Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (56 page)

A certain amount of work is also going on in Europe.
One of the French nationalized constructors and one company outside the nationalized elements have been making preliminary studies, and a little company money has in one case actually been committed.
Some work is also going on in Britain where rigs are now in existence.
Most of it is private venture work, such as that being done by Ed Hull, a colleague of Townsend Brown who, as much as anybody, introduced Europe to electrogravitics.
Aviation Studies’ Gravity Research Group is doing some work, mainly on k studies, and is sponsoring dielectric investigations.

One Swedish company and two Canadian companies have been making studies, and quite recently the Germans have woken up to the possibilities.
Several of the companies have started digging out some of the early German papers on wave physics.
They are almost certain to plan a gravitics program.
Curiously enough the Germans during the war paid no attention to electrogravitics.
This is one line of advance that they did not pioneer in any way and it was basically a U.S.
creation.
Townsend Brown in electrogravitics is the equivalent of Frank Whittle in gas turbines.
This German overlooking of electrostatics is even more surprising when it is remembered how astonishingly advanced and prescient the Germans were in nuclear research.
The modern theory of making thermonuclear weapons without plutonium fission initiators returns to the original German idea that was dismissed, even ridiculed.
The Germans never went very far with fission, indeed they doubted that this chain would ever be made to work.
The German air industry, still in the embryo stage, has included electrogravitics among the subjects it intends to examine when establishing the policy that the individual companies will adopt after the present early stage of foreign licence has enabled industry to get abreast of the other countries in aircraft development.

It is impossible to read thorough this summary of the widening efforts being made to understand the nature of matter of gravity without sharing the hope that many groups now have, of major theoretical breakthroughs occurring before very long.
Experience in nucleonics has shown that, when attempts to win knowledge on this scale are made, advances are soon seen.
There are a number of elements in industry, and some managements, who see gravity as a problem for later generations.
Many see nothing in it all and they may be right.
But as said earlier, if Dr.
Vaclav Hlavaty thinks gravity is potentially controllable that surely should be justification enough, and indeed inspiration, for physicists to apply their minds and for management to take a risk.
Hlavaty is the only man who thinks he can see a way of doing the mathematics to demonstrate Einstein’s unified field theory—something that Einstein himself said was beyond him.
Relativity and the unified field theory go to the root of electrogravitics and the shifts in thinking, the hopes and fears, and a measure of progress is to be obtained only in the last resort from men of this stature.

Major theoretical breakthroughs to discover the sources of gravity will be made by the most advanced intellects using the most advanced research tools.
Aviation’s role is therefore to impress upon physicists of this calibre with the urgency of the matter and to aid them with statistical and peripheral investigations that will help to clarify the background to the central mathematical and physical puzzles.
Aviation could also assist by recruiting some of these men as advisers.
Convair has taken the initiative with its recently established panel of advisers on nuclear projects, which include Dr.
Edward Teller of the University of California.
At the same time much can be done in development of laboratory rigs, condenser research and dielectric development, which do not require anything like the same cerebral capacity to get results and make a practical contribution.

As gravity is likely to be linked with the new particles, only the highest powered particle accelerators are likely to be of use in further fundamental knowledge.
The country with the biggest tools of this kind is in the best position to examine the characteristics of the particles and from those countries the greatest advances seem most likely.

Though the United States has the biggest of the bevatrons—the Berkeley bevatron is 6.2 bev—the Russians have a 10 bev accelerator in construction which, when it is completed, will be the world’s largest.
At Brookhaven a 25 bev instrument is in development which, in turn, will be the biggest.
Other countries without comparable facilities are of course at a great disadvantage from the outset in the contest to discover the explanation of gravity.
Electrogravitics, moreover, unfortunately, competes with nuclear studies for its facilities.
The clearest thinking brains are bound to be attracted to localities where the most extensive laboratory equipment exists.
So, one way and another, results are most likely to come from the major countries with the biggest undertakings.
Thus the nuclear facilities have a direct bearing on the scope for electrogravitics work.

The OEEC report in January made the following points:

The U.S.
has six to eight entirely different types of reactor in operation and many more under construction.
Europe has now two different types in service.

The U.S.
has about 30 research reactors plus four in Britain, two in France.

The U.S.
has two nuclear-powered marine engines.
Europe has none, but the U.K.
is building one.
Isotope separation plants for the enrichment of uranium in the U.S.
are roughly 11 times larger than the European plant in Britain.

Europe’s only heavy water plant (in Norway) produces somewhat less than one-twentieth of American output.

In 1955 the number of technicians employed in nuclear energy work in the U.S.
was about 15,000; there are about 5,000 in Britain, 1,800 in France, and about 1,000 in the rest of Europe.
But the working party says that pessimistic conclusions should not be drawn from these comparisons.
European nuclear energy effort is unevenly divided at the moment, but some countries have notable achievements to their credit and important developments in prospect.
The main reason for optimism is that, taken as a whole, “Europe’s present nuclear effort falls very far short of its industrial potential.”

Though gravity research, such as there has been of it, has been unclassified, new principles and information gained from the nuclear research facilities that have a vehicle application is expected to be withheld.

The heart of the problem to understanding gravity is likely to prove to be the way in which the very high energy sub-nuclear particles convert something, whatever it is, continuously and automatically into the tremendous nuclear and electromagnetic forces.
Once this key is understood, attention can later be directed to finding laboratory means of duplicating the process and reversing its force lines in some local environment and returning the energy to itself to produce counterbary.
Looking beyond it seems possible that gravitation will be shown to be a part of the universal electro-magnetic processes and controlled in the same way as a light wave or radio wave.
This is a synthesis of the Einstein and Hlavaty concepts.
Hence it follows that though in its initial form the mechanical processes for countering gravity may initially be massive to deal with the massive forces involved, eventually this could be expected to form some central power generation unit.
Barycentric control in some required quantity could be passed over a distance by a form of radio wave.
The prime energy source to energise the waves would of course be nuclear in its origins.

