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Thomas G Barnes

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Thomas G. Barnes
Thomas G. Barnes
Born(1911-08-14)August 14, 1911
DiedOctober 23, 2001(2001-10-23) (aged 90)
ResidenceEl Paso, TX, United States
NationalityUSA
Alma materHardin-Simmons University (A.B. 1933; hon. Sc.D. 1950); Brown University (M.S. 1936)
Known forElectrodynamics, Gravity, Electron, space medium theory, geomagnetic decay argument
Scientific career
FieldsProfessor of Physics, Editor of Galilean Electrodynamics
InstitutionsTexas Western College / University of Texas at El Paso (1938-1981); Schellenger Research Laboratories; Institute for Creation Research

Thomas Grogard Barnes (14 August 1911 – 23 October 2001) was an American physicist, professor at the University of Texas at El Paso for forty-three years, and the senior figure in the classical-electrodynamics tradition from which Common Sense Science later grew. He was also one of the most prominent scientists in the twentieth-century young-earth creationist movement, and the two roles are inseparable in his work.

Barnes's physics rests on a single conviction: that classical electricity and magnetism, properly developed, are sufficient — that the effects attributed to special relativity follow from physical mechanisms acting in a real space medium, that inertia and gravitation are electrical in origin, and that the electron is an object with structure rather than a point. His electron and nucleon models of the 1970s and 1980s were the direct inspiration for David L. Bergman's spinning charged ring, and through it for the entire CSS programme; Glen C. Collins later described Helicon Theory as built on "the work of Dr. Thomas Barnes" together with a corrected Parson ring model.

He was a founding editor of Galilean Electrodynamics in 1990 and, in 1997, of Foundations of Science, the Common Sense Science quarterly. He is separately and more widely known — and, outside creationist circles, almost exclusively known — for his argument that the decay of the Earth's magnetic field implies an age for the Earth of less than 10,000 years, a claim rejected by geophysics and discussed below.

Biography

Education

Barnes took an A.B. in physics from Hardin-Simmons University in 1933 and an M.S. from Brown University in 1936 under R. Bruce Lindsay, the acoustician and physics historian, who is reported to have regarded him as one of his most talented graduate students. Hardin-Simmons conferred an honorary Sc.D. on him in 1950.

He did not hold an earned doctorate. This is worth stating plainly, since he was universally styled "Dr. Barnes" and held the rank of Professor Emeritus, and since his critics have made much of it. It is a fair point about how his authority was presented, and a weak one about the merits of his arguments, which stand or fall on their content.

Career

Barnes joined the faculty of Texas Western College — later the University of Texas at El Paso — in 1938 and served there until his retirement in 1981, a tenure of forty-three years. He was immensely popular with students, who called him "Dr. 'Two Gun' Barnes", and he was described by colleagues as a physicist's physicist.

During the Second World War (1943-45) he worked as an electrical engineer in the Division of Physical War Research, where he invented DODAR, an electronic device used by the Marines to locate enemy guns, and he was a consulting physicist to the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946. He spent 1952-53 on leave as a Visiting Fellow at Brown, directed the Schellenger Research Laboratories from 1953 to 1965, and consulted for Globe Universal Sciences and Shell Development Company from 1965 to 1976. In 1981-83, after retiring from UTEP, he served as Dean of the Graduate School of the Institute for Creation Research in El Cajon, California.

He published more than 35 articles and five books, including the textbook Foundations of Electricity and Magnetism (1965), which went through several editions and is the work that establishes his standing as a conventional physicist independent of anything else he wrote.

Creationist organizations

Barnes was recruited by Henry M. Morris at about the time the Creation Research Society was being formed in 1963, and became one of its central figures — serving four years as its president in the mid-1970s, editing and chairing the textbook committee for the CRS biology text Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity (Zondervan), and chairing the Committee on Openness in Science, whose statement was signed by more than 700 creationist scientists. He was subsequently associated with the Institute for Creation Research, which grew out of Morris's Creation Science Research Center of 1970, and was Dean of its Graduate School from 1981.

Scientific work

Space medium theory

Barnes rejected the relativistic account of space and time in favour of a real, physical space medium — an ether in the Lorentzian sense — in which electromagnetic phenomena propagate and against which motion is meaningful. His book Space Medium: The Key to Unified Physics (1986) is the developed statement.

