Russell Humphreys

David Russell Humphreys is an American creationist author with a PhD in physics. He has proposed a Young Earth creationist explanation for the origin of the universe which he says resolved the distant starlight problem.

Education and affiliations

Humphreys graduated with a B.S. from Duke University and was awarded his Ph.D in physics from Louisiana State University in 1972.^[1] He has worked for General Electric and Sandia National Laboratories in nuclear physics, where he received a patent and a science award.^[1] From 2001-2008, he was an associate professor at The Institute for Creation Research.^[1] He currently works for Creation Ministries International (USA).^[1] Humphreys is a board member of both the Creation Research Society and the Creation Science Fellowship of New Mexico.^[2][3]

Planetary Magnetic Field Predictions

In an article publish in CRS Quarterly in December 1984, Humphreys used the known magnetic fields of the Earth, Sun, Moon and Mercury to explain a model for planetary magnetic fields. According to the model, God created the planets with the atomic nuclei spinning in the same orientation. This spin would have initiated a large electric current, resulting in a sustained magnetic field. As part of his model he made predictions about the magnetic fields of Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.^[4]

In 1990 Humphreys published a follow up to his predictions as Voyager II had now measured Uranus and Neptune's Magnetic Fields.^[5] The measured values where within the bounds of his predictions, while dynamo theories had been incorrect about Uranus' field. He also explains why Dynamo theories have trouble explaining the extreme tilt of both Uranus and Neptune's magnetic fields compared to their rotational axis, while his creation model does not.^[6]

The creation model's predictions were again verified when probes in 2008^[7] and 2011 flew past Mercury and measured the magnetic field and found that the decay was in line with that predicted by Humphreys' model, but far faster than that expected by Dynamo theories.^[8]

Cosmology

Humphreys' book, Starlight and Time, presents his alternative to the Big Bang in an attempt to solve what Young Earth creationists call the Distant Starlight Problem. Its thesis is that the Earth is about six thousand years old, and the outer edge of an expanding and rotating 3-dimensional universe is billions of years old (when measured from earth). It proposes, using the principles of relativity, to postulate that time ticked at different rates during the universe's origin.^[9] In other words, according to his theory, clocks on earth registered the six days of creation, while those at the edge of the universe counted the approximately 15 billion years needed for light from the most distant galaxies to reach earth.^[9] The model places the Milky Way galaxy relatively near the center of the cosmos.^[10]

Humphreys' proposal has been criticized by other scientists and old earth creationists, such as Hugh Ross and Samuel R. Conner.^[11] Humphreys has replied to Ross and Conner's critiques.^[12]

In 1998, physicist Dave Thomas wrote that in Humphreys thousands-of-years-old universe, 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 hypothesized Oort Cloud, as some icy chunks are occasionally flung far away by interactions with large planets."^[13]

Thomas also criticised Humphreys' idea that there is "not enough sodium in the sea" for a several billion year old sea, writing, "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 four 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 two days, so there must be a flaw with the "snow" dating method, just as there is with the "salt" method."^[13]

New Cosmology

In 2008 Humphreys published a new but lesser-known cosmological proposal.^[14] In it he seeks to challenge a foundational dogma of general relativity and postulates an additional spacetime dimension, one which grants God ample liberty to hold the earth in a “timeless” region of suspended animation while the rest of the universe ages for billions of years, thus allowing very old and distant starlight to bathe a young Earth on creation day four.^[15] A critic pointed out that the well-known equation for gravitational redshift/blueshift countermands his model’s efforts to achieve today’s observed redshift from cosmic sources, to which Humphreys countered by terming the gravitational redshift equation a “flawed equation” and became dismissive in his remarks about any potential applicability to his model.^[16] Since his new cosmology relies heavily on the observed sunward acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft as a manifestation peculiar to features of his model, his ideas were dealt a significant blow when researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California discovered that the apparent anomaly was due to the thermal recoil force acting on the spacecraft.^[17]

Helium Problems

Geologist Kevin Henke has criticised Humphreys for stating that "zircons from the Fenton Hill rock cores... contain too much radiogenic helium to be billions of years old."^[18][19] Henke wrote that the 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."^[18] Humphreys has replied to Henke's criticisms.^[19][20]

Earth Cooling Model

Scientists Glenn Morton and George L Murphy have dismissed Humphreys' idea that the Earth is cooling as "wrong" because "it is ineffective, it is falsified by observational data, and it is theologically flawed."

• Firstly, in a classical model for a harmonic oscillator (like a particle oscillating in a crystal), "the particle does not lose energy to the cosmic expansion."
• Secondly, Humphreys' model "is too slow to be useful to the creationist agenda."
• Thirdly, "there would be visible effects in the spectra of light emitted during the Flood, including those from stars a few thousand light years away in our own galaxy. A change in the energy levels of atoms (which this idea would entail) would change the frequencies at which light is emitted in a fashion that would be observable. The lack of such observations rules out Humphreys' cooling mechanism as a reasonable possibility."
• Lastly, they criticized it for contradicting the theological foundation that Humphreys uses in another publication.^[21]

See also

• John Hartnett (physicist)

Bibliography

Book

• Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe (Green Forest, AR: Master Books) 1994. ISBN 0-89051-202-7

References

External links

• Russell Humphreys on Creation Ministries International
• Russell Humphreys from Institute for Creation Research
• Talk Origins: "Young-Earth Creationist Helium Diffusion 'Dates':Fallacies Based on Bad Assumptions and Questionable Data" by Dr. Kevin R. Henke
• Answers In Creation Old Earth Creationist Reviews of Russell Humphreys
• Starlight and Time Review by Hugh Ross.
• Young Helium Diffusion Age of Zircons Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay Humphreys's and others' work on helium diffusion.