It is difficult to say which lines of detailed development being processed in the immediate future is more likely to yield significant results.
Perhaps the three most promising are: first, the new attempt by the team of men led by Chamberlain working with the Berkeley bevatron to find, the anti-neutron, and to identify more of the characteristics of the antiproton
^*40
and each of the string of high energy particles that have been discovered during recent operation at 6.2 bev.

A second line of approach is the United States National Bureau of Standards program to pin down with greater accuracy the acceleration values of gravity.
The presently accepted figure of 32.174 feet per second per second is known to be not comprehensive, though it has been sufficiently accurate for the limited needs of industry hitherto.
The NBS program aims at re-determining the strength of gravity to within one part of a million.
The present method has been to hold a ball 16 feet up and chart the elapsed time of descent with electronic measuring equipment.
The new program is based on the old, but with this exceptional degree of accuracy it is naturally immensely more difficult and is expected to take 3 years.

A third promising line is the new technique of measuring high-energy particles in motion that was started by the University of California last year.
This involves passing cosmic rays through a chamber containing a mixture of gas, alcohol and water vapour.
This creates charged atoms, or positive ions, by knocking electrons off the gas molecules.
A sudden expansion of the chamber results in a condensation of water droplets along the track that can be plotted on a photographic plate.
This method makes it easier to assess the energy of particles and to distinguish one from the other.
It also helps to establish the characteristics of the different types of particle.
The relationship between these high-energy particles, and their origin, and characteristics, have a bearing on electrogravitics in general.

So much of what has to be discovered as a necessary preliminary to gravity is of no practical use by itself.
There is no conceivable use, for instance, for the anti-proton, yet its discovery even at a cost of $9-million is essential to check the mathematics of the fundamental components of matter.
Similarly it is necessary to check that all the nuclear ghosts that have been postulated theoretically do in fact exist.
It is not, moreover, sufficient, as in the past only to observe the particles by radiation counters.
In each instance a mechanical maze has to be devised and attached to a particle accelerator to trap only the particle concerned.
Each discovery becomes a wedge for a deeper probe of the nucleus.
Many of the particles of very high energy have only a fleeting existence and collisions that give rise to them from bevatron bombardment is a necessary prerequisite to an understanding of gravity.
There are no shortcuts to this process.

Most of the major programs for extending human knowledge on gravity are being conducted with instruments already in use for nuclear research and to this extent the cost of work exclusively on gravitational examinations is still not of major proportions.
This has made it difficult for aviation to gauge the extent of the work in progress on gravity research.

CONCLUSIONS

1. No attempts to control the magnitude or direction of the earth’s gravitational force have yet been successful.
   But if the explanation of gravity is to be found in the as yet undetermined characteristics of the very high energy particles it is becoming increasingly possible with the bevatron to work with the constituent matter of gravity.
   It is therefore reasonable to expect that the new bevatron may, before long, be used to demonstrate limited gravitational control.
   
2. An understanding and identification of these particles is on the frontiers of human knowledge, and a full assessment of them is one of the major unresolved puzzles of the nucleus.
   An associated problem is to discover a theory to account for the cosmic and quantum relations of gravity, and a theory to link the gravitational constant with the other three dimensionless constants.
   
3. Though the obstacles to an adequate grasp of microphysics still seem formidable, the transportation rewards that could follow from electrogravitics are as high as can be envisaged.
   In a weightless environment, movement with sharp-edged changes of direction could offer unique maneuverability.
   
4. Determination of the environment of the anti-proton, discovery of the anti-neutron and closer examination of the other high energy particles are preliminaries to the hypothesis that gravity is one aspect of electromagnetism that may eventually be controlled like a wave.
   When the structure of the nucleus becomes clearer, the influence of the gravitational force upon the nucleus and the nature of its behaviour in space will be more readily understood.
   This is a great advance on the Newtonian concept of gravity acting at a distance.
   
5. Aviation’s role appears to be to establish facilities to handle many of the peripheral and statistical investigations to help fill in the background on electrostatics.
   
6. A distinction has to be made between electrostatic energy for propulsion and counterbary.
   Counterbary is the manipulator, of gravitational force lines; barycentric control is the adjustment to such manipulative capability to produce a stable type of motion suitable for transportation.
   
7. Electrostatic energy sufficient to produce low speeds (a few thousand dynes) has already been demonstrated.
   Generation of a region of positive electrostatic energy on one side of a plate and negative on the other sets up the same lift or propulsion effect as the pressure and suction below and above a wing, except that in the case of electrostatic application no airflow is necessary.
   
8. Electrostatic energy sufficient to produce a Mach 3 fighter is possible with megavolt energies and a k of over 10,000.
   
9. k figures of 6,000 have been obtained from some ceramic materials and there are prospects of 30,000.
   
10. Apart from electrogravitics there are other rewards from investment in electrostatic equipment.
    Automation, autonetics and even turbine development use similar laboratory facilities.
    
11. Progress in electrogravitics probably awaits a new genius in physics who can find a single equation to tie up all the conflicting observations and theory on the structure and arrangement of forces and the part the high energy particles play in the nucleus.
    This can occur any time, and the chances are improved now that bev.
    energies are being obtained in controlled laboratory conditions.