Pierre-Marie Robitaille

Pierre-Marie Robitaille
Pierre-Marie Robitaille
Born	North Bay, Ontario, Canada
Residence	Columbus, OH, United States
Nationality	Canadian / American
Alma mater	University of Northern Iowa; Iowa State University
Known for	Ultra High Field MRI, Liquid metallic hydrogen solar model, Critique of Kirchhoff's law, Big Bang, Background Radiation
	Scientific career
Fields	Radiology, Magnetic resonance imaging, Thermal physics, Astrophysics
Institutions	The Ohio State University (1989–2019)

Pierre-Marie Luc Robitaille is a Canadian-American scientist, Professor of Radiology at The Ohio State University from 1989 to 2019, who designed and built the world's first Ultra High Field human MRI scanner — and who then turned the physics he had learned from that machine against some of the central claims of modern astrophysics.

He argues that Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission is invalid in its universal form; that the Sun is therefore not a gaseous plasma but condensed matter — liquid metallic hydrogen; and that the cosmic microwave background attributed to the Big Bang is in fact the thermal signature of the Earth's own oceans.

Robitaille is unusual among the researchers documented here in that his dissent grew directly out of a major mainstream achievement. He did not approach thermal physics as an outsider but as the builder of an instrument whose behaviour, in his account, could not be reconciled with the textbook law.

Early life

Robitaille was born in North Bay, Ontario, the third of ten children of Noel Antoine Robitaille and Jacqueline Alice Roy. His father, a physician, had moved to Ontario from Quebec while stationed with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and served the villages of Massey and Espanola, caring also for the Ojibway population of the region. In 1964 the Ojibway Nation honoured him as chief of the Spanish River Band under the name Ke-chutwa-ghizhigud ("Chief Holiday").

Raised by French-Canadian parents, Robitaille was schooled in French at L'École St. Joseph in Espanola before attending Espanola High School, where teaching was in English.

Education

In 1978 his father relocated to Cedar Falls, Iowa. Robitaille enrolled at the University of Iowa and then moved to the University of Northern Iowa, graduating in 1981 with a degree in general science.

He entered a doctoral programme in biochemistry at Iowa State University under David E. Metzler, taking an M.S. in 1984 with a thesis on NMR equilibrium analysis of polyamines with vitamin B6. Recognising that in-vivo NMR was an emerging field, he moved his graduate appointment to the Department of Zoology, where he carried out some of the first ³¹P-NMR studies of isolated sperm cells, while simultaneously enrolling in the inorganic chemistry doctoral programme under Donald Kurtz. He graduated in 1986 with a Ph.D. holding majors in both zoology and inorganic chemistry, defending the two halves of his dissertation before separate committees.

Magnetic resonance imaging

After postdoctoral work in the in-vivo NMR laboratory of Kamil Ugurbil at the University of Minnesota, Robitaille joined The Ohio State University in 1989 as Director of Magnetic Resonance Research and Assistant Professor of Radiology — at the age of 28, with a startup package in excess of $1 million. He directed MRI research there until 2000, eventually leading a $10 million laboratory, and has published more than eighty articles on applied and theoretical aspects of magnetic resonance.

The 8 Tesla scanner

Between 1995 and 2000 Robitaille led the design and assembly of the world's first Ultra High Field human MRI scanner, operating at 8 Tesla — double the previous record, and some 160,000 times the Earth's field at sea level. Many in the field had held that human imaging at such strengths was impossible.

Allan Elster, editor of the Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography, devoted a special issue to the first results, writing that the journal contained "amazing images and technical descriptions of the world's first whole body human clinical magnetic resonance scanner operating at 8 Tesla," and congratulating the Ohio State team "for constructing a device some experts said would be impossible to build." The following month Robitaille's group set a further record with the first MR images at 2,000 × 2,000 resolution.

Paul Lauterbur, who received the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the invention of MRI, later wrote that experts "who had said, and even written, that frequencies above 10 MHz would never be practical watched in amazement as scientists and engineers pushed instrument performances to ever-higher levels." Robitaille co-edited the volume in which that assessment appears (Ultra High Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Springer, 2006).

From MRI to thermal physics

The turn in Robitaille's career came from an anomaly in his own instrument. The 8 Tesla scanner required less radio-frequency power than expected, a result that led him to think of MRI as a thermal process — in early NMR the T₁ relaxation time was called the "thermal relaxation time."

