Russell Humphreys

David Russell Humphreys, Ph.D., is an award-winning nuclear and theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and creationist. His most notable contributions to creation science are his insights on the rapid decay of Earth's magnetic field, his ongoing contributions to the RATE Group project, and his white hole cosmology.

Life and career
Public records of Dr. Humphreys' early life are lacking. He was probably born circa born::1941 in the country::United States, on the assumption that he entered Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) at the usual age and pursued the usual four-year course of study that led to his Bachelor of Science degree from that institution in 1963. He went on to win his PhD in physics from Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) in 1972. By that time, he had become fully convinced that the Earth was much younger than most scientists of the period assumed.

When he had earned his doctorate, he went to work first for General Electric's High Voltage Laboratory, where he invented a number of useful instruments for studying lightning and other high-voltage phenomena, and received at least one US patent. In 1979, he joined Sandia National Laboratories (New Mexico), where he earned many more awards over the next seventeen years.

After retirement from Sandia, Dr. Humphreys worked full-time at the Institute for Creation Research, especially as a member of the RATE Group, then in August 2008 joined Creation Ministries International and now works as an independent researcher.

Education

 * B.S., Duke University, Durham, NC, 1963
 * Ph.D., Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 1972. (Dissertation: cosmic rays and ultrahigh energy nucleon-nucleon interactions.)

Professional Experience

 * 1972-79: General Electric Company, High Voltage Division, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Designed and invented multiple test and measuring instruments for the investigation of lightning and other high-voltage phenomena.
 * 1979-ca. 1995: Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Multiple contributions in nuclear physics, geophysics, high-voltage engineering, and theoretical physics. Contributed to the Particle Beam Fusion Project and was co-inventor of the Rimfire 6-MV laser-triggered gas spark gap switch. Many of his contributions have possible application to nuclear-weapons work and fusion power.

Creationist contributions

 * Paleomagnetism--solved the problem of rapid reversals of Earth's magnetic field. He showed that those reversals probably happened during the global flood and also that the earth's magnetic field is losing energy even more rapidly than at first supposed.


 * Geomagnetism: Proposed a theory on the origins of planetary magnetic fields that successfully predicted observations made of Uranus and Neptune by Project Voyager.


 * Geochemistry: Co-author of key paper showing that total sodium in the ocean is too little, in consideration of its rate of accumulation, to support an old earth.


 * Cosmology: Developer of the white hole cosmology that is one of the prime contenders for an explanation of why the light from distant stars has reached the earth, though the earth is not much older than 6,000 years.

Associations

 * Creation Science Fellowship of New Mexico, President
 * Adjunct professor of the Institute for Creation Research
 * Board member of the Creation Research Society

Honors and Awards

 * Sandia National Laboratories Award for Excellence 1995.
 * Sandia National Laboratories Award for Excellence "in developing and executing new and innovative light ion target theory," 1990.
 * U.S. Patent No. 4,808,368 (Feb 28, 1989) "High voltage supply for neutron tubes in well-logging applications."
 * Sandia National Laboratories Exceptional Contribution Award, for Rimfire laser-triggered gas-insulated switch, 1988.
 * Industrial Research Magazine IR-100 award to PBFA-II project, 1986.
 * Industrial Research Magazine IR-100 award for lightning waveform recorder (to D. R. Humphreys and two others), 1978.
 * U.S. Patent No. 4,054,835 (Oct. 18, 1977) "Rapid-response electric field sensor."
 * Winner, Eighteenth Annual Westinghouse National Science Talent Search (1959). \

Books

 * Starlight and Time. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1994. Humphreys presents a model that attempts to answer the mystery of distant starlight in a young universe.

Articles

 * Helium diffusion rates support accelerated nuclear decay by D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D., Steven A. Austin, Ph.D., John R. Baumgardner, Ph.D., and Andrew A. Snelling, Ph.D. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, R. L. Ivey (Ed.), pp. 175–195, 2003.

Secular

 * "Comparison of experimental results and calculated detector responses for PBFA II Selected thermal source experiments," Review of Scientific Instruments 63 (October 1992) No. 10.
 * "Inertial confinement fusion with light ion beams," 13th Internat. Conf. on Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research, Washington, D.C. 1-6, October, 1990.
 * "Reducing aspect ratios in inertial confinement fusion targets," JOWOG 37 Conference, Albuquerque, NM, January 1990. (Contents classified).
 * "Progress Toward a Superconducting Opening Switch," Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Pulsed Power Conference, Arlington, Virginia, 1987, pp. 279-282.
 * "Scaling relations for the Rimfire multi-stage gas switch," Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Pulsed Power Conference, Arlington, VA, June 29 - August 1, 1987.
 * "Rimfire: A Six Megavolt Laser-Triggered Gas-Filled Switch for PBFA-II," Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE Pulsed Power Conference, Arlington, Virginia, June 10-12, 1985, pp. 262-269.
 * "PBFA II, a 100 TW pulsed power driver for the inertial confinement fusion program," Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE Pulsed Power Conference, Arlington, Virginia, June 10-12, 1985.
 * "Uranium Logging with Prompt Fission Neutrons," International Journal of Applied Radiation and Isotopes 34 (1983) 261-268.
 * "Uranium logging with prompt fission neutrons," IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, NS-28 (1981) 1691-1695.
 * "Pulsed neutron gamma ray logging for minerals associated with uranium," 6th Conf. on Small Accelerators in Research and Industry, Denton, TX, November 3-5, 1980. Sandia National Laboratories document no. SAND80-1531.
 * "Wide-range multi-channel analog switch," Nuclear Instruments and Methods 121 (1974) 505-508.
 * "The 1/g Velocity Dependence of Nucleon-Nucleus Optical Potentials," Nuclear Physics A182 (1972) 580.
 * "Studies of hadron interactions at energies around 10 TeV using an ionization spectrometer-emulsion chamber combination," Proc. 11th Int. Conf. on Cosmic Rays, Budapest 1969, in Acta Physica Acad. Sci. Hungaricae 29 (1970) 497-503.
 * "Wide-Range multi-input pulse height recording system," Review of Scientific Instruments 38 (1967) 1123-1127.