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Thomas E Phipps

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Thomas E. Phipps
Thomas E. Phipps
Born(1925-01-26)January 26, 1925
Champaign, Illinois, United States
DiedJuly 11, 2016(2016-07-11)
Farmer City, Illinois, United States
ResidenceUrbana, IL, United States
NationalityUSA
Alma materHarvard University (A.B. 1944; M.S. 1948; Ph.D. 1951)
Known forHertzian Electrodynamics, IAAD, Mach's Principle, Relativity, Time
AwardsSagnac Award, Natural Philosophy Alliance (2010)
Scientific career
FieldsPhysicist
InstitutionsU.S. Navy Department; Pentagon; U.S. Naval laboratories; private laboratory, Urbana, IL
Doctoral advisorNorman F. Ramsey

Thomas Erwin Phipps, Jr. (26 January 1925 – 11 July 2016) was an American physicist who spent the first half of his career inside the defense-research establishment and the second half mounting one of the most technically serious critiques of Einstein's Special Relativity Theory produced in the twentieth century. Trained at Harvard under the future Nobel laureate Norman F. Ramsey, with roughly forty papers in mainstream journals to his name, Phipps turned in later life to what he called neo-Hertzian electrodynamics — a reformulation of Maxwell's equations using total rather than partial time derivatives — and to a sustained argument that Special Relativity's covariance had been mistaken for physical invariance.

His two books, Heretical Verities: Mathematical Themes in Physical Description (1986) and Old Physics for New (2006; 2nd edition, Apeiron, 2012), are standard references in the relativity-criticism literature, and he published more than twice as many papers in dissident venues as in mainstream ones. He was a member of the Natural Philosophy Alliance and received its Sagnac Award in 2010.

Phipps is distinctive among critics of relativity in two ways. First, he did not merely argue: he built apparatus, running a private laboratory in Urbana for over three decades and publishing experimental tests of the electrodynamic force law, including a confirmation of Ampère longitudinal forces that appeared in the refereed European Physical Journal D. Second, his objection to Special Relativity was primarily one of logical consistency rather than of empirical anomaly — he held that the Lorentz transformation makes claims that cannot all be true simultaneously, whatever the experiments say.

Biography

Early life and education

Phipps was born in Champaign, Illinois, the only child of Thomas Erwin Phipps, Sr. — later emeritus professor of physical chemistry at the University of Illinois — and Mary Eleanor Morgan Phipps. He won a national scholarship to Harvard, taking his A.B. in 1944, M.S. in 1948, and Ph.D. in 1951 in nuclear physics.

His graduate work was of the highest experimental pedigree available at the time. During and immediately after the war (1945-46) he worked in P. M. Morse's Operations Research Group in the Navy Department; he then returned to Harvard for an experimental thesis on molecular beam nuclear magnetic resonance under Norman F. Ramsey, who would receive the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for the separated oscillatory fields method underlying the atomic clock. The resulting series of papers with Kolsky, Ramsey and Silsbee on the radiofrequency spectra of H2 and D2, and on the deuteron quadrupole moment, remain part of the standard literature. The connection is more than biographical: the atomic clock that Ramsey's work made possible is the instrument on which nearly all modern tests of time dilation — and much of Phipps's later argument — depend.

Defense career

Phipps spent twelve years in the Pentagon, ten in systems analysis for the Navy and two in research management for the Department of Defense, with similar appointments at Navy laboratories in California and Maryland. This was a career in applied analysis rather than academic physics, and it left him without the institutional affiliation that later proved a serious practical obstacle to publication.

The Urbana laboratory

In 1980 he retired to Urbana and formed a small private physics laboratory in collaboration with his father, performing experiments in electromagnetism — an unusual father-and-son research partnership between a physicist and a physical chemist, both working outside any institution. In 1986 he published Heretical Verities: Mathematical Themes in Physical Description. After his father's death in 1990 he continued both experimental and theoretical work alone, for another quarter century.

