D. Russell Humphreys
D. Russell Humphreys | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Louisiana State University |
| Known for | Young-earth creationist cosmology; Starlight and Time |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, Cosmology |
| Institutions | Sandia National Laboratories, Institute for Creation Research |
D. Russell Humphreys (David Russell Humphreys) is an American physicist and young-earth creationist known for proposing a creationist cosmology intended to reconcile the observation of distant starlight with a universe only thousands of years old. He is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Career
Humphreys received a PhD in physics from Louisiana State University in 1972 and worked for many years as a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories. He retired from Sandia in 2001 to work full time for the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), where he served as an associate professor of physics, and has also been associated with Creation Ministries International.
Ideas
In his book Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe (1994), Humphreys argues that the universe is only about six thousand years old as measured in Earth's reference frame, while proposing that gravitational time dilation caused clocks to run at different rates during the universe's origin so that far more time elapsed at the outer edge of an expanding, bounded cosmos. He has also written on creationist interpretations of the cosmic microwave background ("bumps in the Big Bang") and on planetary magnetic fields.
These proposals are advanced within the young-earth creationist community and are rejected by the mainstream cosmological consensus, which holds that the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old.