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Herbert Dingle
Times obituary
Eminent scientist and philosopher
Professor Herbert Dingle, who was Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at University College, London, from 1946 to 1955, died on September 4 at the age of 88.
Herbert Dingle, physicist, mathematician, philosopher, and lover of poetry, was born in London in 1890. Following his father's death, his mother returned to her native Devonshire, taking her infant son with her. Thus Dingle received his early education at the Plymouth Science, Art, and Technical Schools, which he left when he was fourteen. For the next eleven years, he worked as a clerk by day and studied, as best he might, by night until in 1915, he won a Royal Scholarship for Physics at the Imperial College in London There he graduated with high honours in physics in 1918, a year which saw his marriage to Alice Westacott, who was his devoted and faithful companion until her death in 1947. Dingle had already been appointed a Demonstrator whilst still a student and his subsequent rise through the grades culminated in his election to the Professorship of Natural Philosophy in 1937. Thereafter, his contributions to the philosophy of science brought him to the Chair of the History and Philosophy of Science at University College, London, in 1946. On his retirement, he was made Professor Emeritus. He had been Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1929 to 1932 and Vice-President in 1938-39 and 1942-44.
Under the influence of Alfred Fowler, Dingle's experimental work lay in the field of spectroscopy, where he analyzed and interpreted the spectra of neutral, ionized, and doubly ionized fluorine, of the iron arc, and of mercury. He was never able to realize his ambition of applying his spectroscopic ability to astrophysical observation observed during total solar eclipses, Three times he was to have observed the Sun's spectrum only to be defeated by cloudy skies at Colwyn Bay (1927) and Montreal (1932), and by the Second World War in 1940 when his expedition was cancelled. Nevertheless, beginning with Modern Astrophysics in 1924, he wrote much during his life on the laboratory and astronomical applications of spectroscopy.
Simultaneously with these experimental researches, Dingle's philosophical bent drew him to a study of relativity. His Relativity For All (1922) appeared at a time when it used to be said that only six men in the world understood the theory. If this had been true, Dingle must be rated high among the six for his little book shows a profound grasp of relativity as a physical theory combined with a capacity for presenting it, not as an esoteric mystery, but as a logical development of the mechanics of Newton. Later, in 1932, as a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, he wrote on the mathematical aspects of the so-called expanding universe theory and on E. A. Milne's alternative cosmology.
But his chief claim to fame lies in his scientific philosophy, expounded in a formidable list of articles in scientific, philosophical, and religious journals as well as in his books The central themes are, firstly, that science is firmly rooted in experience and, secondly, that it is a rational and coherent scheme of thought, though not necessarily the only such scheme. He was thus at variance with his older contemporaries Eddington and Jeans who, to him, seemed to present science to the lay mind as a set of mysterious paradoxes, at times almost as something irrational. Steeped in the knowledge of science he was, Dingle argued that science could only be intelligible if the points of science and of common sense were recognized as alternative rationalizations of the data of experience. By this term he meant not only the individual's own sense-data, but also his memories and the recorded experiences of other people. The dualism which sees an external view of the world existing independently of the investigator and opposed to a mind that explores it was the root source of the confusion. The true dualism lay between the data of experience to which alone we have access, on the one hand, and reason as the correlator of of these data, on the other. Different schemes of correlation were possible according to the end in view. Thus common sense, with its conception of a physical object such as a table or a horse, led to action whilst science, employing the alternative conceptions of mass, light, electrons, etc., sought an understanding of the relations between apparently unconnected experiences. To attempt an expression of the scientific scheme in terms of . the conceptions of common sense was bound to end, in Dingle's view, in inconsistency and paradox.
These ideas are most completely developed in Through Science to Philosophy (1937), but an earlier work, Science and Human Experience (1931), contains an interesting notion later discarded. The experiences rationalized by science are said to be those "common to all normal people," thus providing a universal objective element which is missing from his later work. Supposing indeed that there is no such controlling factor, independent of the scientist's own experience, and reason, why is it that in science some schemes of rationalization "work" so much better than others? In 1961, he engaged in a philosophical dialogue with the first Viscount Samuel, then 90, which was published as A Threefold Cord.
