Russell Humphreys
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Russell Humphreys is an author and nuclear physicist. He is presently an adjunct professor at The Institute for Creation Research, a lecturer for Answers in Genesis, and a board member of both the Creation Research Society and the Creation Science Fellowship of New Mexico. His critics claim he "misrepresents" science and question his research.
Humphreys has written a book called Starlight and Time, which produces a cosmological model where the Earth is several thousands of years old and the outer edge of an expanding and rotating 3-dimensional universe is billions of years old. Humphreys proposes that a "young earth" and universe can co-exist with the distant starlight problem. To do this, he changes the Big Bang model, and concludes that the universe began as a white hole. This is to establish that time would have passed at an immensely slower rate than for the matter (and stars) which had previously been released from the white hole. As a result, he concludes, billions of years are available for starlight to travel to earth while the earth (still within the event horizon of the white hole) was scarcely aging at all. It is an unorthodox model which claims to explain the vast distances to starlight in a "young" universe, the cosmic background radiation, and the redshifting of distant stellar light because they are theoretically evidence of a universe billions of years old.
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[edit] Controversy and criticism
Many scientists disagree with Humphreys work. For example, on Humphrey's thousands of year old universe, in 1998 Dave Thomas wrote "he has his astronomy backwards - the Kuiper Belt contains the remains of the "volatile" (icy) planetesimals that were left over from the formation of the solar system - numbering in the hundreds of millions. If anything, it is the Kuiper Belt that supplies the more remote Oort Cloud, as some icy chunks are occasionally flung far away by interactions with large planets."[1]
Humphreys claims there "not enough sodium in the sea" a several billion year old sea. Conversely, Thomas notes that "Humphreys finds estimates of oceanic salt accumulation and deposition that provide him the data to "set" an upper limit of 62 million years. But modern geologists do not use erratic processes like these for clocks. It's like someone noticing that (A) it's snowing at an inch per hour, (B) the snow outside is 4 feet deep, and then concluding that (C) the Earth is just 48 hours, or two days, in age. Snowfall is erratic; some snow can melt; and so on. The Earth is older than 2 days, so there must be a flaw with the "snow" dating method, just as there is with the "salt" method."[2]
Likewise Dr. Kevin Henke explained he has "criticized and documented some of the numerous problems in Dr. Humphreys' work."[3] For example, Humphreys thinks "that zircons from the Fenton Hill rock cores... contain too much radiogenic helium to be billions of years old."[4] Henke noted that "the "dating" equations in Humphreys" work "are based on many false assumptions (isotropic diffusion, constant temperatures over time, etc.) and the vast majority of Humphreys et al.'s critical a, b, and Q/Q0 values that are used in these "dating" equations are either missing, poorly defined, improperly measured or inaccurate."[5]
Some critics simply assert "Humpherys misunderstands and misrepresents science" because "the rules of the scientific method do not allow individuals to invoke miracles to eliminate scientific data (i.e., U/Pb dates) and questions that they don't like."[6]
Others simply claim he uses arcane sources and misrepresents his sources. [7] For example, "in the eight years since, Humphreys has learned that 'Kuyper' is really spelled 'Kuiper'. That is all he has learned - his astronomy knowledge is still abysmal. The Kuiper Belt is no longer a "supposed" source of comets, it is a documented source, with over 800 Kuiper Belt Objects discovered since 1992," but "don't take my word for it - why not check out Humphreys's own reference on this claim."[8]
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Books
- Evidences for a Young World
- Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe (1994)
[edit] Videos
- Evidences for a Young World
[edit] Academics
[edit] Education
- B.S., Duke University (1963)
- Ph.D., Louisiana State University (1972)
[edit] Honors/Awards/Associations
- Creation Science Fellowship of New Mexico, President
- Industrial Research Magazine’s IR-100 award
- Award for Excellence for contributions to light ion-fusion target theory
