Joseph C Lucas

Joseph C. Lucas
Residence	Temple Hills, MD, United States
Nationality	USA
Known for	Atomic Structure, Nuclear Structure, combinatorial-geometry shell model
Scientific career
Fields	Physicist

A filled shell of eight electrons in the Lucas packing model: two great circles of four toroidal ring electrons each, their magnetic axes alternating around each circle. Figure 5 from "A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei — Part 1" (2002).

Joseph C. Lucas is an American physicist and independent researcher, and the author — with his father Charles W. Lucas, Jr. — of the physical geometrical packing model of the atom and nucleus that forms the atomic-structure component of the Common Sense Science programme.

His contribution is a specific and unusually concrete one. Taking Bergman's toroidal ring electron as given, Lucas asked what happens when such objects — real, finite-sized rings of circulating charge, each carrying a magnetic dipole — are packed around a nucleus. Using combinatorial geometry constrained by results he obtained from physical experiments with ring magnets, he derived the sizes of the successive electron shells as 2, 8, 18 and 32 — the shell structure actually exhibited by the Periodic Table — together with an argument for why the table has exactly seven periods and no shell of 50. The same packing analysis was then applied to protons and neutrons, yielding the nuclear magic numbers and an account of nuclide spin.

He introduced the model in Galilean Electrodynamics in 1996, and it was reprinted and extended in the Common Sense Science quarterly Foundations of Science between 2002 and 2003.

Biography

Joseph C. Lucas is the son of Dr. Charles William Lucas, Jr., the physicist known for the universal electrodynamic force law and a co-founder of Common Sense Science; the two collaborated on all of Joseph's principal papers. He lives in Temple Hills, Maryland.

He attended Oxon Hill Science and Technology High School, graduating first in his class. In 1995 he received the Grand Prize at the International Science Fair held in Hamilton, Ontario, and was offered full scholarships in physics to both Caltech and Harvard. The atomic model that made his name was published the following year, when he was very young — a detail worth recording, since the work is frequently cited simply as "Lucas and Lucas" without any indication that the first author was a student when he did it.

Scientific work

Starting point: why a new model of the atom

The 2002 paper "A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei, Part 1: Structure of Atoms" opens by setting out why its authors thought a classical atomic model was needed, and the argument is worth stating because it is more specific than the usual objection to quantum mechanics.

Both quantum mechanics and relativity, they note, are built on the assumption of point-like particles — yet electron scattering experiments, for which Robert Hofstadter received the 1961 Nobel Prize, show that protons and neutrons have measurable finite size, an internal charge distribution indicating internal structure, and elastic deformation under interaction. The size and shape of the electron had been measured by Compton and refined by Winston Bostick, Compton's last graduate student. These properties are simply set aside by both theories.

Their second objection is the classical radiation problem: if charged electrons move in shell orbits with angular momentum about the nucleus, Ampère's and Faraday's laws — from which Larmor's radiation formula follows, in agreement with all macroscopic experiments on accelerating charges — require them to radiate continuously. They do not. The Lucases take the classical laws seriously and conclude that the electrons do not orbit the nucleus at all.

The paper identifies three developments as making a classical alternative viable: the Ewald–Oseen extinction effect (1915) and Fox's 1963 argument that it permits a Galilean treatment of the Michelson–Morley and Fizeau results; Barnes's 1978 derivation of the standard special-relativistic results from the classical electrodynamics of finite-size elastically deformable particles; and Bergman's 1990 spinning charged ring model, in which the Coulomb self-repulsion of the ring is balanced by the magnetic pinch of its own current, fixing the radius R — and from which, they note, Planck's constant itself can be derived rather than postulated.

The packing model

The model's distinctive feature is its method. Rather than solving a wave equation, Lucas treated the question as one of geometry and magnetostatics: given electrons that are rings with definite size and a magnetic dipole, which arrangements around a nucleus are stable?

He answered this partly by direct experiment. Using ring magnets on a pegboard, he found that a circular arrangement reaches equilibrium only with an even number of magnets, and that at equilibrium their north–south orientations precisely alternate around the ring. Combining that constraint with spherical symmetry — the same alternating pattern must hold on whichever great circles are packed — and enumerating the possibilities gives the permitted shells:

• Shell 1 — 1 great circle of 2 electrons = 2
• Shell 2 — 2 great circles of 4 electrons = 8
• Shell 3 — 3 great circles of 6 electrons = 18
• Shell 4 — 4 great circles of 8 electrons = 32
• Shell 5 — 5 great circles of 10 electrons = 50

A filled shell of eighteen electrons: three great circles of six ring electrons. Figure 6 of the same paper.

