Harald T Van Lintel
Harald T. Van Lintel | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1961 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Residence | 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland |
| Nationality | Dutch |
| Known for | Light, Special Relativity, Microfluids |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physicist |
Harald T. Van Lintel (born 1961) is a Dutch physicist and microsystems engineer based in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is known within the microfluidics community for pioneering work on micromachined silicon micropumps, and within the dissident-science community for his critical re-examination of Special Relativity, including studies of light propagation and the length-contraction paradoxes.
Biography
Van Lintel was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1961. He received his B.Sc. degree in Technical Physics in 1983 at the University of Twente, where he worked on micromachined micropumps and micromachined microphones. He subsequently travelled around the world, during which he worked part-time on solar cells at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, before returning to the University of Twente to assist with the development of a force sensor and a thermo-pneumatic micropump.
In 1989 he was invited by the Debio group to work as project manager for disposable and implantable medical micropumps at Debiotech, work that resulted in several patents. In April 1998 he joined the Microsystems Integration group (LMIS4) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he became involved in microfluidic systems research and related projects such as gas ionisers and scanning micro-mirrors, later focusing on biological lab-chips and nanofilter chips for the analysis of living cells, proteins and DNA. Alongside his engineering work he has maintained a personal interest in light propagation and the foundations of Special Relativity.
Scientific contributions
In 1988, while at the University of Twente, Van Lintel published (with F. C. M. van de Pol and S. Bouwstra) one of the first micromachined silicon micropumps, a piezoelectrically actuated reciprocating device with passive silicon check valves built in a glass–silicon structure. The work is widely cited as a foundational contribution to the field of microfluidics and micropump technology.
In the area of relativistic physics, Van Lintel has re-examined classic paradoxes of length contraction. In "The rod and hole paradox re-examined" (2005), written with Christian Gruber, he analysed the paradox in which a rigid rod moving at high speed passes over a hole of equal size, arguing on the basis of the retardation of stress propagation within the rod material that the rod does not fall through the hole. He has also proposed anisotropic wave propagation as an alternative to the Lorentz contraction hypothesis.
Selected publications
- Sensors & Actuators 15 (1988) pp. 153–167
- MEMS' 99 (1999) pp. 541–546
- MEMS' 01 (2001) pp. 413–417
- Eur. J. Phys. 26 (2005) pp. 19–23, "The rod-and-hole paradox re-examined"
Abstracts
- 2005 - "The Rod and Hole Paradox Re-examined" (Read in full)
- 2003 - "An Alternative to the Lorentz Contraction Hypothesis: Anistropic Wave Propagation"