"I'm Working On That!"...The Joys And Trials Of Innovation

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” -- Peter Thiel, PayPal Co-founder

Perseverance.  Many days, it can be a slog, just putting one foot in front of the other, keep moving the pile forward, getting from idea to reality.

But, it is a labor of love; don't misunderstand, I'm not complaining. So, I have been using the quip, "I'm working on that!", meaning it is still ongoing, I haven't given (nor will I).

One notable use of that phrase was from Dr. Stephen Hawking:

At the beginning of a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data is seen playing poker with holographic depictions of Stephen Hawking, Sir Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein.

Hawking portrayed his own hologram for this episode, making him the only guest in any Star Trek series to play himself. When taking a tour of the set, he paused at the warp drive engine, smiled, and said, "I'm working on that."

I'm working on that. Indeed.

When I see books with titles such as:

Flying Cars: The Extraordinary History Of Cars Designed For Tomorrow's World, Patrick J. Gyger

 

 

Popular Mechanics The Wonderful Future That Never Was: Flying Cars, Mail Delivery By Parachute, And Other Predictions, Gregory Benford

 

 

 

Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, And Other Dead-Wrong Predictions Of The Twentieth Century, Paul Milo

We're aren't there yet. But, I get up every day and say to myself: "Another day closer!" I want a flying car as much as the rest of you. Trust me when I say...

I'm working on that!

 [A Thomas Clarke endeavor]

"Genesis" of Energy Chips: the Family Tree of energy technology

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” -- Peter Thiel, PayPal Co-founder

To power the flying car, we will need an energy source, preferably one that is silent, clean, and uses no fuel.

Where to find such a device? As of now, this technology does not exist; so, we will have to invent it.

The starting point for this would be with the ideas of Nikola Tesla. In 1892, Tesla delivered a lecture before the IEE, in London.

    Nikola Tesla

In that remarkable lecture, Tesla said:

Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. This idea is not novel. Men have been led to it long ago by instinct or reason. It has been expressed in many ways, and in many places, in the history of old and new. We find it in the delightful myth of Antheus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians, and in many hints and statements of thinkers of the present time. Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic?

 

If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic—and this we know it is, for certain—then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.

"...it is a mere question of time..."; it has been 122 years since then. Perhaps a bit longer than what Tesla had in mind?

But, the energy is there, and it always has been. We merely need to learn how to access it, as Tesla pointed out.

One who took up Tesla's challenge was Dr. T. Henry Moray, of Salt Lake City.

  T. Henry Moray

Starting in the early 1900's, and through the early 1940's, Moray built, and demonstrated, a series of what he called "radiant energy" devices. The last model he built was destroyed by a laboratory assistant, and was never rebuilt.

   Dr. Moray demonstrating his energy device

Dr. Moray's son, John Moray, published a book about the device, The Sea Of Energy.

  The Sea Of Energy, 1978 edition

For whatever reason, John Moray never attempted to rebuild any of his father's energy devices.

So, after more than 70 years, we are taking up the challenge laid down by Tesla, and pursued and then abandoned by Moray.

The question is: can we do it?

The answer is: of course we will do it! Why? Because we need it. We need it to power our flying car. Remember the old saying, that necessity is the mother of invention? (And I'm not talking about Frank Zappa's band, either!)

Where Moray used vacuum tube technology for his device, we can make use of the solid-state revolution, to create...



...the energy chip!

And that is what we shall do. 

[A Thomas Clarke endeavor]

"Genesis" of Geonics: the Family Tree of gravity control propulsion

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder

Like anything else, there is a story behind geonics, the science of gravity control fro the purpose of propulsion. It is important to understand the "family tree" of geonics, because without such a technological breakthrough, any flying cars will be not much more than automobiles with wings...such as the Terrafugia, for example.

It was British scientist Michael Faraday who created the starting point for geonics. In his diary entry


  Michael Faraday

 of 19 March 1849, Faraday had just hit upon the idea of investigating this mysterious force of gravity; he wrote:

Gravity. Surely this force must be capable of an experimental relationship to Electricity, Magnetism and the other forces, so as to bind it up with them in reciprocal action and equivalent effect. Consider for a moment how to set about touching this matter by facts and trial.

So Faraday cleared away all other work, and began his experiments in the summer of 1849. His diary entry of 25 August 1849 captured the excitement he felt:

It was almost with a feeling of awe that I went to work, for if the hope should prove well founded, how great and mighty and sublime in its hitherto unchangeable character is the force I am trying to deal with, and how large may be the new domain of knowledge that may be opened up to the mind of man.

