1. Herbert Dingle was an English physicist and philosopher of science, who served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 to 1953.
18 Facts About Herbert Dingle
1. 2.
Herbert Dingle is best known for his opposition to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity and the protracted controversy that this provoked.
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In that same year, Herbert Dingle married Alice Westacott who later gave birth to a son.
4.
Herbert Dingle was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1922.
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Herbert Dingle was a member of the British government eclipse expeditions of 1927 and 1932, both of which failed to make any observations due to overcast skies.
6.
Herbert Dingle spent most of 1932 at the California Institute of Technology as a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar.
7.
Herbert Dingle became a professor of Natural Philosophy at Imperial College in 1938, and was a professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London from 1946 until his retirement in 1955.
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Herbert Dingle was one of the founders of the British Society for the History of Science, and served as President from 1955 to 1957.
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Herbert Dingle founded what later became the British Society for the Philosophy of Science as well as its journal, the British Journal for The Philosophy of Science.
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Herbert Dingle was the author of "Modern Astrophysics" and "Practical Applications of Spectrum Analysis".
11.
Herbert Dingle wrote the essay "Relativity for All" and the monograph The Special Theory of Relativity.
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Herbert Dingle took an interest in English literature, and published Science and Literary Criticism in 1949, and The Mind of Emily Bronte in 1974.
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The first of these took place during the 1930s and was triggered by Dingle's criticism of E A Milne's cosmological model and the associated theoretical methodology, which Dingle considered overly speculative and not based on empirical data.
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Herbert Dingle characterized his opponents as "traitors" to the scientific method, and called them "the modern Aristotelians" because he believed their theorizing was based on rationalism rather than empiricism.
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However, Herbert Dingle then came to realize and acknowledge that his understanding of the problem had been mistaken.
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Herbert Dingle then began to argue that special relativity was empirically wrong in its predictions, although experimental evidence showed he was mistaken about this.
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Herbert Dingle carried on a highly public and contentious campaign to get this conclusion accepted by the scientific community, mostly through letters to the editors of various scientific periodicals, including Nature.
18.
Dozens of scientists responded with answers to Herbert Dingle's claims, explaining why the reciprocity of the Lorentz transformation does not entail any logical inconsistency, but Herbert Dingle rejected all the explanations.