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David L Bergman

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David L. Bergman
David L. Bergman
Born(1938-08-06)August 6, 1938
DiedJune 3, 2020(2020-06-03)
ResidenceRoswell, GA, United States
NationalityUSA
Alma materUC Berkeley (B.A. Physics, 1961); UC Santa Barbara (M.S.E.E., 1967)
Known forElectron, Atomic Structure, Toroidal Ring, Fundamental Particles
Scientific career
FieldsPhysicist, Electrical Engineer
InstitutionsBoeing Airplane Co.; U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force; Common Sense Science, Inc.

David L. Bergman (6 August 1938 – 3 June 2020) was an American electrical engineer and independent physicist, best known for the spinning charged ring model of the electron and as the founder and president of Common Sense Science, Inc., the organization and publishing house through which a distinctive classical alternative to quantum mechanics was developed over three decades.

Bergman's central claim was that the elementary particles are not dimensionless points with unexplained intrinsic properties, but real physical objects with real geometry — specifically, charge distributed on a thin spinning ring. In a 1990 paper in Galilean Electrodynamics with J. Paul Wesley, he showed that such a ring, with only four free parameters, reproduces the electron's mass, charge, spin, and magnetic moment; is stable under electromagnetic forces alone with no ad hoc binding assumption; does not radiate; explains the gyromagnetic ratio of 2 rather than postulating it; and yields the anomalous magnetic moment to higher order in agreement with measurement.

With Charles W. Lucas, Jr., Thomas G. Barnes and Glen C. Collins, Bergman built this into a broader program covering the proton, neutron, nuclear structure, inertia, gravitation and molecular structure, published in the quarterly journal Foundations of Science which he edited (the Common Sense Science quarterly, not the Springer journal of the same name). The program is explicitly and openly grounded in a Christian creationist worldview, which shaped both its philosophical commitments — causality, realism, and the rejection of what its authors regarded as the acausal mysticism of quantum theory — and its reception.

Biography

Early life and education

Bergman grew up and worked on the Bergman Farm and Dairy, established and operated by his grandfather, father and uncles near Tulare, California. He excelled in high school academics, especially mathematics and science, and earned a B.A. in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. He later completed an M.S.E.E. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1967, after his career was already under way.

Engineering career

After two years with the Boeing Airplane Company in Seattle, Bergman began in 1963 a thirty-year career as a civilian electrical engineer working on military systems for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force. His work spanned the introduction of the transistor — he designed electronic circuits when transistors first became available — through radar-guided missiles and other major weapons systems; before retiring from federal service he was lead engineer on a classified Air Force weapon.

Bergman regarded this as formative rather than incidental to his later physics. His argument, repeated throughout his writing, was that the discipline of making electrical systems actually work teaches something about the nature of the physical world that a purely mathematical training does not: a circuit either functions or it does not, and no amount of formalism will rescue a design premised on a misunderstanding of what charge and fields really are.

Turn to fundamental physics

In 1980 Bergman concluded that natural phenomena are fundamentally electrical in character, and began active research on elementary particles. In 1990 he published his first paper on the electron, in Galilean Electrodynamics, with the physicist J. Paul Wesley. Around this time he met Charles W. Lucas, Jr., whose independent research had led to similar conclusions, and the two became long-term collaborators.

In 1997 Bergman founded Common Sense Science, Inc., a non-profit corporation providing research and education in fundamental physics. As its president he wrote for and published its quarterly journal, Foundations of Science, which circulated among scientists and lay readers internationally.

Personal life

He married in 1968 and had two children who settled near him in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia. In 2002 he married again, having one son with his second wife, who was from the Philippines. In retirement he divided his time between family, church activities, research, science conferences and publishing. He died on 3 June 2020, aged 81.

Scientific work

The spinning charged ring model of the electron

Bergman's foundational paper, "Spinning Charged Ring Model of Electron Yielding Anomalous Magnetic Moment" (with J. Paul Wesley, Galilean Electrodynamics vol. 1, Sept/Oct 1990, pp. 63-67), sets out the model that all his later work builds on.

The electron is taken to be a uniform surface charge density on a thin ring of radius R and half-thickness r, spinning about its axis of symmetry with angular velocity ω = c/R — that is, with the charge moving at the speed of light at the ring's radius. Four parameters — R, r, the total charge e, and the tangential velocity — are fixed by requiring the model to reproduce four measured properties: mass, charge, spin ℏ/2, and magnetic moment.

The results Bergman and Wesley emphasized are these:

  • Stability without ad hoc forces. Every earlier physical electron model — Abraham's, Lorentz's — required non-electromagnetic forces, invented for the purpose, to prevent the charge blowing itself apart under Coulomb repulsion. The ring model is claimed to be the first that is completely stable under electromagnetic forces alone: the electrostatic and magnetostatic energies come into equipartition, the magnetic self-attraction of the current loop balancing the electrostatic self-repulsion.
  • No radiation. Because the surface charge density and surface current density are constant in time, the configuration does not radiate — answering the objection that sank the orbiting-electron models.
  • The size of the electron comes out as the rationalized Compton wavelength, R = 3.86 × 10-13 m, and the rotation frequency as the Compton frequency. These are not inputs but consequences, and Bergman regarded their appearance as strong evidence that the Compton wavelength is a real physical dimension rather than a formal parameter.
  • The gyromagnetic ratio of 2 — the notorious factor by which the electron's magnetic moment exceeds the naive classical value, and which in the standard account is simply a property of a point particle — is derived from the geometry of the spinning ring.
  • The anomalous magnetic moment, the small correction beyond 2 that quantum electrodynamics computes to extraordinary precision, is recovered to higher order in agreement with observation.

