Glen C Collins

Glen C. Collins
Residence	Blairsville, GA, United States
Nationality	USA
Alma mater	Georgia Institute of Technology (Electrical Engineering); Vanderbilt University (Ph.D.)
Known for	Atomic Structure, Toroidal Ring, Helicon Theory
Scientific career
Fields	Systems Engineering Consultant
Institutions	Vanderbilt University; Georgia Institute of Technology; U.S. Naval Academy; Common Sense Science

Glen C. Collins, P.E., is an American engineer, computer scientist and independent researcher, and one of the principal figures of Common Sense Science (CSS), the organization founded by David L. Bergman to develop a classical, geometric alternative to quantum mechanics.

Within CSS, Collins occupied a distinctive role. Where Bergman supplied the original spinning charged ring model of the electron and Charles W. Lucas, Jr. the universal electrodynamic force law, Collins was the group's expositor and systematizer: the member who set out what the whole programme claimed, on what methodological grounds, and how its parts fitted together. His 2002 paper "Physical Models for Sub-Atomic Particles and Atomic Structure" is the clearest single statement of CSS's Electro-Magnetic Ring (Helicon) Theory and of the criteria by which CSS argued a physical theory should be judged. He presented Common Sense Science at international conferences and seminars for many years.

Biography

Collins earned degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his doctorate in Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering from Vanderbilt University. He is a registered Professional Engineer (P.E.).

He served as Assistant Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, following teaching duties at Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, and supported artificial-intelligence and supercomputing research for the Naval Research Laboratory and the Naval Intelligence community. He has extensive experience in corporate and programme management and in the development of large computer and communications networks. He lives in Blairsville, Georgia.

As with Bergman's background in weapons electronics and Barnes's in electricity and magnetism, Collins's training informs the character of his contribution: his papers read like systems engineering applied to physical theory, concerned less with any single calculation than with whether the whole structure is consistent, testable and fit for purpose.

Scientific work

Criteria for a physical theory

The first half of Collins's 2002 paper is a statement of what CSS held a scientific model must satisfy — the most explicit methodological charter the group produced. Its premise is that a "Great Error" occurred when physicists abandoned physical models and "embraced abstraction as if the abstraction itself were reality." The criteria are:

• Models must be physical — based on actual geometries occupying real space and time, with defined behaviour, motion, stability and interactions, rather than on abstractions.
• Models must be causal — connecting cause to effect through a defined mechanism, so that "how it works" can be stated.
• Mathematics is a servant, not the reality — a precise nomenclature for expressing relationships, which "can never become the reality" and at best describes some limited aspect of it.
• Unity and simplicity — invoking Ockham against the "particle zoo" and against explaining force transfer by postulating further particles.
• Testability and falsifiability — with the insistence, unusual in this literature, that nothing in science is ever proven; theories are only ever validated "thus far", and the one thing that can be done with confidence is to falsify. Collins pairs this with Mach's criterion that no statement in natural science is admissible unless empirically verifiable.
• Utility — his most pointed argument. Classical electromagnetism underwrote the majority of modern technology; quantum mechanics, QCD and general relativity, he contends, have been credited retrospectively with explaining devices that classical methods and experiment actually produced, while yielding few inventions that proceed from the processes they postulate.

He also identifies changing frames of reference mid-argument as a recurring and hard-to-detect error, citing the twin paradox.

The case against the Standard Model

Collins's objection is that the point-particle assumption attributes to a mathematical abstraction properties that only an extended physical object could have. The electron is known to possess spin, magnetic moment, charge, inertial mass and measured extent; a point of zero size can possess none of these in any explicable way, so the accounts offered are, in his phrase, "just stories." He lists as unexplained by the Standard Model: spin, magnetic moment, finite rest mass, particle stability, inertial force, and the ultraviolet spectral lines of H₂.

