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Rewrite in wiki format: replace the raw PDF dump of Rabounski's 2011 Progress in Physics profile (embedded page headers, broken line wraps, orphaned refs [1]-[40]) with clean structured sections; add his actual scientific claims (Kirchhoff's law, liquid metallic hydrogen Sun, CMB from oceans), reception, and related wiki papers; update portrait
 
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{{Infobox scientist
{{Infobox scientist
| name = Pierre-Marie Robitaille
| name = Pierre-Marie Robitaille
| image = Pierre-Marie Robitaille 1605.jpg
| image = Pierre-Marie Robitaille.jpg
| alt = Pierre-Marie Robitaille
| alt = Pierre-Marie Robitaille
| fields = [[Radiologist]]
| birth_place = North Bay, Ontario, Canada
| fields = [[Radiologist|Radiology]], Magnetic resonance imaging, Thermal physics, Astrophysics
| alma_mater = University of Northern Iowa; Iowa State University
| workplaces = The Ohio State University (1989–2019)
| residence = Columbus, OH, United States
| residence = Columbus, OH, United States
| known_for = [[Big Bang]], [[Background Radiation]]
| nationality = Canadian / American
| known_for = Ultra High Field MRI, Liquid metallic hydrogen solar model, Critique of Kirchhoff's law, [[Big Bang]], [[Background Radiation]]
}}
}}


Pierre-Marie Robitaille is a Professor and American scientist at the Ohio State University and is best known for his proposal that stars are not gaseous but are metallic hydrogen. He is also know for showing that the background radiation associated with the big bang comes from the oceans, not deep space.  
'''Pierre-Marie Luc Robitaille''' is a Canadian-American scientist, Professor of Radiology at The Ohio State University from 1989 to 2019, who designed and built the '''world's first Ultra High Field human MRI scanner''' — and who then turned the physics he had learned from that machine against some of the central claims of modern astrophysics.


Dr. Pierre-Marie Robitaille joined The Ohio State University in 1989. From 1989-2000 he served as Director of Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research. He would eventually come to lead a $10 Million laboratory. He has published over 80 articles dealing with applied and theoretical aspects of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy.  From 1995-2000, Dr. Robitaille led the design and assembly of the world's first Ultra High Field human MRI scanner. This scanner operates at a magnetic field of 8 Tesla (160,000 times the earth's field at sea level). The 8 Tesla MRI doubled the previous record for magnetic field strength in MRI. Dr. Robitaille has published an editorial work on UHFMRI (Pierre-Marie Robitaille and Lawrence J. Berliner, eds, Biological Magnetic Resonance vol. 26: Ultra High Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Springer, New York, 2006). This work features a preface by Paul Lauterbur (Nobel Prize 2003, Medicine). It was as a result of the findings in UHFMRI (a lower than expected RF power requirement) that Dr. Robitaille became involved in Kirchhoff's Law, Universality, and other aspects of thermal physics.
He argues that '''Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission is invalid''' in its universal form; that the Sun is therefore not a gaseous plasma but '''condensed matter — liquid metallic hydrogen'''; and that the cosmic microwave background attributed to the [[Big Bang]] is in fact the thermal signature of '''the Earth's own oceans'''.


==Early Life==
Robitaille is unusual among the researchers documented here in that his dissent grew directly out of a major mainstream achievement. He did not approach thermal physics as an outsider but as the builder of an instrument whose behaviour, in his account, could not be reconciled with the textbook law.
He was born in North Bay, Ontario, the
 
third of ten children to Noel Antoine Robitaille and Jacqueline Alice Roy. Noel Robitaille had moved to Ontario from
==Early life==
his native Quebec when he was stationed as a physician in
 
the Royal Canadian Air Force. Eventually settling in northern Ontario, he served the villages of Massey and Espanola.
Robitaille was born in North Bay, Ontario, the third of ten children of Noel Antoine Robitaille and Jacqueline Alice Roy. His father, a physician, had moved to Ontario from Quebec while stationed with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and served the villages of Massey and Espanola, caring also for the Ojibway population of the region. In 1964 the Ojibway Nation honoured him as chief of the Spanish River Band under the name ''Ke-chutwa-ghizhigud'' ("Chief Holiday").
In his role as a local doctor, Noel Robitaille would also care
 
