Blog Ekkehard Friebe

By Thomas E. Phipps, Jr., U.S.A.

To Seek the Truth in the Face of Authority: The Work of R.A. Waldron (1990)

Editor’s note: Richard A. Waldron passed away in Northern Ireland on May 24 of this year, shortly before he was to retire from the University of Ulster. Just prior to his death, Professor Waldron had agreed to join the editorial board of APEIRON, and contributed an article on stellar collapse which he eagerly looked forward to seeing published in this journal (see page 4).

Richard A. Waldron’s youthful enthusiasm for physics and his compulsive desire to discover nature’s secrets were at once endearing and inspirational. Thomas E. Phipps Jr. has generously agreed to produce an account of his work, and offers this appraisal of the debt owed by science to an extraordinary human being.

The untimely death of Professor Richard A. Waldron, M.A., Sc.D., F.Inst. P., F.I.M.A., C.Eng., F.I.E.R.E., de prives scientific scholarship of one of its most original and courageous minds. The present writer, who has known Professor Waldron only through correspondence, and that for less than a year, is not qualified to provide a Apeiron, No. 7, Summer 1990 2 © 1990 C. Roy Keys Inc. – http://redshift.vif.com proper eulogy. Since a scientist is known by his works, I shall comment on the small portion of Waldron’s extensive work that has come to my attention.

Primarily, Waldron was a modern advocate (1966, 1977, 1979a,b, 1980) of the “ballistic” theory of light due to Ritz (1908). According to this view the photon (subject to Galilean kinematics) acquires the velocity of its emitter, relative to which its speed is c. The concomitant variant of electromagnetic theory can be represented in field theoretical terms, but is more efficiently expressed in terms of a law of direct force action between charges. The latter tradition of electromagnetic description predates Maxwell and goes back at least to the work of Wilhelm Weber before 1850. Weber was the first – and some would say the only – “true relativist,” in that he employed no frame – or observer – related velocity parameters of the type that subsequently made their appearance in the Lorentz force law.

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Siehe auch in diesem Blog:
THE BALLISTiC THEORY OF LIGHT AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR SPACE TRAVEL