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Roger J Anderton

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Roger J. Anderton
Roger J. Anderton
ResidenceUnited Kingdom
NationalityEnglish
Known forBoscovich unified field theory, criticism of Einstein's relativity
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics, Unified field theory, History and philosophy of physics

Roger J. Anderton is an English independent researcher, writer and translator based in the United Kingdom, known for his work on theoretical physics, unified field theory and the philosophy of the natural sciences. His writing pays particular attention to the physics of Newton, Boscovich and Einstein. In addition to writing his own articles, he translates, edits and publishes books, and he is best known as a modern champion of the 18th-century unified field theory of the Jesuit polymath Roger Joseph Boscovich (Ruđer Bošković, 1711–1787).

Anderton is one of the most prolific contributors to the dissident physics community: the General Science Journal alone lists several hundred papers and notes under his name, and he has presented well over fifty live sessions for the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society.

Biography

Anderton is a member of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association (ANPA), the association founded in Cambridge in 1979 by Pierre Noyes, Clive Kilmister, Ted Bastin, Frederick Parker-Rhodes and John Amson, and he has spoken at its meetings, including ANPA 2016 and ANPA Online 2020. He has also long been associated with the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society (CNPS, formerly the Natural Philosophy Alliance), where for a number of years he has hosted and presented the society's bi-weekly live video sessions — held every other Saturday — on the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society YouTube channel. These open online sessions bring together independent researchers to present talks and debate alternative ideas across physics, cosmology and the history of science.

Much of Anderton's more recent Boscovich work is done in collaboration with the Serbian polymer scientist Dragoslav Stoiljković, whose writings on Boscovich he has helped bring into English, and it draws heavily on Yugoslav and Soviet-bloc scholarship that is little known in the English-speaking world. He has also worked as a translator of older continental sources, including a rough English translation of the 1931 pamphlet Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein ("A Hundred Authors Against Einstein").

Anderton presents his ideas through papers, conference talks, books, an active personal YouTube channel and the CNPS livestream series. He is listed in the Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.

Scientific contributions

Boscovich's unified field theory

Anderton's central thesis is that the first unified field theory was formulated by Boscovich in the 18th century, long before Einstein, and that Boscovich's single force law provides the correct foundation for physics. According to Anderton, Boscovich reduced all of physics to point-particles interacting through one universal force whose sign oscillates with distance — the so-called Boscovich curve. At the largest separations the force is attractive and varies as the inverse square of distance (recovering Newtonian gravity), while at intermediate and small separations it oscillates between attraction and repulsion, giving rise to the effects later attributed to the other fundamental forces. In this way Boscovich joined the macro world of Newton's "world machine" to the micro world of atoms under one consistent law.

From this starting point Anderton argues that:

  • Both quantum physics and Einstein's relativity can be traced back to, or derived from, Boscovich's earlier unified theory. He calls this older framework the "Victorian theory of everything" — the physics that was still being taught before the modern era, and from which, in his reading, Einstein was working.
  • Boscovich's theory functions as a form of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), in which the switch from attractive to repulsive force could account for phenomena that mainstream physics attributes to dark matter and dark energy.
  • Prior to roughly the Second World War, Boscovich was still taught in some physics curricula, but was subsequently written out of the mainstream account of the history of science.
  • Einstein was aware of Boscovich's theory before his famous 1905 paper, a claim Anderton has pursued in several papers tracing pre-1905 connections between the two.

With Stoiljković, Anderton has extended this programme into the empirical literature, arguing that many dozens of measured two-particle interaction curves — for nucleons, atoms, molecules, charged colloidal particles and clay particles — reproduce the shape of the Boscovich curve across the whole hierarchy of matter, and that Boscovich's force law can be applied to concrete chemical problems such as the free-radical polymerization of compressed ethylene gas and of liquid methyl methacrylate. These arguments were presented in two chapters of the Vigier symposium proceedings Unified Field Mechanics II (World Scientific, 2018).

Criticism of Einstein's relativity

Anderton positions himself as a "devil's advocate" on the history of relativity. He holds that relativity as a principle is acceptable — indeed that it is Galilean and Newtonian in origin — but that Einstein's particular formulation of it was mishandled, that Einstein "made a great many mistakes", and that modern physics has been built on those errors, which the scientific establishment has since enforced as dogma. Recurring lines of argument in his papers and talks include:

