suppression in physics

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publish it, and fellow scientists know better than to express solidarity with an unorthodoxcolleague. In today's scientific world, the cards are just stacked too heavily against truescientific breakthroughs. Too many careers are at stake, too many vested interests areinvolved for any truly revolutionary advancement in science to take place any more. Alltoo often, scientific truth is determined by the authority of experts and textbooks, not by

logic and reason.

Referring to thefin de siecle "end of science" mentality and the scientific revolutionsfollowing it, Robert G. Jahn writes in 20th and 21st Century Science: Reflections andProjections[3]:

"As we enter the 21st century, science seems poised to execute a similarevolutionary cycle of advancement of their comprehension and relevance.We are opening with a steadily growing backlog of demonstrable physical,biological and psychological anomalies (..) most of which seemincontrovertibly correlated with properties and processes of the human

mind, in ways for which our preceding 20th century scientific paradigmhas no rational explanations. (..)

Thus, at the dawn of the 21st century, we again find an elite, smuglycontented scientific establishment, but one now endowed with far morepublic authority and respect than that of the prior version. A veritablepriesthood of high science controls major segments of public and privatepolicy and expenditure for research, development, construction,production, education and publication throughout the world, and enjoys acultural trust and reverence that extends far beyond its true merit. It is anestablishment that is largely consumed with refinements and deployments

of mid-20th century science, rather than with creative advancement offundamental understanding of the most profound and seminal aspects ofits trade. Even more seriously, it is an establishment that persists infrenetically sweeping legitimate genres of new anomalous phenomenaunder its intellectual carpet, thereby denying its own well-documentedheritage that anomalies are the most precious raw material from whichfuture science is formed."

In his debut editorial as editor-in-chief of theJournal of Scientific Exploration, Henry H.Bauer gives a similarly bleak assessment of the state of modern science[4]:

"Mainstream orthodoxy routinely resists novelties that later becomeaccepted. Throughout the 20th century there are examples: Bretz'sSpokane flood, McClintock's recognition of "jumping genes", Mitchell'sinsights into biological energy mechanisms, Woese's Archaea, andMcCully's homocysteine. Only late in the 20th century did sciencereluctantly grant that acupuncture can have some analgesic effect, that balllightning exists, that the kraken is not myth but the real giant squid, that itis not foolish to look for intelligent life outside the Earth, that 5000-year-


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old megaliths incorporate substantial knowledge of astronomy, that humanbeings inhabited the Americas long before the days of the Clovis culture,and that living systems can sense not only electrical but also magneticfields. Indeed, it may well be that the suppression of unorthodox views inscience is on the increase rather than in decline. In Prometheus Bound

(1994), John Ziman has outlined how science changed during the 20thcentury: traditionally (since perhaps the 17th century) a relativelydisinterested knowledge-seeking activity, science progressively becamehandmaiden to industry and government, and its direction of research isincreasingly influenced by vested interests and self-interestedbureaucracies, including bureaucracies supposedly established to promotegood science such as the National Academies, the National ScienceFoundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Parkinson's Law, it maybe, applies to science as to other human activities: no sooner has anorganization become successfully established than it is by that tokenalready an obsolescent nuisance."

In many cases of anomalous evidence that inconveniences establishment science, simpledenial of publication suffices to suppress the anomaly. Sometimes, however, renegadescientists manage to capture the attention of the general public, pleading their case to alarger audience that has no vested interest in the validity of the established theories.When that happens, and significant interests are at stake, the scientific establishment willturn nasty, resorting to misrepresentation or outright falsification of evidence.

The Cold Fusion Scandal

Such misrepresentation and falsification of evidence happened after Stanley Pons and

Martin Fleischman[5

] announced in March 1989 that they had achieved fusion byelectrochemical means. Several influential US laboratories (Caltech[6], MIT[7],Yale/Brookhaven[8]) reported negative results on Cold Fusion that were based on shoddyexperimental work and a misunderstanding of the Pons-Fleischmann claims[9]. Theygave a hostile hot fusion establishment the excuse it needed to conclude that the claimsmade by were bogus. In November 1989, a DOE panel concluded the same after ashallow mock investigation of only seven months.[10]

Eugene F. Mallove, who was the Chief Science Writer at the MIT News Office at thetime and now publishesInfinite Energy, a journal dedicated to covering potential newenergy sources ignored by mainstream science, played a part in exposing the MIT reportas mistaken, possibly fraudulent[11], and resigned in protest over it in 1991. He writes inTen Years That Shook Physics[12]

"The 1989 reports of MIT[7], Caltech[6], and Harwell have each beenanalyzed by other scientists and these analyses have been published (seereferences, page 34 in IE Issue No. 24). Each of the widely cited 1989'null' experiments has been found to be deeply flawed in experimentalprotocols, data evaluation, and presentation. Each, in fact, contained some


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evidence of excess heat as claimed by Fleischmann and Pons. There isevidence that the MIT data was deliberately altered to erase an indicationof excess heat. The altered data was published officially by MIT, and itwas included in reports to a government agency under the official seal ofMIT. The experiment was paid for out of federal government funds. This

report had a dramatic impact on the perception of many scientists andjournalists.

It is ironic that each of these negative results were themselves the productof the kind of low quality work of which Fleischmann and Pons wereaccused. The difference was that the reports said what the hot fusioncommunity wanted to hear. This was the legacy of the 1989 ERAB report,but that legacy must now be reversed-and it will be, however long thattakes.

Almost two years after they were concocted, Prof. Ronald R. Parker of

MIT's Plasma Fusion Laboratory publicly stated that the MIT PFC coldfusion calorimetry data were 'worthless' (June 7, 1991). In the same period(August 30, 1991) after I had challenged this data, Parker stated that 'MITscientists stand by their conclusions.' Which is it?"

A detailed chronology of this scientific coverup can be found in the same issue.

Most people, including physicists continue to be unaware that low-energy nuclearreactions (LENR) are real, and have been verified in hundreds of experiments throughoutthe 1990s.

In February 2002, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center of the United State Navyin San Diego released a 310 page report titled Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of thePd/D2O System [13] that discusses the overwhelming experimental evidence that the coldfusion effect indeed exists. Dr. Frank E. Gordon, the head of the center's Navigation andApplied Sciences Department, writes in the foreword:

"We do not know if 'Cold Fusion' will be the answer to future energyneeds, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon throughrepeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It is time thatthis phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap whatever benefitsaccrue from additional scientific understanding. It is time for governmentfunding organizations to invest in this research."

A March 2003New Scientistarticle[14] quotes Robert Nowak, an electrochemist and aprogramme manager in chemistry at the Office of Naval Research on the suppressionefforts that the Navy research had to overcome:

"From the beginning, the idea was to keep things modest. 'We put lessthan $1 million a year into the programme,' Nowak says. 'Above that level,


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the red flags go up.' Saalfeld and Nowak never gave the programme itsown line in the ONR's budget, but allotted money to it from miscellaneousfunds. 'We were to keep working and we were allowed to publish ourresults, but we weren't supposed to say a lot about it,' Miles recalls. 'Somepeople were worried that word would get out and it would jeopardise the

navy labs' funding from Congress for other research. We didn't even call it'cold fusion'. We called it 'anomalous effects in deuterated systems'.

