Robert J Heaston

Robert J. Heaston
Born	(1931-03-03)March 3, 1931
Died	February 20, 2009(2009-02-20)
Residence	Naperville, IL, United States
Nationality	USA
Alma mater	University of Arkansas, Ohio State University
Known for	General Relativity, Fundamental Forces, Electromagnetic Spectrum, Epistemology
Scientific career
Fields	Mechanical Engineer
Institutions	United States Air Force, Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Army Research Office, Guidance and Control Information Analysis Center (GACIAC)

Robert J. Heaston (March 3, 1931 – February 20, 2009) was an American chemical engineer, weapons technologist, and independent theoretical physicist. Over a professional career of some 49 years he worked as a rocket-propulsion and missile engineer for the United States Air Force, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the U.S. Army, and later directed the Guidance and Control Information Analysis Center (GACIAC) in Chicago, Illinois. Alongside his weapons-technology career he pursued an independent research program in theoretical physics, and is best known within the Natural Philosophy Alliance for a proposed redefinition of the four fundamental forces and for a hypothesized "superforce" that he argued had been overlooked in Einstein's general theory of relativity. He held that his ideas were outside the physics mainstream and had not been accepted by it.

Biography

Education

Heaston completed a Master of Science degree in chemical engineering at the University of Arkansas, with a thesis on cellulose chemistry, in the early 1950s. He later returned to full-time graduate study, earning a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Ohio State University in 1964; his dissertation, Investigation of Methane and Methane–Steam Reactions in an Argon Arc Plasma, drew on Maxwell's equations, plasma physics, and the Lorentz force. He also undertook a lifelong program of self-study in physics and philosophy.

Military and government career

Heaston entered active duty in November 1953 as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force at the Powerplant Laboratory of the Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio, where he worked on special rocket fuels, including the carborane family of carbon–hydrogen–boron compounds, and later served as senior project engineer on the High Energy Fuel (HEF) program. He submitted essays to the Gravity Research Foundation's annual competition in 1957 and 1958, the start of a lasting interest in theoretical physics.

Beginning in 1961 he worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), where as a program manager on Project Principia he oversaw work in internal ballistics, combustion, and hybrid-rocket technology. After the project was terminated in 1964 he moved to the U.S. Army Research Office in Arlington, Virginia. From 1966 to 1970 he was chief of the Chemistry and Energy Conversion Branches at the Army's European Research Office in Frankfurt, Germany, managing research contracts across several European countries and producing dozens of technical reports.

In 1974–1975 Heaston attended the National War College at Fort McNair as the only Army civilian in his class, graduating with distinction. He was subsequently promoted to Science Advisor (later Technology Manager for Weapons Systems) to the Director of Weapons Systems, coordinating Army science and technology across ground vehicles, helicopters, missiles, artillery, and small arms, and helping to lead U.S. work on precision-guided munitions. In 1983 he took charge of Department of Defense weapons science and technology more broadly, serving as a U.S. representative in NATO and allied (ABCA/TTCP) weapons-technology bodies.

Later career

Heaston retired from the Department of Defense in 1987 and became director of the Guidance and Control Information Analysis Center (GACIAC), operated under an Army contract by the IIT Research Institute in Chicago. In that role he edited numerous conference proceedings, technical reports, and handbooks, and wrote editorials for the GACIAC Bulletin. From 1993 to 2001 he served pro bono on the Board on Army Science and Technology (BAST) of the National Academies. He retired in 2001 to write full-time and settled in Naperville, Illinois. From about 2003 he was active in the Natural Philosophy Alliance (NPA), serving as editor of its newsletter beginning in 2005 and presenting regularly at its annual meetings. He died on February 20, 2009.

Scientific contributions

Heaston developed his physics ideas independently over several decades, framing them as an outgrowth of his weapons-technology work. Central to his program was a proposed redefinition of the four fundamental forces — which he expressed as the Newton gravitational force, the Coulomb electromagnetic force, a "Planck quantum force," and an "Einstein strong force," collectively termed the Heaston equations. From these he derived a specific force magnitude he called the Heaston superforce, which he argued had been overlooked in the Einstein field equations of general relativity and on which the redefined forces converged at the Planck scale.

His related claims included a "quantum surface hypothesis" (that every particle has a surface spinning at the speed of light), a theoretical description of the electromagnetic spectrum as a discrete series of bands governed by the fine-structure constant, a "Heaston collapse limit" for gravitational collapse, and the use of origami as a heuristic tool for visualizing force relationships. He also proposed a "feeling formula" relating human emotion to a logarithmic sensing of time. Heaston himself noted that none of these concepts had been accepted by the physics mainstream, and that several remained untested experimentally.

He was the author or co-author of technical works including a widely distributed Handbook of Precision Guided Munitions (1983), and published his physics papers in venues such as Speculations in Science and Technology, the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, Galilean Electrodynamics, and the proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance.

Abstracts

• 2009 - "The Constant Gravitation Potential of Light and Energy"
• 2008 - "A Third Alternative to the Generation of Energy by Fission and Fusion"
• 2008 - "The Consequences of Assuming that the Speed of Light is not Constant" (Read in full)
• 2008 - "Why Did Einstein Put So Much Emphasis on the Equivalence Principle?" (Read in full)
• 2008 - "The Historical Asymmetry of Acceleration in Special Relativity" (Read in full)
• 2008 - "Predictions of the Heaston Equations and the 21st Century Physics Paradigm" (Read in full)
• 2007 - "Reconstruction of the Derivation of the Einstein Field Equations of General Relativity "
• 2006 - "The Constant Gravitation Potential of Light: Part 1)Theory; Part 2)Physical Aspects"
• 2006 - "Emotions and the Logarithmic Sensing of Time"
• 2006 - "Number Crunching the Large and Small Magnitudes of Physics"
• 2006 - "Origami and the Redefinition of the Four Fundamental Forces"
• 2006 - "A Philosophic Matrix Approach to Problem Solving"
• 2005 - "Consequences of the Redefinition of the Four Fundamental Forces"
• 2005 - "Description of the Overall Electromagnetic Spectrum in Terms of Discrete Theoretical Bands"
• 2005 - "A New Mathematical Definition of the Concept of Force"
• 2005 - "Quantum Gravity and the Structure of the Electron"
• 2004 - "The Characterization of Gravitational Collapse as a Mass-Energy Phase Change"
• 2004 - "The Feeling Formula: A Psychological Equation of State"
• 2004 - "Why is Gravity Hard to Unify with Other Forces?"
• 2003 - "The Asymptotic Box" (Read in full)
• 2003 - "The Gravitational Superforce Hypothesis" (Read in full)
• 2000 - "Design of the Universe - Part III: An Interdependent Pattern"
• 1999 - "Design of the Universe - Part II: Consequences of Redefining the Fundamental Forces"
• 1999 - "Electromagnetic Spectrum"
• 1998 - "Design of the Universe - Part I: Redefinition of the Unification Problem"
• 1991 - "Einstein's Great Oversight"
• 1983 - "A New Look at the Concept of Force"
• 1980 - "Redefinition of the Four Fundamental Forces"
• 1978 - "Unified Interaction Model of the Four Fundamental Forces"
• 1977 - "Speculations on a Unified Model of the Four Fundamental Forces"

External links

• Robert J Heaston at the Natural Philosophy Wiki
• Natural Philosophy Alliance