Friedwardt Winterberg

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Friedwardt Winterberg
Friedwart Winterberg
Friedwart Winterberg
Born June 12, 1929(1929-06-12)
Berlin, Germany
Residence Germany, United States
Citizenship American, previously German
Ethnicity German
Fields Physics
Alma mater Max Planck Institute
Doctoral advisor Werner Heisenberg
Known for General relativity
Nuclear rocket propulsion
GPS

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."[1] He is also an honorary member of the German Aerospace Society Lilienthal-Oberth.

He is known for his ideas which lead to the development of GPS, his fusion activism, his first proposal to experimentally test Elsasser's theory of the geodynamo[2], his defense of rocket scientist Arthur Rudolph, and his involvement in the Albert Einstein-David Hilbert priority dispute.

Contents

[edit] 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.[1]

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.[3] He is an elected member of the Paris-based International Academy of Astronautics, in which he sat on the Committee of Interstellar Space Exploration.[4] 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."[1] 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."[5] 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.

[edit] GPS System

In 1955 in an ASTRONAUTICA ACTA paper 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. Winterberg received a letter in 1957 from Werner Heisenberg expressing enthusiasm for Dr. Winterberg's proposal[6], which today is the basis of the Global Positioning System (GPS), and the only practical application of General Relativity. Neil Ashby presented in Physics Today (May 2002) [7] an account how these relativistic corrections are applied, and their orders of magnitude.

[edit] Fusion activism

Dr.Winterberg has published numerous articles in the area of inertial confinement fusion. In particular Winterberg is known for the idea of impact fusion and the concept of the magnetically insulated diode for the generation of multi-megampere megavolt ion beams for the purpose of heating plasmas to thermonuclear fusion temperatures. He conceived of a nuclear fusion propulsion reactor for space travel, which is called the Daedalus Magnetic Compression Reaction Chamber, which was later developed at the University of Alabama at Huntsville's Propulsion Research Center (see diagram at http://geocities.com/fusion_activism). Winterberg also developed ideas for mining increasingly rare industrially crucial elements on planetary bodies such as the moon using fusion detonation devices (see artist's drawing from Astronautica Acta, Vol. 51, 2002, at http://geocities.com/fusion_activism). He became involved with the idea of using beam weapons in outer space in the late 1970s while working at the Desert Research Institute. According to King, Winterberg shared his ideas on beam weapons with the U.S. Air Force and he speculated on the subject in publications for the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), a division of the Lyndon LaRouche National Caucus of Labor Committees. The FEF published a book of Winterberg describing the design of the hydrogen bomb, with the hope of getting research in inertial confinement fusion declassified. According to King 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".[8] Winterberg also contributed articles and interviews to the FEF magazine, Fusion, and its successor magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology.

On November 12, 2007, Dr. Winterberg addressed the American Physical Society Plasma Physics Convention in Orlando, Florida, encouraging efforts to achieve economically feasible fusion energy, and presenting his ideas for what direction the efforts should take. Winterberg stresses inertial confinement fusion (see his Orlando abstract at http://geocities.com/fusion_activism).

[edit] 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.

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.

In 1992, Winterberg received documents from the post-unification German Federal Archives showing that in 1983 the OSI had requested information about Rudolph's role as a director of the German "Mittelwerke" rocket factory from 1943 to 1945 from the GDR. The GDR replied by passing on the results of its investigation. The case was public enough that Western German newspapers commented on this cooperation.

[edit] 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.[9]

Winterberg 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.[10] Winterberg presented his findings at the American Physical Society meeting in Tampa, Florida in April 2005, see his abstract at http://www.geocities.com/abstract_aps

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 noting Winterberg claims that 1/3rd of the page was removed, when actually over half a page is missing total from the two cut off pages) and internally inconsistent. They further argued there was a likely "non-paranoid" explanation for the missing part of the page.[11]

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".[12]

Most recently, the Max Planck Society has distanced itself from the statements against Professor Winterberg, contained in the original reply by Corry, Renn, and Stachel.[13]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c Bio from the University of Nevada, Reno website.
  2. ^ Winterberg (1963)[citation needed].
  3. ^ King, 171.
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ Winterberg (2002).
  6. ^ Winterberg article in ASTRONAUTICA ACTA and Heisenberg letter on proposed test of General Relativity
  7. ^ Physics Today. Relativity and GPS. Neil Ashby May 2002.
  8. ^ King, 70.
  9. ^ Corry (1997).
  10. ^ Winterberg (2004).
  11. ^ Corry, "Response".
  12. ^ Corry, "Short Statement".
  13. ^ http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/texts/Winterberg-Antwort.html

[edit] 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 this link at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Accessed February 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 0-385-23880-0.
  • 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 0-394-51297-9.
  • Winterberg, Friedwardt. The Physical Principles of Thermonuclear Explosive Devices. New York: Fusion Energy Foundation, 1981. ISBN 0-938460-00-5.
  • 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://www.physics.unr.edu/Forms/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 0-9718811-0-3.
  • 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.
  • Winterberg, Friedwardt; Experimental Test for the Dynamo Theory of Earth and Stellar Magnetism, Phys. Rev., 131, 29 (1963).

[edit] External links