Bravo! I love this kind of article, and wish there were far more of them.
We in the sciences need to fight our tendency to suppress the embarrassing history of mistaken scoffing; where new discoveries are rejected because if they were real, they'd make the scientific community look like fools.
Suppress? Yes. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And it may not be conscious suppression, but the effects are the same. If we take a detailed look at the history of science, it's quite fascinating to see which discoveries were ridiculed at the time. And it's amazing that this ridicule is not common knowledge. Perhaps historians of science need to focus more on digging up dirt, rather than letting scientists tell their own sanitized version of history. For example, try to find any texts which mention:
String Theory
rejected by the wider community, kept alive almost entirely by Caltech's John Schwartz, the "pariah of the physics department," who only avoided being fired because of secret support by Murray Gell-Mann. The work was set back ~10 years by widespread sneering.
See "Feynman's Rainbow," also "Euclid's Window"
Black Holes
Proposed in 1930 by S. Chandra, who was hounded out of his department by Arthur Eddington and supporters, since black holes would ruin one of Eddington's theories (later proved wrong.) The work was only taken up again in the 1960s, so Eddington's actions set black hole research back by thirty years.
Scanning-tunneling microscope.
Ridiculed by the microscope community. Apparently the project avoided setbacks mostly because its discoverers attracted early support by the Nobel prize committee. See Science News, Atom Tinkerer's Paradise
Non-euclidian geometry The field was explored by K. F. Gauss, who fearing ridicule, kept all his papers secret until the end of his life. Lobachevsky did some similar work and did attract scorn. The topic was finally taken seriously after several more decades passed.
Doppler effect.
Proposed in 1842, but ridiculed and ignored because it contradicted the Aether theory of light. Stellar red shift finally penetrated the wall of scorn two decades later (after Doppler himself had died.)
---------
Other more famous instances of ridiculed/vindicated discoveries:
Lynn Margulis, mitochondria, chloroplasts, etc., were once independant cells.
Barbara McClintlok's "jumping genes"
Robert Goddard, finally vindicated when those idiotic spaceships of his were taken seriously by Nazi scientists.
Weltner's continental drift theory
Wright Brothers. Ridiculed by top US scientists and Scientific American magazine, they finally had to move to France before anyone would believe their claims or even come to observe their machine in action.
Arrhenius, ion chemistry. Nearly lost his degree because ions were a heresy (atoms were known to be indivisible.)
Ignaz Semmelweis, doctors should wash hands before surgery. (Semmelweis fought the medical community for ~10 years, and ended up committing suicide in an insane asylum.)
L. Galvani, electricity. "They call me the frogs' dancing master."
W. Harvey, circulation of blood. The medical community ostracized him.
The exact opposite of a bubble would be an airborn droplet.
Yes and no. True, the opposite of an UNDERWATER bubble is an airborne droplet.
However, the opposite of a soap bubble in air drifting on the breeze is an antibubble drifting around underwater.
The part about beer is interesting because it's analogous to blowing soap bubbles on an extremely humid day: the bubbles last longer, or possibly last forever if the air is slightly supersaturated.
An antibubble in beer would collect more and more carbon dioxide into its thin gas layer. If it didn't touch the fluid surface from below, there'd be no reason for it to burst.
Although first observed and studied almost a century ago, no one until now has been able to determine how they form.
Yeah, right. Even little kids have been making antibubbles since that article came out in 1974. If you've tried making them, it's totally obvious how they form. Perhaps what's not totally obvious is why a thin layer of air is stable underwater. But if detergents can stablize an air/water interface in a normal bubble, then this explains both a water film in the air, and an air film underwater.
Antibub trivia: antibubbles have "rainbow" colors, but the rainbows in the opposite place from a soap bubble: they appear at the bottom of the sphere. And of course the rainbows in both bubbles and antibubbles are not rainbows, instead they're antirainbows: dark spectral slots in white light. They're bands of "subtractive colors;" cyan, magenta, yellow.
Note that it's VERY easy to blow antibubbles. The
main trick is to set up a clean liquid surface with a bit of detergent in the water.
