Friedwardt Winterberg

Friedwardt Winterberg

Friedwardt Winterberg (b. June 12, 1929) is a German-American theoretical physicist and research professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. With more than 260 publications and three books, he is known for his research in areas spanning general relativity, Planck scale physics, nuclear fusion, and plasmas. "His work in nuclear rocket propulsion earned him the 1979 Hermann Oberth Gold Medal of the Wernher von Braun International Space Flight Foundation and in 1981 a citation by the Nevada Legislature."(refactored from Winterberg2002) He has also been known for his defense of acquitted war criminal Arthur Rudolph, and his work relating to the Albert Einstein-David Hilbert priority dispute.

Biography

Winterberg was born in 1929 in Berlin, Germany. In 1953 he received his MSc from the University of Frankfurt working under Friedrich Hund, and in 1955 he received his PhD in physics from the Max Planck Institute, Göttingen, as a student of Werner Heisenberg. He later emigrated to the United States, and became a U.S. citizen.(refactored from UNR1)

Winterberg is well-respected for his work in the fields of nuclear fusion and plasma physics, and Edward Teller has been quoted as saying that he had "perhaps not received the attention he deserves" for his work on fusion.(refactored from King171) He is an elected member of the Paris-based International Academy of Astronautics, in which he sat on the Committee of Interstellar Space Exploration.(refactored from RegentsMinutes) According to his faculty webpage, In 1954 he "made the first proposal to test general relativity with atomic clocks in earth satellites" and his "thermonuclear microexplosion ignition concept was adopted by the British Interplanetary Society for their Daedalus Starship Study."(refactored from UNR2) His current research is on the Planck Aether Hypothesis, "a novel theory that explains both quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity as asymptotic low energy approximations, and gives a spectrum of particles greatly resembling the standard model. Einstein's gravitational and Maxwell's electromagnetic equations are unified by the symmetric and antisymmetric wave mode of a vortex sponge, Dirac spinors result from gravitationally interacting bound positive-negative mass vortices, which explains why the mass of an electron is so much smaller than the Planck mass. The phenomenon of charge is for the first time explained to result from the zero point oscillations of Planck mass particles bound in vortex fiaments."(refactored from Winterberg2002-2) The theory proposes that the only free parameters in the fundamental equations of physics are the Planck length, mass, and time, and shows why R3 is the natural space, as SU2 is treated as the fundamental group isomorphic to SO3 — an alternative to string field theories in R10 and M theory in R11. It permits the value of the finestructure constant at the Planck length to be computed, and this value remarkably agrees with the empirical value. He has published extensively on many aspects of physics from the 1950s through the present.

Dr. Winterberg and the GPS System

In 1955 Dr.Winterberg proposed a test of General Relativity, by using atomic clocks placed in orbit in artificial satellites. At that time neither atomic clocks nor artificial satellites even existed. Dr. Winterberg received a letter in 1957 from Werner Heisenberg expressing enthusiasm for Dr. Winterberg's proposal, which today is the basis of the GPS global positioning system, and the only practical application of General Relativity. Dr. Winterberg's article and the letter from Werner Heisenberg may be seen at http://geocities.com/heisenberg_letter

Fusion activism and LaRouche connections

File:Winterberg and LaRouche in 1985.jpg

Winterberg and Lyndon LaRouche at a LaRouche conference in 1985, a picture LaRouche published in his 1987 autobiography.

According to anti-LaRouche biographer Dennis King, who was active in the communist Progressive Labor Party, Winterberg became involved with the idea of using beam weapons in outer space in the late 1970s while working at the Desert Research Institute. He became involved in the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), a division of the Lyndon LaRouche National Caucus of Labor Committees devoted to promoting beam weaponry and the use of both fission and fusion-based nuclear power.(refactored from King69) According to King, during this time the FEF attempted to court the attention of many mainstream scientists, with some success, for the purpose of promoting their technological and political agenda.(refactored from King61-62)

The FEF published a book of Winterberg's — speculating on the design behind the hydrogen bomb, with the hope of getting research in inertial confinement fusion declassified if an un-cleared scientist could discover the "secret" which was apparently still keeping much of the work classified — as part of their "Fusion Energy Foundation Frontiers of Science Series", which included other publications touting the benefits of fusion energy research as well as the benefits of LaRouche's economic theories.(refactored from Winterberg1981) He played a minor role in the United States v. The Progressive, et al. case, when he sent excerpts from a LaRouche publication to Howard Morland, inspiring the latter to refine his theory of what the hydrogen bomb "secret" was.(refactored from Morland97)

The FEF also funding speaking tours for Winterberg overseas, and he was quoted as saying, in 1980, that he thought LaRouche's U.S. presidential campaign was the "most scientifically founded".(refactored from King70) Winterberg also contributed articles and interviews to the FEF magazine, Fusion, and its successor magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology.(refactored from WinterbergInterview)

Dr.Winterberg had only scientific connections to LaRouche, and was never a member of the LaRouche Society.

