P de Haas

P. de Haas
P. de Haas
Residence	Netherlands
Known for	Gravity

P de Haas — E. P. J. ("Paul") de Haas — is a Dutch physicist, physics teacher and independent researcher from the Netherlands, known for his work on the foundations of gravity, relativistic dynamics and the relationship between gravitation and quantum theory.

Biography

De Haas holds a master of arts in philosophy and a master of education in physics. He teaches physics at Kandinsky College in the Arnhem–Nijmegen region of the Netherlands, and has been a PhD candidate in science education research at Radboud University in Nijmegen. His stated interests are the teaching of physics and the history and philosophy of physics.

Much of his research has been published outside the mainstream journals, in venues associated with critical and foundational approaches to modern physics, such as the Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie and Apeiron, although he has also published in the peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Physics.

Scientific contributions

De Haas' work centres on re-examining the conceptual foundations of relativity and gravitation, often by returning to the early twentieth-century literature and reworking it with modern mathematical tools.

Mie's gravity and de Broglie's harmony of the phases. De Haas argued that under a Lorentz transformation, the gravitational mass of Gustav Mie's 1912 theory of gravity behaves in exactly the same way as the clock-like frequency of Louis de Broglie's 1923 phase harmony. Extending the parallel to inertial mass and the wave-like frequency, he reinterpreted de Broglie's harmony of the phases as an equivalence principle for quantum gravity, in which the classical equivalence of masses appears as a limiting case of a quantum equivalence of phases. He presented this as supporting a realist reading of wave–particle duality and as implying a modification of Hamilton's variational principle in quantum mechanics.
Biquaternion formulation of relativistic dynamics. De Haas developed a formulation of relativistic tensor dynamics using biquaternions (complex quaternions), recasting the standard tensor apparatus of relativistic mechanics and electrodynamics in quaternionic form.
Geodetic precession as a global Thomas precession. In the Canadian Journal of Physics he reviewed interpretations of the Thomas precession and of the geodetic (de Sitter) precession of a gyroscope in free-fall orbit, and derived the geodetic precession as a three-dimensional Schouten precession and as a global, gravitational Thomas precession, using the equivalence principle together with elements of hyperbolic geometry.

Selected publications

E. P. J. de Haas, "The combination of de Broglie's Harmony of the Phases and Mie's theory of gravity results in a Principle of Equivalence for Quantum Gravity", Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, Vol. 29, 2004, pp. 707–726.
E. P. J. de Haas, "Biquaternion formulation of relativistic tensor dynamics", Apeiron, Vol. 15, No. 4, October 2008, pp. 358–381.
E. P. J. de Haas, "The geodetic precession as a 3D Schouten precession and a gravitational Thomas precession", Canadian Journal of Physics, Vol. 92, No. 10, 2014, pp. 1082–1093.

External links