Electro-Magnetic Ring (Helicon) Theory

Collins's synthesis names the CSS programme Electro-Magnetic Ring (Helicon) Theory and traces its construction:

• It builds on Thomas G. Barnes' work and on a corrected and extended version of Alfred Lauck Parson's 1915 ring model, which defined electrons and protons as charged particles of finite size and specifiable shape.
• Bergman refined Barnes's model by fixing that shape as a thin toroidal ring of charge circulating at light speed — the object CSS calls a helicon — and identified two degrees of freedom within it corresponding to known physical properties, giving causal accounts of magnetic moment, spin and self-stability.
• Charles W. Lucas, Jr. and Joseph Lucas extended the work to atomic structure and particle fine structure, including spectra and spin predictions for known nuclides.

The theory's further commitments, as Collins sets them out:

• Time flows constantly and independently and is not tied to space; space is not absolute, interactions depending only on relative distances and motions.
• Field energy is non-quantized — continuous and analog. The appearance of quantization is a resonance effect arising from the interaction of energy with helicons of finite, specific size. On this basis Collins reports that Helicon Theory derives the hydrogen line spectra from first principles and predicts the near-ultraviolet hydrogen spectra.
• Inertial mass is derived, not intrinsic — the feedback force produced when a charge is moved within its own electric and magnetic fields, computed by Barnes using the same Lenz's-law and Faraday's-law reasoning an engineer applies to a generator armature. "Mass is the reaction force of a charge moving within its own fields, and is not substance or 'stuff.'"
• No strong or weak nuclear force is required. Nuclear binding, chemical interaction, accelerator results and decay energies are held to follow from electric and magnetic forces alone, with the magnetic near-field — whose geometry does not fall off as an inverse square at short range — doing the work usually assigned to the strong force.

Other work

His earlier paper "Fundamental Force Laws and Models of Matter Compared and Validated" (1998) compares competing force laws and matter models against experimental constraints. With Bergman he compiled "Science and Rationalism" (2002), a collection of correspondence among scientists and philosophers on the nature of science, truth and reality.

As a CSS speaker Collins's lecture topics included "Atomic Structure — Why do we Care?", "Common Sense Physics — Physical Model of the Atom", "How Philosophy Drives Scientific Models & Vice Versa", "CSS Atomic Models vs. Standard Models", "Wholescale Replacement for Modern Physics", and — reflecting CSS's creationist commitments — "Creationist Inconsistencies and Biblical Principles" and young-earth arguments from radiometric dating.

Reception

Collins's work shares the reception of Common Sense Science generally: no engagement from mainstream physics, where the decisive objection is that electron–positron scattering shows no substructure down to about 10^-20 m, far below the Compton-scale ring the helicon model requires, and where the Standard Model's pointlike electron matches every measurement made.

His distinctive contribution is nonetheless worth separating from the model's fate. The 2002 paper's insistence that nothing is ever proven, that consensus is not evidence, and that a theory contradicted by measurement should be abandoned rather than patched, is a stricter falsificationism than most critics of modern physics adopt — and one that applies with equal force to Helicon Theory itself. Whether CSS met its own standard is a fair question to put to it, and Collins is the member who supplied the standard.

His 2002 paper was published in the Common Sense Science quarterly Foundations of Science (V5 N4) and reprinted in the Journal of New Energy (V6 N4).

Abstracts

• 2002 - "Physical Models for Sub-Atomic Particles and Atomic Structure" (Read in full)
• 1998 - "Fundamental Force Laws and Models of Matter Compared and Validated"

Books

• 2002 - "Science and Rationalism: Correspondence of Scientists and Philosophers Seeking Truth and Searching for Reality in the Ideas of Plato, the Bible, and Advanced Science" (with David L. Bergman)

See also

• Common Sense Science
• David L. Bergman
• Charles W. Lucas, Jr.
• Thomas G. Barnes

References

• G. C. Collins, "Physical Models for Sub-Atomic Particles and Atomic Structure", Foundations of Science V5 N4 (2002); reprinted Journal of New Energy V6 N4 (archived copy)
• Common Sense Science, "Scientists" and "Speakers" pages (site defunct; archived): https://web.archive.org/web/20230323071056/http://commonsensescience.net/scientists.html