John G Hartnett: Difference between revisions
Enhance: restructure the CV blurb into wiki sections; fix fields (job title -> actual fields); add his cryogenic sapphire oscillator work, Carmelian cosmology (no dark matter/dark energy), creationist cosmology, reception, and links into the wiki's cosmology cluster |
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| image = John G Hartnett 1625.jpg | | image = John G Hartnett 1625.jpg | ||
| alt = John G. Hartnett | | alt = John G. Hartnett | ||
| birth_date = {{birth date|1952| | | birth_date = {{birth date and age|1952|3|24}} | ||
| birth_place = Manjimup, Western Australia | | birth_place = Manjimup, Western Australia | ||
| fields = [[Physicist|Physics]], Frequency standards and metrology, [[Cosmology]] | | fields = [[Physicist|Physics]], Frequency standards and metrology, [[Cosmology]] | ||
Latest revision as of 21:01, 20 July 2026
John G. Hartnett | |
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| Born | March 24, 1952 Manjimup, Western Australia |
| Residence | Australia |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Alma mater | University of Western Australia |
| Known for | Cryogenic sapphire oscillators, Carmelian cosmology, cosmology without dark matter or dark energy, Relativity, Redshift |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, Frequency standards and metrology, Cosmology |
| Institutions | University of Western Australia; University of Adelaide |
John Gideon Hartnett (born 24 March 1952) is an Australian physicist known in two very different capacities: as an experimentalist who helped build some of the most stable clocks in the world, and as a cosmologist who argues that the universe requires neither dark matter nor dark energy — and who rejects the Big Bang outright.
Like Pierre-Marie Robitaille, Hartnett is a case of dissent issuing from technical accomplishment rather than from outside the discipline. His work on ultra-stable cryogenic oscillators is mainstream precision metrology of a high order, commercialised and sold to national standards laboratories. His cosmology is not accepted at all.
Education and career
Hartnett was born in Manjimup, Western Australia. He took both his B.Sc. (Hons I) and his PhD with distinction at the School of Physics, University of Western Australia, and in 2005 became an ARC QEII Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. He worked for many years in the Frequency Standards and Metrology research group at UWA, latterly as a research professor, and subsequently at the University of Adelaide. He has published more than eighty papers in refereed journals and holds two patents.
Frequency standards and metrology
Hartnett's experimental speciality is the cryogenic sapphire oscillator — a frequency standard in which a pure sapphire resonator, cooled with liquid helium, supports an exceptionally stable microwave "whispering gallery" mode. Clocks of this type are among the most stable frequency references ever constructed, and Hartnett was part of the team that supplied such oscillators to the National Metrology Institute of Japan at Tsukuba. He was a founding director of the start-up that commercialised the technology.
His related interests include ultra-low-noise radar and, significantly for his other work, the use of such resonators to conduct tests of fundamental physics. His 2002 paper Proposal for a New Michelson-Morley Experiment Using a Single Whispering Spherical Mode Resonator proposed exactly this: using the precision of the sapphire technology to re-examine Lorentz invariance and the isotropy of the speed of light — the experiment at the historical root of relativity.
Carmelian cosmology
Hartnett's cosmological work develops the cosmological relativity of the Israeli physicist Moshe Carmeli, which adds the expansion velocity of the universe as a further dimension alongside space and time, giving a five-dimensional "spacetimevelocity" framework.
Applying and extending Carmeli's formulation, Hartnett argues that two of the central posits of modern cosmology become unnecessary:
- Dark matter. He has published solutions for spiral galaxy rotation curves derived from Carmelian general relativity, arguing that the observed flat rotation curves follow from the theory itself, so that no unseen halo of exotic matter need be invoked to hold galaxies together.
- Dark energy. He has argued that the distance–redshift relation of the high-redshift supernova surveys — the observations that led to the introduction of dark energy and an accelerating expansion — is fitted by Carmelian cosmology without any such component, and that the universe on this account is spatially flat without dark matter.
The significance of the claim is its economy: the standard model requires that roughly 95% of the universe consist of substances never detected in a laboratory, and Hartnett's contention is that both were introduced to rescue a framework rather than because the observations demanded them. This places his work alongside the other critiques of the standard cosmology documented here — see Big Bang, Redshift and Intrinsic redshift.
Creationist cosmology
Hartnett is a young-earth creationist, and much of his cosmological writing is addressed to that community; he speaks internationally for Creation Ministries International on cosmology, astronomy and Genesis. His book Starlight, Time and the New Physics (2007) applies Carmeli's framework to the starlight-travel-time problem — the difficulty, on a young-earth chronology, of light from distant galaxies having reached the Earth — arguing that relativistic time dilation in the Carmelian model permits it.
With Alex Williams he wrote Dismantling the Big Bang (2005), a sustained critique of standard cosmology.
This religious commitment is stated here as a matter of record rather than as an assessment. It is not unusual among researchers catalogued on this wiki — Common Sense Science is likewise explicitly grounded in a creationist worldview — and readers may judge for themselves what bearing, if any, it has on the physics.
Reception
Hartnett's metrological work is uncontroversial and well regarded. His cosmology is not accepted by mainstream astrophysics, which holds that Carmeli's formulation lacks an adequate physical justification for treating expansion velocity as an independent dimension, and that the successes claimed for it in fitting rotation curves and supernova data are achieved by adjustable parameters rather than by prediction. The creationist framing has also led much of the astronomical community to decline to engage with the work at all.
Supporters reply that the dark sector is itself a set of adjustable components introduced precisely to save the standard model, and that a framework which dispenses with both while fitting the same data deserves examination on its merits rather than dismissal by association.
Related work on this wiki
Hartnett's papers and books catalogued here include Starlight, Time, and the New Physics (2008) and the Michelson–Morley resonator proposal above. His critique of the standard cosmology belongs with the wider body of work indexed under Category:Cosmology and Category:Redshift, including Arp's discordant redshifts and the alternative redshift mechanisms surveyed at Redshift.
Abstracts
- 2008 - "Starlight, Time, and the New Physics"
- 2002 - "Proposal for a New Michelson-Morley Experiment Using a Single Whispering Spherical Mode Resonator" (Read in full)
Books
- 2007 - "Starlight, Time and the New Physics" (Read in full)
- 2005 - "Dismantling the Big Bang" (Read in full)