 Ultimately, Faraday did not find what he was looking for:

Here end my trials for the present. The results are negative. They do not shake my strong feeling of the existence of such a relation between gravity and electricity, though they give no proof that such a relation exists.

 ("On the possible relation of gravity to electricity", August 1850, Experimental Researches In Electricity)

In the late 1800's in Switzerland, there was a classmate of Albert Einstein, from the USA, named Paul Alfred Biefeld. After graduation, Biefeld returned to the States, and became a highly regarded college professor. Influenced by Faraday and Einstein, Biefeld began tentative steps in gravity and electricity. 

  Paul Alfred Biefeld

 In the early 1920's, Professor Biefeld started working with a young undergraduate student, Thomas Townsend Brown. Brown enthusiastically joined in with his professor, essentially making the gravity-electricity connection his life's work.

T. Townsend Brown

The research bore fruit, and a kind of crude propulsion was being demonstrated. The phenomenon came to be called:

The Biefeld-Brown Effect

For a number of years that followed, Brown continued on with research into the Biefeld-Brown Effect, writing articles and lab reports, giving presentations at conferences, briefing government officials, and so forth. 

In the 1950's, Brown came to the attention of a North Carolina industrialist, Agnew Bahnson, who enthusiastically sponsored Brown's research. Bahnson even had a research laboratory built for Brown, in North Carolina.

  Agnew H. Bahnson, Jr.

 Bahnson could see the possibilities in Brown's work, and in the practical application of the Biefeld-Btown Effect. So much so, that Bahnson wrote a 1959 science fiction novel, The Stars Are Too High, in which a wealthy industrialist and a brilliant scientist build a flying machine that uses gravity control for propulsion...and the havoc it causes, when the US Air Force sees their test flights on their national defense radar!

Unfortunately, they never built such a vehicle, for it would have been, in truth, a flying car.

Also in the 1950's, a Princeton physicist, who also had a connection to Albert Einstein, John A. Wheeler, began looking at Einstein's famous formula E=mc^2.^

   John A. Wheeler

Wheeler reason that if star have gravity due to their mass, then it ought to be possible to have an object composed of pure electromagnetic energy (light, for example), and still have gravity. Wheeler sent a rough sketch of the idea to Einstein, who was on the campus at Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein though the idea was interesting, and asked Wheeler to keep him informed. Sadly, Einstein died before Wheeler had finished his paper.

This paper was published in 1955, simply titled "Geons". The paper, and others like was published in a 1962 book by Wheeler, Geometrodynamics. 

Wheeler did not think that geons would be found in nature, because of their inherent instability. But, as an engineer, I know that making unstable things stable is a matter of course for control systems theory. But the idea of the geon itself, as an extension of the Biefeld-Brown Effect, is a fascinating one!

Wheeler's autobiography was entitled Geons, Black Holes, And Quantum Foam: A Life In Physics (1998). I find it interesting that the first word in the title was "Geons". Yes, Wheeler though they were important.

While it has been noted the connection with Albert Einstein, there is another connection here: Agnew Bahnson. In addition to Brown's laboratory, Bahnson also  sponsored  the 1957 Chapel Hill Conference, "The Role Of Gravitation In Physics", at the University of North Carolina. The leading physicists of the day were in attendance, including John A. Wheeler.

 For reasons still undetermined, everything seemed to come to a stop around 1960. Not just come to a stop, they seemed to disappear; it was most difficult for me to track all this down, to pick up the thread, and to set out anew, the course of gravity control for propulsion.

The next chapter is being written, even now. This blog is part of that story. Stick around and watch; it's going to be interesting!

[ A Thomas Clarke enterprise]

Chuck Yeager Turns 91 Today

Famed test pilot General Charles "Chuck" Yeager turns 91 years old today.



In October 1947, the then Captain Yeager, flying the Bell X-1 experimental aircraft, broke the "sound barrier", flying faster than Mach 1 (the speed of sound). The flight made history.



The exploits of Yeager, and other test pilots of the early Space Age, were immortalized in a book, The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe:



The book was later turned into a major Hollywood film:



with actor Sam Shepard portraying Yeager:



Again, happy birthday, General Yeager; you sir, have "the right stuff"!

[A Thomas Clarke endeavor]

When I Think "Flying Car", This Is What Comes To Mind

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." -- Peter Thiel, PayPal Co-founder 

Flying car.

People have been thinking about how cool it would be to have a flying car, for a long time now.
Me too. But...

 ...just WHAT would a real, honest-to-goodness flying car look like? Nobody knows, because 
they aren't any being made. So there's no basis for comparison.

Here's my impression of what a flying car would look like:
 

 

 



The above is  version of the concept car made for the unreleased movie, "Fast Lane", now
made in Florida, by Kit Car Mike.

