Herbert Dingle

Herbert Dingle (1890–1978), an English astronomer and president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 to 1953, is best remembered for his opposition to Einstein's special theory of relativity.

Dingle was born in London, but spent his early years in Plymouth, where he was taken following the death of his father, and where he attended Plymouth Science, Art and Technical Schools. Due to lack of money, he left school at the age of 14 and found employment as a clerk, a job which he held for 11 years. At age 25 he won a scholarship to the Imperial College, London, from which he graduated in 1918. In that same year, Dingle married Alice Westacott who later gave birth to a son. (As a Quaker, Dingle was exempt from military service during World War I.) He took a position as a Demonstrator in the Physics Department, and devoted himself to the study of spectroscopy (following his mentor Alfred Fowler), especially its applications in astronomy. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1922.

Dingle was a member of the British government eclipse expeditions of 1927 (Colwyn Bay) and 1932 (Montreal), both of which failed to make any observations due to overcast skies. He spent most of 1932 at the California Institute of Technology as a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar. There he met the theoretical cosmologist R. C. Tolman, and studied relativistic cosmology.

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. He 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.

Dingle participated in two highly public and polemical disputes. The first took place during the 1930s, triggered by Dingle's criticism of E. A. Milne's cosmological model and the associated theoretical methodology, which Dingle considered pernicious.

The second dispute in the 1960's was with the astrophysicist William H. McCrea and centered on Dingle's objections to the theory of special relativity. This culminated in his 1972 book, Science at the Crossroads in which he argued that any attempts to argue with Einstein's special theory of relativity will be ruthlessly suppressed. In that book Dingle also raised objections against Einstein's 1918 solution of the twin paradox. An article by Chang about Dingle's "rebellion" argues that his objections were largely philosophical and not well understood. As Dingle had claimed that Einstein's prediction about a moving clock was in error and experiments showed Einstein right, the consensus in the physics community was and still is that Dingle was wrong..

Dingle is also known for his 1922 essay, "Relativity for All", and his 1940 text book The Special Theory of Relativity. A collection of Dingle's lectures on the history and philosophy of science was published in 1954. He also took an interest in English literature, and published "Science and Literary Criticism" in 1949, and "The Mind of Emily Bronte" in 1974.