Phipps published most of his later papers from his home address in Urbana. As Robert J. Buenker noted in his 2016 survey of Phipps's work, the absence of an institutional address caused him considerable difficulty in getting papers accepted at venues such as the Cornell preprint archive — a filtering mechanism that operates on affiliation rather than content, and one that Phipps' own case illustrates precisely, since the same author had published in Physical Review, Journal of Chemical Physics and SIAM Review when he had a letterhead.

Personal life and death

He married Mabel Lee Maier; after her death he married Frances Motz Boldyreff in 1979, who died in 2003; in 2015 he married Kathleen L. Leahr, who survived him. Latterly of Mahomet, Illinois, Thomas E. Phipps, Jr. died on 11 July 2016 at Farmer City, Illinois, aged 91.

Scientific work

Mainstream physics

Phipps's orthodox output spans molecular beam spectroscopy (the H2/D2 radiofrequency work with Ramsey's group, 1950-52), the theory of the Schottky effect, gas-phase effusion through orifices (a series of Journal of Chemical Physics papers with Wahlbeck and Adams, 1968-69), and applied mathematics — including notes in SIAM Review on continued-fraction representations of eigenvalues. His 1960 Physical Review paper "Generalization of Quantum Mechanics" is the earliest of his papers to show the direction his later work would take: a willingness to question a formalism widely regarded as closed.

Covariance versus invariance

The unifying thread of Phipps's critical work is a distinction he pressed for four decades: covariance is not invariance. A covariant theory is one whose equations retain the same form under a coordinate transformation; an invariant theory is one in which physically measured quantities do not change. Special Relativity, he argued, achieves the former and is routinely misread as achieving the latter. Under the Lorentz transformation, lengths, masses, energies and clock rates all become observer-dependent — and Phipps found it intolerable that basic physical magnitudes should have this subjective character, with each of two observers entitled to declare the other's clock the slow one.

His most pointed objection, developed in papers such as "Logical Insufficiency of the "Two Postulates" of Special Relativity", "Covariance vs. Invariance" and "The Relativity of Simultaneity is a Mistake", is that the Lorentz transformation yields two consequences that cannot both hold. Symmetric time dilation requires that the elapsed times measured by two observers be strictly proportional, Δt′ = γΔt. Remote non-simultaneity requires that two events with Δt = 0 for one observer have Δt′ ≠ 0 for another. But a quantity strictly proportional to zero is zero. Phipps regarded this as a straightforward internal contradiction, not an interpretive subtlety, and spent much of his career trying — unsuccessfully — to get the mainstream community to address it directly rather than by appeal to the transformation's authority.

He also emphasized that every experiment actually performed shows time dilation to be asymmetric and unambiguous: in the Hay rotor experiments, in the Hafele–Keating flying-clock test, and in the daily operation of the Global Positioning System, it is always determinate which clock runs slow. He drew from GPS in particular — whose satellite clocks are pre-corrected before launch against a single Earth-centered frame — the conclusion that physics operates with a preferred frame in practice while denying one in principle. Several of his papers ("GPS and the Twins Paradox", "Implications of Relativity Without Einstein Synchronization in the GPS", "Twin Paradoxes") develop this point.

Neo-Hertzian electrodynamics

Phipps's positive program was a reformulation of electromagnetism he called neo-Hertzian, after Heinrich Hertz's alternative rendering of Faraday's law. The technical move is simple to state and far-reaching in consequence: replace every partial time derivative ∂/∂t in Maxwell's equations with the total (convective) derivative d/dt = ∂/∂t + v·∇.

The resulting equations are invariant under a Galilean-type transformation rather than covariant under the Lorentz transformation. Lengths are genuinely invariant — there is no Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction — while clock rates are physically slowed by motion, an asymmetric and objective effect. Because the total derivative carries the velocity of the observer or medium explicitly, the theory builds the state of motion into the field equations themselves instead of into the coordinate transformation. Phipps argued that this recovers first-order effects that Maxwell's equations describe only awkwardly, and he applied it in particular to stellar and planetary aberration, which he regarded as the sharpest observational discriminator between the two schemes ("Neo-Hertzian Wave Equation and Aberration", "Stellar and Planetary Aberration", "Failures of Relativity Theory to Describe Starlight", "Relativity and Aberration"). His "First-Order Modification of Maxwell's Equations" and "On Hertz's Invariant Form of Maxwell's Equations" set out the formalism; Old Physics for New is its book-length statement.