for the Ojibway population of the region. In 1964, he would
Raised by French-Canadian parents, Robitaille was schooled in French at L'École St. Joseph in Espanola before attending Espanola High School, where teaching was in English.
be honored by the Ojibway Nation, becoming the first white
man to bear the distinction of Ojibway chief of the Spanish
River Band. His Indian name, Ke-chutwa-ghizhigud, meaning “Chief Holiday” [1].
Raised by French-Canadian parents, Pierre-Marie Robitaille attended L’Ecole St. Joseph in Espanola, Ontario, where ´
he studied primarily in his native tongue. Upon completion
of the 8th grade, he attended Espanola High School, where
education was conducted in English. As an adolescent, he often served as an altar boy during daily mass at St. Louis de
France Catholic Church, the French parish of his community.
Surrounded by the forests of Northern Ontario, he enjoyed ice
fishing, hunting, and building log cabins in the woods.


==Education==
==Education==
In 1978, just as Robitaille was completing his secondary
education, his father relocated to Cedar Falls, Iowa. Mrs. Robitaille and her children were to remain in northern Ontario.
In order to maintain ties with his father, Robitaille enrolled
at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. It was there that he
met his future wife, Patricia. Though he relocated to Iowa for
the 1978–1979 school year, Robitaille rarely saw his father.
Therefore, he moved to Cedar Falls, Iowa. He would graduate from the University of Northern Iowa, in 1981, with a
degree in general science.


At that time, Robitaille entered a Ph.D. program in biochemistry under the tutelage of Dr. David E. Metzler at Iowa
In 1978 his father relocated to Cedar Falls, Iowa. Robitaille enrolled at the University of Iowa and then moved to the University of Northern Iowa, graduating in 1981 with a degree in general science.
State University, obtaining an M.S. degree in 1984. His masters thesis involved NMR equilibrium analysis of polyamines
 
with vitamin B6. At the same time, Robitaille realized that
He entered a doctoral programme in biochemistry at Iowa State University under David E. Metzler, taking an M.S. in 1984 with a thesis on NMR equilibrium analysis of polyamines with vitamin B6. Recognising that ''in-vivo'' NMR was an emerging field, he moved his graduate appointment to the Department of Zoology, where he carried out some of the first ³¹P-NMR studies of isolated sperm cells, while simultaneously enrolling in the inorganic chemistry doctoral programme under Donald Kurtz. He graduated in 1986 with a Ph.D. holding majors in '''both''' zoology and inorganic chemistry, defending the two halves of his dissertation before separate committees.
in-vivo NMR was beginning to grow. He sought unsuccessfully to convince Dr. Metzler to enter this promising new area
 
of biochemistry and, eventually, entered the field on his own.
==Magnetic resonance imaging==
Prof. Pierre-Marie Robitaille.
 
After postdoctoral work in the ''in-vivo'' NMR laboratory of Kamil Ugurbil at the University of Minnesota, Robitaille joined The Ohio State University in 1989 as Director of Magnetic Resonance Research and Assistant Professor of Radiology — at the age of 28, with a startup package in excess of $1 million. He directed MRI research there until 2000, eventually leading a $10 million laboratory, and has published more than eighty articles on applied and theoretical aspects of magnetic resonance.
 
===The 8 Tesla scanner===
 
Between 1995 and 2000 Robitaille led the design and assembly of the world's first '''Ultra High Field''' human MRI scanner, operating at '''8 Tesla''' — double the previous record, and some 160,000 times the Earth's field at sea level. Many in the field had held that human imaging at such strengths was impossible.
 