He then measured the relative binding strength of each configuration, mounting ring magnets on pegs, removing one peg, and weighing the force needed to pull its magnet away — holding the board on edge to eliminate friction. Two results followed. Great circles of four magnets bind most tightly, which he offered as the physical origin of valence behaviour in chemical bonding. And great circles of ten or more show no more tendency to bind in a circle than an odd number does — so no shell of 50 should exist, and the atom should have only four shell sizes: 2, 8, 18, 32. This is his explanation for why the Periodic Table has seven periods and stops where it does.

Further magnet experiments established that two concentric rings of the same size are stable when oppositely oriented, while three or more are unstable and rearrange — the magnets "like to be oriented in pairs in all directions" — and gave relative binding strengths for whole shells, with 18-electron shells most tightly bound and 32-electron shells slightly less bound than 8.

Extension to the nucleus

"A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei, Part 2: Structure of the Nucleus" (2002) applies the same geometrical packing analysis to protons and neutrons, reproducing the nuclear magic numbers that indicate shell structure and suggesting a physical origin for nuclide spin and for the liquid-drop features of nuclei. Supporters of the model report that it predicts thousands of nuclide spins and gives more accurate accounts of radioactivity and decay rates than the models it replaces — claims which, if they hold up, would be the model's strongest evidence, and which have not been independently assessed.

"A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei, Part 3: Spectral Lines" (2003) completes the series by deriving spectra.

Other work

"Weber's Force Law for Realistic Finite-Size Elastic Particles" (2000) adapts the nineteenth-century Weber force law — a velocity- and acceleration-dependent action-at-a-distance law, also of interest to Thomas E. Phipps, Jr. — to particles with real extent and elasticity. "Electrodynamics of Real Particles vs. Maxwell's Equations, Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics" (1992) is his earliest catalogued paper and states the general case for finite-size particle electrodynamics. With his father he also presented "The Origin of Atomic Structure" to the International Conference on Creationism.

Reception

The packing model shares the standing of Common Sense Science as a whole: no engagement from mainstream physics, where shell structure and the magic numbers are accounted for by the quantum shell model — the Pauli exclusion principle with spin–orbit coupling, for which Goeppert Mayer and Jensen shared the 1963 Nobel Prize — and where the sequence 2, 8, 18, 32 falls out of 2n² without any assumption about particle geometry.

That coincidence is itself the interesting point, and cuts both ways. Critics note that reproducing a sequence already derivable from a simpler principle is weak evidence for a physical picture. Supporters reply that the quantum derivation obtains the numbers from a counting rule about states while offering no physical reason why matter should be built that way, whereas the packing model gives a mechanical account — and, unlike the quantum shell model, also says why there is no fifth shell size and hence why the table ends.

Within the dissident community the model is well regarded and forms the atomic-structure layer of the CSS synthesis: Collins's account of Helicon Theory credits "Joseph and Charles W. Lucas, Jr." with extending Barnes's and Bergman's work to atomic structure and particle fine structure.

Whatever one concludes, the ring-magnet experiments are a genuine and unusual feature of this literature — a testable, physically executed procedure rather than an argument from first principles, and one any reader can repeat on a kitchen table.

Abstracts

• 2003 - "A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei, Part 3: Spectral Lines" (Read in full)
• 2002 - "A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei, Part 1: Structure of Atoms" (Read in full)
• 2002 - "A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei, Part 2: Structure of the Nucleus" (Read in full)
• 2000 - "Weber's Force Law for Realistic Finite-Size Elastic Particles"
• 1996 - "A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei" — Galilean Electrodynamics V7, N1 (Jan/Feb 1996), the original publication of the packing model
• 1992 - "Electrodynamics of Real Particles vs. Maxwell's Equations, Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics"

See also

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

References

• J. Lucas and C. W. Lucas, Jr., "A Physical Model for Atoms and Nuclei — Part 1", Foundations of Science (February 2002); most of the paper first appeared in Galilean Electrodynamics V7, N1 (Jan/Feb 1996) (archived copy)
• J. C. Lucas and C. W. Lucas, "The Origin of Atomic Structure", Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol3/iss1/32/