A consequence he accepted and defended was the rejection of Einstein's second postulate: on the neo-Hertzian view the free-space speed of light is not a universal constant independent of the motion of source and observer. This is the point on which his sympathetic critics most often part company with him.

Electrodynamic force laws and experiment

Unusually among theorists of any persuasion, Phipps built apparatus to discriminate between competing force laws. The question at issue is old: Ampère's original force law between current elements predicts longitudinal forces — tensions acting along the current streamlines, capable of doing work in the direction of current flow — whereas the modern Lorentz force law predicts that all forces on a current-carrying conductor act perpendicular to the streamlines.

Phipps's experimental program included the VACE experiments (reported 1997 and 1999), mercury-cell tests of Ampère tension of the kind proposed by J. P. Wesley, and a technique he developed and named inertial modulation. The last is his most original experimental idea: from Newton's second law and conservation of linear momentum, a force-exerting element of finite mass M that is free to recoil transmits to a test element of mass m not the full "formula force" but that force multiplied by a modulation factor Ω = m/(M + m) ≤ 1. Because different force laws distribute the recoil differently, deliberately varying the recoil freedom of the source — by mounting it on a tuning fork, for example — modulates the measured force in a law-dependent way, converting a static and easily confounded measurement into a signal at a known frequency. He developed the method across a three-part series in 2005-06 and reported a confirmation of longitudinal forces in "An Experimental Confirmation of Longitudinal Electrodynamic Forces", published in the refereed European Physical Journal D (2001).

Related theoretical work addressed the Weber force law — a nineteenth-century velocity- and acceleration-dependent action-at-a-distance law that Phipps sought to modernize ("Toward Modernization of Weber's Force Law", "Derivation of a Modernized Weber Force Law", "Weber-type Laws of Action-at-a-Distance in Modern Physics") — and the physical status of the vector potential.

Quantum mechanics and Mach's principle

Phipps's quantum work runs from the 1960 Physical Review generalization through the "beta structure hypothesis" (1976) to later papers on measurement: "Measurement Theory via Hidden Variables Not Subject to Bell's Theorem" (1988) and "An Alternative Approach to Quantum Projection" (1998). The Bell's-theorem paper is characteristic — an attempt to locate the precise assumption that makes the no-go theorem bite, rather than a wholesale rejection of it.

He took Mach's Principle seriously as a physical proposition rather than a slogan ("Should Mach?s Principle Be Taken Seriously?", 1978), consistent with his broader preference for theories in which inertia and electromagnetic interaction have identifiable physical causes rather than geometric ones.

Criticism of the practice of physics

Phipps wrote a good deal about the sociology of his own field, and did so with more wit than most. "Ice Age in Physics" (Physics Today, 1983) and "The Bunkification of Physics Today" (1997) argue that theoretical physics had entered a period in which mathematical elaboration substituted for physical understanding and in which dissent had become professionally unaffordable. "A Do-It-Yourself Refutation of Modern Physics" and "An Essay in Science Criticism" (both 1995) set out his view that the discipline had lost the habit of taking refutation seriously. His obituary tribute "In Memory: Chalmers W. Sherwin" and his appreciation of R. A. Waldron, "To Seek the Truth in the Face of Authority", show the same concern from the other side: what it costs individuals to dissent.

Reception

Phipps was one of the most respected figures in the dissident-physics community, in large part because of the unimpeachable quality of his mainstream credentials and his willingness to submit his ideas to experimental test. The Natural Philosophy Alliance awarded him its Sagnac Award in 2010 in recognition of his contributions. He was a frequent contributor to Physics Essays, Apeiron, and Galilean Electrodynamics, and a regular presence at NPA conferences, where his papers on aberration and on the logic of the two postulates were among the most cited.