Allan Elster, editor of the ''Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography'', devoted a special issue to the first results, writing that the journal contained "amazing images and technical descriptions of the world's first whole body human clinical magnetic resonance scanner operating at 8 Tesla," and congratulating the Ohio State team "for constructing a device some experts said would be impossible to build." The following month Robitaille's group set a further record with the first MR images at 2,000 × 2,000 resolution.
 
Paul Lauterbur, who received the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the invention of MRI, later wrote that experts "who had said, and even written, that frequencies above 10 MHz would never be practical watched in amazement as scientists and engineers pushed instrument performances to ever-higher levels." Robitaille co-edited the volume in which that assessment appears (''Ultra High Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging'', Springer, 2006).
 
==From MRI to thermal physics==
 
The turn in Robitaille's career came from an anomaly in his own instrument. The 8 Tesla scanner required '''less radio-frequency power than expected''', a result that led him to think of MRI as a thermal process — in early NMR the ''T''₁ relaxation time was called the "thermal relaxation time."
 
Reasoning that if MRI is thermal it should be possible to extract the temperature of the human head using the laws of thermal emission, in the way Penzias and Wilson had derived ~3 K for the microwave background, he found the calculation returned a Wien displacement temperature of less than 1 K for a human head. Something in the standard treatment of thermal emission, he concluded, was wrong.
 
==Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission==
 
Robitaille's central scientific claim is that '''Kirchhoff's law is invalid in its universal form'''. He accepts the uncontroversial part — that for an opaque object at thermal equilibrium, emission equals absorption. What he rejects is Kirchhoff's further step: the assertion that radiation within any cavity at equilibrium must be black, or normal, '''irrespective of the material of the cavity walls'''. That universality, he argues, has no proper experimental basis and misrepresents laboratory reality, since real cavities take on the character of their walls.
 
On his account the correct treatment of thermal emission is properly credited to '''Balfour Stewart''' rather than Kirchhoff, and blackbody radiation requires a '''rigid lattice''' — a physical structure capable of supporting the necessary oscillations — rather than arising universally from matter in any state.
 
==The liquid metallic hydrogen Sun==
 
If Kirchhoff's universality fails, then a body cannot be inferred to be a blackbody merely from emitting a thermal spectrum. Robitaille draws the consequence directly: because the Sun emits a continuous thermal spectrum, and only condensed matter with a lattice can do so, '''the Sun cannot be a gaseous plasma'''. It must be condensed matter.
 
He proposes that the solar interior consists of '''liquid metallic hydrogen''' — hydrogen compressed into a metallic, lattice-bearing liquid state — with the photosphere marking the transition to a gaseous atmosphere. He regards the thermal spectrum of the Sun as, by itself, sufficient proof of a condensed solar body, and has developed the model across a long series of papers together with a range of supporting solar observations.
 
==The microwave background and the Earth's oceans==
 
The same reasoning underlies his reassignment of the '''cosmic microwave background'''. Since the assignment of the 2.7 K signal to the cosmos depends on the universality of Kirchhoff's law, and since that universality fails, the signal need not be cosmological at all. Robitaille argues that astrophysics has never properly accounted for the thermal emission of '''water''' itself, and that the microwave background is produced by the Earth's oceans rather than by the early universe.
 
He set out radiological analyses of the '''WMAP''' and '''COBE''' satellite results — among the most-read papers in the journal ''Progress in Physics'' — and later extended the analysis to the '''Planck''' satellite. He has also questioned the validity of Boltzmann's constant as a further consequence of correcting Kirchhoff's law.
 
==The New York Times advertisement==
 
In 2002 Robitaille took the unusual step of purchasing an advertisement in ''The New York Times'' announcing "The Collapse of the Big Bang and the Gaseous Sun." The response from the press and from the scientific community was immediate and at times harsh. He has since noted that, contrary to some reports, the advertisement had nothing to do with the concurrent Ohio controversy over the teaching of evolution; the timing was coincidental.


