Companion to The Hydroplate Theory and the Heat Problem. Each entry says what the source actually establishes and which direction it pushes. Library keys refer to sources/index.tsv.
Primary — Walt Brown
brown-2008 — In the Beginning, 8th edition. The radioactivity chapter is book pp. 381–435. Contains the mechanism, the 7.72 × 10³⁷ erg energy figure (endnote 89, pp. 428–429), the heat answer (p. 400), the quartz shut-off temperature (p. 393 and p. 400), Table 44's launch requirement (p. 600), and the photoneutron thresholds of endnote 82 that contradict endnote 89. This is the strongest statement of Brown's case and the article is built on it. The copy on disk is a post-2015 printing, which resolves the long-standing confusion about whether the radioactivity chapter was 8th- or 9th-edition material.
brown-2019 — the 9th edition, recovered as a PDF from Real Science Radio via the Wayback Machine after creationscience.com moved it behind a registration wall. Raises the energy figure to 1.01 × 10³⁸ erg. Cuts against Brown: every problem in the article scales with this number.
brown-2020, brown-2010, brown-2015 — the Technical Notes (including "Energy Available" and "Energy Required"), the 2010 pre-critique baseline of the radioactivity chapter, and four dated captures bracketing Brown's revision of the pre-Flood crust from 10 miles to 60 miles. The revision matters because it invalidates Glenn Morton's flexure argument and softens Baumgardner's per-kilogram figure.
The energy budget — three independent checks, all young-earth
baumgardner-2011b — John Baumgardner's author-to-author critique, Flood Science Review pp. 520–528. The single most important critical source in the subject, and now obtained in full rather than through paraphrase. Two arguments: the amplitude-limited elastic strain energy of the fluttering crust (0.10 J/kg, 51 bar peak stress, p. 522), and the fission-fragment waste heat (7.9 × 10³¹ J, "enough to vaporize the entire granite crust hundreds of times over," p. 526). Cuts hard against Brown.
carter-2023b — Carter and Isaacs, Journal of Creation 37(1):87–93. Top-down gravitational potential energy of Brown's pre-Flood earth: 2.38 × 10²⁷ J. Independently confirms Brown's own Table 38 figure of 1.1 × 10²⁷ J. Cuts against Brown.
faulkner-2013 — CRSQ 49(3):197–210. Jet kinetic energy and atmospheric thermalization: assuming only one millionth of the jet energy heats the air still gives a 34 °C global rise. The most conservative and best-constructed argument any critic has made, and never answered with arithmetic.
The heat problem stated by young-earth researchers
worraker-2018 through worraker-2022, plus worraker-2016 — the only systematic, quantitative, model-neutral survey of Flood heat in the creationist literature. Worraker defends no fix, which makes him the best witness. Granite at 1.99 × 10⁷ J/kg, "more than 13 times enough to completely melt"; total radiogenic heat over 4.5 Ga at 7.6 × 10³⁰ J, within 2 % of Brown's own figure by an unrelated route.
icr-2005 — RATE Vol. 2 ch. 10. Concedes the heat problem (p. 761), lists supernatural heat removal as an admissible inference (p. 762), and hedges Humphreys' fix as one that "may not, in fact, be the correct mechanism" (p. 763). Establishes that Brown's charge against his own movement is accurate.
doyle-2020b, doyle-2020 — CMI's institutional position: no simple scientific answer exists and there may not be one; and separately, that the hydroplate energy budget is unsolved with no substantive interaction with Baumgardner or Faulkner.
helmkamp-2022b, -part-2 — Barbara Helmkamp, CRSQ 59. Independently reinvents Brown's endothermic-nuclear-sink idea, more carefully, confined to radiohaloes, and labelled incomplete by its author. Cuts for Brown to the extent that it shows his instinct was shared by a careful researcher.
Proton-21, on which "cold repacking" depends
adamenko-2003b, adamenko-2003, adamenko-2004, adamenko-2004b, proton21-2016 — the laboratory's own output. Establishes what was measured and, crucially, that the laboratory's claim is that products are stable and radioactivity is destroyed, and that "cold repacking" appears inside a net-energy-release claim. The laboratory does not support the use Brown makes of it.
mowry-2009 — Sandia SAND2009-7874. Tested an aluminium surrogate, not a Proton-21 sample; attributes the anomaly to ejected impurities. Refutes the "a national laboratory replicated it" claim made in the popular defences. Public domain.
dolan-2009 — the only substantive outside review, in a cold-fusion newsletter. Reports the flagship radioactivity-destruction effect as only 5–10 % and ~2 kJ of measured plasma energy against a claimed 10–50 MJ.