The most substantial assessment of his work is Robert J. Buenker's "Commentary on the Work of Thomas E. Phipps, Jr. (1925-2016)", written shortly after his death. Buenker endorses Phipps's central charge — that symmetric time dilation and remote non-simultaneity cannot both follow from a self-consistent transformation, and that all actual experiments (Hay's rotor, Hafele–Keating, GPS) show time dilation to be asymmetric — while dissenting from his rejection of light-speed constancy, arguing that the transverse Doppler results and the Fresnel drag coefficient together uphold Einstein's second postulate even as they undermine the Lorentz transformation. Buenker's own alternative, a "Universal Time-dilation Law" referred to an objective rest system, is in effect a Lorentzian settlement of the kind Phipps opened the way to. The exchange is a good illustration of substantive disagreement within the dissident tradition, as distinct from the blanket dismissal the tradition receives from outside.

Mainstream physics has largely declined to engage. Phipps's repeated complaint was not that his arguments were refuted but that they were not read: journals returned manuscripts unreviewed on grounds of insufficient interest or insufficient novelty of mathematics, and the preprint archives filtered on affiliation. Whether or not one accepts his conclusions, the pattern he documented — a technically competent objection to a foundational theory receiving no substantive reply for forty years — is itself part of the record of twentieth-century physics.

Books

Articles (Mainstream)

  • "Radiofrequency Spectrum of H2 in a Magnetic Field," Phys. Rev. 79, 883 (1950) (with H. G. Kolsky, N. F. Ramsey, H. B. Silsbee).
  • "Radiofrequency Spectrum of D2 in a Magnetic Field," Phys. Rev. 80, 483 (1950) (with H. G. Kolsky, N. F. Ramsey, H. B. Silsbee).
  • "The Deuteron Quadrupole Moment and the Radiofrequency Spectra of H2 and D2 in Low Magnetic Fields," Phys. Rev. 81, 1061 (1951) (with H. G. Kolsky, N. F. Ramsey, H. B. Silsbee).
  • "Nuclear Radiofrequency Spectra of H2 and D2 in High and Low Magnetic Fields, "Phys. Rev. 87, 395 (1952) (with H. G. Kolsky, N. F. Ramsey, H. B. Silsbee).
  • "Generalization of Quantum Mechanics," Phys. Rev. 118, 1653 (1960).
  • "Application of Numerical Methods to the Theory of the Periodic Deviations in the Schottky Effect," Phys. Rev. 128, 524 (1962) (with Geneva G. Belford, Aron Kuppermann).
  • "Effusion. II. Angular Number Distributions of Gaseous Cadmium from a Right-Circular Cylindrical Orifice into Vacuum," J. Chem. Phys. 49, 1603 (1968) (with P. G. Wahlbeck).
  • "Effusion. III. Angular Number Distributions of Gaseous CsCl from Right-Circular Cylindrical Orifices into Vacuum," J. Chem. Phys. 49, 1609 (1968) (with J. Q. Adams, P. G. Wahlbeck).
  • "Effusion. V. Angular Number Distributions of Gaseous CsCl from a Conical Orifice into Vacuum," J. Chem. Phys. 51, 920 (1969) (with J. Q. Adams, P. G. Wahlbeck).
  • "A Continued Fraction Representation of Eigenvalues," SIAM Rev. 10, 223 (1968).
  • "A Continued Fraction Representation of Eigenvalues," SIAM Rev. 13, 390 (1971).
  • "A Double-Sum Identity," SIAM Rev. 13, 389 (1971).
  • "Kinematics of a 'Rigid' Rotor," Lett. Nuovo Cimento, V9, pp. 467-470 (1974).
  • "Comment on Marinov's Light Velocity Experiment," Physics Letters, 55(2), 83-84 (Feb 1978).
  • "Ice Age in Physics," Phys. Today 36, 15 (1983).
  • "An Experimental Confirmation of Longitudinal Electrodynamic Forces," Eur. Phys. J. D 14, 247-251 (2001).

Abstracts

]]" (Read in full)

R. A. Waldron]]" (Read in full)

See also

References

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