Anti-Relativity in Action: The Scientific Activity of Herbert E. Ives between 1937 and 1953

Between 1937 and 1953 the industrial physicist Herbert E. Ives pursued a research project with the aim of challenging the acceptance of relativity theories, becoming the most important American opponent of Einstein of the period. During his anti-relativistic activity Ives also performed the famous Ives-Stilwell experiment. Usually interpreted as the first direct confirmation of the time dilation formula of special relativity theory, Ives regarded the experiment as a proof of what he called the Larmor-Lorentz theory. Ives’s heterodox views about relativity were mainly ignored by the scientific community during his lifetime. After his death, however, his criticisms of what the majority of physicists took for granted helped to spark the late 1950s philosophical discussions around the conventional stipulation of distant simultaneity in special relativity theory. Ives’s anti-relativistic beliefs and actions allow an analysis of the heterodox efforts of an accredited member of the scientific community and the subsequent process of his professional marginalization in a specific historical and scientific context. This paper has three aims: first, to uncover the epistemic roots of Ives’s opposition to relativity; second, to analyse Ives’s rhetorical strategies and the reasons why he failed to persuade his peers; and, lastly, to draw distinctions between the public network of allies Ives built in scientific publications and the hidden network of allies present in his correspondence. It will become clear that the hardening of Ives’s tone against relativity and Einstein depended on the progressive marginalization and loss of recognized socio-professional identity due to Ives’s unorthodox ideas about relativity. Ives’s case is illuminating for several historical, philosophical and sociological perspectives concerning the complex mechanisms through which the margins interact with the mainstream of science, both in the production of certified knowledge and in the contextually contingent re-definition and re-configuration of the boundaries of acceptable scientific discourse.