Some antibubble references:
C.L. Stong, "Curious Bubbles in Which a Gas Encloses a Liquid Instead of the Other Way Around", Scientific American Magazine, THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST, April 1974
It's not impossible to kill yourself with a badly-designed ECG device.
Places like UL/CSA say that voltages under 40V or so are safe. But if you apply it to electrodes pasted to your chest, the unsafe voltage is WAY lower than 40V.
If you build a simple ECG and connect it to a computer, that computer had better be battery-powered. If not, then you might get a nasty surprise (waking up in the afterlife of your choice.)
"Source dipole?" "self-regauging?" "Drude electrons?" I've heard those terms a few times before. Sounds somebody's been reading articles by Col. Thomas "MEG Device" Bearden.
Hey everyone, please get your crackpots straight. Perpetual Motion crackpots just want their devices to keep spinning constantly. Give them a maglev bearing and a vacuum chamber and they're happy forever. It's only the "Free Energy" crackpots who want their devices to keep going faster and faster (or to drive uphill, or to drive against friction, etc.) I should know; I'm a FE crackpot myself. See
http://amasci.com/freenrg/fnrg.html
This current inventor is making the usual mistakes: doing everything but PUBLISHING. He seems to start out right: trying to get his idea out into the public. Yet nobody else can build a test model, since the critical parts simply MUST be hidden inside a wooden box... to prevent all the idea thieves from taking the secret and becoming billionaires!:)
So let's see... the goal is to convince the disbelievers. Yet the critical parts must remain secret. So we can show "convincing demonstrations" and give explanations to the experts, but we simply HAVE to keep those experts from ever learning the details, otherwise they'll find out how to build their own version.
Isn't there something wrong with this picture?
If a "free energy" inventor comes up with a genuine discovery, he won't need any oil companies to suppress him as long as he follows the usual path and keeps the critical details a secret.
Note: "pseudoscience" doesn't mean making up your own terminology. After all, most cutting-edge advancements will require some new words to be coined. Pseudoscience means "fake science;" something that gives the surface appearance of science, yet is nothing of the sort. I certainly agree that this battery-car is pseudoscience, since a central goal of a genuine scientist is to teach colleagues how to do it. Hold nothing back. No excuses, no paranoia, no "naive experimenters might hurt themselves." Explain in great detail how the actual device in use was built and adjusted. If there are "idea thieves" trying to steal the device, make damn sure they succeed!
As for me, I don't want the problems with my own demonstrations to be weak wheel bearings. I want to have problems with incoming guided missles as I'm demonstrating my antigravity ideas by buzzing the White House in my plywood/duct-tape flying saucer!
Podkletnov's "gravity pulse" experiment is well known in fringe science circles... as the Morton experiment! Morton found the same effect: sparks leaping between a VandeGraaff generator and a metal plate will generate some sort of strange narrow beam that lights up neon bulbs, repels bits of paper, etc., and the beam still does this when shielded with metal.
But Morton used no superconductor, and this was in 1966.
Apparantly any hobbyist with a VDG machine
can reproduce this effect. (Mine is dead right now, guess it's time to go fix it.)
Also, some of Morton's observations were verified at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, by Klaus Schlecht in 1985. For info, see the hobbyist mag for electric propulsion experiments, ESJ (below.)
I guess Podkletnov will have to change his theory if this phenomenon can be produced without any macro quantum electron coherence.
If the experiment is this easy, curious geeks should see whether Morton and Podkletnov are just fooling themselves. Maybe even the scoffers would be tempted to go out to the garage lab and fire up the old VDG machine.
"Debunkers" imagine that theory trounces experiment. But science is based on reality, where experiments trounce theory! If you actually PERFORM the microwave oven bowl 'o plasma experiment, IT WORKS!
So does this mean that everything else on his 'antigrav' website must be valid? By Debunkers' logic yes, since they believe that the truth of any detail must apply to the whole (i.e. if one small section is truth/garbage, the WHOLE WEBSITE must be truth/garbage as well.)