' That was still not enough to keep the sceptics off their backs. 'Fairlyprominent individuals within the physics community voiced threats,'Nowak admits. 'They said that they were aware that federal funds weregoing into cold fusion research and they were going to do what they couldto stop it."'

That "cold fusion" continues to be ignored by the scientific establishment, and, to addinsult to injury, is being used synonymously with "bad science", usually in such

expressions as "the cold fusion debacle", constitutes one of the greatest scientific scandalsin human history, and a human tragedy. While wars over oil are being fought, a potentialsource of energy that could solve humanity's energy problems for all eternity is beingignored by all but a small community of researchers. At the same time, the dead-end "hotfusion" program continues to receive billions of dollars in public funds. If there is ascandal associated with cold fusion, this is it.

So addicted is the plasma fusion community to federal research funds that eveninnovative concepts for hot fusion that threaten to lead to practical fusion energy soonand to a corresponding gigantic embarrassment for the hot fusion establishments areviciously suppressed. A recent example are the suppression efforts aimed atFocus

Fusion. Plasma physicists Eric J. Lerner, Dr. Bruce Freeman and Dr. Hank Oona used aninnovative design to achieve hydrogen-boron fusion, which, unlike the deuterium-tritiumreaction the hot fusion mainstream is trying to create, creates no lethal neutrons. Yet (ortherefore?) the discovery met with stiff resistance from the hot fusion establishment. A2002 press release of the Focus Fusion Society describes the suppressive efforts of thehot fusion establishment:

"On May 23rd Dr. Richard Seimon, Fusion Energy Science ProgramManager at Los Alamos demanded Dr. Hank Oona, one of the physicistinvolved in the experiment, dissociate himself from comparisons thatshowed the new results to be superior in key respects to those of thetokamak and to remove his name from the paper describing the results.The tokamak, a much larger and more expensive device, has been thecenterpiece of the US fusion effort for 25 years. Seimon did not disputingthe data or the achievement of high temperatures. He objected to thecomparisons with the tokamak, arguing that it was biased against thetokamak. In addition, Seimon pressured Dr. Bruce Freeman, another co-author of the paper, to advocate the removal of all tokamak comparisonsfrom the paper. Both of my colleagues in this research have been


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threatened with losing their jobs if they dont distance themselves from thecomparisons with the tokamak, says Lerner who is lead author on thepaper. Both of them had carefully reviewed and approved the paperoriginally and had endorsed its conclusions. For them to be forced torecant under threat of firing is outrageous. It undermines the very basis of

scientific discourse if researchers are not allowed by their institutions tospeak honestly to each other."[15]

If the claims about Focus Fusion pan out, it could be the cheap, clean, inexhaustiblesource of energy that the hot fusion establishment has been promising the world for half acentury, but failed to deliver.

Transmutation

If a new class of nuclear reactions can take place under low energy conditions, then it isreasonable to expect even transmutations of heavy elements. But to conventional

chemistry and physics, the claim of heavy elemental transmutations occurring in"chemical" systems, apparently validating the ancient proto-science of alchemy,constitutes an even greater provocation than cold fusion.

John Bockris, a distinguished professor of chemistry at Texas A&M and one of theworld's leading electrochemists, had to learn this lesson in the early years of the coldfusion scandal. He successfully replicated the Pons and Fleischmann experiment in 1989and discovered bursts of tritium production.

He then became one of the principal targets of a smear campaign against cold fusionresearch by science journalist Gary Taubes. Taubes was writing a book on Cold Fusionand had already made up his mind that cold fusion was "pathological science". He spenttime with Bockris and his students at Texas A&M, posing as a disinterested seeker of thetruth. There, he got the idea that Nigel Packham, one of Bockris' graduate students had"spiked" the cold fusion cell with tritium. The allegation was utterly baseless, but Taubeswas out for blood and needed to have his scandal. He got Science to publish hisallegations in June 1990[17]. Bockris called the editor and asked for the right to publish adetailed response, but his request was denied. Eventually, he managed to get a one-column letter published denying the allegations. Publication of Taubes' paranoiddelusions in Science gave them wide credence and circulation.

A fair-minded Nov 1998 article in Wired[20] sets the record straight:

"'We thought Taubes was genuine at first,' Bockris told me recently,speaking in a clipped, precise British accent that he acquired before hemoved to the United States in 1953. 'We exposed our lab books to him,and told him our results. But then he said to Packham, my grad student,'I've turned off the tape, now you can tell me - it's a fraud, isn't it? If youconfess to me now, I won't be hard on you, you'll be able to pursue yourcareer."


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(Taubes has been shown Bockris's statement. He prefers not to comment.)

According to Bockris, 'A postdoctoral student named Kainthla, and atechnician named Velev, both detected tritium and heat after we tookPackham off the work because of the controversy. Since then, numerous

people have obtained comparable results. In 1994, I counted 140 papersreporting tritium in low-temperature fusion experiments. One of them wasby Fritz Will, the president of The Electrochemical Society, who has animpeccable reputation."

Still, Taubes's report in the June 1990 Science magazine clearly suggestedthat Packham might have added tritium to fake his results. This reassuredmany people that cold fusion had been bogus all along. Packham receivedhis PhD, but only on condition that all references to cold fusion beremoved from the body of his thesis. Today he works for NASA,developing astronaut life-support systems. "I don't know why Gary Taubes

wrote what he did," he says. "Certainly I did not add any tritium in myexperiment."

But for Bockris, the worst was yet to come. In 1991, he was approached by a self-taughtinventor without formal scientific credentials from Tennessee named Joe Champion whoclaimed that he had discovered a process that could perform heavy elementtransmutation. Bockris eventually brought Champion to Texas A&M as a consultant andstarted experiments to replicate the claimed results. In 1993, the local media got wind ofthe research and made it widely known that medieval alchemy was being performed atthe university! This lead to a second, even nastier scientific witch hunt against Bockris.23 distinguished professors at Texas A&M signed a petition to the provost asking that

Bockris be stripped of his title, and 11 full professors in the chemistry department wrote aletter asking that Bockris be removed from the department. The petition stated[18]

"For a trained scientist to claim, or support anyone else's claim to havetransmuted elements is difficult for us to believe and is no more acceptablethan to claim to have invented a gravity shield, revived the dead or to bemining green cheese on the moon. We believe that Bockris' recentactivities have made the terms 'Texas A&M' and 'Aggie' objects ofderisive laughter throughout the world..."

Bockris was subsequently investigated for fraud, based on charges that he was trying todefraud investors with false claims of being able to manufacture gold. He was"completely exonerated" only one week after a hearing in which he had been allowed topresent his research and defend himself in January 1994.

The professors in the department of chemistry who had initiated the investigation, lead bydistinguished professor Frank A. Cotton, were disappointed at this outcome. So theysecretly formed a committee to start yet another investigation. Bockris learned of theexistence of this "Ad Hoc Committee" only when information of its existence was leaked


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to the press in June 1994. In classical totalitarian fashion, he was subsequently denied theright to defend himself before the committee and even to know what the charges were.He later learned that he was being investigated because his results were "impossible".

After 11 months of investigation, Bockris was exonerated again in May 1995. But the

official investigation is only part of the story. An article inInfinite Energy[19] whichdescribes the entire affair in full details suggests a psychological explanation for theunscientific conduct of Bockris' colleagues.