The paper opens by quoting Ivan Sellin's admission that "a good theory of electron structure still is lacking" and that there is "still no generally accepted explanation for why electrons do not explode under the tremendous Coulomb repulsion forces in an object of small size." Bergman's position throughout was that this is a real and unanswered question, that the standard model's response — declare the electron pointlike and the question ill-posed — is an evasion rather than an answer, and that a model which resolves it deserves examination on that ground alone.

Extension to the proton, neutron and nucleus

Bergman applied the same approach across the particle spectrum. "The Real Proton" (2000), "Notions of a Neutron" (2001) and "Fine-Structure Properties of the Electron, Proton and Neutron" (2006) develop ring models of the nucleons, deriving their sizes, magnetic moments and fine-structure properties from geometry rather than from fitted parameters. "Nuclear Binding and Half-Lives" (2002) and "Hydrogen — Element #1" (2001) extend this to nuclear structure and to the simplest atom, and the FORMS project (Fields of Real Molecular Structures) carried the models up to molecular scale.

Inertia, force and the physical world

A parallel strand addresses the origin of the properties usually taken as primitive. "Origin of Inertial Mass" (1999) and "Inertial Mass of Charged Elementary Particles " (1997) argue that inertia is an electromagnetic effect of the particle's own field rather than an irreducible attribute of matter — a position with a long classical pedigree running back to J. J. Thomson. "Theory of Forces" (1998), "Forces on Moving Objects" (1997) and "The Troubled Theories of Magnetic Induction" (2000, 2005) pursue a unified force law, work later carried furthest by Lucas.

"The Law of Cause and Effect: Dominant Principle of Classical Physics" (2004) is the clearest statement of the methodological commitment underlying all of it: that every physical effect must have an identifiable physical cause, and that a theory which abandons this in favour of intrinsic, uncaused, or merely probabilistic properties has given up the explanatory ambition that made physics worth doing. The two-part "[[Observations of the Properties of Physical Entities Part 1 - Nature of the Physical World|Observations of the Properties of Physical Entities]]" (2004) sets out the corresponding ontology, and "Unification of Physics: Theory of Everything" (2003) the intended scope.

Science, origins and the creationist framework

Bergman was a creationist, and Common Sense Science made no secret of it: the organization presented its work to churches, creation-science fellowships, Christian schools and colleges as well as to scientific conferences. Papers including "Conflict of Atomism and Creationism in History" (1998), its 2011 revision "Conflict of Atomism and Creation-Science in History", the two-part "Science of Origins" (2007) and "Is There Truth in Science?" (1998) argue that the philosophical assumptions underwriting the scientific method — that reality exists, that it is orderly, that causes produce effects, that the human mind can grasp it — are the assumptions of a created and rational universe, and that modern physics has been progressively abandoning them.

This is the aspect of Bergman's work on which readers of this wiki will divide most sharply, and it should be stated plainly rather than elided. It cuts both ways in assessing him. On one hand, the ring model's technical content stands or falls independently of its author's theology: the equipartition of electric and magnetic energy in a spinning charged ring is either right or wrong on its own terms. On the other, Bergman himself insisted the connection was not incidental — he held that his physics followed from his metaphysics, and it would misrepresent him to present the model as though it had been developed in a worldview vacuum.

Reception

Bergman's work has been almost entirely ignored by mainstream physics. The relevant experimental point, and the one his critics regard as decisive, is that high-energy scattering experiments show no electron substructure down to about 10-20 m — some seven orders of magnitude smaller than the Compton-wavelength ring the model requires — and that the Standard Model's pointlike electron with intrinsic spin agrees with every measurement made to date, including the anomalous magnetic moment computed to twelve significant figures. The toroidal ring tradition, running from Alfred Lauck Parson's 1915 "magneton" through Arthur Compton's papers of the late 1910s to Bostick, Winterberg, Bergman and Lucas, is classified in the standard reference literature as obsolete.

Bergman's answer was that agreement with measurement is not the same as physical understanding, and that a formalism which computes the anomalous moment while denying that the electron has any structure to compute it from has purchased precision at the cost of intelligibility. Whether that is a profound objection or a category error is precisely the dispute.

Within the dissident community Bergman was widely respected, and Common Sense Science was among the better-organized alternative-physics efforts of its period: a real journal on a regular schedule, a coherent multi-decade research program, several collaborating researchers, and a body of work that engages the technical literature rather than gesturing at it. He was a frequent presence at Natural Philosophy Alliance conferences and his papers are among the most cited in the classical-electron literature on this wiki, alongside those of Winston H Bostick and Glen C Collins.

An episode Bergman himself publicized — recorded in "No Government Funds for CSS Research: DARPA sees FORMS as Threat to Theories of Modern Physics" (2005) — was the rejection of CSS's molecular-modelling proposal by DARPA, which he reported as having been declined on the ground that the approach conflicted with accepted theory rather than on technical merit. His account is the only one available, and is presented here as his account.

Publications

Key papers

  • D. L. Bergman and J. P. Wesley, "Spinning Charged Ring Model of Electron Yielding Anomalous Magnetic Moment", Galilean Electrodynamics 1, Sept/Oct 1990, pp. 63-67 (Read in full)
  • D. L. Bergman, "Spinning Charged Ring Model of Elementary Particles", Galilean Electrodynamics (1991)
  • D. L. Bergman, "Charged Ring Model of Elementary Particles: A Controversy", Galilean Electrodynamics (1993)
  • D. L. Bergman and C. W. Lucas, Jr., "Credibility of Common Sense Science" (2003)

Abstracts

Part 1 - Nature of the Physical World]]" (Read in full)

  • 2004 - "[[Observations of the Properties of Physical Entities

Part 2 - Shape and Size of Electron, Proton and Neutron]]" (Read in full)

]]" (Read in full)

Books

See also

References

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