Another cool trick was discovered by people on the (now defunct) usa-tesla list. You're familar with those "plasma globe" toys sold by Radio Shack and Spencer's Gifts? Well, the gas partial pressure is not as low as most people believe. In fact, they work fine at ONE ATMOSPHERE. Just inflate a balloon or a plastic baggie with welder's Argon, stick a wire into it, and connect it to a high voltage high-freq AC supply. Insert test-objects and body parts as desired.
These are a bit more involved than uWave oven tricks since you'd need to build (buy?) a small Tesla coil. Links to a number of schematics and projects are here:
ONE ATMOSPHERE 'PLASMA GLOBES'
http://www.amasci.com/tesla/plasplan.html
For those who haven't tried all the microwave oven tricks yet, definitely try cooking a light bulb. Clear unfrosted 'decorator' bulbs are best. Colored plasma flames! Melting iron filament supports! Beware, it IS possible to explode a bulb if you apply power for more than about five seconds. They don't really "explode", instead I think the red-hot tungsten support wires crack the glass, and the bulb goes poof all over the oven. (Me, I have a couple of huge old 'experiment' ovens bought for $5 at garage sales.)
Sprinkle salt on it to create blazing yellow/orange sodium light.
Hey, the previous link mentions that they drilled a 3/4" hole in the top of the uWave oven and inserted a vid cam. I wonder if a "ball lightning" can exit through such a hole and fly around the room? However, these do seem to vanish instantly when you cut power to the oven. I guess the hole needs to be LARGER... and then make an external chamber from metal screening!
I see where an Igor would be useful in performing such experiments. Have HIM work with the equipment while the mad doctor stays way over here and turns on the big switch.
I still have some shrunken quarters from
Dale Travous "quartershrinker" from 1991.
They do feel heavier. But they weigh the
same, so it's psychological.
Yes, they're MUCH thicker than a normal
quarter.
((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))
The ORIGINAL quartershrinker: D. Travous, 1991
on
Making Small Change
·
· Score: 4
I wonder if these guys came up with the
device independantly? Or did they hear about
Dale Travous device in Seattle back in 1991?
It's mentioned here:
Dale Travous, a professional artist in Seattle, was messing with Boeing Surplus discharge caps around 1990/1991. I told him about an old article
in Rev. Phy. Inst. where the authors were crushing soupcans with a 1-turn copper coil.
Dale came up with a device which he called... um... "the quartershrinker." He used it for
several months to shrink pennies, then found
that quarters were slightly more impressive,
and the name "quartershrinker" was the one
that stuck.
It was written up by Gary Hawkins in the old "Extraordinary Science" magazine published by the now-defunct Int'l Tesla Society. His technique was identical to the one used
by Bert Hickman.
So is this a case of "100th monkey syndrome?"
More likely the "quartershrinker" idea was
spread by word of mouth.
Another venerable website for electrodynamic
shennanigans:
Slashdot Mirror
Bravo! I love this kind of article, and wish there were far more of them.
We in the sciences need to fight our tendency to suppress the embarrassing history of mistaken scoffing; where new discoveries are rejected because if they were real, they'd make the scientific community look like fools. Suppress? Yes. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And it may not be conscious suppression, but the effects are the same. If we take a detailed look at the history of science, it's quite fascinating to see which discoveries were ridiculed at the time. And it's amazing that this ridicule is not common knowledge. Perhaps historians of science need to focus more on digging up dirt, rather than letting scientists tell their own sanitized version of history. For example, try to find any texts which mention:
String Theory
rejected by the wider community, kept alive almost entirely by Caltech's John Schwartz, the "pariah of the physics department," who only avoided being fired because of secret support by Murray Gell-Mann. The work was set back ~10 years by widespread sneering. See "Feynman's Rainbow," also "Euclid's Window"
Black Holes
Proposed in 1930 by S. Chandra, who was hounded out of his department by Arthur Eddington and supporters, since black holes would ruin one of Eddington's theories (later proved wrong.) The work was only taken up again in the 1960s, so Eddington's actions set black hole research back by thirty years.
Scanning-tunneling microscope.
