"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]