If Dingle's philosophy can be criticized as a philosophy only of use when we are philosophizing, such was not his own attitude towards it. His analysis of the nature of physical time, of the "dimensions" of physical magnitudes, and his relativity theory of temperature (1944) are all applications to particular physical problems of his philosophical ideas. The standpoint he adopted was diametrically opposed to Eddington's, who saw a law of nature as an expression of the character of our knowledge of an independently existing external world. Still more antipathetic was E. A. Milne's attitude, who argued that mechanics and the structure of the universe could be deduced from prior principles without an empirical element at all. Such "modern Aristotelian" doctrines seemed to Dingle to be a return to the pre-scientific era in which the scientific method, so laboriously built up over 300 years, would perish.
In 1969, Dingle launched into sharp controversy with his assertion in the Listener that aspects of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity were untenable. This aspect of the theory known as "time dilation" dealing with the relative speeds of clocks was attacked as untenable by Dingle, provoking a storm of correspondence and a markedly hostile reaction throughout much of the scientific world. This reaction eventually led to Dingle's contention, in another book, that the basis of much physical experimentation was wrong.
Mention must also be made of Dingle's love of music and, above all, of his deep appreciation of poetry. His passion for a rational understanding of anything that interested him urged him to find a point of view from which a poet's work would appear as a coherent and intelligible whole. His studies of Wordsworth, Swinburne, and Emily Brontë reveal this attitude very clearly, and it was further explained in Science and Literary Criticism (1949). Moreover, Dingle's scientific and philosophical works, written in a characteristically witty style, abound with poetic allusions and quotations. Indeed, it may be said that he sought to interpret the mind of man as a whole, untrammelled by mental subdivisions into watertight compartments labelled science, philosophy, or emotional experience—a feat which few men have achieved.
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Professor G. J. Whitrow writes:
Friends of Professor Herbert Dingle, whose obituary notice appeared in The Times of September 6, were pleased that such a comprehensive and authoritative account was published of his career until about 1946, but we have been puzzled by some of the references to his last 30 years.
The most surprising omission was the absence of any mention of his having been president of the Royal Astronomical Society (from 1951 to 1953). He was also for some years president of Commission 41 (History of Astronomy) of the International Astronomical Union, and he was a vice-president of the International Union for the History of Science from 1953 to 1956. As first president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, he founded in 1950 with the support of the late Dr. H. P. Morrison of the Nelson publishing firm, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. From 1955 to 1957 he was president of the British Society for the History of Science.
In the latter year he began his famous campaign against the Special Theory of Relativity, although he never lost his respect for Einstein's genius—just as he admired his fellow-Quaker Eddington despite submitting his philosophy of science to severe criticism in 1954 in his brilliant Eddington Memorial Lecture on The Sources of Eddington's Philosophy. Dingle's polemic against special relativity did not, as stated in the obituary notice, begin in 1969 in the columns of The Listener but in the correspondence section of Nature, in a controversy with Professor W. H. McCrea, FRS, concerning the so-called "clock paradox" (paradox of the travelling twin). Later Dingle attacked the entire concept of relativistic time. Although I, for one, did not see eye to eye with him, I had no sympathy whatsoever for the scurrilous abuse to which he was at times subjected by some scientists and engineers not professionally expert in the subject. The astonishing story of his struggle against them and, more importantly, against what he regarded as the relativistic "establishment" was told with his usual felicitous literary style in one of his last books, Science at the Crossroads, published in 1972. (His last book, published in 1974, was The Mind of Emily Brontë.)
His point of view regarding relativity was not, as many believed, purely negative, for he adopted, and spent much effort in developing, the alternative "ballistic" theory of light transmission due to one of the most distinguished of Einstein's contemporaries, the Swiss physicist W. Ritz.
