Constantinos Ragazas
Constantinos Ragazas | |
|---|---|
| Known for | Heterodox derivations of Planck's law and a "duration" view of time |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics, Foundations of physics |
| Institutions | The Lawrenceville School |
Constantinos Ragazas is a retired mathematics teacher and author known for a body of self-published writing on the foundations of physics, centered on Planck's law, thermodynamics, and the nature of time. He is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Ideas
Ragazas argues that Planck's blackbody-radiation law can be recovered as an exact mathematical identity and that Planck's constant is better understood as an accumulation of energy than as a quantum of action. A recurring theme in his work is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics implies every physical process, or "event", requires a lapse of time, so that physical time is intrinsically "duration" (t−s) rather than "instantiation" (t=s). He contrasts this with the instantaneous time coordinate of the (x,y,z,t) event in General Relativity, which he argues is in tension with thermodynamics.
Work
He has written a chapter, "The Thermodynamics in Planck's Law" (InTech, 2011), roughly seventeen papers on the viXra e-print archive, and several Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) essay-contest entries, including "The Metaphysics of Physics" (2012). His work is philosophically framed and published outside conventional peer-reviewed physics venues. He is associated with The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where he taught mathematics.