Dennis J McCarthy

Dennis J. McCarthy
Residence	Norfolk, MA, United States
Nationality	USA
Known for	Growing Earth, Geophysics, Biogeography, Thomas North authorship research
Scientific career
Fields	Biogeography, Geophysics, English literature
Institutions	Buffalo Museum of Science (research associate)

Dennis J. McCarthy is an American independent researcher and author who has published across an unusually wide range of subjects, including geophysics, biogeography and English literature. He is best known in natural philosophy circles for his defence of an expanding (growing) Earth on biogeographical and geophysical grounds, and in the wider world for his research arguing that Sir Thomas North wrote source plays later adapted by William Shakespeare — work that reached the front page of The New York Times in 2018.

McCarthy works entirely outside the conventional academic career track, and both strands of his research put him at odds with established consensus: expanding-Earth geology on the one hand, and orthodox Shakespeare scholarship on the other.

Biography

McCarthy is a research associate at the Buffalo Museum of Science and has served on the editorial board of Biogeography & Systematics, a journal launched by the Systematic & Evolutionary Biogeographical Association (SEBA). He has published peer-reviewed papers advocating Earth expansion, and his 2007 paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research attracted broad attention for offering an explanation of the lopsided ocean–continent distribution of the globe.

His 2009 book Here Be Dragons: How the Study of Animal and Plant Distributions Revolutionized Our Views of Life and Earth was published by Oxford University Press, and was received as an accessible popular history of biogeography — how the geographic distribution of organisms came to inform, and be informed by, evolution and tectonics.

From roughly the same period McCarthy pursued a second line of research in Elizabethan literature, working for many years as an independent scholar and collaborating with June Schlueter, professor emerita of English at Lafayette College. He describes himself as a "rogue scholar" applying modern digital text-comparison tools and databases to problems in literary history. He maintains the site sirthomasnorth.com.

Scientific contributions

Expanding Earth and biogeography

McCarthy's central geological argument is biogeographical rather than purely geophysical. He has documented biotic links across the Pacific — shared distributions of animal and plant groups on opposite sides of the ocean — that in his reading require a substantially smaller Mesozoic Pacific basin than plate-tectonic reconstructions allow. On a fixed-radius Earth, such Pacific-spanning distributions must be explained by long-distance dispersal across an ocean that was already wide; McCarthy argues instead that the simplest reading of the distributional data is that the basin has grown, and with it the Earth itself.

This places him within the Expansion Tectonics tradition, which holds that the Earth's radius has increased over geological time and that continental drift is a consequence of expansion rather than of subduction-driven plate recycling.

Hemispheric asymmetry

In "Geophysical explanation for the disparity in spreading rates between the Northern and Southern hemispheres" (Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 112, 2007; doi:10.1029/2006JB004535), McCarthy addressed a long-standing anomaly: the Southern Hemisphere is markedly more oceanic than the Northern, and sea-floor spreading rates differ systematically between them. His account was, by his own description, the first to explain this lopsided continent–ocean distribution. Although the published paper did not state the connection explicitly, McCarthy regards the explanation as consistent with, and supportive of, an expanding Earth.

Ether and gravity

Underlying McCarthy's geological work is an interest in an ether-sink conception of gravity — a model in which gravitation arises from a flow or absorption of a medium into matter. Such a mechanism, he argues, would naturally produce the growth of some astronomical bodies over time, and so provides a physical basis for planetary expansion rather than leaving it as an unexplained observation. His earlier papers on Lorentzian derivations, the preferred reference frame, the Hafele–Keating experiment and the Sagnac effect (listed below) belong to this same Lorentzian/ether-theoretic line of thought.

Thomas North and the Shakespeare canon

McCarthy's literary research argues that Sir Thomas North (1535–1604), the Elizabethan translator best known for englishing Plutarch's Lives — a work universally acknowledged as a Shakespeare source — was himself a playwright, and that plays he wrote were later reworked into the texts we know as Shakespeare's. An early statement of the thesis, "A Shakespeare/North Collaboration: Titus Andronicus and Titus and Vespasian", appeared in Shakespeare Survey (vol. 67, 2014, pp. 85–101), proposing that a now-lost 1562 play by North lay behind Titus Andronicus.

The research that brought the work to wide public notice concerned a different North: George North, a kinsman of Thomas. Working with June Schlueter, McCarthy identified an unpublished 1576 manuscript, A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels, written at the North family seat of Kirtling Hall in Cambridgeshire. Using the plagiarism-detection program WCopyfind — software normally used to catch student copying — the pair found sequences of rare words and distinctive phrasings shared between the manuscript and roughly eleven Shakespeare plays, among them King Lear, Macbeth and Richard III. Their edition of the manuscript was published in 2018 by D. S. Brewer in association with the British Library, and the discovery was reported on the front page of The New York Times and covered internationally, including by The Guardian and Smithsonian magazine.

McCarthy and Schlueter subsequently published Thomas North's 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021), and McCarthy has continued to develop the full authorship argument in North of Shakespeare (2011) and in his later Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays. Journalist Michael Blanding's book North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar's Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard's Work (Hachette, 2021; published in the UK as In Shakespeare's Shadow) is an extended narrative account of McCarthy and his research.

The methodological thread joining McCarthy's two careers is the same: large-scale comparison of distributional data — of species across oceans, of rare word-sequences across texts — used to argue that patterns conventionally attributed to independent origin are better explained by common source.

CNPS talks

He has presented in the CNPS online seminar series:

• "Did Shakespeare base his works on Thomas North? Dennis McCarthy says Yes!" (1 May 2021)

Abstracts

• 1999 - "The Classical Newtonian Derivation of Lorentzian Equations for Sound and Other Media Processes"
• 1999 - "The Orbiting Clock Paradox: Should the Lorentzian View Be Preferred?"
• 1997 - "The Ether as a Preferred Reference Frame"
• 1997 - "The Hafele-Keating Contradiction"
• 1997 - "Can Relativity Predict and Open Rotational Sagnac Effect and not an Open Orbital Sagnac Effect Simultaneously?"

Works

Books

• 2021 - Thomas North's 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare (with June Schlueter), Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• 2018 - A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels by George North: A Newly Uncovered Manuscript Source for Shakespeare's Plays (edited with June Schlueter), D. S. Brewer / The British Library
• 2011 - North of Shakespeare
• 2009 - "Here Be Dragons / How the study of animal and plant distributions revolutionized our views of life and Earth", Oxford University Press (Read in full)
• 1999 - "The Fourth Revolt" (Read in full)
• Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays

Papers

• 2014 - "A Shakespeare/North Collaboration: Titus Andronicus and Titus and Vespasian", Shakespeare Survey 67, pp. 85–101
• 2007 - "Geophysical explanation for the disparity in spreading rates between the Northern and Southern hemispheres", Journal of Geophysical Research 112 (doi:10.1029/2006JB004535)

Media

• 2009 - Expanding Earth / We are Currently in the Middle of a Major Scientific Revolution (Video Lecture)
• 2008 - 4th Revolt - Dennis McCarthy - Lopsided Hemispheres (Video Slides)
• 2008 - 4th Revolt - Dennis McCarthy - Expanding Earth (Video Slides)

External links

• Sir Thomas North — McCarthy's site on the Thomas North authorship research
• The Fourth Revolt
• CNPS talk: "Did Shakespeare base his works on Thomas North?"