Herbert Dingle

Herbert Dingle ( born August 2, 1890 in London, † September 4, 1978 in Hull ) was a British astrophysicist and natural philosopher. He was 1951-1953 President of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Life

Dingle was born in London, but spent after the death of his father, his early years in Plymouth. Due to insufficient financial resources he had to leave school and work 11 years as an employee there, however. At 25, he won a scholarship to the Imperial College in London, graduating in 1918. During the same year he married Alice Westacott, with whom he had a son. As a Quaker Dingle was adopted military service in the First World War. He obtained a position as an assistant in the Physics Department, and devoted himself ( his mentor Alfred Fowler following) the study of spectroscopy and above all their application in astronomy. In 1922 Dingle Member ( Fellow ) of the Royal Astronomical Society, which he was president from 1951 to 1953.

Dingle was a member of the occultation expeditions of the British Government from 1927 ( Colwyn Bay) and 1932 ( Montreal), which both failed due to overcast skies. In 1932, he spent most of his time at the California Institute of Technology as a scholar of the Rockefeller Foundation. Here he met the theoretical Kosomologen Richard C. Tolman and studied relativistic cosmology.

1938 Dingle became a professor of natural philosophy at the Imperial College and was a professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London from 1946 until his retirement in 1955. Thereafter he bore the title "Professor Emeritus " for this institution. He was a co-founder of the British Society for the History of Science and founded the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and related to 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 introductory work on the theory of relativity as 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 in 1954 was published. He was also interested in English literature and published Science and Literary Criticism (1949) and The Mind of Emily Brontë (1974).

Controversies

Dingle was also known for his participation in various public and polemical disputes. Thus he criticized in the 1930s, the cosmological model of Edward Arthur Milne as too speculative and not based on experience. He also criticized Arthur Stanley Eddington, with almost every prominent British astrophysicist and cosmologist involved in this debate. Dingle characterized his opponents as "traitors" to the scientific method and called it "the modern Aristotelians " because he believed that their theoretical considerations based more on rationalism rather than empiricism. Willem de Sitter supported some of the less radical statements of Dingle's criticism of Milne and Eddington. However, the modern cosmologists believe that the hypothetical- deductive method of Milne is valid.

Although he had in the 1920s wrote a textbook on special relativity theory (SRT ) one of the first and she accepted initially to Dingle turned retired from her and threw it. Originally, he argued that the SRT in the twin paradox no different aging of the twins forecasting, but, however, he himself recognized his error in the argument. He then claimed that the predictions of the SRT are empirically false, even though the experiments showed the opposite. After Dingle focused his criticism back on the assumption that the SRT is logically inconsistent. Above all, Dingle was referring to the time dilation, according to which each observer sees the clocks of the other run mutually slower. For him, the reciprocity of the Lorentz transformation was an obvious absurdity.

Dingle expressed his criticism in an extensive public campaign to the public, such as in letters to the journal Nature. Many scientists ( including Whitrow ) answered him and said that the reciprocity of the Lorentz transformation can be easily demonstrated and thus the SRT is in no way inconsistent. However, Dingle rejected the solutions and finally published (1972 ) the book Science at the Crossroads, in which he claimed that the refutation of the SRT was provided, however, has been ignored or suppressed by the whole scientific world. The consensus in the scientific community is that Dingle's objections to the logical consistency of the SRT are unfounded.