Advanced Science

This page is all about knowledge, science, technology and gadgetry, and how people apply (use and abuse) these interesting little creatures. This particular point is of extreme philosophical importance to me because technology is often blamed for what are essentially behavioural problems in people and psychoses on a societal scale.

Technology is neutral in my mind. It just sits there until someone does something with it. In my opinion we should celebrate what we have achieved over the last couple of centuries. Technology should be praised and respected, not feared and barbarically destroyed. Of course, some would say that pollution for instance, is a hallmark of technology and cite this as a reason why we should be getting "back to nature". I however, would argue that we as a species have never been in (wild) nature, due to a history of culture and technology which stretches back to the very beginning of our species.

As for pollution, health problems, militarisation and so on, these are important issues. But the technology is as harmful as it is designed to be or is used. To me it is self-evident. If the technology pollutes, for instance, then design into it pollution-curbing or pollution-averting systems. Blame the guy in the board room, not the gear!

In this page I will be drawing on my own self-learned experience (I'm no true scientifico), and explore the current situation and the latest progress in plain English. And as those who have been following developments will know, chances are we are standing at the edge of something huge, technology-wise.

For me - as a kid born in 1970 - aviation and the moon-shots were truly magical demonstrations of what Humanity was capable of doing. But as for the trends we are seeing today, my first inkling must have been the pocket calculator in 1975. This was a big shock to me at school. The user-friendly PC in 1993, was my second big shock. Something incredible was emerging here... magic at our fingertips and a turn-about in the way we thought and dealt with the world. DNA-manipulation - as another example - could change us into a completely different race of humans, and radical advances in tapping natural energy and in engineering the space-time continuum itself, could give us the power to conquer the Galaxy in a surprisingly short period of time.

So, although nowhere near comprehensive, here are just a few listings of current developments that have touched me personally and get my emotions stirring. Hope you get something out of it, too.

In this section I will take a brief look at energy, and the brilliant machines which can liberate it from nature to benefit us all. People are always talking about energy, especially in regards as to how to apply it and where to get it from. They often talk about an "energy crisis" as if we are destined to run short of power resources. If they mean fuels then perhaps one could go along. But if they mean actual energy, then they are precisely wrong. Why? Because it underpins everything and is everywhere. Any physicist will tell you this. The whole Universe is made of the stuff! That brilliant person, Prof. Richard Feynman, once said that the energy contained in one cubic meter of empty space is enough to boil all the oceans on Earth!

Although this sounds like very old science and not new science, this is not exactly the case. Nuclear - and a good proportion of conventional explosives - will soon be eradicated from the Earth's surface because they have (I think unfairly) been labelled "weapons." But if examples like the International Space Station are any guide of things to come, we might soon have a huge need for these bulk energy devices. Applications like Solar System mining, planetary engineering, star-ship propulsion, mass-energy generation and storage in the freezing depths of space, and even dimension warping may require the odd bomb or two.

Boyle was an Englishman (or Scottish - can't remember!), whose ideas changed the world beyond comprehension. He was a brilliant man. I'm not even sure he was aware at the time how important his ideas were to become.

Boyle was the first man to realise and put down on paper the mathematics governing the relationship between temperature (heat) and pressure (work or motive force). One of the obvious and earliest applications of his theory was in the steam engine, where heat applied to a boiler flashed water into steam and expanded its volume by 30,000%. The internal combustion engine, turbines (gas and steam) and a whole host of machines use heat to produce a motive or electrical force.

In conventional (or chemical) explosives, gunpowder, or more often these days, plastic explosives, generate for a tiny fraction of second a temperature in the thousands of degrees. This generates a fire ball which imposes work on the surrounding atmosphere in the form of blast. In nuclear explosives the heat generated by the fission of ultra-heavy metals, or fusion of ultra-light gases produces a temperature in the millions of degrees. It therefore follows that nuclear explosives are a thousand times more powerful than conventional explosives, due to Boyles proportional relationship of heat-to-pressure. This simple rule is really the core of industrial society. Well, this is the tried and tested method of generating useful energy, should the following fail...

Remember Pons and Fleischman, the chemists who back in 1990 claimed that they had discovered a brand new form of power production? These two chemists went through a rough time to try and get their point across. And I can understand why. The problem was with the terminology their little phenomenon got branded with, and not not so much with the phenomenon itself. Even Arthur C. Clarke states that he is "99% certain" that these machines produce more energy than they consume. If this is true, as mounting evidence suggests, it takes these devices out of the battery range, and into something very bizarre...