"One of the most difficult aspects of the treatment to which Bockris wassubjected was social ostracism, starting with Dean Kemp's accusation andnot even ending with the second exoneration. There were about sixty-fiveprofessors in the large Chemistry Department at Texas A&M. Mostignored Bockris for much of the two-year period in which the University,egged-on by ring-leaders in the Department, acted against him. After thefirst complete exoneration, two professors did congratulate him, but he

was isolated. Bockris' wife Lilli felt it perhaps more than he, because shehad a number of faculty wives whom she had known as friends. When shemet them now in the supermarket, instead of having the usual kindly chat,they turned their backs on her. Lilli recalls that the year she spent inVienna after the Nazis took over seemed to her less unpleasant andthreatening than the isolation and nastiness which she felt in CollegeStation, Texas from 1993 through 1995.

One would have thought that after all that had been done, everythingwould be settled now. This was not the attitude of many of Bockris'colleagues. The motivating force for the antipathy may be the

subconscious fear that the discoveries of the Bockris group mighteventually be proved and recognized. Then his original contributionswould be rated as discoveries of great magnitude. There were at least twoprofessors in the Chemistry Department who had made it known that thatthey expected to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry some day. Thepossibility that it might go instead to a colleague whose work they somuch denigrated must have been an unwelcome thought. (They did nothave the attitude of physicist Richard Feynman, who was displeased bythe artificial focus on one person's accomplishment that the Nobel Prizesystem encouraged.)

Having failed in the three official investigations that had been carried outagainst Bockris, they decided that all they could do would be to persuadethe head of the department to have Bockris shunnedas in anexcommunication for religious heresy. No one was supposed to speak withthe errant Bockris. For a long time, absorbed in his work as ever, he didn'tunderstand that shunning was underway. Most of the colleagues had beenignoring him anyway since the inquiries had begun in 1993. He did notice,however, that whenever he wanted to talk to the Head of the Department,


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perhaps once every few months, he came to his office and did not inviteBockris to come to his. Of course, he was more than twenty years youngerthan Bockris, but later Bockris realized that this was an example of theshunning. The Head did not want anyone to see that he was talkingcollegially with Bockris!

Bockris' colleagues in the physical chemistry division took no notice ofthe shunning order, which might have gone around unofficially. Inpractice, the shunning made no effective difference to how Bockris carriedout his work, though it was a very considerable act of spite. It proved onceagain that at least in the Chemistry Department at Texas A&M University,research results which do not agree with existing theory are not tolerated."

The Wired article suspects financial motives behind the scientific establishment'santi-scientific witch hunt:

"Financial factors may have played a part in the fierce animosity exhibitedtoward cold fusion experiments. When a congressional subcommitteesuggested that $25 million could be diverted from hot fusion research tocold fusion, naturally the hot fusion scientists were outraged."[20]

Today, the evidence that transmutation of heavy elements can occur in electrochemicalsystems has become fairly strong. Yasuhiro Iwamura, Mitsuru Sakano and Takehiko Itohof the Mitsubishi Advanced Technology Research Center have shown reproducibletransmutation of Cesium (Z=55) into Praseodymium (Z=59) and Strontium (Z=38) intoMolybdenum (Z=42) in a deuterium-palladium system. Their results were published inthe Japanese Journal of Applied Physics.[21]

These results were recently independently replicated by Higashiyama et al at OsakaUniversity and presented at the Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion inCambridge, Massachusetts 24 - 29 August 2003[22].

At http://www.suppressedscience.net/www.lenr-canr.org the interested reader can find acomprehensive collection of papers on Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.

1

Reasons to doubt the validity of Relativity Theory

Einstein's special theory of relativity, published in 1905, is one of the foundational

theories of modern physics. It states that the vacuum speed of light is the same for allobservers in initial (non-accelerated) reference frames, and that time and spacecoordinates combine in a peculiar way when measured from different inertial systems.Exactly how this happens is described by a set of equations called the LorentzTransformation.

1 www.lenr-canr.org


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Strictly speaking, special relativity theory does not apply to anything in the physicaluniverse, since gravitational fields, however minute, are always present. It took Einsteinabout 10 years to incorporate gravity and acceleration into his theory, and the result isknown asgeneral relativity. It describes gravity not as a force, but as curvature ofspacetime caused by mass. According to general relativity, there can be no such thing as

a gravity shield.

Despite the consensus of a majority of physicists that special relativity is proven beyond ashadow of a doubt, there is a well-reasoned experimental and theoretical case against itsvalidity. But relativity dissidents are routinely censored from presenting their ideas atconferences or having them published in the scientific literature. John E. Chappell, Jr.,the late director of the Natural Philosophy Alliance (an organization of relativity critics),relates the following suppression experience:

"There has been a particularly vicious attitude towards critics ofEinsteinian relativity at U.C. Berkeley ever since. I ran into it in 1985,

when I read a paper arguing for absolute simultaneity at that year'sInternational Congress on the History of Science. After I finished, theDanish chairman made some courteous remarks about dissidents he hadlearned about in Scandinavia, and then turned to the audience forquestions. The first speaker was one of a group of about 4 young physicsstudents in the back. He launched immediately into a horrible tirade ofverbal abuse, accusing me of being entirely wrong in my analysis, asimplification of the Melbourne Evans analysis-'Evans is wrong; you arewrong,' he shouted. He accused me of being way out of line to present my'faulty' arguments on his prestigious campus. When I started to ask him'Then how would you explain...', he loudly interrupted me with 'I don't

have to explain anything.' The rest of the audience felt so disturbed by allthis, that the question session was essentially destroyed."[23]

Such reactions are not uncommon. To even begin to criticize Einsteins's theory of specialrelativity has become a scientific heresy of the highest order. The prevailing attitude ofthe physical establishment is that anyone who doubts the validity of this "bedrock ofmodern physics" is insane, and that trying to refute it is a symptom of "psychosis"[24].

Caltech Professor David L. Goodstein states in a video-tape lecture

"There are theories in science, which are so well verified by experiencethat they become promoted to the status of fact. One example is theSpecial Theory of Relativity-it's still called a theory for historical reasons,but it is in reality a simple, engineering fact, routinely used in the designof giant machines, like nuclear particle accelerators, which always workperfectly. Another example of that sort of thing is the theory of evolution.These are called theories, but they are in reality among the best establishedfacts in all of human knowledge."[25]


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Isaac Asimov has stated that "no physicist who is even marginally sane doubts thevalidity of SR."[26]

An article on relativity dissidents[28] quotes relativist Clifford Will of WashingtonUniversity expressing a similar sentiment:

"SR has been confirmed by experiment so many times that it borders oncrackpot to say there is something wrong with it. Experiments have beendone to test SR explicitly. The world's particle accelerators would notwork if SR wasn't in effect. The global positioning system would not workif special relativity didn't work the way we thought it did."

Unfortunately for the progress of physics, when opinions like these reach a critical mass,they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dissent is no longer respected, or even tolerated.Evidence to the contrary can no longer be communicated, for the journals will refuse topublish it[24]. Mathematically and logically, the notion that a theory that has made many

correct predictions must necessarily be true is untenable. Scientific models can producearbitrarily many, arbitrarily good predictions and still be flawed, as the historical exampleof the Ptolemaic (geocentric) model of the solar system shows. It does not matter howmany observations are consistent with a theory if there is only one observation that is not.Ironically, relativity itself should have driven this point home to physicists long ago.