He transferred his graduate appointment to the Department
Following the advertisement he turned to ''Progress in Physics'', where he has published the bulk of his work in thermal physics and astrophysics.
of Zoology, where he brought in-vivo NMR methods to the
laboratory of George Brown, an electron microscopist. It was
there that he acquired a set of standards for in-vivo 31P-NMR
[2] and conducted some of the first studies of isolated sperm
cells with 31P-NMR [3, 4]. At the same time, Robitaille enrolled in the Inorganic Chemistry doctoral program, under the
guidance of Professor Donald Kurtz. He graduated from Iowa
State University with a Ph.D. in 1986, holding majors in Zoology and Inorganic Chemistry. His dissertation was divided
into two parts which he would defend in front of separate
committees, one for each major.


==Radiology and Magnetic Resonance==
==Sky Scholar==
Following his Ph.D. training, Pierre-Marie Robitaille
joined the in-vivo NMR laboratory of Professor Kamil Ugurbil at the University of Minnesota. There, he conducted work
in cardiac spectroscopy, operating one of the first small animal 4.7T/40cm magnetic resonance instruments in the United
Dmitri Rabounski. Pierre-Marie Luc Robitaille L1
Volume 3 PROGRESS IN PHYSICS July, 2011
States. It was Professor Ugurbil who urged Robitaille to apply for faculty positions in magnetic resonance imaging and
spectroscopy. Ultimately, he accepted the position of Director
of Magnetic Resonance Research and Assistant Professor of
Radiology at The Ohio State University, with a startup package well in excess of $1 million. He was 28.
While at Ohio State, Professor Robitaille established himself as a leader in cardiac spectroscopy and magnetic resonance [5, 6]. He would eventually design and assemble the
world’s first Ultra High Field MRI instrument [7–16]. The
results obtained from this scanner would propel MRI into a
new era in imaging technology. Professor Allan Elster, the
Editor of the Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography recognized the magnitude of the contribution and arranged for a
special issue of the journal to be published outlining some of
the first 8 Tesla results. In is editorial comments relative to
this issue, Dr. Elster wrote:
“This is a landmark issue of the Journal of Computer
Assisted Tomography. Contained within its pages are
amazing images and technical descriptions of the
world’s first whole body human clinical magnetic resonance scanner operating at 8 Tesla. Congratulations to
Pierre-Marie Robitaille and his co-workers in Radiology and Engineering at The Ohio State University for
constructing a device some experts said would be impossible to build. The total stored magnetic energy in
this 30,000 kg magnet is a remarkable 81 megajoules.


To put this value into perspective, 81 MJoules is the
Robitaille presents his arguments to a general audience through his YouTube channel '''Sky Scholar''', where he lectures on thermal emission, the structure of the Sun, and the history of blackbody physics.
kinetic energy of a 200-metric ton locomotive barreling down the track at 100 km per hour! The human
images obtained so far are also astounding (Fig. 1), especially considering that the system has only been operational for a few months and many radio frequency
coil and pulse sequence issues remain to be worked out.
The Ohio State team has proposed a number of interesting theories concerning susceptibility effects and dielectric resonance phenomena within the human head
at 8 Tesla. Some of these theories challenge traditional
tenets in MR physics and are admittedly controversial.
As more measurements are obtained and experiments
are conducted, these theories will be refine, improved,
or discarded. Robitaille et. al. have led us to a new
frontier in clinical MR imaging. Perhaps one day in
the not-so-distant future, 1.5 Tesla will be considered
low-field imaging” [14].


The next month, Professor Robitaille established a new
==Reception==
record for high resolution imaging in MRI, once again published in JCAT, with the following editorial note:
“Pierre-Marie Robitaille and the Ohio State University
MRI Team have done it again! In this issue they present
the world’s first MR images obtained at 2,000×2,000
resolution — in honor of the new millennium of course.
In case you missed it, please check out the Journal of
Computer Assisted Tomography’s November/December 1999 issue. Here Robitaille and colleagues have
published 10 landmark articles describing the design
and construction of their 8 Tesla whole-body MR scanner, as well as additional remarkable images of the
brain. If you wish to download some of the images directly (they look even better on a video monitor), please
see the JCAT website at www.rad.bgsm.edu/jcat/
supp.htm. Happy Y2K from all of us at JCAT!” [15].


