Townsend assures Sawyer that a monograph on Equivalence, written by his collaborator, Enos Witmer, will add weight to the significance of Brush's early research. Apparently, this monograph is too important to be mailed, but Townsend intends to bring it to their next meeting.
Interesting. And from the letters page that I just (re)read, his reply to Gary of 1978 shows that he still believed in the violation of the Equivalence Principle for at least antimatter ("contraterrene" matter) as late as that year.
https://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/mis ... /gary2.htm
Adequate theory does not exist to foretell or explain the findings and so, as is often the case, the scientific community pays little attention. This is true also in the case of contra-terrene "non-equivalence" of inertial and gravitational mass - a subject almost taboo today.
I've often puzzled over why Townsend would anomalously be both close to the Princeton IAS Relativity circle, and yet believe that Equivalence was violated (a belief which today is associated with Relativity denial).
But his link to IAS being Witmer - and Witmer having doubts about Equivalence - might explain both of those.
Witmer being associated with University of Pennsylvania also tracks.
I wonder what was in Witmer's 1979 "Space-Time and Microphysics: A New Synthesis"?
https://books.google.com/books/about/Sp ... edir_esc=y
Witmer's 1987 obituary from the UPenn Almanac:
https://almanac.upenn.edu/archive/v34pdf/n13/111787.pdf
Dr. Enos Eby Witmer, an emeritus associate professor of physics, died October 29 at the age of 89. Dr. Witmer received his doctorate from Penn in 1923, and began his career here the same year as the Harrison Research Fellow. He was appointed assistant professor of Physics in 1928, and associate professor in 1966. He took a leave of absence to the Moore School from March to August 1944 and was in charge of Theoretical Research on
Radar there from 1943-45. He was also a project leader in the lab there until 1950. Dr. Witmer retired in 1969. He is survived by Dr. Anne Marie Witmer; and two stepsons. John and Wolf Springer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_Sch ... ngineering
It was here that the first general-purpose Turing complete digital electronic computer, the ENIAC, was built between 1943 and 1946.
Witmer did some work on "molecular spectra" with Eugene Wigner (interview 1963 by Thomas Kuhn)
https://www.aip.org/history-programs/ni ... ies/4963-2
Wigner:
... Then I started to work on the molecular case with Witmer. Witmer is at the University of Pennsylvania now. It’s a very tragic thing because he never was promoted from Assistant Professor, but I did not know that until recently. Of course, at this stage of the game it’s not possible to do much about it.
Kuhn:
He was involved in a number of things of some importance as a collaborator, at least during this period.
Wigner:
Yes. He is even more gauche than I was, and he is rigid in some ways. Well, we all have our faults. But that collaboration with him was very satisfactory. I remember there was a meeting at the end of that year that I was in Goettingen and Heisenberg and Pauli came. Pauli always was extremely derisive to almost everybody. Born and Oppenheimer wrote a paper which I consider very important on why the nuclear motion in molecules can be treated differently from the electronic motion. Pauli thought —well, “de mortuis nil nisi bene” —but anyway, the fact is that he thought he could irritate both Born and me at the same time by saying, “Well, even that paper had some good to it because it induced Wigner to work out the group theory of molecules; of course it isn’t very interesting.”
Kuhn:
Did that paper have a real role? I know you refer to it and to some extent use it, but is that what started you on the molecular problem?
Wigner:
I don’t know. You see, up to that time I was not worried about molecules because I was working on atoms, and my interest in these, perhaps less fundamental, questions was reasonably confined. The Born-Oppenheimer paper showed how things are. It wasn’t that I had thought hard about that question and that then their paper was the revelation. I did not think about it, but when it came out I realized that now we could work out the spectroscopy of molecular spectra and that would be interesting because it did not then exist. One could see that we could work out something that would be new, so I decided to do that.
Kuhn:
where did Witmer come into it?
Wigner:
I don’t know exactly. He was not a great group theorist. He was interested in molecular spectra, but really I could not tell you why we collaborated.
Kuhn:
Do you think he may have come in because he knew more about molecular spectra and you about group theory?
Wigner:
That may be.
Witmer has a 1967 paper with a possibly unique interpretation of quantum mechanics, two years before he retired, which I would love to read. He didn't like the Copenhagen Interpretation (yay!).
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1967A ... W/abstract
Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and the Future of Physics
Witmer, Enos E.
Abstract
This paper deals with the problem of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the nature of physical theory, and the future of physics. First, the question of why there are so many different interpretations of quantum mechanics proposed and accepted by outstanding quantum experts is treated. This requires a discussion of the relation between physics and philosophy and drawing a distinction between a physical formalism and a physical explanation. The Copenhagen interpretation is considered, criticized, and found to be unsatisfactory in some respects. Finally, an interpretation that contains ideas from previous interpretations but which may itself be new, is proposed. Hopefully, this is superior to the previous interpretations. It has, I believe, the advantage of logical clarity. In the process of doing this, I introduce a theory of levels of physical theory, according to which microscopic physical theory, as it develops in successive stages, becomes more and more adaptable to explaining—or at least taking cognizance of—fundamental biological or ultimately psychological phenomena.
Publication:
American Journal of Physics, Volume 35, Issue 1, pp. 40-52 (1967).
Pub Date:
January 1967
Regards, Nate
