Robert S Fritzius
Robert S. Fritzius | |
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| Born | October 7, 1939 Blytheville, Arkansas, United States |
| Residence | Starkville, Mississippi, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Purdue University |
| Known for | Emission Theory, Walter Ritz, Astronomy, Gamma Ray Bursters, Pulsars, Quasars, Time, Newtonian Physics, Electrodynamics |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Electrical Engineer |
Robert Stephen Fritzius (born October 7, 1939) is an American electrical engineer, retired U.S. Navy officer, and independent researcher known for his efforts to revive scientific interest in the 1908 electrodynamics of the Swiss mathematical physicist Walther Ritz. Through his website Shade Tree Physics, Fritzius publishes his own alternative interpretations of physics, astronomy, and cosmology, with an emphasis on a Newtonian, emission-based account of electrodynamics that lies outside the mainstream of modern physics.
Biography
Fritzius was born on October 7, 1939, in Blytheville, Arkansas, and was reared in Missouri. He enlisted in the United States Navy in 1958 and trained as an electronics technician, working on shipboard radar, communications, and sonar equipment and later on tactical airborne navigation (TACAN) systems.
From 1962 to 1966 he studied electrical engineering at Purdue University under the Navy Enlisted Scientific Education Program, having been promoted to Chief Electronics Technician in 1965. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue in 1966, was commissioned as an officer, and completed naval aviation training, being designated a Naval Aviator in 1967.
During the remainder of his naval career Fritzius served in electronic warfare, communications engineering, and airborne systems evaluation roles, including duty as a communications engineer with the Defense Communications Agency in Saigon (1970–1971), an electronic warfare division officer at the Naval Missile Center, Point Mugu (1971–1973), and an electronic warfare troubleshooter at the Air Force Electronic Warfare Center, Kelly Air Force Base, Texas (1975–1977), where he co-designed radio-frequency jamming tests for the Global Positioning System (GPS). He retired from the Navy as a Lieutenant, USNR, in 1978.
After leaving the Navy, Fritzius pursued a varied civilian career centered in Mississippi. He studied mechanical engineering and Palestinian archaeology, taking part in the 1980 excavations at Halutza (Elusa) in the Negev of Israel. He worked as a BASIC computer programmer on insect pest management and other projects at Mississippi State University in the early 1980s, and from 1989 to 1993 he was a research assistant in mosquito research in the university's Department of Entomology, where he applied starch-gel electrophoresis and neural-network software to species identification. From 1994 to 2001 he was a telecommunications specialist at Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi, retiring in December 2001. From 2013 to 2017 he served as Wing Historian for the Mississippi Wing of the Civil Air Patrol.
Scientific contributions
Fritzius describes himself as an amateur, or "shade tree," physicist, and his work is presented outside the framework of mainstream physics. He traces his interest in the subject to his undergraduate years, when dissatisfaction with conventional explanations of magnetism led him to attempt to construct his own model of electricity and gravitation, including a version of push (or "shadow") gravity.
His central project has been the promotion and interpretation of the ballistic, or emission, theory of light and electrodynamics originally advanced by Walther Ritz in 1908. In Ritz's emission theory, electric charges are held to emit force-carrying particles whose collisions with other charges produce observable electrical effects, and light is emitted at a constant speed relative to its source rather than relative to an absolute frame. Ritz was a contemporary and critic of Albert Einstein on questions of relativity, but he died young in 1909 before developing his ideas fully. Fritzius, an admirer of Ritz, arranged for Ritz's French-language writings to be translated into English and made them available online.
Building on Ritz's framework, Fritzius developed what he calls Emission-Absorption-Scattering (EAS) Sub-quantum Physics, in which charges emit, absorb, and scatter hypothetical sub-quantum particles. He has applied Ritzian and emission-theory ideas to a range of astronomical and cosmological topics, including variable stars, Cepheids, quasars, pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and a proposed "variable electric charge" origin for the cosmological redshift as an alternative to metric expansion of the universe. These proposals are not accepted within mainstream astrophysics and cosmology.
His broader research interests have included archaeology, astronomy, gamma-ray bursts, Venusian astrobiology, time, and the catastrophism of Immanuel Velikovsky.
Honors
Fritzius has been an associate member of the American Astronomical Society and, since 2004, of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR). He served as Chairman of the Physics and Engineering Division of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences (2004–2005), was a member of the Rainwater Astronomical Society in French Camp, Mississippi, and participated in NASA's Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG) from 2007 to 2008.
Abstracts
- 2008 - "Interpreting SN 2006gy from a Modified Ritzian Viewpoint" (Read in full)
- 2005 - "Adriaan van Maanen's Challenge to the Expanding Universe"
- 1999 - "Cepheids. It gets worse!" (Read in full)
- 1999 - "A Ritzian Interpretation of Variable Stars " (Read in full)
- 1998 - "Commentary on Ritz's Electrodynamics" (Read in full)
- 1996 - "The Possibility that QSOs are Non-Cosmological in Origin"
- 1995 - "Galilean Relativity and Spectroscopy: Binary Brightness / Velocity Curves"
- 1994 - "The SRT, Quantum Mechanical Unstable States, and Cosmology"
- 1994 - "Variable Electrical Charge Cosmological Redshift"
- 1993 - "Emission-Absorption-Scattering (EAS) Sub-quantum Physics" (Read in full)
- 1990 - "The Ritz-Einstein Agreement to Disagree" (Read in full)
- 1988 - "Cosmological Redshift: Long Term Electrical Charge Variations May Account for Cosmological Redshift"
Media
- 2009 - Walther Ritz, Emission Theory and the Real World (Video Lecture)