Melvin A. Cook

Melvin Alonzo Cook (October 10, 1911 – October 12, 2000) was an American chemist, most known from his work in explosives, including the development of shaped charges and slurry explosives.

Family Melvin married Wanda Garfield. They had three sons and two daughters. Their son, Merrill Cook, became a politician who served as the U.S. representative for Utah's second congressional district from 1997 to 2001. In some of his work in this area of creation theory he provided arguments in favor of a 6000-year-old planetary surface. One argument for a "young Earth," which he wrote about in his book, Science and Mormonism, was that the atmosphere had not yet reached an equilibrium state with respect to carbon-14 creation/decay, and thus the atmosphere of Earth was in fact not older than 6000 years, although this has been debated. He wrote an introduction to the 1954 book Man, His Origin and Destiny, by Joseph Fielding Smith.

Selected bibliography

Books Prehistory and Earth Models (1966, ) Science and Mormonism (1968, ASIN B00166NKK4) with his son, M. Garfield Cook.

Articles "Plasma and Universal Gravitation" — From Appendix III, The Science of High Explosives — American Chemical Society Monograph Series No. 139 (1958)

Other frequently cited writings "What Happened to the Earth's Helium?" — New Scientist, Vol. 24, 3 December 1964, pp. 631–632 "Where is the Earth's Radiogenic Helium?" — Nature, Vol. 179, 26 January 1957, p. 213

External sources Article on the BLU-82 at GlobalSecurity.org Notation on The Melvin Cook Papers (1802–1989) at the University of Utah TalkOrigins Archive article on a Melvin Cook claim Who's Who in Creation/Evolution at ChristianAnswers.net History of Dyno Nobel