The birth of Ultra High Field MRI represented a paradigm
Mainstream physics and astrophysics have not accepted Robitaille's conclusions, and his work in these areas has been published almost entirely outside the established journals. Critics hold that Kirchhoff's law is well founded and experimentally supported, that helioseismology and standard solar modelling account successfully for the Sun as a gaseous plasma, and that the isotropy and spectral form of the microwave background rule out a terrestrial origin.
shift for many in the MRI community who had previously
believed that human images could never be acquired at such
field strengths [16, 17]. Relative to the creation of the first
UHFMRI systems, Paul Lauterbur (Nobel Prize in Medicine
and Physiology, 2003) wrote:
“In the early machines, low radiofrequencies of 4 MHz
or so meant that RF coil designs were simple (even
inexperienced undergraduates could design and build
such circuits with little knowledge of more than DC
electrical circuits), and the forces on gradient coils
were small. The effects of magnetic susceptibility inhomogeneity in and around the object being imaged
were negligible, and RF penetration depths were not
a problem for human-scale samples. Everything began to change as higher fields and higher frequencies
came into use, and the earlier idyllic simplicities began to seem quaint. The trend continued, however,
driven by the increased signal to noise ratios and the
resultant higher resolution and speed available, and sophisticated engineering became more and more essential, not only for magnets but for gradient systems and
radiofrequency transmitters and receivers, but also for
better software for modeling and correcting distortions.


Experts who had said, and even written, that frequencies above 10 MHz would never be practical watched
His defenders on this wiki note that the objections largely restate the consensus rather than engage the specific argument he makes about cavity radiation, and that his standing as the builder of the 8 Tesla instrument gives his reading of thermal emission a practical authority that critics have tended to pass over.
in amazement as scientists and engineers pushed instrument performances to ever-higher levels at everincreasing magnetic field strengths, as this volume
demonstrates” [18].


Prior to assembling the 8 Tesla instrument, Professor
==Related work from researchers on this wiki==
Robitaille envisioned that his career would remain firmly
grounded in MRI. However, the first results at 8 Tesla relative to RF power requirements in MRI profoundly altered his
scientific outlook. He began to think about MRI as a thermal
process. In the early days of NMR, the T1 relaxation time was
referred to as the “thermal relaxation time”. As a result, Professor Robitaille advanced the idea that, if MRI was thermal
process, it should be possible to extract the temperature of the
human head using the laws of thermal emission, in the same
manner that Penzias and Wilson had measured a temperature
of ∼3 K for the microwave background [19]. Unfortunately,
such an approach yielded a Wien’s displacement temperature
of less than 1 K for the human head. Surely, something was
L2 Dmitri Rabounski. Pierre-Marie Luc Robitaille
July, 2011 PROGRESS IN PHYSICS Volume 3
incorrect.


Professor Robitaille viewed magnetic resonance as enabling scientists to examine the reverse of the emission problem in the infrared, as studied by Planck and his predecessors
Robitaille's reassignment of the microwave background belongs to a wider body of work catalogued here that disputes its cosmological interpretation:
[20]. Therefore, he turned his attention to thermal radiation
and astrophysics. Soon, he published an abstract which questioned the assignment of the microwave background to the
cosmos [21]. Then, in a bold step, he placed an ad in the New
York Times [22] announcing the Collapse of the Big Bang
and the Gaseous Sun. The response from the popular press
and the scientific community was immediate and sometimes
harsh [23–25]. Despite claims to the contrary [23], Professor
Robitaille’s advertisement in the New York Times had nothing to do with the concurrent debate in Ohio relative to evolution [23]. The timing was purely coincidental.
Following the ad in the New York Times, Professor Robitaille turned to Progress in Physics and began outlining his
ideas in a series of papers which spanned a very broad area
of fundamental physics. His papers on the WMAP [26] and
COBE [27] satellites are amongst the most viewed by the
journal audience and, eventually, his position was found
to merit some consideration by the astrophysics community [28].


