosmology, which he then approached as a working astrophysicist rather than as a mathematician.

Philosophy of science and the 1937 cosmology controversy

Throughout his career Dingle held that science is answerable to observation and to reason, and that mathematical formalism must remain the servant of experience rather than its master. This conviction produced his first public controversy. On 8 May 1937 he published in Nature a polemical article, "Modern Aristotelianism" (139, 784–786), attacking what he saw as the a-priori and deductive turn in British cosmology represented by E. A. Milne, and, by extension, by Eddington and Dirac — a tendency he characterised as "cosmolatry" and as a pseudo-science of "invertebrate cosmythology". Nature devoted a supplement to the ensuing debate in June 1937. The episode established the pattern of Dingle's later work: a methodological objection, pressed publicly, against a body of theory whose practitioners he believed had stopped asking whether their formalism corresponded to anything physically possible.

Expositor of special relativity

Dingle came to the relativity controversy not as an outsider but as one of the theory's best-known British expounders. Relativity for All (Methuen, 1922) was an early popular exposition written within a few years of the theory's general acceptance in Britain, and his Methuen monograph The Special Theory of Relativity (1940, reaching a fourth edition in 1961) was a standard student text for a generation. As he later stressed, at the outset of the dispute he believed the theory to be sound, and his criticism grew out of taking its own principle of relativity strictly.

The origin of the criticism

In 1955, reading Sir George Thomson's The Foreseeable Future, Dingle noticed the claim that a space-travelling twin would return younger than the twin who stayed at home. In an article in Nature (177, 782, 1956) he argued that the twins must necessarily age at the same rate, because it was an essential requirement of special relativity — which he then believed sound — that no observation could ascribe the motion preferentially to either twin. This opened a long and public exchange with the relativist W. H. McCrea (see, for example, McCrea in Discovery 18, 174, 1957, and Dingle in Proceedings of the Physical Society A69, 925, 1956).

Dingle later described this controversy as the origin of a deeper realisation. In his words, the discussion "made me see that the theory required that the twins would age both at the same rate and at different rates, which is clearly contradictory." His first statement of the contradiction appeared in the Bulletin of the Institute of Physics (December 1958, p. 314), where he put it not in terms of clock readings but in terms of measuring rods, showing that the theory required each of two rods to be shorter than the other. During 1960 he published further papers on the matter in Science Progress (48, 201), Philosophy of Science (27, 233) and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (11, 11).

Notably, Dingle from that point deliberately set the travelling-twin scenario aside. As he wrote in The Times in January 1972, "I have carefully avoided the 'clock', or 'twin', paradox... knowing from experience that Paul's reversal of motion can be misused ad lib, to meet any need." His mature objection concerns two clocks in uniform, unaccelerated relative motion, where no asymmetry of any kind is available.

The Argument and the Question

In Science at the Crossroads (1972) Dingle set out his criticism in two forms, which he called "The Argument" and "The Question".

The Argument:

According to the special theory of relativity, two similar clocks, A and B, which are in uniform relative motion and in which no other differences exist of which the theory takes any account, work at different rates. The situation is therefore entirely symmetrical, from which it follows that if A works faster than B, B must work faster than A. Since this is impossible, the theory must be false.

The Question:

According to the special relativity theory, as expounded by Einstein in his original paper, two similar, regularly-running clocks, A and B, in uniform relative motion, must work at different rates. In mathematical terms, the intervals, dt and dt', which they record between the same two events are related by the Lorentz transformation, according to which dt ≠ dt'. Hence one clock must work steadily at a slower rate than the other. The theory, however, provides no indication of which clock that is, and the question inevitably arises: How is the slower-working clock distinguished?

Dingle regarded the Question as the more important of the two, because it demands a single, brief, positive answer rather than a refutation. He gave the point a concrete numerical form in his 1972 letter to The Times: for two clocks in uniform relative motion at a speed such that the Lorentz factor is 2, when B reads 1 and 2 o'clock, A must read 2 and 4 o'clock; but the identical calculation performed the other way round, treating A's readings as given, yields B reading 2 and 4 o'clock when A reads 1 and 2. Einstein, Dingle argued, made only the first calculation and so "missed the contradiction."

Dingle was careful about the scope of his conclusion. He did not deny the relativity of motion, nor the empirical adequacy of the Lorentz transformation as a piece of mathematics; what he held to be proved was that Einstein's interpretation of the transformation as a symmetrical relation between the rates of two physical clocks could not be a description of anything physically possible. He held the separate question of asymmetrical ageing to be an open experimental matter, awaiting "a valid determination of the true relation between the velocity of light and that of its source" — a question he also pursued in print (Monthly Notices of the RAS 119, 67, 1959; Nature 183, 1761, 1959).

