Herb James Spencer
Herb James Spencer | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1943 (age 82–83) Glasgow, Scotland |
| Residence | South Surrey, BC, Canada |
| Nationality | British-Canadian |
| Alma mater | Imperial College London (London University) |
| Known for | electrodynamics, Understanding the Electron Theory (UET) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical physics, software science, natural philosophy |
Herbert James Spencer (born 1943), who publishes as H. J. Spencer or Herb Spencer, is a British-Canadian theoretical physicist and software scientist. Trained as a theoretical physicist at Imperial College, London, he later worked as a management consultant and software developer before returning to independent research in natural philosophy, where he is known for a body of work he calls the Understanding the Electron Theory (UET). His writings, which challenge the mathematical foundations of modern quantum mechanics and electrodynamics, are self-published through open archives such as viXra and are outside the framework of mainstream physics.
Biography
Spencer was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1943. He studied physics at Imperial College London (a college of London University), where he was awarded a First Class Honours BSc degree in 1964, together with the Associateship of the Royal College of Science (ARCS). He continued at London University, receiving a PhD in theoretical physics in 1967 for a thesis titled Many Body Problems, and was awarded a National Research Fellowship in theoretical physics at Imperial College the same year. During the late 1960s he published several papers in leading physics journals.
Spencer subsequently left academia, describing himself as having lost interest in the discipline's heavily mathematical style. He moved into the emerging field of computing, working as a management consultant on the use of computers in business and later founding a software company that offered fixed-price projects across several industries, including a large software system for the insurance industry. He settled in South Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, from where he pursues his research and writing in natural philosophy.
Scientific contributions
Spencer's later work is organized around what he terms the Understanding the Electron Theory (UET), a program that seeks to rebuild physics on the basis of the electron as the fundamental constituent of matter. In this framework the electron is treated as a point object with no spatial extension, from which other particles and phenomena are constructed. Spencer argues that the interaction between electrons occurs discretely and discontinuously in time, taking place only between points on their mutual light-cone, rather than as the continuous field interactions assumed by classical electromagnetism.
A central theme of this work is a critique of the use of continuum mathematics in physics. Spencer contends that calculus and continuous mathematics obscure physical understanding and should be replaced by discrete mathematics. On this basis he offers an extended critique of quantum mechanics and of the Copenhagen interpretation, which he characterizes as providing computational recipes rather than genuine physical insight. These positions fall well outside the consensus of the mainstream physics community, and his papers are circulated through self-archiving repositories rather than peer-reviewed journals.
Spencer has released a series of long papers under the UET label through the viXra e-print archive, Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Titles include A Natural Philosophical Critique of Quantum Mechanics, An Algebraic Representation for Action-at-a-Distance, Continuous Natural Vector of Electro-Magnetism, Continuous Two-Electron Theory of Electromagnetism, Discrete Relativistic Electron Dynamics, Quantum Optical Mechanics, Quantum Measurement: A New View and Problems of Quantum Mechanics.