The programme's characteristic move is to explain relativistic effects by mechanism rather than by kinematics. In "A Classical Foundation For Electrodynamics" (with R. R. Pemper and H. L. Armstrong, 1977) the "so-called relativistic effects" of high-velocity charges are derived from physical processes in classical electrodynamics instead of from Einstein's postulates. "Velocity Effects on Atomic Clocks and the Time Question" (1982) applies the same treatment to clock rates, arguing that moving clocks are physically altered rather than that time itself dilates — the Lorentzian rather than Einsteinian reading. "Space Medium Theory Applied to Lunar and Stellar Aberration" (with Harold S. Slusher, 1990) tests the medium against aberration, and "Resonant Optics for Detection of Rotation and Translation" (1991) proposes an experiment to detect motion with respect to it.

Electrical models of matter and force

The strand with the longest afterlife is Barnes's insistence that mass, inertia and gravitation are electromagnetic.

"Electric Explanation Of Inertial Mass" (1983) and "Electric Explanation of Transverse Mass" (1984) argue that inertia is a feedback effect: when a charge is accelerated it moves within its own electric and magnetic fields, and the reaction computed by Lenz's and Faraday's laws — exactly the calculation an engineer performs for a generator armature — is what we measure as inertial mass. On this account mass is not substance but a reaction force. Collins later summarized the CSS position in Barnes's own terms: "Mass is the reaction force of a charge moving within its own fields, and is not substance or 'stuff.'"

"Electric Theory of Gravitation" (with Slusher, Akridge and Ramirez, 1982) and "Another Theory of Gravitation: An Alternative to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity" (with R. J. Upham, Jr., 1976) extend the approach to gravity, and "A Unified Theory Of Physics" (1984) states the intended synthesis: one medium, one set of forces, no separate nuclear or gravitational interactions.

Structure of the electron and nucleons

"A New Theory Of The Electron" (with Richard R. Pemper, 1977-78, restated 1985) and "New Proton and Neutron Models" (1980) gave the electron and nucleons definite physical structure at a time when almost no one outside the ether tradition was attempting it. "Transformer Analog of the Hydrogen Atom" (1985) models the atom on the electrical device Barnes knew best.

This is the work that propagated. Bergman took Barnes's initial models and fixed the particle's shape as a thin toroidal ring of charge circulating at light speed; the Lucases extended that to atomic and fine structure; and the resulting Helicon Theory is, by CSS's own account, Barnes's programme carried forward. Whatever its ultimate standing, Barnes is the point at which a nineteenth-century line of thought — Parson's ring, the electromagnetic theory of mass — was picked up again and handed on.

The Earth's magnetic field and the age of the Earth

Barnes's most cited and most contested claim, set out in Origin and Destiny of the Earth's Magnetic Field (1973, revised 1983) and in a series of Creation Research Society Quarterly papers, is that the geomagnetic field is produced by freely decaying electric currents in the Earth's core, with no dynamo sustaining it.

Observatory measurements since 1835 show the dipole moment declining; Barnes fitted an exponential to them, obtained a half-life of about 1,400 years, and argued that extrapolating backwards gives an impossibly large field within a few thousand years — hence an Earth less than 10,000 years old. He held that the field has never reversed.

The geophysical objections are specific and, in the mainstream view, decisive:

  • The energy is redistributed, not lost. Over the same period in which the dipole component declined, the non-dipole components increased, leaving the total field energy outside the core roughly constant. Barnes's reply — that the non-dipole terms are irrelevant "noise" — did not include a calculation of their energy.
  • The field has reversed, many times. The paleomagnetic record of geomagnetic reversals, recorded in the magnetic striping of the ocean floor and in dated lava sequences, is the foundation of plate tectonics and of magnetostratigraphy. Barnes denied reversals; the evidence for them is independent of any assumption about the Earth's age.
  • An obsolete core model and unquantified uncertainties. Critics, including a U.S. Geological Survey assessment, argued that Barnes had not propagated experimental uncertainties and had used a superseded model of the Earth's interior.

Fitting an exponential to 150 years of the dipole term alone and extrapolating it over millennia is the methodological heart of the dispute. The argument remains in wide circulation in creationist literature, where it is often presented as definitive; it has no standing in geophysics.