The study of Kirchhoff’s Law of Thermal Emission has
* His own ''[[WMAP: A Radiological Analysis]]'' (2007).
been the driving force behind Prof. Robitaille’s work in astrophysics. Robitaille has demonstrated the invalidity of this
* [[Vincent W Carpenter]] — ''[[Does The Microwave Background Radiation Support The Big Bang Theory?]]''
law and its subsequent claims for universality [29–33]. Prof.
* [[Alexander A Scarborough]] — ''[[The Cosmic Microwave Background: A New Perspective on the 2.7 K Radiation]]''
Robitaille has also argued that the proper analysis of thermal emission should be attributed to Balfour Stewart [32].
* [[Joseph J Smulsky]] — ''[[Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and New Space Projects]]''
Resting on the knowledge that Kirchhoff’s Law was invalid,
* ''[[Possible Solar Microwave Background Radiation]]'' — which likewise proposes a local rather than cosmological source.
Robitaille argued for a liquid model of the Sun [34] and advanced simple proofs to strengthen his position [35]. Robitaille maintains that the emission of a thermal spectrum
from the Sun, by itself, comprises all the proof necessary
for a liquid model. Given the error within Kirchhoff Law,
the Sun cannot be a gaseous plasma. It must be condensed
matter.


Robitaille has also based his re-assignment of the microwave background to the Earth on Kirchhoff’s Law [28].
Further material is indexed under [[:Category:Big Bang]] and [[:Category:Cosmology]].
He has shown that astrophysics did not properly consider the
emission of water itself when contemplating the background
[36, 37]. His recent paper analyzing the Planck satellite [38]
further builds on his position, along with papers by the authors, Rabounski and Borissova [39]. Finally, Robitaille has
questioned the validity of Boltzmann’s constant [40]. This is
the result of the correction of Kirchhoff’s Law [28, 29–33]
and the re-assignment of the microwave background to the
Earth [36–39].


==Personal Life==
==Personal life==
Robitaille maintains a quite lifestyle in Columbus, Ohio.
 
He has been married to Patricia for 30 years, and they have
Robitaille lives quietly in Columbus, Ohio. He has been married to Patricia for over thirty years, and they have three sons: Jacob, Christophe and Luc. He sails a Flying Scot and is an avid builder of timber-frame structures.
three sons: Jacob, Christophe, and Luc. Dr. Robitaille enjoys
sailing his Flying Scot and is an avid builder of timberframe
structures.


==Abstracts==
==Abstracts==


* 2007 - "[[WMAP: A Radiological Analysis]]" ([http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2007/PP-08-01.PDF Read in full])
* 2007 - "[[WMAP: A Radiological Analysis]]" ([http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2007/PP-08-01.PDF Read in full])
==See also==
* [[Big Bang]]
* [[Background Radiation]]
* [[Redshift]]
* [[:Category:Cosmology|Category: Cosmology]]
''Biographical detail in this article draws on Dmitri Rabounski's profile of Robitaille in ''Progress in Physics'', Vol. 3, July 2011.''


[[Category:Scientist|Robitaille Pierre-Marie]]
[[Category:Scientist|Robitaille Pierre-Marie]]
[[Category:Big Bang|Robitaille Pierre-Marie]]
[[Category:Cosmology|Robitaille Pierre-Marie]]
[[Category:Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists]]

Latest revision as of 11:55, 20 July 2026

Pierre-Marie Robitaille
Pierre-Marie Robitaille
Born
North Bay, Ontario, Canada
ResidenceColumbus, OH, United States
NationalityCanadian / American
Alma materUniversity of Northern Iowa; Iowa State University
Known forUltra High Field MRI, Liquid metallic hydrogen solar model, Critique of Kirchhoff's law, Big Bang, Background Radiation
Scientific career
FieldsRadiology, Magnetic resonance imaging, Thermal physics, Astrophysics
InstitutionsThe Ohio State University (1989–2019)

Pierre-Marie Luc Robitaille is a Canadian-American scientist, Professor of Radiology at The Ohio State University from 1989 to 2019, who designed and built the world's first Ultra High Field human MRI scanner — and who then turned the physics he had learned from that machine against some of the central claims of modern astrophysics.

