The Sagnac Awards and Their Significance

In honor of the many significant contributions to alternative science, the NPA will present its Third Annual Sagnac Award in 2011 to three deserving scientists. Any individual whose lifetime work contributes substantially to science or technology outside the confines of mainstream paradigms could be eligible for the Sagnac Award, regardless of nationality or educational background. The award namesake, French physicist Georges Sagnac (1869-1926), was an associate of Nobelists Pierre and Marie Curie, Jean Perrin and Paul Langevin at the Sorbonne in Paris. Sagnac conducted experiments in 1913 demonstrating a net difference between light paths moving in opposite directions on a rotating platform. Many alternative scientists believe his 'Sagnac Effect' challenges the theories of Sagnac's contemporary, Albert Einstein. Yet in spite of its challenge and repeatability, Sagnac's experiment receives only passing mention, if any, in physics textbooks, and little is known about Sagnac himself. So just as Sagnac was not recognized for his major contributions, the Sagnac Award is intended to honor those unsung heroes making largely unrecognized, but significant contributions to science today.

The Award, designed by Greg Volk and David de Hilster, features three interlocking rings to symbolize matter circulating in closed loops, a possible ring model for the electron as proposed by Alfred Parson, Arthur Compton and other early 20th century scientists.

Click here to see the 2010 winners

Click here to see the 2009 winners

2011 Sagnac Award Recipients

Born in Egypt, where he obtained his bachelor degree in 1947, Mahmoud Melehy joined the Egyptian State Telephone and Telegraph Service, prior to moving top the US in 1948. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 1952, and in 1958 joined the Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty at the University of Connecticut (UConn) in Storrs, where he remains a professor emeritus. In 1960, Dr. Melehy consulted at Shockley Transistor, Mountain View, CA, resulting in two published papers with Dr. W. Shockley, inventor of the junction transistor and co-recipient of the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics. Dr. Melehy's research has been devoted mainly to generalizing Einstein's 1905 theory of Brownian motion to surfaces, membranes and other interfaces. The generalized theory has led to a unified theory for semiconductor diodes and solar cells, which accurately corroborates experimental data reported, over more than 25 years, by some 27 authors. The general theory has further revealed that the first and second laws of thermodynamics require that electric charges reside at most interfaces. This result explains numerous natural phenomena, such as surface tension, capillarity, fog and cloud suspension, atmospheric electricity, particle adhesion to surfaces, the release of electric charges upon phase change, and the mystery of generating static electricity by rubbing two different surfaces against one another, to mention a few examples. Dr. Melehy has published on this subject some 80 scholarly journal publications and one book. He has presented his work in numerous international conferences, including the Paris, 2005 "Einstein Century International Conference".

Halton Christian Arp received his Bachelors degree from Harvard College in 1949 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1953, both cum laude. He is a professional astronomer who, earlier in his career, conducted Edwin Hubble's nova search in M31. He has earned the Helen B. Warner Prize, the Newcomb Cleveland Award and the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award. For 28 years he was staff astronomer at the Mt. Palomar and Mt. Wilson observatories. While there, he produced his well-known catalog of "Peculiar Galaxies" that are disturbed or irregular in appearance. Arp discovered, from photographs and spectra with the big telescopes, that many pairs of quasars (quasi-stellar objects) which have extremely high redshift z values (and are therefore thought to be receding from us very rapidly - and thus must be located at a great distance from us) are physically connected to galaxies that have low redshift and are known to be relatively close by. Because of Arp's observations, the assumption that high red shift objects have to be very far away - on which the Big Bang theory and all of "accepted cosmology" is based - has to be fundamentally reexamined.

Harold Aspden (b. 1927) is a retired British author, theoretical physicist, electrical engineer, and inventor from Southampton, Hampshire, England. He is an outspoken critic of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and has proposed a whole new concept of Physics based on a dynamic Aether fluid crystal structure permeating all space: the energy source that regulates quantum activity, constantly framing our whole physical universe, and that accounts for the creation of matter.

He is the author of a number of books, most notably Physics without Einstein (1969; 2005), The Physics of Creation (2003) and Creation: The Physical Truth (2006). He is also author of a number of papers published in notable peer-review journals (Journal of Applied Physics [1952], Lettere al Nuovo Cimento [Europhysics Letters], Physics Today, etc.) and in alternative non-mainstream journals (Hadronic Journal, Physics Essays, etc.).

His academic career was conducted at the following institutions: Manchester (B.Sc., 1945-1948), Trinity College, Cambridge (Ph.D., 1950-1953) and Southampton (Visiting Senior Research Fellow, 1983-1992). He was the director in charge of IBM's European Patent Operations from 1963 to 1983. He is also member of the British Institute of Physics.

Neil Munch has had a life-long interest in space, advanced physics, cosmology, and an insatiable curiosity about most everything.

• 1948-1956: advanced engineering projects in rocket propulsion, space travel, information systems, ordnance systems at several companies.
• 1956-1986: joined General Electric Space Division as scientific contributor and manager of space sciences groups up to 45 people.