Rudolph controversy

In 1983, Winterberg became involved in a scandal which erupted over the engineer Arthur Rudolph, who had been brought to the United States after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip to work on the U.S. rocketry program. It was Rudolph who then designed the massive famous Saturn V rocket, that launched Neil Armstrong to the Moon. In the early 1980s, Rudolph's record as a potential Nazi war criminal at Peenemünde surfaced and became the center of a political controversy after the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) negotiated to have him leave the country and stripped of his U.S. citizenship. Rudolph was later acquitted of all charges and his German citizenship was restored.

The FEF launched a campaign to characterize Rudolph's prosecution as a Communist conspiracy. Winterberg, characterized by King as "Rudolph's most outspoken supporter", lobbied vigorously to paint Rudolph as a victim, giving interviews to magazines and launching his own investigation into Rudolph. According to King, Winterberg sent handwritten notes to the OSI prosecutor "with themes such as: Israel is guilty of Nazi-style crimes, Simon Wiesenthal was a Nazi collaborator, Zionism is a form of Nazism that has 'infected' world Jewry."(refactored from King79) The LaRouche campaign attempted to characterize the attacks on Rudolph to be part of a Communist plot against NATO and against the Strategic Defense Initiative, and suggested that the OSI prosecutors were "traitors".(refactored from King80) In 1985, the LaRouche-run Schiller Institute held the Krafft Ehricke Memorial Conference in Berlin to unite their support behind SDI, nuclear fusion, and exoneration of Peenemünde scientists. Winterberg attended, and LaRouche included a picture of he and Winterberg talking at the conference in his 1987 autobiography.(refactored from LaRouche)

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Winterberg and the FEF were proven correct when Winterberg was able to obtain documents from the East German archives which proved that the OSI, despite their earlier denials, had indeed collaborated with the communist government of East Germany in the Rudolph investigation. Parts of these documents are available online at a private website.

Einstein-Hilbert dispute

Main article: Relativity priority dispute

Winterberg was also involved in a dispute relating to the history of general relativity in a controversy over the publication of the general relativity field equations (both Albert Einstein and David Hilbert had published them in a very short time span of one another). In 1997, Leo Corry, Jürgen Renn, and John Stachel published an article in Science entitled "Belated decision in the Hilbert-Einstein priority dispute", arguing that, after looking at the original proofs of the article by Hilbert, that they indicated that Hilbert had not anticipated Einstein's equations.(refactored from Corry1997)

Winterberg, working with author Christopher Jon Bjerknes, published a refutation of these conclusions in 2004, observing that the galley proofs of Hilbert's articles had been tampered with — part of one page had been cut off. He argued that the removed part of the article contained the equations that Einstein later published and alleged that it was part of a "crude attempt by some unknown individual to falsify the historical record." He alleged that Science had refused to print the article and thus he was forced to publish it in Zeitschrift für Naturforschung. Winterberg's article argued that despite the missing part of the proofs, that the correct crucial Field Equation is still imbedded on other pages of the proofs, in various forms, including Hilbert's variational principle with correct Lagrangian from which the Field Equation is immediately derived.(refactored from Winterberg2004) Winterberg presented his findings at the American Physical Society meeting in Tampa, Florida in April 2005, see his abstract at http://www.geocities.com/aps_abstract

Corry, Renn, and Stachel authored a joint reply to Winterberg, which they claimed Zeitschrift für Naturforschung refused to publish without "unacceptable" modifications, and unable to find a publisher elsewhere, they made it available on the internet. The reply accused Winterberg of misrepresenting the reason why Science would not publish his paper (it had to do with the section of the journal it was scheduled to appear in), and also misrepresenting that the paper published in Zeitschrift für Naturforschung was the same paper he had submitted to Science, and had in fact been "substantially altered" after Winterberg had received their comments on an earlier draft. Actually, Winterberg in his Final Comment had clearly stated that the paper submitted to Science had been a previous version. They also contended that Winterberg was writing in "the paranoid style" (as discussed by Richard Hofstadter) and making vague accusations of conspiracy. They then argue that Winterberg's interpretation of the Hilbert paper was incorrect, that the lost part of the page was unlikely to have been consequential, and that much of Winterberg's reasoning about what could be in the missing piece was incorrect (down to quabbling over Winterberg estimation that 1/3rd of the page was removed, when actually a total amount of over half a page is missing from the two mutilated pages 7 and 8 together) and internally inconsistent. They further argued there was a likely "non-paranoid" explanation for the missing part of the page.(refactored from Corry-full)