Eminent scientist and philosopher
Professor Herbert Dingle, who was Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at University College, London, from 1946 to 1955, died on September 4 at the age of 88.
Herbert Dingle, physicist, mathematician, philosopher, and lover of poetry, was born in London in 1890. Following his father's death, his mother returned to her native Devonshire, taking her infant son with her. Thus Dingle received his early education at the Plymouth Science, Art, and Technical Schools, which he left when he was fourteen. For the next eleven years, he worked as a clerk by day and studied, as best he might, by night until in 1915, he won a Royal Scholarship for Physics at the Imperial College in London There he graduated with high honours in physics in 1918, a year which saw his marriage to Alice Westacott, who was his devoted and faithful companion until her death in 1947. Dingle had already been appointed a Demonstrator whilst still a student and his subsequent rise through the grades culminated in his election to the Professorship of Natural Philosophy in 1937. Thereafter, his contributions to the philosophy of science brought him to the Chair of the History and Philosophy of Science at University College, London, in 1946. On his retirement, he was made Professor Emeritus. He had been Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1929 to 1932 and Vice-President in 1938-39 and 1942-44.
Under the influence of Alfred Fowler, Dingle's experimental work lay in the field of spectroscopy, where he analyzed and interpreted the spectra of neutral, ionized, and doubly ionized fluorine, of the iron arc, and of mercury. He was never able to realize his ambition of applying his spectroscopic ability to astrophysical observation observed during total solar eclipses, Three times he was to have observed the Sun's spectrum only to be defeated by cloudy skies at Colwyn Bay (1927) and Montreal (1932), and by the Second World War in 1940 when his expedition was cancelled. Nevertheless, beginning with Modern Astrophysics in 1924, he wrote much during his life on the laboratory and astronomical applications of spectroscopy.
Simultaneously with these experimental researches, Dingle's philosophical bent drew him to a study of relativity. His Relativity For All (1922) appeared at a time when it used to be said that only six men in the world understood the theory. If this had been true, Dingle must be rated high among the six for his little book shows a profound grasp of relativity as a physical theory combined with a capacity for presenting it, not as an esoteric mystery, but as a logical development of the mechanics of Newton. Later, in 1932, as a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, he wrote on the mathematical aspects of the so-called expanding universe theory and on E. A. Milne's alternative cosmology.
But his chief claim to fame lies in his scientific philosophy, expounded in a formidable list of articles in scientific, philosophical, and religious journals as well as in his books The central themes are, firstly, that science is firmly rooted in experience and, secondly, that it is a rational and coherent scheme of thought, though not necessarily the only such scheme. He was thus at variance with his older contemporaries Eddington and Jeans who, to him, seemed to present science to the lay mind as a set of mysterious paradoxes, at times almost as something irrational. Steeped in the knowledge of science he was, Dingle argued that science could only be intelligible if the points of science and of common sense were recognized as alternative rationalizations of the data of experience. By this term he meant not only the individual's own sense-data, but also his memories and the recorded experiences of other people. The dualism which sees an external view of the world existing independently of the investigator and opposed to a mind that explores it was the root source of the confusion. The true dualism lay between the data of experience to which alone we have access, on the one hand, and reason as the correlator of of these data, on the other. Different schemes of correlation were possible according to the end in view. Thus common sense, with its conception of a physical object such as a table or a horse, led to action whilst science, employing the alternative conceptions of mass, light, electrons, etc., sought an understanding of the relations between apparently unconnected experiences. To attempt an expression of the scientific scheme in terms of . the conceptions of common sense was bound to end, in Dingle's view, in inconsistency and paradox.
These ideas are most completely developed in Through Science to Philosophy (1937), but an earlier work, Science and Human Experience (1931), contains an interesting notion later discarded. The experiences rationalized by science are said to be those "common to all normal people," thus providing a universal objective element which is missing from his later work. Supposing indeed that there is no such controlling factor, independent of the scientist's own experience, and reason, why is it that in science some schemes of rationalization "work" so much better than others? In 1961, he engaged in a philosophical dialogue with the first Viscount Samuel, then 90, which was published as A Threefold Cord.