Reception

Barnes occupies two quite separate positions in the record.

As a physicist and teacher he had a long, conventional and well-regarded career: a wartime invention in service use, a research laboratory directorship, industrial consultancies, four decades of teaching, and a textbook on electricity and magnetism that was used in classrooms. Within the dissident community his standing is high and his influence real — he is one of the founding editors of Galilean Electrodynamics, alongside Petr Beckmann, and the acknowledged source of the classical particle-modelling programme that Bergman, Lucas and Collins carried into Common Sense Science.

As a public advocate of a young Earth he is known in the mainstream literature almost solely as the author of a rejected argument, and his physics is generally read — fairly or not — through that lens. It should be recorded that the direction of inference in his own writing ran from his theology to his physics quite openly: he was not a physicist who happened to be a creationist, but a creationist who held that classical physics and a young Earth were parts of one picture.

Readers of this wiki are likely to weigh the two strands differently, and both are set out here so that the weighing is possible. The electromagnetic account of inertia and the ring models of matter are testable propositions about charge and fields, and their fate does not depend on the geomagnetic argument; the geomagnetic argument has been tested and has not survived.

Selected articles

  • T. G. Barnes, "Resonant Optics for Detection of Rotation and Translation", Galilean Electrodynamics V2, N3, p. 55 [Correspondence V2, N4, p. 77] (1991)
  • T. G. Barnes and H. S. Slusher, "Space Medium Theory Applied to Lunar and Stellar Aberration", Galilean Electrodynamics V1, N4, p. 43 [Correspondence V1, N5, p. 68] (1990)
  • T. G. Barnes, "Electric Explanation of Inertial Mass", Creation Research Society Quarterly V19, N4 (Mar 1983)
  • T. G. Barnes, H. S. Slusher, G. R. Akridge and F. S. Ramirez IV, "Electric Theory of Gravitation", Creation Research Society Quarterly V19, N2, pp. 113-116 (Sep 1982)
  • T. G. Barnes and F. S. Ramirez IV, "Velocity Effects on Atomic Clocks and the Time Question", Creation Research Society Quarterly V18, N4 (Mar 1982)
  • T. G. Barnes, "Satellite Observations Confirm the Decline of the Earth's Magnetic Field", Creation Research Society Quarterly V18, N1 (Jun 1981)
  • T. G. Barnes, "New Proton and Neutron Models", Creation Research Society Quarterly V17, N1, pp. 41-47 (Jun 1980)
  • R. R. Pemper and T. G. Barnes, "A New Theory of the Electron", Creation Research Society Quarterly V14, N4, pp. 210-220 (Mar 1978)
  • T. G. Barnes, R. R. Pemper and H. L. Armstrong, "A Classical Foundation for Electrodynamics", Creation Research Society Quarterly V14, N1, pp. 38-45 (Jun 1977) — "so-called 'relativistic effects' of high velocity charges are explained by physical mechanisms instead of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity"
  • T. G. Barnes and R. J. Upham, Jr., "Another Theory of Gravitation: An Alternative to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity", Creation Research Society Quarterly V12, N4, pp. 194-197 (Mar 1976)
  • T. G. Barnes, "Earth's Magnetic Energy Provides Confirmation of Its Young Age", Creation Research Society Quarterly V12, N1 (Jun 1975)

Career summary

  • 1938-1981 — Faculty, Texas Western College / University of Texas at El Paso; Professor Emeritus of Physics
  • 1943-1945 — Electrical Engineer, Division of Physical War Research; inventor of DODAR, used by the Marines for locating enemy guns
  • 1943-1946 — Consulting Physicist, U.S. Navy
  • 1952-1953 — Visiting Fellow, Brown University
  • 1953-1965 — Director, Schellenger Research Laboratories
  • 1965-1976 — Consulting Physicist, Globe Universal Sciences and Shell Development Company
  • 1981-1983 — Dean of the Graduate School, Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, California
  • Four years as President of the Creation Research Society
  • Chairman of the Textbook Committee for Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity (Zondervan)
  • Chairman of the Committee on Openness in Science, signed by more than 700 creationist scientists
  • Founding editor, Galilean Electrodynamics (1990) and Foundations of Science, the Common Sense Science quarterly (1997)

Abstracts

Books

See also

References

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