As you can see, it is NOT an automobile with wings, as some of the so-called flying cars are.
By using quantum engineering, we can directly control the force of gravity, to create propulsion,
and thus have a clean, "sexy" shape for our flying car.

So, what would riding in a flying car be like? The folks at Eurocopter (now Airbus Helicopters) 
have made this really cool-looking artwork of their proposed X-4 prototype:



A clean, unobstructed view as you zoom over the countryside. I love it! This is what you would see,
flying along in one of our vehicles.

When can I get one? Hey, I'm working on it. Thoughts, ideas? Let me know, OK?

[A Thomas Clarke endeavor]

QE 101: Pulling Energy From "Thin Air" (A Tutorial On The Science Behind The Flying Car)

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." -- Peter Thiel, PayPal Co-founder 

QE 101

Pulling Energy From "Thin Air"

To power the flying car, we will need to develop a device we call the "energy chip", which 
could look something like this:

 

So, how would such an energ chip work, then? 

Energy fills the universe. All of it. There is no place you can go where you are beyond this
field of energy. It is called by many names: zero point energy, the quantum field, etc.

In 1892 Nikola Tesla delivered a lecture in London, before the Institute of
Electrical Engineers (IEE):

Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power
obtainable at any point of the universe. This idea is not novel, Men
have been led to it long ago by instinct or reason. It has been
expressed in many ways, and in many places, in the history of old
and new.

Throughout space, there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic? If
static, our hopes are in vain; if kinetic -- and this we know it is, for
certain -- then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in
attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.

"Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and
High Frequency", in The Illustrated Tesla, by Nikola Tesla,
Thomas Commerford Martin (ed.), 2007

And this energy that fills the universe is enormous, almost beyond comprehension. John A.
Wheeler's 1962 book, Geometrodynamics, showed that the energy density was enormous:
10⁹³ grams/cm³ .

Just to put that number in perspective, there isn't 10⁹³  of ANYTHING in the totality if the
universe: stars, hydrogen atoms, galaxies, none of them add up to a number that large. And
remember, that energy is in every cubic centimeter, at every point in the universe.

So, why don't we have this energy technology available to us today? Mostly because it has
been overlooked. Since energy fills the universe, that means it  would be found in every
possible direction. In other words, it is "balanced", so there is no obvious sensing of this
tremendous energy flow. But, it isn't perfectly balanced. There is a very slight mismatch,
that betrays the presence of an energy field: Brownian motion, "noise" in electronic
circuits, even the enigma that is inertia.

Henry Moray, an early 20th Century researcher of this subject, had this to say about the
balance of the energy of the universe, and how disturbing that equilibrium might be useful
in making a device to extract electrical power from it:

TALK ON RADIANT ENERGY
Given by T. Henry Moray
In the Speech and Drama Building, Valley State College, Jan. 23, 1962 Northridge, California.
(N.B.: Valley State College is now Cal State Northridge)

Let me repeat, when an elastic substance is subjected to strain and then set free, one
of two things happen. The substance may slowly recover from the strain and gradually
attain its natural state or the elastic recoil may carry it past its position of equilibrium
and beyond, and cause it to execute a series of oscillations. In other words, there may
be a continuous flow of energy in one direction until the discharge is completed or an
oscillating discharge may occur. That is, the first flow may be succeeded by a backrush
and succeeding backrushes, the oscillations going on until the energy is either radiated
or used up in the energizing of the conductors. If your device will oscillate in harmony
with the oscillations of the Universe, or in other words, if the device is capable of
synchronization with the vibrations of that energy throughout space, then the oscillations
will go on forever. No one can call such an arrangement perpetual motion any more than
one can call the motion of the earth perpetual motion. The Radiant Energy device
oscillates because of the oscillations of the Universe.

THE SEA OF ENERGY
IN WHICH THE EARTH FLOATS

by T. Henry Moray
1978

CHAPTER 10
CAPTURE OF ENERGY BY RESONANCE
with the Radiations of the Universe

Oscillating Discharge — When any elastic substance is subjected to strain and then set
free, one of two things happens. The substance may slowly recover from the strain and
gradually attain its natural state, or the elastic recoil may carry it past its position of
equilibrium, and cause it to execute a series of oscillations. Something of the same sort
may also occur when an electrified condenser is discharged. In ordinary language there
may be a continuous flow of electricity in one direction until the discharge is completed,
or an oscillating discharge may occur; that is, the first flow may be succeeded by a
back-rush, as if the first discharge has overrun itself and something like recoil has set in.
The condenser thus becomes more or less charged again in the opposite sense, and a
second discharge occurs, accompanied by a second back-rush, the oscillation going on
until all the energy is either radiated or used up in heating the conductors. However, in
the case of Radiant Energy, the oscillations can continue forever because of the actions
of the universe. It is known that high frequency currents may be classified as to their
oscillating characteristics, i.e., damped or undamped. The energy from the universe being
of both types, depending on conditions beyond the scope of this writing, we have a
back-rush effect as explained before in the RE device.