Ridiculed by the microscope community. Apparently the project avoided setbacks mostly because its discoverers attracted early support by the Nobel prize committee. See Science News, Atom Tinkerer's Paradise
Non-euclidian geometry
The field was explored by K. F. Gauss, who fearing ridicule, kept all his papers secret until the end of his life. Lobachevsky did some similar work and did attract scorn. The topic was finally taken seriously after several more decades passed. Doppler effect.
Proposed in 1842, but ridiculed and ignored because it contradicted the Aether theory of light. Stellar red shift finally penetrated the wall of scorn two decades later (after Doppler himself had died.)
---------
Other more famous instances of ridiculed/vindicated discoveries:
Lynn Margulis, mitochondria, chloroplasts, etc., were once independant cells. Barbara McClintlok's "jumping genes"
Robert Goddard, finally vindicated when those idiotic spaceships of his were taken seriously by Nazi scientists.
Weltner's continental drift theory
Wright Brothers. Ridiculed by top US scientists and Scientific American magazine, they finally had to move to France before anyone would believe their claims or even come to observe their machine in action.
Arrhenius, ion chemistry. Nearly lost his degree because ions were a heresy (atoms were known to be indivisible.)
Ignaz Semmelweis, doctors should wash hands before surgery. (Semmelweis fought the medical community for ~10 years, and ended up committing suicide in an insane asylum.)
L. Galvani, electricity. "They call me the frogs' dancing master."
W. Harvey, circulation of blood. The medical community ostracized him.
Yes and no. True, the opposite of an UNDERWATER bubble is an airborne droplet.
However, the opposite of a soap bubble in air drifting on the breeze is an antibubble drifting around underwater.
The part about beer is interesting because it's analogous to blowing soap bubbles on an extremely humid day: the bubbles last longer, or possibly last forever if the air is slightly supersaturated.
An antibubble in beer would collect more and more carbon dioxide into its thin gas layer. If it didn't touch the fluid surface from below, there'd be no reason for it to burst.
Although first observed and studied almost a century ago, no one until now has been able to determine how they form.
Yeah, right. Even little kids have been making antibubbles since that article came out in 1974. If you've tried making them, it's totally obvious how they form. Perhaps what's not totally obvious is why a thin layer of air is stable underwater. But if detergents can stablize an air/water interface in a normal bubble, then this explains both a water film in the air, and an air film underwater.
Antibub trivia: antibubbles have "rainbow" colors, but the rainbows in the opposite place from a soap bubble: they appear at the bottom of the sphere. And of course the rainbows in both bubbles and antibubbles are not rainbows, instead they're antirainbows: dark spectral slots in white light. They're bands of "subtractive colors;" cyan, magenta, yellow.
Make Antibubbles
Some antibubble references:
C.L. Stong, "Curious Bubbles in Which a Gas Encloses a Liquid Instead of the Other Way Around",
Scientific American Magazine, THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST, April 1974
Project websites:
J. Thomas page
http://www.antibubble.org/
Science Hobbyist Page
http://amasci.com/amateur/antibub/antibub1.html
T. Fritz page (more advanced tricks)
http://hot-streamer.com/antibubbles/
It's not impossible to kill yourself with a badly-designed ECG device.
Places like UL/CSA say that voltages under 40V or so are safe. But if you apply it to electrodes pasted to your chest, the unsafe voltage is WAY lower than 40V.
If you build a simple ECG and connect it to a computer, that computer had better be battery-powered. If not, then you might get a nasty surprise (waking up in the afterlife of your choice.)
Hey everyone, please get your crackpots straight. Perpetual Motion crackpots just want their devices to keep spinning constantly. Give them a maglev bearing and a vacuum chamber and they're happy forever. It's only the "Free Energy" crackpots who want their devices to keep going faster and faster (or to drive uphill, or to drive against friction, etc.) I should know; I'm a FE crackpot myself. See http://amasci.com/freenrg/fnrg.html
This current inventor is making the usual mistakes: doing everything but PUBLISHING. He seems to start out right: trying to get his idea out into the public. Yet nobody else can build a test model, since the critical parts simply MUST be hidden inside a wooden box... to prevent all the idea thieves from taking the secret and becoming billionaires! :)
So let's see... the goal is to convince the disbelievers. Yet the critical parts must remain secret. So we can show "convincing demonstrations" and give explanations to the experts, but we simply HAVE to keep those experts from ever learning the details, otherwise they'll find out how to build their own version.