The public controversy and Science at the Crossroads

From 1962 the dispute became highly public. Dingle's letter in Nature of 8 September 1962 (195, 985) prompted an exchange with Max Born and a Nature leading article of 30 March 1963 (see Nature 197, 1248 and 1287). In the issue of 14 October 1967 Nature printed Dingle's article "The Case Against Special Relativity" (216, 119–122) together with McCrea's reply "Why the Special Theory of Relativity is Correct" (216, 122–124); Dingle answered again in Nature of 6 January 1968 (217, 19–20). Further correspondence ran in The Listener in 1969 and again from September 1971 to January 1972, prompting an article by Bernard Levin in The Times of 21 December 1971 and an exchange there between R. A. Lyttleton (8 January 1972) and Dingle (26 January 1972).

Science at the Crossroads (Martin Brian & O'Keeffe, 1972) is the record of that campaign. Its chapters — "The Basic Principles of Science", "The Origin of the Controversy", "Reactions to Criticism", "Attitude of the Press", "Attitude of the 'Elder Statesmen'", "Four Outstanding Errors", "Einstein's Theory in its Original Context", "Non-Einsteinian Relativity", "The 'Clock (or Twin) Paradox'" and "The Present Position" — document, name by name and letter by letter, the responses he received. Dingle's charge in the book is stated at the outset:

I can present the matter most briefly by saying that a proof that Einstein's special theory of relativity is false has been advanced; and ignored, evaded, suppressed and, indeed, treated in every possible way except that of answering it, by the whole scientific world.

The book's argument is therefore as much about the ethics and method of science as about kinematics. Dingle contended that the traditional claim of science to acknowledge "the absolute authority of experience... and reason over all theories" could no longer be upheld, and that "mathematics has been transformed from the servant of experience into its master." He also observed a striking gradient in the replies he received: "the readiness to respond to my criticism decreases steadily with increasing distinction of those who read it."

Later assessment

The dispute has since become a case study in the history and philosophy of science. Hasok Chang's detailed study "A Misunderstood Rebellion: The Twin-Paradox Controversy and Herbert Dingle's Vision of Science" (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24(5), 741–790, 1993) reviewed the whole controversy and concluded that Dingle's opponents had not in fact rebutted his argument, and had largely not addressed the argument he actually raised; Chang emphasised Dingle's insistence on a causal, physical account of the predicted asymmetry, over and above a purely geometrical or spacetime one. Karl Popper's response to Dingle on relativity and the problem of the observer has likewise been the subject of later scholarly study. Dingle's formulation continues to be restated and defended in the dissident literature, including recent papers on "Dingle's inconsistency argument".

Discussed in CNPS talks

Dingle's critique of special relativity has been the subject of a CNPS online seminar presented by Roger J Anderton:

Abstracts

Books

Works

Books

  • Relativity for All, Methuen & Co., Ltd., London, and Little, Brown, and Company, Boston, 1922
  • Modern Astrophysics, Collins, London, 1924
  • Life and Work of Sir Norman Lockyer (Part Author), Macmillan, London, 1928
  • Science and Human Experience, Williams & Norgate Ltd., London, 1931, and The Macmillan Company, New York, 1932
  • Through Science to Philosophy, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1937
  • The Special Theory of Relativity, Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, and John Wiley & Sons Inc. New York, 4th Edition, 1961 (1st Edition 1940)
  • Mechanical Physics, Nelson, London, 1941
  • Sub-Atomic Physics, Nelson, London, 1942
  • Science and Literary Criticism, Nelson, London, 1949
  • Practical Applications of Spectrum Analysis, Chapman and Hall, London, 1950
  • A Century of Science: 1851-1951 (Editor), Hutchinson's Scientific and Technical Publications, London, 1951
  • The Scientific Adventure: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., London, 1952
  • The Sources of Eddington's Philosophy, The Eighth Arthur Stanley Eddington Memorial Lecture, Cambridge University Press, 1954
  • A Threefold Cord: Philosophy, Science, Religion, A Discussion Between Viscount Samuel and Professor Herbert Dingle, George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, 1961
  • Science at the Crossroads, Martin Brian & O'Keeffe, London, 1972
  • The Mind of Emily Brontë, Martin Brian & O'Keeffe, London, 1974

Articles

  • "Modern Aristotelianism", Nature 139, 784-786 (8 May 1937)
  • Nature 177, 782 (1956)
  • Proceedings of the Physical Society London A69, p. 925 (1956)
  • Bulletin of the Institute of Physics, December 1958, p. 314
  • Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 119, 67 (1959)
  • Nature 183, 1761 (1959)
  • Science Progress 48, 201 (1960)
  • Philosophy of Science 27, 233 (1960)
  • British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 11, 11 (1960)
  • Nature 195, 985 (8 September 1962)
  • "The Case Against Special Relativity", Nature 216, 119-122 (14 October 1967)
  • Nature 217, 19-20 (6 January 1968)
  • "A Re-examination of the Michelson-Morley Experiment," Vistas in Astronomy, V9, pp. 97-100 (1967)

External links

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