Pari Spolter
Pari Spolter | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | January 30, 1930 Tehran, Iran |
| Residence | Granada Hills, California, United States |
| Nationality | Iranian-American |
| Alma mater | University of Geneva University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| Known for | Gravitational Force of the Sun (1993); alternative theory of gravitation |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Biochemistry, gravitation |
Pari Spolter (born January 30, 1930) is an Iranian-American biochemist, publisher, and author. Trained as a biochemist, she is best known outside her original field for her 1993 book Gravitational Force of the Sun, in which she challenges the accepted theories of gravitation of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and proposes an alternative formulation in which gravitational force is independent of mass. Her ideas lie outside the mainstream of physics and astronomy and have been published chiefly through her own imprint, Orb Publishing Company, rather than in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Biography
Spolter was born in Tehran, Iran, on January 30, 1930. She earned a licence ès sciences chimiques, mention biologiques (a degree in biochemistry) from the University of Geneva in Switzerland in 1952, and subsequently a Master of Science (1959) and a Ph.D. in biochemistry (1961) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
From 1952 to 1957 she taught at the University of Tehran. In 1957 she immigrated to the United States, and about a year later she married the pediatrician Herbert Spolter; the couple had four children. She held academic and research posts as a research associate and instructor at Temple University in Philadelphia (1961–1965) and as a research biochemist at the Public Health Service Hospital in San Francisco (1965–1968). Her laboratory research during these years was supported by government grants.
After raising her family, Spolter turned to independent research without an academic affiliation. In 1988 she established the Orb Publishing Company in Granada Hills, California, through which she has published her books. She has said that she chose to publish her own work rather than submit it to scientific journals in order to avoid the peer-review process, which she regarded as a risk to the priority of her ideas.
Scientific contributions
Spolter's central work, Gravitational Force of the Sun, was first published in 1993, with a revised second edition in 2014. In it she argues that the mass of a body is not a necessary factor in gravitational attraction. Aligning herself with Johannes Kepler rather than with Newton or Einstein, she proposes that the gravitational force of the Sun can be expressed as the product of acceleration and the area of a circle whose radius equals the semimajor axis of a body's orbit—a quantity she holds to be constant for all planets, asteroids, and artificial satellites and independent of the mass of the orbiting body. From this she derives a force equation of the form F = a·A (force equals acceleration times area).
She further contends that the sequential mean distances of the planets from the Sun follow an exponential law (relating her results to the Titius–Bode relation), from which she concludes that gravitation is quantized. In two chapters she also questions Einstein's general theory of relativity and the interpretation of the Michelson–Morley experiment. Spolter has noted that, although her doctorate is in biochemistry rather than physics, she considered her experimental training an advantage, contrasting a data-first laboratory approach with what she viewed as an overly theory-driven method in modern physics and cosmology.
Critical response to the book has been mixed, with much of the favorable notice coming from outside the university-based scientific mainstream, including publications associated with alternative-energy and fringe-science communities. Reviewers such as T. E. Phipps, Jr., writing in Infinite Energy, praised her erudition and independence while noting her limited formal preparation in physics; others in the mainstream scientific community did not accept her conclusions. A second book, The Dance of the Moon, followed in 2015.
Honors
- Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award, Marquis Who's Who (2019)
- Listed in multiple editions of Who's Who in the West
- Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, and the New York Academy of Sciences
Selected reviews and articles
- Yale Scientific, spring/summer 1994, p. 25.
- Rapport, June–July 1994, p. 32; September–October 1994, p. 60.
- Book Reader, fall 1994.
- Choice, May 1994, p. 1457; October 1994, p. 252.
- Nexus, December–January 1996, pp. 4–5; June–July 1996, p. 60.
- New Energy News, July 1996, pp. 20–21.
- TESLA: A Journal of Modern Science, first quarter 1997, pp. 39–40.
- Infinite Energy, January–February 1997, pp. 46–47; July–August 2001, pp. 4–5.
- On Wisconsin, May/June 1997, p. 40; January/February 1998.
Abstracts
- 2011 - "Kepler's Second Law and Conservation of Angular Momentum"
- 2011 - "Kepler's Second Law and Conservation of Angular Momentum" (Read in full)
- 1997 - "Gravitational Force of the Sun - A New Theory"
- 1997 - "New Concepts in Gravitation"
Books
- 1994 - "Gravitational Force of the Sun" (Read in full)