John W Kierein

John W. Kierein
John W. Kierein
Born	1936
Residence	Broomfield, CO, United States
Nationality	USA
Known for	Big Bang, Gravity, Hubble's Constant, Compton Effect, Redshift, Expansion Tectonics
	Scientific career
Fields	Aerospace, Astrophysics

John W. Kierein (born 1936) is an American aerospace engineer and independent researcher best known for advocating a Compton Effect interpretation of astronomical redshift. Kierein argues that cosmological redshift is produced not by the expansion of space, as in the Big Bang model, but by an inelastic scattering of light passing through the tenuous electron plasma of intergalactic space, a proposal that belongs to the broader family of "tired light" cosmologies. He is also associated with theories of "pushing gravity" and an expanding Earth. His views lie outside the mainstream of modern cosmology, and his scattering model has been criticized by professional astrophysicists.

Biography

Kierein spent his professional career in the American aerospace industry. He worked for Ball Aerospace & Technologies while living in Boulder, Colorado, and later for KinetX, where he contributed to the Iridium satellite program in the mid-1990s while living in Phoenix, Arizona. He also worked as a consultant for Raytheon in the Boston area. He has resided in Broomfield, Colorado.

Kierein was active in a series of dissident-science organizations. He won a contest sponsored by the Association for Pushing Gravity Research (APGR), organized by Bill Carnahan of Austin, Texas, and subsequently served as the group's president. Together with John Chappell and others he helped arrange meetings—held in venues such as Fort Collins and Flagstaff, Arizona, and later the University of Connecticut—out of which grew the Natural Philosophy Alliance (NPA). Kierein served as an early president of the NPA before relinquishing the role to Chappell around the turn of the century.

Over his career Kierein corresponded and collaborated with a number of scientists who questioned aspects of mainstream cosmology, including the radio-astronomy pioneer Grote Reber, the physicist Paul Marmet, and the astronomer Halton Arp, a leading critic of the redshift–distance relationship. He also corresponded extensively with the geologist S. Warren Carey, a proponent of the expanding-Earth hypothesis, offering comments on Carey's 1988 book Theories of the Earth and Universe.

Scientific contributions

Kierein's central idea is that the redshift of light from distant astronomical objects is caused by the Compton Effect rather than by Doppler motion or the expansion of the universe. In 1968 he and Brooks M. Sharp published a paper in the journal Solar Physics proposing that the observed solar redshift—greater at the limb of the Sun than at its center—arises from Compton scattering of sunlight by electrons in the solar atmosphere, the shift being larger toward the limb because more electrons lie along the line of sight. Kierein and Reber independently advanced Compton-effect interpretations of the cosmological redshift within a few months of one another.

To make the scattering produce a redshift proportional to wavelength, as required by observations, Kierein's treatment introduces an additional factor of the ratio of the wavelength to the Compton wavelength into the standard Thomson scattering cross-section, and describes the scattering electrons as centers of Huygens' secondary wavelets reconstructing the wavefront. In this framework the universe is static rather than expanding, and no cosmic expansion or dark matter is required to account for the redshift.

Kierein extended these ideas into a broader program. He proposed a "pushing gravity" mechanism in which gravitation results from a net push by long-wavelength background radiation, and he suggested that this same mechanism could drive the accretion of planetary mass and the expansion of the Earth (Expansion Tectonics).

Kierein's Compton model has been criticized by mainstream astrophysicists. Ned Wright of UCLA and others have argued that the nonstandard modification of the scattering cross-section is not permitted by observation, and that Compton scattering would blur and shift images in ways inconsistent with the sharpness of distant sources. His work is therefore not accepted within mainstream physics and cosmology, and is regarded as a non-standard, alternative interpretation.

Abstracts

External links

Kierein, J. W. & Sharp, B. M. (1968), "Compton Effect Interpretation of Solar Red Shift", Solar Physics 3, 450–453 (NASA ADS)
"Kierein's Erroneous Compton Model for the Redshift" — critique by Edward L. Wright, UCLA