  • The 1905 paper does not cohere. Anderton argues that the mathematics and the verbal argument of Einstein's 1905 special relativity paper do not make sense on their own terms, and he has worked through the paper in detail, drawing on annotated readings such as Bruce Nappi's and on Alasdair Beal's treatment of the same material.
  • Moving goalposts. On his account, relativity has been repeatedly and silently amended — over relativistic mass, over the constancy of lightspeed, over the addition of Minkowski spacetime in 1908, over translation from German into English by Sommerfeld and others — so that the theory now taught is not the theory Einstein wrote, and no explicit agreement was ever recorded for the changes. He has assembled a timeline of these amendments.
  • Metaphysics mistaken for physics. Anderton argues that many claims made in the name of relativity are metaphysical rather than physical, and that the failure to mark the boundary has produced lasting confusion; from a Newtonian standpoint, he holds, the metaphysics of Einstein's relativity does not make sense. He proposes that the relativity principle as usually stated should be discarded and revised.
  • Mistaught, therefore mis-attacked. A distinctive theme in his later talks is that because relativity is taught badly and inconsistently, many dissidents end up attacking a strawman rather than the theory itself — a criticism he directs at parts of the dissident community as well as at the mainstream.
  • The aether. Anderton argues that discarding the aether by redefining it as a metaphysical rather than physical concept was a major error, that the mathematics of Einstein's own 1905 paper implies an aether, and that restoring the aether as a physical concept is what allows relativity and quantum mechanics to be corrected and joined into a unified field theory.
  • Newtonian–Einsteinian duality. He maintains that with modest mathematical manipulation the formalism of Einsteinian physics can be converted into Newtonian physics — that Newtonian physics, general relativity and unified field theory are the same thing "barring mistakes that need correcting", and that spacetime curvature is not required.

Quantum physics, method and the sociology of science

Anderton extends the same critique to quantum theory, arguing that the myth-making he identifies in relativity was carried over into quantum physics, that Einstein's influence "messed up" quantum mechanics, and that standard textbook accounts — such as the wave-particle duality story told about the double-slit experiment — misrepresent what was actually done and found. He has also examined how antimatter, originally conceived with negative mass, came to be re-described with positive mass.

A further strand of his work concerns the scientific method itself and the treatment of critics. He argues that the sheer number of modifications required by relativity represents a failure of the scientific method, that Einstein's papers were never peer reviewed, and that academia has phased out relativity critics by a "soft sunset" — letting existing critics fade away while preventing new ones from entering the field. He has documented episodes such as the censorship of future dissident talks at the India Science Congress and the near-total silence of Western media on a Chinese scholar's claim to have disproven relativity. In several recent talks he has used large language models as an investigative tool, interrogating them about relativity to expose the vagueness and mutual contradiction in the way relativists state their own theory.

CNPS talks

Anderton is the most prolific presenter in the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society's bi-weekly livestream series, which he also hosts. His sessions are grouped below by theme, newest first within each group.

Anti-relativity series: the 1905 paper, its mathematics and its paradoxes

Moving goalposts: how relativity was rewritten

Metaphysics, method and the teaching of physics

Aether, Newtonian physics and unified theory

Quantum physics and antimatter

Experiments, observations and anomalies

Other dissidents, debate and the sociology of physics

Works

Books

  • Nedelkovich, Dušan (author); Anderton, Roger (translator), Natural Philosophy and Relativity of Boscovich, Lulu, 2013. ISBN 9781291344509 — an English translation of Nedelkovich's 1922 study of Boscovich.
  • Anderton, Roger; Stoiljković, Dragoslav, Roger Boscovich: The Founder of Modern Science, Lulu.com, 2014 (90 pp.).

Conference chapters

  • "Modern Applications of Boscovich's Unified Field Theory", in Unified Field Mechanics II: Formulations and Empirical Tests (World Scientific, 2018), pp. 242–251.
  • "Centres of Force and Point-particles in Boscovich's Unified Theory", in Unified Field Mechanics II: Formulations and Empirical Tests (World Scientific, 2018), pp. 252–259.
  • "An Introduction to Boscovichian Unified Field Theory" — conference paper, indexed in the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS, 2013).

Abstracts on this wiki

Selected papers at the General Science Journal

Several hundred further papers, notes and lecture transcripts by Anderton are archived at the General Science Journal, among them:

  • "Unified Field Theory: basics"
  • "Boscovich Unified Field Theory and Atomism" (with Dragoslav Stoiljković)
  • "Einstein was aware of Boscovich's theory before his famous paper" (2019)
  • "Another connection of Boscovich to Einstein pre-1905" (2019)
  • "Unified field theory pre-Einstein" (2021)
  • "Relationship between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics" (2022)
  • "Relativity does not require Spacetime curvature"
  • "Feynman's Relativistic Mistake"
  • "Einstein's Revision to Relativity"
  • "Newtonian Gravitational deflection of light"
  • "How the influence of Einstein messed up Quantum mechanics" (2021)
  • "Einstein's ether theory" (2021)
  • "Einstein's papers were never peer reviewed" (2019)
  • "Hundred Authors Against Einstein — rough translation" (2021)
  • "Criticism of Einstein's Relativity" (2023)

Media

Personal YouTube channel

Anderton maintains the YouTube channel Roger Anderton (@rogeranderton418), where he posts lectures and commentary on Boscovich, unified field theory, the history of relativity and dissident physics. Notable uploads include:

External links

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