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Peter Marquardt

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Peter Marquardt
Peter Marquardt
Born1947
Berlin, Germany
ResidenceCologne, Germany
NationalityGerman
Known forCriticism of Special Relativity, Requiem für die Spezielle Relativität, the "mole hill effect", Light as a photon flux, Angular Momentum
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics
InstitutionsUniversity of Cologne; Gesellschaft zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Physik (Society for the Advancement of Physics), Cologne

Peter Marquardt (born 1947 in Berlin) is a German physicist based in Cologne and one of the best-known German-language critics of Einstein's theory of relativity. Trained as a solid-state physicist and long active in nanocrystal and mesoscopic-materials research at the University of Cologne, he is widely known for the book Requiem für die Spezielle Relativität (1997), written with Georg Galeczki, and for a long series of papers arguing that much of twentieth-century physics rests on conceptual and mathematical confusions rather than on observation. He is a long-standing member of the Natural Philosophy Alliance / John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society community.

Biography

Marquardt was born in 1947 in Berlin and took his doctorate in 1976 with a dissertation on ferromagnetic thin films. His mainstream research career was in condensed-matter and materials physics: he worked in Cologne on the smallest solid-state bodies — "nanocrystals" — on nanocrystalline and colloidal systems, on applications of microgravity, and on the fabrication, characterization and modelling of novel nanostructures using scanning-probe microscopy. In this field he published with Günter Nimtz and others on size-induced metal–insulator transitions, on the quasi-static conductivity of sub-micrometre crystals, on melting-point depression in mesoscopic systems, and on the dielectric properties of percolating nanocrystals.

It was the Romanian-born, Israeli-trained physicist Georg Galeczki (1945–2016), who had come to the University of Cologne, who introduced Marquardt to the foundational problems of physics. The two became close collaborators and co-authors, and Marquardt has described their partnership as an unusually productive one, in which he supplied much of the physics argument while Galeczki contributed the polemical and linguistic sharpening.

In 1995 Marquardt and Galeczki founded in Cologne the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Physik e.V. (Society for the Advancement of Physics), of which Marquardt was one of the leading figures. Under its banner the two organised the international workshops "Physics as a Science" in Cologne, and Marquardt co-edited the 1997 conference proceedings. Their joint papers appeared in Apeiron, Physics Essays, Il Nuovo Cimento and Fusion, and Marquardt later became a regular contributor to the Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance.

Within the NPA/CNPS community Marquardt delivered the John Chappell Memorial Lecture in 2007 ("'It Ain't Necessarily So': Nature's Little Surprises and How to Accept Them"), and in 2011 presented the Sagnac Award to the astronomer Halton Arp. He wrote the memorial notice for Galeczki after Galeczki's death in 2016.

Scientific contributions

Against special relativity

Marquardt's central claim, developed at book length with Galeczki in Requiem für die Spezielle Relativität (1997), is that special relativity is not a theory burdened by "paradoxes" but a theory burdened by outright contradictions, which have been marketed to the public as paradoxes — and that its very incomprehensibility has helped popularise it. The authors argue that a consistent physics requires a globally preferred frame of reference: without one, they hold, energy conservation, radiation processes and stellar aberration cannot be described coherently. Their conclusion is stated in deliberately Galilean terms — the Earth moves, and it moves in an absolute sense.

A recurring target is the elevation of a coordinate transformation to the status of a law of nature. In their treatment, transformations act as conjuring tricks: the "circus of mathematics", as they put it, contains sleights of hand that are hard to see through and are routinely mistaken for genuine physics. Related papers press the same point from different directions — that the Michelson–Morley result does not support special relativity but tells against it; that relativistic thermodynamics is a ghost that should be laid to rest; that special relativity is incompatible with particle dynamics; and that Minkowski space-time can be dispensed with altogether ("Farewell Minkowski Space").

The mole hill effect

Marquardt's best-known original theme is what he calls the mole hill effect, named from the maxim that we do not stumble over mountains but over mole hills. The mole hills are the small, unexamined obstacles in our own reasoning — confusions of time with duration, of energy with energy changes, of dynamics with kinematics, and the over-loading of non-physical notions such as "probability" and "signal". Careful, repeated observation and analysis, he argues, makes one a slowpoke, but in science it is often well worth going slow. Once one starts hunting mole hills, he adds, one finds them everywhere, and not only in science.

The same critical stance runs through "A Distant View of Physics", where he attacks the anthropocentrism of what he calls the cult theories of physics: dogmatising the observer's role opens the door to giving a transformation the status of a natural law, to tying the speed of light to the observer, to the uncertainty principle, and to a finite universe that began with a Big Bang. He notes the irony that Einstein was rejected where he was half right — in his objection to Copenhagen quantum theory — and accepted where he was, in Marquardt's view, definitely wrong. In "The Paradise of Thinking" he argues that physics suffers from too many premature "case closed" labels: the photoelectric effect, Maxwell's equations, the ether question, E = mc², the Michelson–Morley experiment, quantisation and tunnelling are none of them closed cases, and inertness, not error, is the real enemy of science.

Cosmology

With Galeczki, Marquardt argued in "A Non-Expanding, Non-Relativistic Universe" (Apeiron, 1996) that all "relativities" — Galilean, Machian and Einsteinian alike — fail on both principled and observational grounds, at every scale. From atoms up to galaxies, they observe, matter prefers to rotate rather than to expand. A slightly amended Newtonian gravitation theory obeying the third principle can account for the observed facts; electromagnetic waves propagate isotropically in a fundamental frame of reference defined by the mass–energy distribution of the universe; thermodynamics is a necessary ingredient of any cosmology; and there is no cosmological arrow of time.

Light, action and Planck's constant

A further strand of Marquardt's work treats light as a many-particle phenomenon — a photon flux rather than a naive stream of individual quanta — and examines the constant gravitational potential of light and energy. In papers with Galeczki on the uncertainty principle and on action in quantum mechanics he questions the standard interpretation of Planck's constant, and in "The Many Faces of Planck's Constant h" he catalogues the different roles the constant is made to play. He has also proposed a Sagnac experiment as a test bed for the questions raised by rotating-frame optics.

CNPS talks

  • "A Distant View of Physics 2.0" (30 June 2018) — Marquardt's paper, read aloud on his behalf by David de Hilster in the CNPS livestream series. The essay ranges widely over the ways physics is pushed away from being a natural science in its own right, and in particular over the misuse of mathematics to establish dogma, which Marquardt calls the "language of power" (LOP) — the many-voiced expression of mainstream control over physics against justified criticism.

Abstracts

Selected journal publications with Georg Galeczki

  • "The Uncertainty Principle Revisited", Apeiron, October 1994
  • "Action and Quantum Mechanics", Apeiron, February 1995
  • "Some Remarks Concerning the Wave Equation", Physics Essays 8 (1995) 189
  • "About Longitudinal Amperian Forces and Weber's Electrodynamics", Fusion 16 (1995) 15
  • "Inertia Principle and Transformation Laws", Il Nuovo Cimento 111 B (1996) 655
  • "A Non-Expanding, Non-Relativistic Universe", Apeiron 3 (1996) 108
  • "Free Trade between Mass and Energy?", Apeiron 4 (1997) 82
  • "The Incompatibility between Special Relativity and Particle Dynamics", Apeiron 4 (1997) 122
  • "Order and Coherence", Physics Essays 10 (1997) 506
  • "Farewell Minkowski Space", Apeiron 3 (1998) 121

Books

Media

External links

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