Herbert Dingle
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Herbert Dingle (1890–1978) was an English astronomer and president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 to 1953.
Dingle was born in 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 the Imperial College, London, from which he graduated in 1918. (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 married Alice Westacott in 1918, and they had one son. Alice died in 1947.
He 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. 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.[1]
Dingle is best known for his participation in two highly public and polemical disputes. The first took place during the 1930s, triggered by Dingle's criticism of E. A. Milne's cosmological model and the associated theoretical methodology, which Dingle considered pernicious.[2] The second took place in the 1960s, and centered on Dingle's objection to the theory of special relativity.[3][4] This culminated in his 1972 book, Science at the Crossroads.[5][6] In both of these disputes, Dingle was opposed by (among others) the astrophysicist William H. McCrea. The consensus in the physics community is that Dingle's objections to special relativity were unfounded.[7][8][9][10].
Dingle is also known for his 1922 essay, "Relativity for All", and his 1940 text book The Special Theory of Relativity. A collection of Dingle's lectures on the history and philosophy of science was published in 1954.[11] He also took an interest in English literature, and published "Science and Literary Criticism" in 1949, and "The Mind of Emily Bronte" in 1974.
References
- ^ Whitrow, "Obituarys: Herbert Dingle", Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 21, p. 333–338, 1980.
- ^ "Cosmology: Methodological Debates in the 1930s and 1940s"from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- ^
Dingle, H. (October 14 1967). "The Case against Special Relativity". Nature: 119.
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McCrea, W.H. (October 14 1967). "Why The Special Theory of Relativity is Correct". Nature: 122.
{{cite journal}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Science at the Crossroads by Herbert Dingle
- ^ "Challenging Einstein's Special Relativity: Herbert Dingle — Science at the Crossroads" This article links two PDF files: The body and the appendices of Herbert Dingle's book Science at the Crossroads.
- ^ Einstein, "Dialogue About Objections to the Theory of Relativity", Die Naturwissenschaften, 6, 1918
- ^ H. Reichenbach, "The Philosophy of Space and Time", 1927
- ^ Taylor and Wheeler, Spacetime Physics, W.H. Freeman & Co, 1966.
- ^ Rindler, Essential Relativity, Springer-Verlag, 1969
- ^ The Scientific Adventure: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science, 1954, re-published in 1970 by Ayer Publishing.
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