He argues that Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission is invalid in its universal form; that the Sun is therefore not a gaseous plasma but condensed matter — liquid metallic hydrogen; and that the cosmic microwave background attributed to the Big Bang is in fact the thermal signature of the Earth's own oceans.

Robitaille is unusual among the researchers documented here in that his dissent grew directly out of a major mainstream achievement. He did not approach thermal physics as an outsider but as the builder of an instrument whose behaviour, in his account, could not be reconciled with the textbook law.

Early life

Robitaille was born in North Bay, Ontario, the third of ten children of Noel Antoine Robitaille and Jacqueline Alice Roy. His father, a physician, had moved to Ontario from Quebec while stationed with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and served the villages of Massey and Espanola, caring also for the Ojibway population of the region. In 1964 the Ojibway Nation honoured him as chief of the Spanish River Band under the name Ke-chutwa-ghizhigud ("Chief Holiday").

Raised by French-Canadian parents, Robitaille was schooled in French at L'École St. Joseph in Espanola before attending Espanola High School, where teaching was in English.

Education

In 1978 his father relocated to Cedar Falls, Iowa. Robitaille enrolled at the University of Iowa and then moved to the University of Northern Iowa, graduating in 1981 with a degree in general science.

He entered a doctoral programme in biochemistry at Iowa State University under David E. Metzler, taking an M.S. in 1984 with a thesis on NMR equilibrium analysis of polyamines with vitamin B6. Recognising that in-vivo NMR was an emerging field, he moved his graduate appointment to the Department of Zoology, where he carried out some of the first ³¹P-NMR studies of isolated sperm cells, while simultaneously enrolling in the inorganic chemistry doctoral programme under Donald Kurtz. He graduated in 1986 with a Ph.D. holding majors in both zoology and inorganic chemistry, defending the two halves of his dissertation before separate committees.

Magnetic resonance imaging

After postdoctoral work in the in-vivo NMR laboratory of Kamil Ugurbil at the University of Minnesota, Robitaille joined The Ohio State University in 1989 as Director of Magnetic Resonance Research and Assistant Professor of Radiology — at the age of 28, with a startup package in excess of $1 million. He directed MRI research there until 2000, eventually leading a $10 million laboratory, and has published more than eighty articles on applied and theoretical aspects of magnetic resonance.

The 8 Tesla scanner

Between 1995 and 2000 Robitaille led the design and assembly of the world's first Ultra High Field human MRI scanner, operating at 8 Tesla — double the previous record, and some 160,000 times the Earth's field at sea level. Many in the field had held that human imaging at such strengths was impossible.

Allan Elster, editor of the Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography, devoted a special issue to the first results, writing that the journal contained "amazing images and technical descriptions of the world's first whole body human clinical magnetic resonance scanner operating at 8 Tesla," and congratulating the Ohio State team "for constructing a device some experts said would be impossible to build." The following month Robitaille's group set a further record with the first MR images at 2,000 × 2,000 resolution.

Paul Lauterbur, who received the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the invention of MRI, later wrote that experts "who had said, and even written, that frequencies above 10 MHz would never be practical watched in amazement as scientists and engineers pushed instrument performances to ever-higher levels." Robitaille co-edited the volume in which that assessment appears (Ultra High Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Springer, 2006).

From MRI to thermal physics

The turn in Robitaille's career came from an anomaly in his own instrument. The 8 Tesla scanner required less radio-frequency power than expected, a result that led him to think of MRI as a thermal process — in early NMR the T₁ relaxation time was called the "thermal relaxation time."

Reasoning that if MRI is thermal it should be possible to extract the temperature of the human head using the laws of thermal emission, in the way Penzias and Wilson had derived ~3 K for the microwave background, he found the calculation returned a Wien displacement temperature of less than 1 K for a human head. Something in the standard treatment of thermal emission, he concluded, was wrong.

Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission

Robitaille's central scientific claim is that Kirchhoff's law is invalid in its universal form. He accepts the uncontroversial part — that for an opaque object at thermal equilibrium, emission equals absorption. What he rejects is Kirchhoff's further step: the assertion that radiation within any cavity at equilibrium must be black, or normal, irrespective of the material of the cavity walls. That universality, he argues, has no proper experimental basis and misrepresents laboratory reality, since real cavities take on the character of their walls.

On his account the correct treatment of thermal emission is properly credited to Balfour Stewart rather than Kirchhoff, and blackbody radiation requires a rigid lattice — a physical structure capable of supporting the necessary oscillations — rather than arising universally from matter in any state.

The liquid metallic hydrogen Sun

If Kirchhoff's universality fails, then a body cannot be inferred to be a blackbody merely from emitting a thermal spectrum. Robitaille draws the consequence directly: because the Sun emits a continuous thermal spectrum, and only condensed matter with a lattice can do so, the Sun cannot be a gaseous plasma. It must be condensed matter.

He proposes that the solar interior consists of liquid metallic hydrogen — hydrogen compressed into a metallic, lattice-bearing liquid state — with the photosphere marking the transition to a gaseous atmosphere. He regards the thermal spectrum of the Sun as, by itself, sufficient proof of a condensed solar body, and has developed the model across a long series of papers together with a range of supporting solar observations.

The microwave background and the Earth's oceans

The same reasoning underlies his reassignment of the cosmic microwave background. Since the assignment of the 2.7 K signal to the cosmos depends on the universality of Kirchhoff's law, and since that universality fails, the signal need not be cosmological at all. Robitaille argues that astrophysics has never properly accounted for the thermal emission of water itself, and that the microwave background is produced by the Earth's oceans rather than by the early universe.

He set out radiological analyses of the WMAP and COBE satellite results — among the most-read papers in the journal Progress in Physics — and later extended the analysis to the Planck satellite. He has also questioned the validity of Boltzmann's constant as a further consequence of correcting Kirchhoff's law.

The New York Times advertisement

In 2002 Robitaille took the unusual step of purchasing an advertisement in The New York Times announcing "The Collapse of the Big Bang and the Gaseous Sun." The response from the press and from the scientific community was immediate and at times harsh. He has since noted that, contrary to some reports, the advertisement had nothing to do with the concurrent Ohio controversy over the teaching of evolution; the timing was coincidental.

Following the advertisement he turned to Progress in Physics, where he has published the bulk of his work in thermal physics and astrophysics.

Sky Scholar

Robitaille presents his arguments to a general audience through his YouTube channel Sky Scholar, where he lectures on thermal emission, the structure of the Sun, and the history of blackbody physics.

Reception

Mainstream physics and astrophysics have not accepted Robitaille's conclusions, and his work in these areas has been published almost entirely outside the established journals. Critics hold that Kirchhoff's law is well founded and experimentally supported, that helioseismology and standard solar modelling account successfully for the Sun as a gaseous plasma, and that the isotropy and spectral form of the microwave background rule out a terrestrial origin.

His defenders on this wiki note that the objections largely restate the consensus rather than engage the specific argument he makes about cavity radiation, and that his standing as the builder of the 8 Tesla instrument gives his reading of thermal emission a practical authority that critics have tended to pass over.

Related work from researchers on this wiki

Robitaille's reassignment of the microwave background belongs to a wider body of work catalogued here that disputes its cosmological interpretation:

Further material is indexed under Category:Big Bang and Category:Cosmology.

Personal life

Robitaille lives quietly in Columbus, Ohio. He has been married to Patricia for over thirty years, and they have three sons: Jacob, Christophe and Luc. He sails a Flying Scot and is an avid builder of timber-frame structures.

Abstracts

See also

Biographical detail in this article draws on Dmitri Rabounski's profile of Robitaille in Progress in Physics, Vol. 3, July 2011.

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