For centuries, Newtonian physics had led science to one triumph after another inexplaining the inner workings of the natural world, and at the end of the 19th century, nophysicist who was "even marginally sane" doubted its validity. After all, hadn't thevalidity of Newtonian physics "been confirmed by experiment so many times" that itwould have "bordered on crackpot to say there is something wrong with it"? Didn't the

operation of the world's steam engines prove the validity of Newtonian physics? And yet,Newtonian physics loses its validity at speeds approaching the speed of light. Inhindsight, it is obvious why the discrepancy was never caught. Due to the enormity of thespeed of light c, effects of the order of (v/c) only manifest themselves in highlysophisticated experiments. Similarly, even modern technology cannot easily distinguishbetween relativity and competing theories that agree with relativity at first order of (v/c)but disagree at higher order. One such competing theory is Ronald Hatch's ModifiedLorentz Ether Theory[27]

Hatch, a former president of the Institute of Navigation and current Director ofNavigation Systems Engineering of NavCom Technologies, is one of the world'sforemost experts on the GPS. Concerning the question of whether the operation of theGPS proves the validity of SR, he has come to conclusions diametrically opposite fromClifford Will's. InRelativity and GPS[29,30], he argues that the observed effect of velocityon the GPS clocks flat out contradicts the predictions of special relativity.

Hatch's proposed alternative to special and general relativity theory, Modified LorentzEther Gauge Theory (MLET), agrees with General Relativity at first order but correctsmany astronomical anomalies that GRT cannot account for without ad-hoc assumptions,


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such as the anomalous rotation of galaxies and certain anomalies in planetary orbits. Inaddition, the force of gravity is self-limiting in MLET, which eliminates pointsingularities (black holes), one of the major shortcomings of GRT. One of the testablepredictions of Hatch's theory is that LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational WaveObservatory, will fail to detect any sign of gravity waves.

A suppression story surrounding the historical roots of relativity.

Relativity textbooks all contain the story of how the Michelson-Morley experiment[31]supposedly proved the non-existence of a light-carrying medium, the ether. In thisexperiment, light rays are sent on round trips in different directions and then reunited,resulting in an interference pattern. If an ether "wind" caused the speed of light to bedirection-dependent, then rotation of the experimental apparatus would result in a shift ofthis pattern. But such a shift was never detected, proving the isotropy (direction-independence) of the speed of light, or so the story goes.

But physical reality is more complicated then the foundational myth of relativity wouldhave us believe. An examination of historical papers on the subject indicates thatrelativists have rewritten history. The M-M experiment of 1887 found only a fraction ofthe effect size predicted by the stationary ether hypothesis, thus clearly disproving it, butthe effect was emphatically not "null" within the accuracy of the experiment.

Dayton C. Miller reviews the evidence in The Ether-Drift Experiments and theDetermination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth [32] and concludes that

"The brief series of observations was sufficient to show that the effect didnot have the anticipated magnitude. However, and this fact must beemphasized, the indicated effect was not zero; the sensitivity of theapparatus was such that the conclusion, published in 1887, stated that theobserved relative motion of the earth and ether did not exceed one-fourthof the Earth's orbital velocity. This is quite different from a null effect nowso frequently imputed to this experiment by the writers on Relativity."

Miller then discusses the original M-M data and shows that there is a systematic effectindicating a speed of the Earth relative to the Ether of 8.8 km/s for the noon observationsand 8.0 km/s for the evening observations.

Relativity skeptics like Miller believed that the ether may be entrained ("dragged along")by the earth. To test that hypothesis, Miller endeavored to replicate the M-M experiment(which had been performed in a basement in Cleveland) at greater altitude on MountWilson, where presumably there would be a stronger ether drift.

After years of careful experimentation, Miller indeed found a systematic deviation fromthe null result predicted by SR which greatly embarrassed Einstein and his followers.Einstein tried to explain it away as an artifact of temperature variation, but Miller had


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taken great care to avoid precisely that kind of error. Miller told the Cleveland PlainDealeron January 27, 1926,

"The trouble with Professor Einstein is that he knows nothing about myresults. ... He ought to give me credit for knowing that temperature

differences would affect the results. He wrote to me in Novembersuggesting this. I am not so simple as to make no allowance fortemperature."

But the tide of scientific opinion had turned against the ether and in favor of Einstein.The 1919 solar eclipse observations led by Sir Arthur Eddington that allegedly confirmedgeneral relativity's prediction of the deflection of starlight by a gravitational field was soambivalent and poorly performed that it was scientifically worthless[33], but thanks toEddington's authority, it was accepted as a resounding confirmation. Some of the starshad moved in the direction predicted by Einstein, but not as much, or too much, othershad even moved in the opposite direction. Confirmation was obtained by the "scientific"

device of discarding the data that didn't fit the prediction, and retaining the data that did.The "confirmation" was triumphantly announced by Eddington at a joint meeting of theRoyal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society to an audience that had not actuallyseen the data first hand. In the judgement of an eye witness, the meeting resembled acoronation ceremony rather than a scientific conference.[34]

Because of this scientific fraud, Einstein became a world celebrity overnight, surroundedby an aura of scientific infallibility. Miller's results, which suggested that in order todetect anisotropies in the speed of light, the interferometer needed to be surrounded by aslittle matter as possible, and located at a high altitude, were ignored in subsequent tests ofthe isotropy of the speed of light, such as the Brillet-Hall experiment[35], and recently,

the Mller experiment[36

].

After Miller's death, one of his students, Robert S. Shankland, gave the physicsestablishment the final excuse it needed to forget Miller's work for good[37]. Shanklandsimply revived the old criticism of temperature variations, against which Miller hadalways successfully defended himself during his lifetime, to reach the conclusion thatMiller's results must be invalid. Some relativity skeptics believe that that conclusion waspreordained by Shankland's manifest devotion to Einstein which is evident in hiswriting[38,39].

One of these, James DeMeo, Ph.D., has undertaken a detailed review of Miller's workand Shankland's critique[40] that comes to the conclusion that the Shankland team

"with some degree of consultation with Einstein, decided that 'Miller mustbe wrong' and then set about to see what they could find in his archive thatwould support that conclusion."

It must be noted, however, that Miller's determination of the velocity of the Earth relativeto the ether is incompatible with modern observations. Miller found that the solar system


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is moving at a speed of 208 kilometers per second towards a point in the GreatMagellanic Cloud in the constellation Doradus, in contradiction to modern measurementsdiscussed below.

Even if the alleged null result of the M-M experiment is accepted, the isotropy of the

speed of light does not necessarily follow. M. Psimopoulos and T. Theocharis, twophysicists at Imperial College, London, point out in a letter toNature[41] that the M-Mexperiment has only been performed in terrestrial laboratories, where the gravitationalfield and the magnetosphere of the Earth and other ambient factors are always present,and must therefore be repeated in space before its conclusions can be accepted asuniversal. They note that

"all sorts of experiments have already been conducted in space. But thefew experiments which might have truly tested the perhaps mostfundamental and controversial hypotheses in twentieth century physics-Einstein's postulates - have curiously not been done."