One of the great pleasures and revelations of my life was to have freely corresponded with Chris Tinsley in the last two years of his life. Chris was an English investigative reporter who covered the new wave in energy and space-time research and experimentation, and published his findings in Infinite Energy magazine (also on the net). He was a no-nonsense thinker whom I admired, and find am emulating more and more these days.

He cut through the "group-think" and exposed the large swathe of scientists, including Carl Sagan for a time, who first rubbished and then actively opposed investigation into anomalous energy readings and even gravity anomalies in some electrically-driven apparatus. He described these scientists as a "Church" which went out of its way to protect its fleshly and finacial interests.

Tinsley described how some of these so-called "cold fusion" machines - a title he himself hated - produced excess heat (and in some cases cooled down!), and produced anomalous amounts of isotopes that conventional science says could only have occurred in the deadly environment of a nuclear reactor. Yet the tell-tale signs of deleterious neutrons and gamma rays were totally missing from these machines. This defies traditional nuclear physics, since if our current definition of fusion applies to these gizmoes the conditions are way too cold, way too under pressure, and would require special shielding to protect nearby personnel from the harmful rays pouring out of the device.

So, here we have a possible new source of de-centralised energy in small kit-form, since most of these machines are portable. And as the magazine title suggests, the energy could well be infinite. The processes seem to have both electric and nuclear features, yet are clearly neither in the traditional sense if what we see happening is actually happening. Obviously a third category which covers both electro-magnetic and nuclear phenomena - but which is neither - must be involved. Ironing out the theory or cause could take decades, but we might be able to make immediate use of this miraculous fountain of energy, if the powers that be don't (or can't) put their foots down!

There has also been tremendous progress in the area of space-time manipulation - as well as some unexpected discoveries. Most of us think of space, time and gravity as very different things, with no apparent relationship. However, Albert Einstein early last century summised that space, time and gravity were really just different faces of the same thing which he called the "space-time continuum." What this basically meant was that space was not an empty void or "hole" that things merely passed through (as many people still think), but actually akin to a real material in that disturbances or objects in it resulted in changes in gravity and even time-flow.

Part of the character of this "material" was that it imposed a limit on the speed of light, gravity and all moving objects. This is the "cosmic speed limit" of 186,000 m/s, or 300,000km/s. It was impossible to move faster than this because time and space are no longer "flexible" at these speeds - time literally stops and space is compressed to nothingness. The mass of the object also increases to infinite density, so that its huge inertia would demand an unforthcoming amount of energy to boost it over that level.

Until extremely recently, all experiments to date have agreed with Einstein's theories that gravity is not a force, but a warp in the shape of space-time; that nothing can travel faster than light; that both gravity and high speeds slow time down, and so on. However, a model of the Universe which pre-dates Relativity has been resurrected - the electric field model. According to this model there is a minimum electro-magnetic potential in all space, a kind of "floor" which sets the limits to space capabilities. This is often called the "permitivity of free space" in high school gravity equations. It is this which gives space its "substance". If one can alter this basic electro-potential, the character of space itself can be changed!

Experiments to prove that the substance of space has an electro-magnetic, as well as a time and gravity component, have been successful. The best documented was the recent German experiments to prove that "quantum barriers" (made of simple parallel metal plates) could send radio signals several times faster than light - an apparent contradiction of Einstein's theory.

There is also the well-documented Casimir Effect in which two pieces of metal foil or film at very close distances are pushed together by the outside energy. This has been measured. Gravity has also been likened to this - see Infinite Energy magazine - in which the "shadow" or blocking effect of planets on the background electric field literally sucks bodies together - but through push, not pull. The quantum barrier experiments also suggest that a piece of space has been "removed" from the gap in between, to the extent that the restriction on the permissible speed of light (still the fastest moving object in these devices!) is actually removed and replaced with a higher value.

Since the speed of light remains constant until the barriers are altered in some way, the latest developments seem to be saying that Einstein was not wholly wrong, but that we now have the means to exploit a "loophole" in it that allows travel faster than the traditionally accepted fixed speed of 300,000km/s.