If Dingle's philosophy can be criticized as a philosophy only of use when we are philosophizing, such was not his own attitude towards it. His analysis of the nature of physical time, of the "dimensions" of physical magnitudes, and his relativity theory of temperature (1944) are all applications to particular physical problems of his philosophical ideas. The standpoint he adopted was diametrically opposed to Eddington's, who saw a law of nature as an expression of the character of our knowledge of an independently existing external world. Still more antipathetic was E. A. Milne's attitude, who argued that mechanics and the structure of the universe could be deduced from prior principles without an empirical element at all. Such "modern Aristotelian" doctrines seemed to Dingle to be a return to the pre-scientific era in which the scientific method, so laboriously built up over 300 years, would perish.
In 1969, Dingle launched into sharp controversy with his assertion in the Listener that aspects of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity were untenable. This aspect of the theory known as "time dilation" dealing with the relative speeds of clocks was attacked as untenable by Dingle, provoking a storm of correspondence and a markedly hostile reaction throughout much of the scientific world. This reaction eventually led to Dingle's contention, in another book, that the basis of much physical experimentation was wrong.
Mention must also be made of Dingle's love of music and, above all, of his deep appreciation of poetry. His passion for a rational understanding of anything that interested him urged him to find a point of view from which a poet's work would appear as a coherent and intelligible whole. His studies of Wordsworth, Swinburne, and Emily Brontë reveal this attitude very clearly, and it was further explained in Science and Literary Criticism (1949). Moreover, Dingle's scientific and philosophical works, written in a characteristically witty style, abound with poetic allusions and quotations. Indeed, it may be said that he sought to interpret the mind of man as a whole, untrammelled by mental subdivisions into watertight compartments labelled science, philosophy, or emotional experience—a feat which few men have achieved.
___________________________________________
Professor G. J. Whitrow writes:
Friends of Professor Herbert Dingle, whose obituary notice appeared in The Times of September 6, were pleased that such a comprehensive and authoritative account was published of his career until about 1946, but we have been puzzled by some of the references to his last 30 years.
The most surprising omission was the absence of any mention of his having been president of the Royal Astronomical Society (from 1951 to 1953). He was also for some years president of Commission 41 (History of Astronomy) of the International Astronomical Union, and he was a vice-president of the International Union for the History of Science from 1953 to 1956. As first president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, he founded in 1950 with the support of the late Dr. H. P. Morrison of the Nelson publishing firm, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. From 1955 to 1957 he was president of the British Society for the History of Science.
In the latter year he began his famous campaign against the Special Theory of Relativity, although he never lost his respect for Einstein's genius—just as he admired his fellow-Quaker Eddington despite submitting his philosophy of science to severe criticism in 1954 in his brilliant Eddington Memorial Lecture on The Sources of Eddington's Philosophy. Dingle's polemic against special relativity did not, as stated in the obituary notice, begin in 1969 in the columns of The Listener but in the correspondence section of Nature, in a controversy with Professor W. H. McCrea, FRS, concerning the so-called "clock paradox" (paradox of the travelling twin). Later Dingle attacked the entire concept of relativistic time. Although I, for one, did not see eye to eye with him, I had no sympathy whatsoever for the scurrilous abuse to which he was at times subjected by some scientists and engineers not professionally expert in the subject. The astonishing story of his struggle against them and, more importantly, against what he regarded as the relativistic "establishment" was told with his usual felicitous literary style in one of his last books, Science at the Crossroads, published in 1972. (His last book, published in 1974, was The Mind of Emily Brontë.)
His point of view regarding relativity was not, as many believed, purely negative, for he adopted, and spent much effort in developing, the alternative "ballistic" theory of light transmission due to one of the most distinguished of Einstein's contemporaries, the Swiss physicist W. Ritz.