Silvertooth's Experiment

In a 1986 letter toNature[42] Ernest W. Silvertooth reported that he constructed aninterferometer capable of detecting the absolute motion of the Earth with respect to theether. InExperimental detection of the ether[43] and Motion through the Ether[44],Silvertooth reported that on the particular day of his measurements, the Earth moved at378 km/s towards the constellation Leo. If relativity is correct, than this result should becomplete garbage.

Silvertooth published his findings before NASA launched COBE, the first satellite toaccurately measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Due to Doppler shift,there is a slight anisotropy in the spectrum of the CMB. Based on precise measurementsof this anisotropy, it was determined that, relative to the CMB, the heliocentric framemoves at 390 km/s towards Leo. Given the earth's orbital speed of 30 km/s, this is a verygood agreement with Silvertooth's measurement. In a refined experiment[45], Silvertoothand Whitney confirmed the earlier result and found a speed of v = 378 km/s.

A citation search through ISI Web of Science[47] reveals no references to any ofSilvertooth's papers in the mainstream scientific literature. An online document[46]briefly mentions and dismisses it on the grounds that both the experiment and thetheoretical analysis are flawed, but given how well Silvertooth's result agrees with theindependently determined motion of the Earth through the CMB, error seems to be aninsufficient explanation. Unless Silvertooth committed outright fraud by simply making alucky guess as to the Earth's velocity relative to the CMB and then ascribing this guess toan imaginary experiment, the inescapable conclusion would be that translation can bemeasured by purely electromagnetic means and that Einstein's theory of special relativityis falsified.


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Is the Speed of Light in Interplanetary Space a Constant?

The late physicist Bryan G. Wallace discovered in 1961 that radar distance measurementsof the surface of the planet Venus did not confirm the constancy of the speed of light.There were systematic variations in the radar data containing diurnal, lunar and synodic

components. Attempting to get his results published inPhysical Review Letters, heencountered great resistance from referees, and eventually settled for a lesser journal[48].

In a letter toPhysics Today[49] Wallace summarizes his findings as follows:

"The 1961 interplanetary radar contact with Venus presented the firstopportunity to overcome technological limitations and perform directexperiments of Einstein's second postulate of a constant light speed of c inspace. When the radar calculations were based on the postulate, theobserved-computed residuals ranged to over 3 milliseconds of theexpected error of 10 microseconds from the best [general relativity] fit the

Lincoln Lab could generate, a variation range of over 30,000%. Ananalysis of the data showed a component that was relativistic in a c+vGalilean sense. "

Let's do a quick reality check here. If the speed of light in interplanetary space is nonconstant, how could NASA not have noticed in its robotic exploration of the solarsystem? Wallace makes the scandalous claim that NASA has noticed, and has been usingequations with non-relativistic components to calculate signal transit times in the solarsystem all along:

"At the December 1974 AAS Dynamical Astronomy Meeting, E. M.Standish Jr of JPL reported that significant unexplained systematicvariations existed in all the interplanetary data, and that they are forced touse empirical correction factors that have no theoretical foundation."[50]

In a 1973 paper[51], Wallace describes how the Lincoln Lab introduced averaging tosuppress the anomalous radar results and refused to release the raw data to him,stonewalling his investigation.

"The apparent improvement in the residuals for later years was due to thefact that the Lab interpolated the 1964 [Venus] data to 12:00 UT and the1967 data to one observation a day from 2:12 UT to 2:21 UT. Theobserving time for the 1961 data ranged from 00:33 UT to 23:40 UT. Theinvolved radar astronomers are publicly claiming nearly completeagreement between their recent radar analysis and general relativity, butmy investigation reveals otherwise. At the Fourth Texas Symposium ofRelativistic Astrophysics, I.I. Shapiro of the Lincoln Lab promised to sendme any data I wanted. I read in an article published by the lab that theyhad data for the same observing dates covering a wide range of dailyobserving times from both the MIT and USSR radar stations. I wrote


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Shapiro requesting this data 2/13/69; his letters of 2/28/69 and 3/12/69ignored my request. I made an issue of this in my letter to him of 3/20/69,and in his reply of 3/27/69 he stated, 'Unfortunately the data do not exist inthe form in which you wanted them and hence, I cannot honor yourrequest.'

Shapiro later sent me data that were completely worthless for making anobjective test of the relative velocity of light in space. The data were fromtwo MIT radar stations in Massachusetts. The separation between themwas only 0.2' of longitude and 20.6" of latitude and the observations hadbeen interpolated to 2:12 UT to 2:21 UT with only one observation perday. It seems obvious that the Lab eliminated the variations byinterpolating the data for each day to the one observing time for that daythat agreed with the general relativity prediction. One could use the samemethod to prove that a stopped clock keeps perfect time."

A subsequent letter submitted toPhysics Today on July 9, 1984 was denied publication.Wallace reproduced this letter in the chapterPublication Politics of his online bookTheFarce of Physics[52]. In it, he wrote

"The speed of light is c+v

During a current literature search, I requested and received a reprint of apaper [T. D. Moyer, Celes. Mech., 23, 33(1981)] published by TheodoreD. Moyer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The paper reports the methodsused to obtain accurate values of range observables for radio and radarsignals in the solar system. The paper's (A6) equation and the

accompanying information that calls for evaluating the position vectors atthe signal reception time is nearly equivalent to the Galilean c+v equation(2) in my paper RADAR TESTING OF THE RELATIVE VELOCITY OFLIGHT IN SPACE. [B. G. Wallace, Spectros. Lett., 2, 361(1969)] Theadditional terms in the (A6) equation correct for the effects of thetroposphere and charged particles, as well as the general relativity effectsof gravity and velocity time dilation.

The fact that the radio astronomers have been reluctant to acknowledgethe full theoretical implications of their work is probably related to theunfortunate things that tend to happen to physicists that are rash enough tochallenge Einstein's sacred second postulate. Over twenty-three years havegone by since the original Venus radar experiments clearly showed thatthe speed of light in space was not constant, and still the average scientistis not aware of this fact! This demonstrates why it is important for theAPS to bring true scientific freedom to the PR journal's editorial policy."

Supporting evidence comes from Ronald Hatch who finds that the NASA equations forinterplanetary navigation follow his MLET theory rather than special relativity:


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"The experimental evidence is almost overwhelming in support of theMLET view. There is a large disjoint between the SRT theorists and theexperimentalists. The SRT theorists continue to claim that the speed oflight is automatically the velocity c and isotropic with respect to themoving observer or experiment. But the SRT experimentalists do what is

necessary to explain and make sense of the measurements. The equationsfor tracking and navigating the interplanetary probes developed by the JetPropulsion Laboratory(JPL) for NASA clearly follow the MLETtemplate."[27]

Mr. Wallace died on April 19, 1997, his findings ignored and thus neither confirmed norrefuted by the physics establishment. The question remains: Is the speed of light ininterplanetary space subject to systematic variations in time?