This back-rush effect, in a capacitor, was first noted by Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thompson), in 1856.

So, how does this knowledge then inform Quantum Engineering?  The relevant steps of such a process
would like this:

1. the zero-point field is in (near-perfect) equilibrium
2. this balance of forces is disturbed, possibly by applying a voltage
3. the universe tries to re-establish this balance, leading to a "ringing" oscillation, or back-rush
4. an electrical circuit would be connected to the point of the disturbance in the equilibrium
5. The energy that is trying to re-establish the equilibrium will drive the electrical circuit
6. electrical power will thus be extracted by this means
7. a "keep-alive" circuit will keep the equilibrium off-balance, as long the device is turned on

After figuring all of this out, I then noticed that the logo for Tostitos nacho chip snack food had a
logo that captured this concept quite nicely:
 

From left to right, the logo goes from zero, to a high amplitude disturbed state, and then begins a
"ringing" oscillation, as it gradually moves back to zero. I am convinced that the advertising agency
for Frito-Lay did NOT have quantum engineering on their minds, when designing this logo for
Doritos. Just my opinion.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once remarked that, if you could take the zero point
energy contained in the volume within a coffee cup, and convert that energy into heat, it would be
enough to boil away all the oceans on Planet Earth.

Here is an article from 1922, touching on zero point energy, citing Sir Oliver Lodge, at least in the first
paragraph, then somehow switches to a discussion of atomic energy. Intriguing headline, though!




Science And Invention, March 1922

[A Thomas Clarke endeavor]

QE 101: The Fundamentals Of Geonics (A Tutorial On The Science Behind The Flying Car)

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." -- Peter Thiel, PayPal Co-founder 

 

QE 101

Fundamentals Of Geonics

Geonics: geon + ics (of, relating to, or characterized by)

(term coined in 2010, by Thomas Clarke)

Geon: gravitational + electromagnetic + on (entity)

(from Geometrodynamics, John A. Wheeler, 1962)
 

Geonics, then, is the technology of gravity control, primarily for the
propulsion of vehicles, both in air and in space.

Geonics begins with the standing wave, which is a stationary wave,
characterized by nodes (which do not move), and antinodes (which
undergo maximum displacement).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_wave

• 

  Standing waves in a string — the fundamental mode and the first 6 overtones.

Standing waves can be 2 dimensional (2-D):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_drum

http://kino-ap.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/WG760.gif
 

And standing waves can also be produced in 3 dimensional (3-D) space:

http://www.quantummatter.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/SRStanding-3D-2_textmedium.png



http://gong.nso.edu/gallery/disk2k10/data/resource/harmonics/modes2.jpg

(Solar Oscillations)

The standing waves related to geonics will be electromagnetic in
nature. Electromagnetics comes in two "flavors":

• the far field (launched as propagating radiation)
• the near field (circulates in the vicinity of the energy source)

 

       http://www.qualitydigest.com/nov03/Images/Articles/Ultrasonic(NearFar_Field).jpg

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_and_far_field

 

 

Near and far field regions for an antenna

 

 

 

 

Geonics uses the techniques of a phased array (constructive and destructive interference),
to create a precision-controlled standing wave pattern:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased-array_radar
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Phased+array+radar

Beamforming is the key concept for a phased array:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming

Beams, as well as standing waves, can be steered by introducing a phase shift:

http://www.hobbyprojects.com/oscilloscope_tutorial/images/phase_shift_measurement.gif

To increase the peak power of the geonic device, without drastically increasing
the average power of the system, we will be using the "chirp" technique:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirp

 

A linear chirp waveform; a sinusoidal wave that increases in frequency linearly over time
 

Finally, the the high-energy electromagnetic standing wave pattern in the
near field will interact with the gas molecules in the atmosphere. As such,
The vehicle will glow, when the geonics are activated: at different operating
frequencies, the color of the glow will change with that particular frequency.
Also, the power level of the geonics will determine how bright that glow will
be. Because of this, the interaction of the geonics with the atmosphere is
closely related to a device called the MASER. Interestingly enough, masers
have been shown to be naturally occurring, as well as made here on Earth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_maser


  

[A Thomas Clarke endeavor]