Alphonsus G Kelly

Alphonsus G. Kelly
Born	(1926-01-06)January 6, 1926 Brownstown, County Meath, Ireland
Died	July 30, 2005(2005-07-30) Dublin, Ireland
Nationality	Irish
Alma mater	University College Dublin; National University of Ireland
Known for	Relativity criticism, Sagnac effect analysis, Unipolar Induction
Scientific career
Fields	Mechanical and electrical engineering
Institutions	Electricity Supply Board (ESB); ESB International

Alphonsus Gabriel Kelly (6 January 1926 – 30 July 2005), commonly known as Al Kelly, was an Irish mechanical and electrical engineer who spent his career with Ireland's Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and, in retirement, became a critic of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. He is best known outside engineering circles for his analyses of the Sagnac effect and clock-synchronisation, and for his posthumously published book Challenging Modern Physics: Questioning Einstein's Relativity Theories.

Biography

Kelly was born on 6 January 1926 in Brownstown, County Meath, Ireland, where his father worked in local government and later served as a member of parliament. He attended the local national school and St. Finian's College in Mullingar, County Westmeath, before qualifying in mechanical and electrical engineering at University College Dublin. In 1966 he was awarded a Ph.D. by the National University of Ireland.

He was married to Ria, and the couple had six children. Kelly died in Dublin on 30 July 2005 at the age of 79.

Engineering career

Kelly joined Ireland's Electricity Supply Board in 1947, at the outset of a major national programme of rural electrification and new generating-station construction, and remained with the organisation for more than four decades. As Chief Project Engineer from 1968 to 1980 he was responsible for the planning and execution of large generating stations, including the first commercial combined-cycle gas-turbine power plant in Europe, at Marina, Cork, in the early 1970s. From 1980 to 1990 he served as Director of Generation and Transmission, and in 1988 he became the first Chairman of ESB International (ESBI), the board's consultancy subsidiary, helping open the Saudi Arabian market. He was also founder and Chairman of Top Tech Ireland Limited and Chairman of HDS Energy Ltd.

Kelly's doctoral work concerned the support, against atmospheric pressure, of a column of pumped liquid to a height greater than that calculated from the liquid's static density — in effect, the finding that a siphon can lift water higher than the equivalent of atmospheric pressure. The result had practical cost-saving consequences in pumping, earned him a prize from the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and led to an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. He wrote some twenty technical articles on innovations in power-station and transmission-line design, and authored the management book How to Make Your Life Easier at Work (McGraw-Hill), which was translated into seven languages and sold widely.

Scientific contributions

In retirement Kelly turned to a reanalysis of relativity theory, giving public talks from 1995 onwards at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, which published a series of his monographs. His work, which lies outside the scientific mainstream, focused particularly on the Sagnac effect and on the synchronisation of standard clock-stations around the Earth, which he argued involved a Sagnac correction for the Earth's rotation rather than a purely relativistic effect. He obtained the original 1972 Hafele–Keating airborne-clock test data from the United States Naval Observatory and contended that the data diverged from the commonly accepted interpretation of the results.

In 1998 Kelly built apparatus to test the relative motion of magnets and conductors, concluding that it was the cutting of the lines of magnetic force by a conductor, rather than the mere change in flux, that gave rise to an induced electromotive force. In reconsidering Faraday's analysis of unipolar induction, he concluded that a magnet's magnetic field rotates with the magnet. In 2001 he proposed an interpretation of the apparent spiral structure of galaxies in terms of light emitted at different times from elements rotating at different distances from the observer.

His views were largely opposed by the mainstream science community — an opposition aired in a 1996 correspondence in the Irish Times — though the physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris drew on Kelly's analysis in a 1997 paper in Physics Letters A seeking to explain the Sagnac effect via a non-zero photon mass. Kelly's papers appeared in journals including the Engineers Journal, Infinite Energy, Physics Essays, Meta Research Bulletin and Galilean Electrodynamics. He was working on the book Challenging Modern Physics: Questioning Einstein's Relativity Theories at the time of his death, and it was published posthumously.

Honors

Kelly was a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, and a Life Fellow of both the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is listed in Who's Who.

Abstracts

• 2005 - "Big Bang or Full Stop?"
• 2000 - "Hafele and Keating Tests; Did They Prove Anything?" (Read in full)
• 1997 - "A New Theory on the Behavior of Light"
• 1997 - "Synchronisation of Clock-Stations and the Sagnac Effect"

Books

• 2005 - "Challenging Modern Physics: Questioning Einstein's Relativity Theories" (Read in full)
• 1998 - "Experiments on the Relative Motion of Magnets and Conductors (Monograph No. 5)"
• 1998 - "Faradays Final Riddle: Does the Field Rotate with a Magnet? (Monograph No. 6)"
• 1997 - "Rules for Einstein-Synchronisation of Clocks Challenged (Monograph No. 4)" (Read in full)
• 1996 - "A New Theory on the Behaviour of Light (Monograph No. 2)" (Read in full)
• 1996 - "Reliability of Relativistic Effect Tests on Airborne Clocks (Monograph No. 3)" (Read in full)
• 1995 - "Time and the Speed of Light: A New Interpretation (Monograph No. 1)" (Read in full)

External links

• "Pioneering engineer who helped transform the ESB" — obituary, The Irish Times
• Challenging Modern Physics at Universal Publishers
• In Memoriam by Ian J. Cowan, Galilean Electrodynamics, V16 N6 (Nov/Dec 2005)