It is therefore imperative that systematic, high precision speed of light experiments beperformed in earth orbit and interplanetary space. No such experiments have been carried

out yet - why test a theory that you already know is correct? - but majority opinion hasbeen changing lately. Attempts to reconcile general relativity with quantum theory havebeen a notable failure, and physicists have come to suspect that a unified field theorymust involve "small" violations of special and general relativity. Mller et al. state

"Special relativity (SR) underlies all accepted theories of nature at thefundamental level. Therefore, it has been and must be tested with everincreasing precision to provide a firm basis for its future application. Suchtests are also motivated by the efforts to unify gravity with the other forcesof nature, one of the outstanding open challenges in modern science. Infact, many currently discussed models of quantum gravity do violate the

principles of SR."[36

]

This has finally created a renewed interest in testing both relativity theoriesexperimentally to high precision. German physicists are currently designing the OPTISmission[53], a satellite carrying ultra-high precision experiments to test key assumptionsand predictions of relativity; among them, the isotropy and constancy of the speed oflight. As expected, the OPTIS mission objective is to confirm special and generalrelativity, or at most to find weak violations:

"New unifying theories (e.g. the String-Theory) predict small deviationsfrom the Special and General Relativity. If such deviations could be found(e.g. an unisotropy of the speed of light) the way to a new understandingof the time and space structure of the universe would be open."[54]

The motivation to conduct such experiments in Earth orbit is solely due to technologicalconsiderations and has nothing to do with the dissident argument that space-based tests ofspecial relativity might produce radically different results than ground-based ones. But ifMiller and other relativity critics are right, OPTIS may find much more than small


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deviations. The mission is still in the planning stages and no launch date has been set, butresults could be available between 2005 and 2007.

Superluminal Signals

There is some evidence for the existence of superluminal signals in nature, whichcontradicts the special relativistic idea that such signals violate causality and are thereforeimpossible.

W. A. Rodrigues, Jr. and others have constructed formal solutions of the main relativistic

wave equations traveling at arbitrary speeds 0 v < [55]. They call these solutionsundistorted progressive waves (UPWs). These formal solutions have infinite energy andcan therefore not exist in reality; however; numerical simulations and experiments withsound waves suggest that so-called finite aperture approximations to these waves can begenerated[56]. Such has been done; however, in all the finite aperture approximationsexperimentally produced, only the peaks move superluminally; the wave fronts move at

c, excluding the possibility of superluminal signaling[57]. InFinite energy superluminalsolutions of Maxwell equations[58], de Oliveira and Rodrigues show that genuinelysuperluminal, finite-energy vacuum solutions of Maxwell's equations exist, which,unfortunately, cannot be produced by a finite antenna. The authors state, however, that

"even if the new superluminal solutions cannot be produced by physicaldevices, the only possible reason for their non existence in our universe isthat of a possible violation of the principle of relativity."

Von Flandern has shown in a series of papers that the force of gravity must act in exactlythe same fashion it is calculated by astronomers, that is, near-instantaneously. Otherwise,

angular momentum would no longer be conserved and planetary orbits would beunstable. In The Speed of Gravity - What the Experiments Say[59] he writes

"Standard experimental techniques exist to determine the propagationspeed of forces. When we apply these techniques to gravity, they all yieldpropagation speeds too great to measure, substantially faster thanlightspeed. This is because gravity, in contrast to light, has no detectableaberration or propagation delay for its action, even for cases (such asbinary pulsars) where sources of gravity accelerate significantly during thelight time from source to target By contrast, the finite propagation speedof light causes radiation pressure forces to have a non-radial componentcausing orbits to decay (the "Poynting-Robertson effect"); but gravity hasno counterpart force proportional to v/c to first order.

General relativity (GR) explains these features by suggesting thatgravitation (unlike electromagnetic forces) is a pure geometric effect ofcurved space-time, not a force of nature that propagates. Gravitationalradiation, which surely does propagate at lightspeed but is a fifth ordereffect in v/c, is too small to play a role in explaining this difference in


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behavior between gravity and ordinary forces of nature. Problems with thecausality principle also exist for GR in this connection, such as explaininghow the external fields between binary black holes manage to continuallyupdate without benefit of communication with the masses hidden behindevent horizons. These causality problems would be solved without any

change to the mathematical formalism of GR, but only to its interpretation,if gravity is once again taken to be a propagating force of nature in flatspacetime with the propagation speed indicated by observational evidenceand experiments: not less than 2 1010 c.

Such a change of perspective requires no change in the assumed characterof gravitational radiation or its lightspeed propagation. Although faster-than-light force propagation speeds do violate Einstein special relativity(SR), they are in accord with Lorentzian relativity, which has never beenexperimentally distinguished from SR-at least, not if favor of SR. Indeed,far from upsetting much of current physics, the main changes induced by

this new perspective are beneficial to areas where physics has beenstruggling, such as explaining experimental evidence for non-locality inquantum physics, the dark matter issue in cosmology, and the possibleunification of forces. Recognition of a faster-than-lightspeed propagationof gravity, as indicated by all existing experimental evidence, may be thekey to taking conventional physics to the next plateau."

In a 2002 paper[60] Van Flandern and Vigier extend these results and conclude that thealleged Einstein "general speed limit" of c must be invalid.

It must be understood that if the existence of instantaneous signals (rather than "just"

superluminal ones) were confirmed, this would instantly invalidate special relativity,which is founded on the impossibility of synchronizing two distant clocks by means of aninstantaneous signal.

A suppression story concerning a flaw in quantum theory

D.L. Hotson shares the following suppression story inDirac's Equation and the Sea ofNegative Energy[61] (talking about himself in the third person):

"(..) Unfortunately, he could not resist asking awkward questions. Hisprofessors taught that conservation of mass-energy is the never-violated,rock-solid foundation of all physics. In 'pair-production', a photon of atleast 1.022 MeV 'creates' an electron-positron pair, each with 0.511 MeVof rest energy, with any excess being the momentum of the 'created' pair.So supposedly the conservation books balance.

But the 'created' electron and positron both have spin (angular momentum)

energy of h/4. By any assumption as to the size of electron or positron,this is far more energy than that supplied by the photon at 'creation'.


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'Isn't angular momentum energy?' he asked a professor.

'Of course it is. This half-integer spin angular momentum is the energyneeded by the electron to set up a stable standing wave around the proton.Thus it is responsible for the Pauli exclusion principle, hence for the

extension and stability of all matter. You could say it is the sole cause ofthe periodic table of elements.'

'Then where does all this energy come from? How can the 'created'electron have something like sixteen times more energy than the photonthat supposedly 'created' it? Isn't this a huge violation of your never-violated rock-solid foundation of physics?'

'We regard spin angular momentum as an 'inherent property' of electronand positron, not as a violation of conservation.'

'But if it's real energy, where does it come from?' (..)

'Inherent property' means we don't talk about it, and you won't either ifyou want to pass this course.'

Later, Mr. Hotson was taken aside and told that his 'attitude' wasdisrupting the class, and that further, with his 'attitude', there was nochance in hell of his completing a graduate program in physics, so 'saveyour money'. He ended up at the Sorbonne studying French literature andlater became a professional land surveyor."

The Big Bang Scandal

Big Bang Cosmology, which is built on general relativity theory, is forced to use anumber of adjustable parameters and ad-hoc assumptions to agree with observation, suchas inflation, the assumption that most of the mass of the universe must consist of 'darkmatter', a kind of matter that cannot be detected, but nevertheless must exist, for the solereason that big bang theory requires it, and now the latest fad, "dark energy".

