Alexander Bolonkin
Alexander Bolonkin | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | Russian-American |
| Known for | Advanced space-propulsion concepts and a speculative theory relating the fundamental parameters of the Universe |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Aerospace engineering, theoretical physics |
| Institutions | Brooklyn College (City University of New York) |
Alexander Bolonkin (14 March 1933 – 25 December 2020) was a Russian-American aerospace engineer, researcher and author. He is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Biography
Bolonkin worked as an aerospace engineer in the Soviet Union before emigrating to the United States, where he was associated with research work for NASA and U.S. Air Force laboratories and taught at Brooklyn College (City University of New York). He published prolifically on speculative aerospace and space-technology concepts, including space towers, cable and "space elevator" structures, solar and electrostatic propulsion, and other advanced-technology proposals.
Ideas
In a series of self-published articles (including papers on the General Science Journal and archived at the Internet Archive) titled Universe: Relations between Time, Matter, Volume, Distance, and Energy, Bolonkin developed a theory intended to derive relations among the main parameters of the Universe — energy, time, volume, distance, matter, and (in a later part) charge. He argues that these quantities can be transformed into one another and that the Universe ultimately consists of a single substance, energy, from which he attempts to derive minimal ("quantum") values of each parameter and estimates for cosmological quantities. These claims fall outside accepted physics and cosmology.