Mike A Gimbel

Mike A Gimbel
Born	1944 (age 81–82)
Residence	Saylorsburg, PA, United States
Nationality	American
Known for	Anti-Relativity, dialectical-materialist critique of modern physics
Scientific career
Fields	Physics, Cosmology, Philosophy of science
Institutions	New York City Department of Water Resources (retired); Civil Service Technical Guild, Local 375, AFSCME, AFL-CIO

Mike A Gimbel (Michael A. Gimbel, born 1944) is an American writer, retired New York City municipal worker and union officer who applies the philosophy of dialectical materialism to a critique of twentieth-century theoretical physics. In his 2011 book Dialectical Materialism vs. "The New Physics" he argues that relativity, black holes, curved space and the mathematical cosmology of the Big Bang era are idealist constructions rather than physics, and that genuine physics is the study of three-dimensional matter in motion. He is also known outside physics as an early sabermetrician who worked as a statistical consultant for the Montreal Expos and the Boston Red Sox in the 1990s.

Biography

Gimbel was born in 1944 and grew up in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan in a politically active household with ties to communist and folk-music circles. He left Queens Community College in the early 1960s to devote himself to anti-war activism.

His working life was spent with the New York City Department of Water Resources, and he became a labour officer in the Civil Service Technical Guild, Local 375, AFSCME, AFL-CIO — a union representing several thousand engineers, architects, planners, scientists and other professional and technical workers in New York City government. He served as president of the local's second-largest chapter for thirteen years and retired from the union's executive board. He is a longstanding Marxist and has been associated with the Workers World Party, writing on politics and sport, and has presented at the Left Forum in Manhattan.

In the 1990s Gimbel became known in baseball for his Run Production Average (RPA) player-valuation method, published as Mike Gimbel's Baseball Player & Team Ratings in annual editions between 1990 and 1995. He consulted part-time for general manager Dan Duquette with the Montreal Expos, and followed Duquette to the Boston Red Sox, where his role as the club's statistical analyst became public in a 1997 Boston Globe interview; the resulting controversy ended the arrangement. He has since been described as a forgotten precursor of the later "Moneyball" analytics movement.

Gimbel lives in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania with his wife Jeri, where they maintain a large sanctuary for rescued animals.

Scientific contributions

Gimbel's central claim is that physics and cosmology have been in a prolonged crisis, caused by the substitution of mathematics for physical investigation. In his formulation, mathematics is a tool for describing nature and is not itself physics, yet for roughly a century mathematical formalism has been treated as though it disclosed physical reality directly. From this he argues that a mathematical fourth dimension exists in the equations but not in the world; that objects do not carry their own time; that space is not curved; that black holes, wormholes and the entities of string theory are mathematical abstractions rather than observed bodies; and that there is no fundamental "God particle." Time travel, on this account, is a consequence of taking equations for things.

The philosophical framework is explicitly that of Marx, Engels and Lenin — particularly Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, from which Gimbel quotes at length. He treats the interpretive apparatus built around relativity and quantum mechanics as a modern recurrence of the idealist and positivist tendencies Lenin attacked: a physics in which the observer, the equation, or the act of measurement is made to constitute reality, displacing matter existing independently of consciousness. Against this he sets a materialist programme in which physical reality is three-dimensional matter in motion, knowable and objective, with change explained dialectically rather than by mathematical fiat. He extends the argument to cosmology, characterising Big Bang cosmology as a creationist account in scientific dress, and directs his criticism at popular expositors such as Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku.

The book was endorsed by Glenn Borchardt, director of the Progressive Science Institute, who commended it for exposing what he regarded as fundamental problems in contemporary physics and cosmology.

Gimbel has also argued for the aquatic ape hypothesis in human evolution — the proposal that human ancestors passed through a period of semi-aquatic adaptation, which he holds accounts for a cluster of human traits not found in other great apes. He presented the evidence for it in a 2021 CNPS interview. He connects this to his wider theme that dialectical materialism, which Marx and Engels welcomed in Darwin's theory of evolution, remains the correct method for the natural sciences.

CNPS talks

He has appeared in the CNPS Dissident Science interview series:

• "The Aquatic Ape - Presenting the Evidence with Mike Gimbel" (25 September 2021)

Works

Books

• 2011 - "Dialectical Materialism vs. The New Physics" — full title Dialectical Materialism vs. "The New Physics": A Response to the Myths Created by an Idealistic Theory Called "Relativity", New Vista Publishers, ISBN 978-0-9846778-0-1 (Read in full)
• 1990–1995 - Mike Gimbel's Baseball Player & Team Ratings (annual editions)

External links

• The Aquatic Ape - Presenting the Evidence with Mike Gimbel (CNPS Dissident Science)
• Google Books entry for Dialectical Materialism vs. "The New Physics"
• "Saber Rattler" — Grantland profile of Gimbel