The decay-acceleration mechanism
caldwell-1980, filipescu-2024, kawano-2020 — measured photofission and photoneutron cross sections for ²³⁸U and ²³²Th. These are what make the photon-field heat penalty computable. Cut decisively against Brown's mechanism.
choudhary-2025 — the bound-state beta decay literature behind Bosch's rhenium-187 result. Confirms Brown reports Bosch accurately and establishes why it does not generalize.
barker-1991 — the Barker patent Brown cites. Says the opposite of what Brown uses it for: stripping electrons increases thorium's alpha half-life from 80,000 to 146,000 years. Also reports count rates "oscillating like a weakly damped harmonic oscillator," which decay does not do.
jenkins-2008 versus norman-2009, cooper-2009, pomme-2022 — the claimed solar-distance effect and the replication record against it. The disputed effect is at the 0.1 % level; Brown needs 10¹³.
The neutron-fluence test
hidaka-2024 — the samarium and gadolinium neutron dosimeter, its detection threshold (10¹⁶ n/cm²), and measured fluences including the Oklo reactor cores (1.3–8.0 × 10²⁰ n/cm²). Open access, CC BY. This is the source behind the strongest argument in the article.
hiess-2012 — the uniformity of terrestrial ²³⁸U/²³⁵U, a second constraint on any global neutron episode.
ame2020-atomic-mass-evaluation — the mass table used for the cold-repacking accounting.
lis-2019 — measured cometary D/H across nine comets, 1.03 to 3.40 × VSMOW. Falsifies Brown's one sharp prediction, which requires a single value of exactly 2.
The popular defences, audited in full
nickel-2015 — twelve videos, 6 h 07 m of distinct material, Part 8 on radioactivity. Contains no energy budget of any kind.
enyart-2019e, enyart-2019d, enyart-2019c, enyart-2019g — five radio programmes answering twenty named heat objections, plus Nickel's two spreadsheets. The only original heat calculations the hydroplate camp has produced. Both are arithmetically exact and both fail physically; the article shows how.
Standing For Truth, eighteen transcripts — keys mcqueen-2022, budinsky-2020 through budinsky-2025, bond-2019, lisle-2020, hubbard-2021, and others. Audited claim by claim in research/standing-for-truth-audit.md: 69 leads, 15 sound, 8 sound but weak, 24 needing work, 16 dead, 6 unverifiable.
kingcrocoduck-2022, gutsickgibbon-2022 — the critic side, graded by the same standard and found wanting in specific, documented ways.
Critics of the hydroplate theory generally
oard-2013 — CMI's commissioned critique. "Orders of magnitude insufficient." Never answered on heat. Notably, it never mentions Proton-21 or cold repacking at all.
kuban-2020 — the most comprehensive non-creationist critique. Right conclusion; one arithmetic error understating his own case by 1,000×; leans in one place on Amazon-review calculations.
morton-2003 — strong on seismology (shear-wave shadow zones), wrong on "64 million degrees" (a units error), and out of date on flexure now that Brown's crust is 100 km rather than 10.
isaacs-2022 — ARJ 15:97–108, against the liquefaction submodel rather than the heat. Included because it is the AiG-journal position on the model.
pitts-2009 — the rigorous refutation of the rival cooling proposal. Prefer it to Morton and Murphy.
The adjudication and the debate record
spencer-2011, -part-2 — the account of the only formal, moderated, multi-round review any Flood model has undergone. Brown participated in three of five rounds and withdrew.
foley-2004b, foley-2004, meert-2006 — the standing debate offer and why it never produced a debate.
bramer-2025 — Brown died in 2025.
Experiments nobody has done
- Replicate Proton-21 independently, with a process blank. Twenty-six years, five thousand shots, one laboratory, zero outside replications in either direction. This is the cheapest decisive experiment in the whole subject.
- Measure samarium and gadolinium isotopes in the deepest continental crust available. The dosimeter is standard and the prediction is unambiguous. Nobody has ever framed it as a test of a Flood model.
- Publish a closed hydroplate energy budget — source, sinks, total, in joules. Nickel started this in 2019 and has been promising the finished version for six years.
- Recompute Morton's flexure argument at a 100 km crust. It may not survive, and the honest thing is to find out.