Two of the three vaunted "predictions" of big bang theory - the light element abundancesand the temperature of the microwave background are actually retrodictions meaning thatbig bang theory failed to predict them quantitatively correctly and was then adjusted after

the data came in to fit the observational evidence[67

].

The third, the Hubble expansion, is entirely a figment of the imagination, as veteranastronomer Halton Arp has pointed out for decades. There are ample examples of high-redshift quasars that are physically connected to low-redshift galaxies, and there isevidence that red shift is quantized. But astronomy has failed to self-correct, and the onlyacknowledgement Arp received from the scientific establishment was to be largely(though not completely[62]) banned from publication in scientific journals or from


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speaking at conferences, and to be denied telescope time. He gives details in Quasars,Redshifts, and Controversies[63]

"[Around 1980] I had tried to make a customary tennis date with an oldand valued Caltech friend who had been a longtime opponent on the

subject of Quasars. He was embarrassed and evasive. On the followingday, the six-person allocation committee, of which he was a member, sentme an unsigned letter stating that my research was judged to be withoutvalue and that they intended to refuse allocation of further observing time.(..) A number of directors of other observatories as well as other well-known astronomers communicated to the director of my observatorystrongly supporting my research and opposing the action of the allocationcommittee. I challenged members of the committee to debate the actualscientific facts. But none of this prevented the inevitable last act. Myobservations on the 200-inch telescope at Palomar terminated in 1983, andat Las Campanas in 1984. "

Arp found scientific asylum at the Max Planck Institut fr Astrophysik in Munich,Germany, where he was allowed to continue his work. But the suppression continued. InSeeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science, Arp relates the followingstory[64]:

"'Just another isolated case'. Your eye slid over that phrase because youwanted to see whether the referee was going to recommend publication.The answer was: not for theAstrophysical Journal Letters. The messagebehind the smooth, assured phrase was clear: 'No matter how conclusivethe evidence, we have the power to minimize and suppress it.' What was

the observation this time? Just two X-ray sources unmistakably pairedacross a galaxy well known for its eruptive activity. The paper reportedthat these compact sources of high-energy emission were both quasars,stellar-appearing objects of much higher redshift than the central galaxy,NGC4258. Obviously, they had originated from the galaxy, incontradiction to all official rules. Slyly, the referee remarked that 'becausethere was no known cause for such intrinsic, excessive redshifts the authorshould include a brief outline of a theory to explain them.'

My mind flashed back through 30 years of evidence, ignored by peoplewho were sure of their theoretical assumptions. Anger was my only honestoption- but stronger than that provoked by worse 'peer reviews' becausethis was not even my paper. I did not have to stop and worry that myresponse was ruled by wounded personal ego. How did this latest skirmishbegin? Several years earlier an X-ray astronomer had come into my officewith a map of the field around NGC4258. There were two conspicuous X-ray sources paired across the nucleus of the galaxy. He asked if I knewwhere he could get a good photograph of the field, so he could checkwhether there were any optical objects that could be identified with the X-


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ray sources. I was very pleased to be able to swivel my chair around to thebookshelves in back of me and pull out one of the best prints in existenceof that particular field. I had taken it with the Kitt Peak NationalObservatory, 4-meter telescope about a dozen years previously. (..)

Wolfgang Pietsch quickly found a small pointing correction to the satellitepositions and established that his X-ray pair coincided with blue stellarobjects at about 20th apparent magnitude. At that instant I knew that theobjects were almost certainly quasars, and once again experienced thateuphoria that comes at the moment when you see a long way into adifferent future. In view of the obvious nature of these objects I feltPietsch showed courage and scientific integrity in publishing thecomment: 'If the connection of these sources with the galaxy is real, theymay be bipolar ejecta from the nucleus.'

Arp then describes how establishment obstruction delayed the necessary confirmatory

observation for two years.

"Then the dance of evasion began. It was necessary to obtain opticalspectra of the blue stellar candidates to confirm that they were quasars andascertain their redshifts. A small amount of time was requested on theappropriate European telescope. It was turned down. Pietsch's eyesavoided mine when he said 'I guess I did not explain it clearly enough'.The Director of the world's largest telescope in the US requested a briefobservation to get the redshifts. It was not done. The Director of the X-rayInstitute requested confirmation. It was not done. Finally, after nearly twoyears, E. Margaret Burbidge with the relatively small 3-meter reflector on

Mount Hamilton, on a winter night, against the night sky glow from SanJose, recorded the spectra of both quasars. It was fortunate that mandatoryretirement had been abolished in the US, because by this time, Margarethad over 50 years of observing experience. Of course, the referee reportfrom which I quoted was directed against her paper, which reported thisimportant new observation. In her firm, but lady-like English way,Margaret withdrew her paper from theAstrophysical Journal Letters andsubmitted it to the European journalAstronomy and Astrophysics Letters".

Arp concludes and generalizes,

"What was particularly appalling about this series of events was thatMargaret Burbidge was someone who had given long and distinguishedservice to the scientific community. Professor at the University ofCalifornia, Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory and President ofthe American Association for the Advancement of Science among othercontributions. It seems it was permissible to let her fly anywhere in theworld doing onerous administrative tasks, but her scientific


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accomplishments were not to be accorded elementary scientific respectand fair treatment.

Some would argue that this is a special case, owing to the climate ofopinion where the offices of theAstrophysical Journal Letters are located.

But, as events in the following chapters make clear, the problem ispervasive throughout astronomy, and, contrary to its projected image,endemic throughout most of current science. Scientists, particularly at themost prestigious institutions, regularly suppress and ridicule findingswhich contradict their current theories and assumptions."

G. Burbidge gives the following devastating summary of the anti-scientific conduct of theastrophysical establishment:[66]

"The existence of a class of objects which have redshifts not largely due tothe cosmic expansion was not predicted either in the hot big bang

cosmology or in QSSC. How is this phenomenon dealt with in eachhypothesis? As far as that big bang model is concerned its supporters arein complete denial. They never mention the observational evidence, do notallow observers who would like to report such evidence any opportunity todo this in cosmology conferences, argue against its publication, and ifforced to comment on the data, simply argue that they are wrong."

Thomas Van Flandern's recent paperThe Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang[67] gives anoverview of problems with Big Bang cosmology and concludes,

"The Big Bang (..) no longer makes testable predictions wherein

proponents agree that a failure would falsify the hypothesis. Instead, thetheory is continually amended to account for all new, unexpecteddiscoveries. Indeed, many young scientists now think of this as a normalprocess in science! They forget, or were never taught, that a model hasvalue only when it can predict new things that differentiate the model fromchance and from other models before the new things are discovered.Explanations of new things are supposed to flow from the basic theoryitself with, at most, an adjustable parameter or two, and not from add-onbits of new theory. (..) Perhaps never in the history of science has so muchquality evidence accumulated against a model so widely accepted within afield. Even the most basic elements of the theory, the expansion of theuniverse and the fireball remnant radiation, remain interpretations withcredible alternative explanations. One must wonder why, in thiscircumstance, four good alternative models are not even beingcomparatively discussed by most astronomers."

One of these models is Quasi-Steady State Cosmology (QSSC) proposed in 1993 byHoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar[65,66].