Isn't there something wrong with this picture?
If a "free energy" inventor comes up with a genuine discovery, he won't need any oil companies to suppress him as long as he follows the usual path and keeps the critical details a secret.
Note: "pseudoscience" doesn't mean making up your own terminology. After all, most cutting-edge advancements will require some new words to be coined. Pseudoscience means "fake science;" something that gives the surface appearance of science, yet is nothing of the sort. I certainly agree that this battery-car is pseudoscience, since a central goal of a genuine scientist is to teach colleagues how to do it. Hold nothing back. No excuses, no paranoia, no "naive experimenters might hurt themselves." Explain in great detail how the actual device in use was built and adjusted. If there are "idea thieves" trying to steal the device, make damn sure they succeed!
As for me, I don't want the problems with my own demonstrations to be weak wheel bearings. I want to have problems with incoming guided missles as I'm demonstrating my antigravity ideas by buzzing the White House in my plywood/duct-tape flying saucer!
But Morton used no superconductor, and this was in 1966.
Apparantly any hobbyist with a VDG machine can reproduce this effect. (Mine is dead right now, guess it's time to go fix it.)
Also, some of Morton's observations were verified at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, by Klaus Schlecht in 1985. For info, see the hobbyist mag for electric propulsion experiments, ESJ (below.)
I guess Podkletnov will have to change his theory if this phenomenon can be produced without any macro quantum electron coherence.
See:
If the experiment is this easy, curious geeks should see whether Morton and Podkletnov are just fooling themselves. Maybe even the scoffers would be tempted to go out to the garage lab and fire up the old VDG machine.So does this mean that everything else on his 'antigrav' website must be valid? By Debunkers' logic yes, since they believe that the truth of any detail must apply to the whole (i.e. if one small section is truth/garbage, the WHOLE WEBSITE must be truth/garbage as well.)
((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))
These are a bit more involved than uWave oven tricks since you'd need to build (buy?) a small Tesla coil. Links to a number of schematics and projects are here:
For those who haven't tried all the microwave oven tricks yet, definitely try cooking a light bulb. Clear unfrosted 'decorator' bulbs are best. Colored plasma flames! Melting iron filament supports! Beware, it IS possible to explode a bulb if you apply power for more than about five seconds. They don't really "explode", instead I think the red-hot tungsten support wires crack the glass, and the bulb goes poof all over the oven. (Me, I have a couple of huge old 'experiment' ovens bought for $5 at garage sales.)((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))
Sprinkle salt on it to create blazing yellow/orange sodium light.
Hey, the previous link mentions that they drilled a 3/4" hole in the top of the uWave oven and inserted a vid cam. I wonder if a "ball lightning" can exit through such a hole and fly around the room? However, these do seem to vanish instantly when you cut power to the oven. I guess the hole needs to be LARGER... and then make an external chamber from metal screening!
I see where an Igor would be useful in performing such experiments. Have HIM work with the equipment while the mad doctor stays way over here and turns on the big switch.
((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))
Yes, they're MUCH thicker than a normal quarter.
((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))
Dale Travous, a professional artist in Seattle, was messing with Boeing Surplus discharge caps around 1990/1991. I told him about an old article in Rev. Phy. Inst. where the authors were crushing soupcans with a 1-turn copper coil. Dale came up with a device which he called... um... "the quartershrinker." He used it for several months to shrink pennies, then found that quarters were slightly more impressive, and the name "quartershrinker" was the one that stuck.
It was written up by Gary Hawkins in the old "Extraordinary Science" magazine published by the now-defunct Int'l Tesla Society. His technique was identical to the one used by Bert Hickman.
So is this a case of "100th monkey syndrome?" More likely the "quartershrinker" idea was spread by word of mouth.
Another venerable website for electrodynamic shennanigans:
((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))