Physics (Dishington book)

Physics
Author	Roland H Dishington
Published	1989
Publisher	Beak Publications
Pages	502
ISBN	B00071SET6 Invalid ISBN

Physics (1989) is the first and longest of the four books in which Roland H Dishington set out his independent reconstruction of theoretical physics. At 502 pages it is the full statement of the programme he would later condense and revise as Physics 2001 (2001), Physics 2001 Revised (2009) and Unified Field Theory (2011).

Its aim is stated without qualification: a visualizable unified field theory covering particles, energy, charge, electricity and magnetism, gravitation and the nuclear forces — arrived at by cause-and-effect reasoning rather than by formalism.

For the general topic, see Physics.

The complaint

The book opens with an indictment of the textbooks, and it is one of the plainest statements on this wiki of the objection that motivates most of the literature here:

Modern physics books are honeycombed with strange if not bizarre philosophical ideas. The student is told to abandon his intuition, cause and effect and the deterministic world. He is offered, instead, a statistical numbers game, a space and time done with mirrors, and an abstract view of the world conformable only to pure mathematicians.
— Roland H. Dishington, Physics (1989), Preface

Three targets are packed into that sentence. The "statistical numbers game" is quantum mechanics on the Copenhagen reading; "a space and time done with mirrors" is relativity; and the "abstract view conformable only to pure mathematicians" is the general charge that mathematical tractability has been allowed to override physical intelligibility.

His summary of the book's purpose is the sentence the preface ends on:

Fuzzy atoms are out, Determinism is in.
— Roland H. Dishington, Physics (1989), Preface

The programme

Dishington states his method as a descent through levels of explanation:

Physics is an intuitively understandable deterministic description of the real world with no paradoxes. It consists of cause and effect explanations of observed phenomena in successively lower levels of abstraction. At the bottom is a remaining unexplained metaphysical base.
— Roland H. Dishington, Physics (1989), Preface

Two things are worth marking in that formulation.

The first is the demand for no paradoxes — the position that the twin paradox, wave–particle duality and quantum indeterminacy are not deep truths to be accepted but symptoms of a wrong description.

The second is more unusual, and more candid than most such books manage: Dishington concedes that at the bottom there remains an unexplained metaphysical base. He does not claim to explain everything. The claim is that explanation should be pushed down as far as it will go, and that modern physics stops far too early — not that it can be pushed all the way.

The structure, and its honesty about itself

The book's most distinctive feature is that Dishington grades his own chapters by how rigorous they are. Few authors of unified theories tell the reader which parts to trust.

Chapters 1–7 — "well known material, slightly rearranged and modified". Standard physics, restated.
Chapters 8–9, The Electron — "reasonably rigorous".
Chapter 10, Rods, Clocks and Plumb Bobs — "solidly rigorous". The title signals the subject: the measuring instruments whose behaviour relativity explains by the geometry of spacetime, and which Dishington means to explain physically instead.
Chapter 11, Mechanics — "solidly rigorous".
Chapter 12, The Atom — "solidly rigorous".
Chapters 13, The Nucleus, and 14, The Particles — "highly speculative", though built on the ideas of chapters 8 to 12.
Chapters 15–17 — "rigorous where possible".

His own assessment, offered in the preface, is that "the qualitative deterministic picture is almost complete" while "the quantitative level is varied" — which is a fair description of the programme as a whole, and an unusually frank one.

Relation to his physics

The chapters Dishington rates most highly are the ones carrying his own contribution. The electron chapters develop the model he set out separately in The Extended Electron — the electron as a zone of depletion in the aether, bounded by a standing wave — and the mechanics chapter follows the consequence he drew in Kinetic Energy, Momentum and Inertia, that all energy derives from distortions of the electron and is therefore wholly electric in nature.

Rods, Clocks and Plumb Bobs is the relativity chapter under another name, and its title is the argument: the phenomena relativity attributes to the structure of spacetime are, on this account, effects on physical objects that should be explained by what those objects are made of. Compare his later The Conservation Law (1998), which reduces the many conservation laws to one conserved substance, and Correcting the Texts: Fundamental Errors in Electromagnetics (2012), which carries the same insistence into Maxwell's theory.

The speculative chapters — the nucleus and the particles — are where the aether programme is extended furthest beyond what it can support, and Dishington says so.

Assessment

As a book, Physics is the most complete single presentation of a coherent independent programme in this archive: one substance, one conservation law, an extended electron, and a refusal of the paradoxes. It is written as a textbook rather than as a polemic, and its self-grading gives a reader an honest route through it.

Its limitations are those of the programme. It was self-published and unrefereed; its quantitative reach is, by the author's own account, uneven; and the chapters that would have to compete with the standard model of the nucleus and of particle physics are the ones he marks as speculative. The book's value is as a worked-out alternative picture, not as a rival calculation.

Links to Purchase Book

Physics (1989)