Herbert Dingle (2 August 1890 – 4 September 1978) was an English physicist and philosopher of science, who served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 to 1953.

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.

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.

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.

[5] A. S. Eddington was another target of Dingle's criticism, and the ensuing debate eventually involved nearly every prominent astrophysicist and cosmologist in Britain.

Dingle characterized his opponents as "traitors" to the scientific method, and called them "the modern Aristotelians" because he believed their theorizing was based on rationalism rather than empiricism.

He then began to argue that special relativity was empirically wrong in its predictions, although experimental evidence showed he was mistaken about this.

[14] This culminated in his 1972 book, Science at the Crossroads in which Dingle stated that "a proof that Einstein's special theory of relativity is false has been advanced; and ignored, evaded, suppressed and, indeed, treated in every possible way except that of answering it, by the whole scientific world."