Another interesting development in the 1990's was the so-called Tampere Experiment named after a town in central-south Finland. Here, a super-cooled, super-conducting magnetically-levitated disc appeared to lower the gravity and weight of objects placed immediately above it. See Dr. Puthoff and others for the data.

This seemed to suggest that gravity is not a pulling force or a simple warp in space-time, but surprisingly, a pushing force that could be "shielded" by an electrical (and possibly spinning) object. According to classical Newtonian theory, a force can only ever be a push, so this interpretation of gravity makes sense. Newton and others until Einstein, continued to call gravity a "pull" because they could not find any cause for the "push."

However, the fact that clocks still slow down in gravity wells, and planets close to stars - such as Mercury - have less than 360 degrees in their orbits due to the little bit of space "sucked out" by the heavy star, still suggests a space-time rather than electrical, interpretation to the nature of the space "substance."

The fact that light - a massless and therefore weightless and inertialess item - can also be bent by gravity, also suggests that something other than a push or pull is going on here. Integrating the proofs of the two very different theories will be very difficult, but when complete could help to "Unify" all of physics into one simple formula - particularly if "cold fusion" is also another clue in the puzzle. But as stated earlier, this could take decades, or even longer to work out.

It's utilitarian value however, could be with us very shortly: infinite power resources; faster-than-light communications; faster-than-light transport; and, gravity manipulation/ anti-gravity. It doesn't take an Einstein to see that this would radically alter our current state of civilizational development...

Recently, a German team succeeded in sending a radio message across a space of about 20cm at something like 5.4 x Lightspeed ("c"). According to the scientists, however, this did not constitute a violation of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity which definitively sets "c" at 1 x Lightspeed, and no more! But how could this be? The scientists reckon that rather than a violation of Einstein's law, the experiment merely exposed a loophole in it.

The scientists adhered to the belief that "c" is indeed the absolute cosmic "speed limit", as per Relativity. With this in mind, they therefore had to offer a mechanism to explain what had apparently just happened - a breach of this limit. They pointed to quantum effects as the solution to the problem.

At the ultra-microscopic level, particles appear "smeared" or probabilistically scattered across space. Although this quantum effect diminishes sharply with distance from the highest density region where the particle should be - what one might call the "source" - theoretically there is nothing to say that a particular particle won't also be found at the other end of the known Universe! The chances of this happening are infinitesimally small per particle, but given enough particles we would expect to see some making macroscopic quantum jumps across space.

Quantum barriers, of which the device in question is composed, are simple metal plates arranged in parallel to each other. The thinking goes that these plates act as a kind of "filter" in which the "real(er)" radio-photons were screened out, allowing only the quantumly-generated photons to reach the receiver. In this interpretation therefore, the information passed through the device at 5.4c, but the radio waves per-se did not. The receiver was merely picking up information-carrying photons which had spontaneously appeared in that area, without traversing the distance in-between radio source and radio receiver!

However, some fringe scientists see Infinite Energy, have found evidence (quantum effects notwithstanding) that such parallel arrangements actually do something to the space-time contained therein. In this interpretation, the limits to the space-time "substance" (which sets the speed limit to 300,000 km/s; permits masses only up to the point where they fall through this "fabric" to form a black hole, and so on), also has an electro-magnetic component. This is seen in equations which deal with the "permitivity" of free space, and in the Casimir Effect where two metal plates or pieces of foil are pushed together by the outside electro-magnetic potential.

What they are suggesting, is that what we have observed was not so much a quantum "trick of the light", but a real phenomenon in which the speed restriction on light, or in this case radio, is actually raised to a higher level. The Universe, they say, is permeated with real and virtual energy, which is represented by an infinite number of possible wavelengths. By bringing together two parallel plates we reduce the infinite number of potential wavelengths down to only one wavelength - set by the distance between the plates. We have effectively "rarefied" the electro-magnetic component of space-time in the device. This in turn reduces the "drag" on any signal passing through this modified space, permiting "c" to have a higher value than the 300,000 km/s currently permitted by un-modified space!

So, in this ether interpretation for faster-than-light communication, we take the result at face value: the signal was indeed transmitted at 5.4c. If this is true, then it destroys Einstein's proposition that nothing can ever exceed "c" - let alone any artificially elevated "c"! But this may indeed be what's happening. The jury is still out...