Reasoning that if MRI is thermal it should be possible to extract the temperature of the human head using the laws of thermal emission, in the way Penzias and Wilson had derived ~3 K for the microwave background, he found the calculation returned a Wien displacement temperature of less than 1 K for a human head. Something in the standard treatment of thermal emission, he concluded, was wrong.

Kirchhoff's law of thermal emission

Robitaille's central scientific claim is that Kirchhoff's law is invalid in its universal form. He accepts the uncontroversial part — that for an opaque object at thermal equilibrium, emission equals absorption. What he rejects is Kirchhoff's further step: the assertion that radiation within any cavity at equilibrium must be black, or normal, irrespective of the material of the cavity walls. That universality, he argues, has no proper experimental basis and misrepresents laboratory reality, since real cavities take on the character of their walls.

On his account the correct treatment of thermal emission is properly credited to Balfour Stewart rather than Kirchhoff, and blackbody radiation requires a rigid lattice — a physical structure capable of supporting the necessary oscillations — rather than arising universally from matter in any state.

The liquid metallic hydrogen Sun

If Kirchhoff's universality fails, then a body cannot be inferred to be a blackbody merely from emitting a thermal spectrum. Robitaille draws the consequence directly: because the Sun emits a continuous thermal spectrum, and only condensed matter with a lattice can do so, the Sun cannot be a gaseous plasma. It must be condensed matter.

He proposes that the solar interior consists of liquid metallic hydrogen — hydrogen compressed into a metallic, lattice-bearing liquid state — with the photosphere marking the transition to a gaseous atmosphere. He regards the thermal spectrum of the Sun as, by itself, sufficient proof of a condensed solar body, and has developed the model across a long series of papers together with a range of supporting solar observations.

The microwave background and the Earth's oceans

The same reasoning underlies his reassignment of the cosmic microwave background. Since the assignment of the 2.7 K signal to the cosmos depends on the universality of Kirchhoff's law, and since that universality fails, the signal need not be cosmological at all. Robitaille argues that astrophysics has never properly accounted for the thermal emission of water itself, and that the microwave background is produced by the Earth's oceans rather than by the early universe.

He set out radiological analyses of the WMAP and COBE satellite results — among the most-read papers in the journal Progress in Physics — and later extended the analysis to the Planck satellite. He has also questioned the validity of Boltzmann's constant as a further consequence of correcting Kirchhoff's law.

The New York Times advertisement

In 2002 Robitaille took the unusual step of purchasing an advertisement in The New York Times announcing "The Collapse of the Big Bang and the Gaseous Sun." The response from the press and from the scientific community was immediate and at times harsh. He has since noted that, contrary to some reports, the advertisement had nothing to do with the concurrent Ohio controversy over the teaching of evolution; the timing was coincidental.

Following the advertisement he turned to Progress in Physics, where he has published the bulk of his work in thermal physics and astrophysics.

Sky Scholar

Robitaille presents his arguments to a general audience through his YouTube channel Sky Scholar, where he lectures on thermal emission, the structure of the Sun, and the history of blackbody physics.

Reception

Mainstream physics and astrophysics have not accepted Robitaille's conclusions, and his work in these areas has been published almost entirely outside the established journals. Critics hold that Kirchhoff's law is well founded and experimentally supported, that helioseismology and standard solar modelling account successfully for the Sun as a gaseous plasma, and that the isotropy and spectral form of the microwave background rule out a terrestrial origin.

His defenders on this wiki note that the objections largely restate the consensus rather than engage the specific argument he makes about cavity radiation, and that his standing as the builder of the 8 Tesla instrument gives his reading of thermal emission a practical authority that critics have tended to pass over.

Related work from researchers on this wiki

Robitaille's reassignment of the microwave background belongs to a wider body of work catalogued here that disputes its cosmological interpretation:

His own WMAP: A Radiological Analysis (2007).
Vincent W Carpenter — Does The Microwave Background Radiation Support The Big Bang Theory?
Alexander A Scarborough — The Cosmic Microwave Background: A New Perspective on the 2.7 K Radiation
Joseph J Smulsky — Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and New Space Projects
Possible Solar Microwave Background Radiation — which likewise proposes a local rather than cosmological source.

Further material is indexed under Category:Big Bang and Category:Cosmology.

Personal life

Robitaille lives quietly in Columbus, Ohio. He has been married to Patricia for over thirty years, and they have three sons: Jacob, Christophe and Luc. He sails a Flying Scot and is an avid builder of timber-frame structures.

Abstracts

2007 - "WMAP: A Radiological Analysis" (Read in full)