Later, though, the original reply to Winterberg had been removed from their website and replaced with a much shorter statement saying that Winterberg's conclusions were incorrect, specifically that he had focused on the missing page fragment, "a fact without any bearing on the matter at hand", while failing "to address the substantive difference between the theory expounded in the proofs" of Hilbert. The statement further said that Winterberg had apparently indicated that he was "personally offended" by the original response, the "Max Planck Institute for the History of Science has decided to replace the original, more detailed response to his paper with this abbreviated version".(refactored from Corry-short)

Notes

Template:Ent Winterberg, (2002). Template:Ent University of Nevada, Reno faculty page. Template:Ent King, p. 171. Template:Ent Cited in the University of Nevada System Board of Regents' Meeting Minutes, April 12-13, 1990. Online at http://system.nevada.edu/Board-of-R/Meetings/Minutes/1990/1990/19900412.htm_cvt.htm, accessed February 17, 2006. Template:Ent University of Nevada, Reno faculty page. Template:Ent Winterberg (2002). Template:Ent King, p. 69. Template:Ent King p. 61-62. Template:Ent Winterberg (1981). Template:Ent Morland, p. 97. Template:Ent King, p. 70. Template:Ent "Interview with Prof. Friedwardt Winterberg," (2003). Template:Ent King, p. 79. Template:Ent King, p. 80. Template:Ent LaRouche, in pictures section, captioned: "Talking with Dr. Friedwardt Winterberg during the Schiller Institute's memorial conference for space scientist Krafft Ehricke, June 1985." Also note that the conference is described in a caption to a photograph in "Interview with Prof. Friedwardt Winterberg," (2003) as "organized by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., and his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche". Template:Ent Corry (1997). Template:Ent Winterberg (2004). Template:Ent Corry, "Response". Template:Ent Corry, "Short Statement".

References

• Corry, L., Renn, J., and Stachel, J.; "Belated Decision in the Hilbert-Einstein Priority Dispute," Science 278 (1997): pp. 1270-1274. Abstract
• Corry, L., Renn, J., and Stachel, J.; "Response to F. Winterberg, 'On "Belated Decision in the Hilbert-Einstein Priority Dispute", published by L. Corry, J. Renn, and J. Stachel' Z. Naturforsch. 59a (2004) 715-719." (n.d.) Available online through the Internet Archive via Template:Wayback. Accessed Feburary 15, 2006.
• Corry, L., Renn, J., and Stachel, J.; "Short Statement in Response to Friedrich Winterberg." (n.d.) Available online at http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/texts/Winterberg-Antwort.html. Accessed February 15, 2006.
• Logunov, A.A. et al., Division of Theoretical Physics, Institute for High Energy Physics, Protvino, Russian Federation, arXiv:physics/0405075v3, 16 June 2004.
• Todorov, Ivan T., Einstein and Hilbert: The Creation of General Relativity, Institut fuer Theoretische Physik Universitaet Goettingen, arXiv:physics/0504179v1, 25 April 2005.
• King, Dennis; Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. New York: Doubleday, 1989. ISBN 0385238800.
• LaRouche, Jr., Lyndon H.; The Power of Reason, 1988: An Autobiography. Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1987.
• Morland, Howard; The Secret That Exploded. New York: Random House, 1981. ISBN 0394512979.
• Winterberg, Friedwardt. The Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices. New York: Fusion Energy Foundation, 1981. ISBN 0938460005.
• Winterberg, Friedwardt; "On 'Belated Decision in the Hilbert-Einstein Priority Dispute', published by L. Corry, J. Renn, and J. Stachel," Z. Naturforsch. 59a (2004): pp. 715-719. Available online at http://physics.unr.edu/faculty/winterberg/Hilbert-Einstein.pdf
• Winterberg, Friedwardt; The Planck Aether Hypothesis: An Attempt for a Finitistic Non-Archimedean Theory of Elementary Particles, C.F. Gauss Academy of Science Press (January 1, 2002). ISBN 0971881103.
• University of Nevada, Reno, Department of Physics faculty page, "Friedwardt Winterberg", available online at http://physics.unr.edu/faculty/winterberg/, accessed February 15, 2006.
• 21st Century Science and Technology, "Interview with Prof. Friedwardt Winterberg: A Revolutionary Concept for Fusion Energy," 16:3 (Fall 2003). Available online at http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/fall%202003/interview.html. Accessed February 15, 2006.

External links

• Winterberg's faculty page at the University of Nevada, Reno.
• Interview with Winterberg in Fall 2003 from 21st Century Science and Technology, a LaRouche publication.