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Anti-Gravity

In 1992, Russian scientist Eugene Podkletnov published claims to have observed partialgravitational shielding above a rotating superconductor[68]. The scientific establishmentreacted with scorn and dismissed the claims on a-priori grounds[69]:

"Most physicists laughed at Podkletnov's report. Riley Newman, aprofessor of physics at UC Irvine who has been involved in gravityresearch for 20 years, typified the reaction when he commented, 'I thinkit's safe to say gravity shielding is not conceivable.' Like many scientists,he felt that Podkletnov must have made a mistake, measuring magneticfields or air currents instead of genuine weight reduction.

And yet, few of Podkletnov's critics actually bothered to read hisdescription of his work. Their reaction was so dismissive, it almostsounded like prejudice. From their perspective he was an outsider, a

nonmember of the 'gravity establishment.' They couldn't believe that amajor discovery in physics had been made by such a no-status dilettantefooling around at some obscure lab in Finland."

Podkletnov's claims received major publicity in 1996, when a British newspaper reportedthat a followup paper was about to be published in the British Journal of Physics D.Podkletnov later withdrew the paper under curious circumstances:

"But Podkletnov has now withdrawn the paper, just weeks before it wasdue to appear. His decision follows a bizarre series of developmentstriggered by media interest in the device. Earlier this month Tampere

University issued a carefully worded statement denying all knowledge ofthe antigravity research. While admitting that it had been involved in somepreliminary experiments done by Podkletnov in the early 1990s, theuniversity said he was no longer on the staff.

Suspicions deepened when Vuorinen, the supposed coauthor of the paper,issued a statement denying that he had ever worked on antigravity withPodkletnov.

The furore appears to have surprised Podkletnov, who insists that theclaims made in the paper are genuine. But he says the university is correct

in denying the existence of any recent research, as the paper centers onexperiments carried out in 1992.

On the key issue of Vuorinen's denial of involvement in the work,Podkletnov says that there must have been some confusion over names,and that another Petri Vuorinen was the true coauthor. Podkletnov doeshave an unpaid affiliation with Tampere's Institute of Material Science.


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However, inquiries have failed to uncover anyone with a similar name atthe university who admits to working on the antigravity research.

The controversy also appears to have shocked the Institute of Physics,which publishes the Journal of Physics D. Three referees failed to find any

major flaw in the paper's claims, which if confirmed would rate as one ofthe greatest scientific breakthroughs in history.

Gravity is the most ubiquitous force in the Universe, and no one has everfound any way of shielding matter from its effects. The discovery of ashielding effect would have huge theoretical and commercial implications.

Faced with Tampere University's statement, and Vuorinen's denial that hewas involved, Richard Palmer, managing editor of the journal, decided toput the paper on hold pending further inquiries. Three days later, on 9September, Podkletnov solved the institute's dilemma by withdrawing his

paper. He gave no reason. But he stands by his claims: 'This is animportant discovery and I don't want it to disappear,' he told NewScientist.

The paper may now never appear in any physics journal: Podkletnov issaid to have been put under pressure from unknown 'funding agencies' notto reveal any more, pending patent applications.

Even so, the mystery of the antigravity machine lingers. What is known isthat the paper had passed scrutiny by independent experts insuperconductivity, and had been accepted by a reputable journal. Tampere

University itself concedes that Podkletnov has a good reputation forresearch, and refuses to pass judgment on whether the antigravity machineactually works."[70]

Podkletnov was subsequently thrown out of the university. But despite the controversy,NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama decided to investigate his claims[71].The first attempt at replication failed, but it had been conducted without sufficientknowledge of the original experiment[72]. As of 2002, NASA was still working on asecond attempt.

Podkletnov now says that he can generate repulsive force beams. According to Nick

Cook,

"Meanwhile, Mr Podkletnov, now based at the Moscow ChemicalScientific Research Center, has taken his ideas further. Last year hepublished another paper - backed by Giovanni Modanese, an Italianphysicist, detailing work on an 'impulse gravity generator' that is capableof exerting a repulsive force on all matter.


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Using a strong electrical discharge source and a superconducting 'emitter',the equipment has produced a 'gravity impulse', Mr Podkletnov says, "thatis very short in time and propagates with great speed (practicallyinstantaneously) along the line of discharge, passing through differentobjects without any observable loss of energy".

The result, he maintains, is a repulsive action on any object the beam hits,that is proportional to its mass. When fitted to a laser pointing device, MrPodkletnov says, his laboratory installation has already demonstrated itsability to knock over objects more than a kilometer away. The sameinstallation, he maintains, could hit objects up to 200km away with thesame power."[72]

These claims caught the attention of aerospace company Boeing which has been reportedto be researching antigravity.

Whether antigravity will ultimately be proven to exist or not, one thing is already clear:mainstream physics is unwilling to investigate antigravity claims in good faith. Robert L.Park, the spokesman of theAmerican Physical Society made a typical comment in hisWhat's New column in 2002 that illustrates the unscientific "theory overrides evidence"modus operandi of the physics establishment:

"Why would Boeing choose to spend millions to test a ridiculous claim byan obscure Russian physicist that has failed every test and is a physicalimpossibility to begin with?"[73]

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics, in simple language, says that in a closed physicalsystem, useful energy decays into waste heat, and you can't win it back. A machine thatproduces, say, electrical energy from ambient heat is impossible according to the secondlaw, and termed a "perpetuum mobile of the second kind".

But the second law is under siege, and it may turn out that this alleged rock-solid law ofnature is only a reflection of the limitations of 19th and 20th century engineering.

In a paper titledA Solid-State Maxwell Demon[74] D.P. Sheehan and A.R. Putnam of thedepartments of Physics and J.H. Wright of the department of Mathematics and Computer

science of the University of San Diego propose a semiconductor device that wouldgenerate useful energy from the thermal noise of an electronic circuit. The authorssuccessfully tested their model on a commercial semiconductor simulator and estimatethat the technology necessary to construct a laboratory model will be available by 2007.In their introduction, they write:

"Over the last ten years, an unprecedented number of challenges havebeen leveled against the absolute status of the second law of


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thermodynamics. During this period, roughly 40 papers have appeared inthe general literature, representing more than a dozen distinct challenges;the publication rate is increasing. Recently, for the first time, a majorscientific press has commissioned a monograph on the subject and a firstinternational conference has been convened to examine these challenges."

One would think that given the implications (defeating the second "law" means nothingless than solving the human energy crisis permanently), governments, corporations andthe scientific establishment would be interested. But there is very little interest. Theprevailing (circular) reasoning remains that machines that violate the second law areimpossible because they would contradict the second law[76].

Conclusions

There is widespread belief among physicists and non-physicists alike that physics hasessentially "figured out" the universe. According to this "end of science" argument[75], all

that remains to the great enterprise of science is to connect a few dots and do some fine-tuning. But the evidence discussed in this article suggests that this satisfactory state ofaffairs is a mere illusion created by the scientific establishment's habit of suppressing orignoring disconfirming evidence, and that some of the most basic tenets of physics are inneed of major revision.

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[4]Henry H. Bauer, Journal of Scientific Exploration 14, 3, p.304-305 (2000)

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Rochus Boerner 2003 This article may be freely distributed as long as it is unchangedand this notice remains.

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