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Curtis E Renshaw

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Curtis E. Renshaw
Curtis E. Renshaw
Born(1957-12-20)December 20, 1957
ResidenceAlpharetta, GA, United States
NationalityUSA
Alma materGeorgia Institute of Technology
Known forSpecial Relativity, Galilean-Newtonian relativity, Radiation Continuum Model
Scientific career
FieldsElectrical engineering, Electromagnetic theory, Relativity
InstitutionsTele-Consultants, Inc.

Curtis E. "Curt" Renshaw (born 20 December 1957) is an American electrical engineer, defense contractor and independent relativity theorist. Over more than two decades he has developed a Galilean-Newtonian alternative to Einstein's special and general relativity, built on a "Radiation Continuum Model" of light that replaces Einstein's second postulate. His central claim is that once light is modelled correctly from first principles, the whole apparatus of time dilation, length contraction, relative simultaneity and velocity-dependent mass increase becomes unnecessary — and with the basis for special relativity removed, that of general relativity falls with it. He has argued this case in some thirty conference papers, in Galilean Electrodynamics, Apeiron, Physics Essays and the IEEE Electronic Systems Magazine, and at length in his book-length treatment Newton's Revenge: The Restoration of Space and Time.

Biography

Education

Renshaw earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1982 and a second degree in physics from Georgia Tech in 2013. He pursued master's-level work at George Washington University and at Georgia Tech, concentrating on electromagnetic theory — the background from which his later objections to relativity are drawn.

Engineering career

In 1982 Renshaw joined the Navy EHF Satcom Program (NESP) Office of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, then NAVELEX, in Washington, D.C. NESP was the Navy component of the MILSTAR communications program and placed the first operational EHF satellite into service.

In 1985 he founded Tele-Consultants, Inc. (TCI), providing engineering, logistics and management support to the Department of the Navy and other defense customers; by 2011 the firm employed over 160 people across 15 states. In 1995 he and his wife Martha Renshaw co-founded Medical Out-Sourcing, Inc., a staffing and home health care provider in Middle Georgia, which was sold to ResCare in 2005.

Relativity work

The Radiation Continuum Model

Renshaw's alternative begins not with a critique of the Lorentz transformation but with a model of light itself. In the Radiation Continuum Model, developed with William M. Kallfelz and first presented in 1996, Maxwell's equations are argued to be Galilean-invariant, removing the motivation for Einstein's second postulate. From that starting point Renshaw contends that a Galileo-Newtonian account of distance, time, velocity and mass is sufficient to describe electromagnetic radiation, and that the relativistic effects are artefacts of how light propagation was originally modelled rather than features of the world.

Much of his subsequent output consists of working this claim through the standard experimental canon — Fresnel, Fizeau, Hoek, Michelson-Morley, Michelson-Gale and Sagnac — and through the classical tests of general relativity, including the perihelion shift of Mercury, gravitational lensing and the time delay of a solar-grazing photon.

Proposed observational tests

A distinguishing feature of Renshaw's programme is that he has repeatedly proposed concrete observational discriminators rather than resting on argument alone. He treated apparent superluminal jets (1996) and pulsar timing (1996) as tests of special relativity; argued across several 1999–2000 papers that the anomalous Doppler data from Pioneer 10 and 11 favour a Galilean over a relativistic interpretation; and proposed NASA's Space Interferometry Mission as a direct test of relativistic length contraction. He has also returned repeatedly to the experiment of Fizeau as a test of relativistic simultaneity, in papers spanning 1997 to 2016.

Correspondents and collaborators

Renshaw has developed his work in discussion with a number of researchers documented on this wiki. His theory was reviewed and discussed at length with Howard C Hayden and Cynthia Kolb Whitney, editors of Galilean Electrodynamics, and with Roy Keys, editor of Apeiron. He held several discussion sessions with Grote Reber, the father of radio astronomy, and collaborated on a joint paper with Shao-Zhi Xu and Xiang-Qun Xu of China, who have argued independently on this wiki against the legitimacy of the Lorentz transformation.

Other correspondents include Dr. G. P. Rodrique, professor of electromagnetics at Georgia Tech; Dr. Peter Brown of the United Kingdom; Dr. P. Chubey and Svetlana Tolchelnikova-Murri of Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg; William M. Kallfelz, whom Renshaw credits as instrumental in the theory's early development; and Dr. David Finkelstein of Georgia Tech, author of Quantum Relativity. He has also debated the theory with Michael Lemonick, science editor of Time magazine and author of The Light at the Edge of the Universe, who by Renshaw's own account remained unpersuaded.

Conference presentations

Renshaw has presented papers at multiple independent sessions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and at independent sessions of the International Conference on Space, Time and Gravitation in 1996 and 1998, hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. He has also presented at meetings of the IEEE, at NASA's Astrobiology Conference, and at other international conferences in Germany and London.

Personal life

Renshaw lives in Alpharetta, Georgia, with his wife Martha. They have four children, including twin sons born in 1994. The family are keen skiers and snowboarders.

Abstracts

Books

Media

External links

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