Management Note on the Gravitics Situation

The present antigravity situation is one of watching and waiting by the large aircraft prime contractors for lofting inventions or technological breakthroughs. Clarence Birdseye in one of his last utterances thought that an insulator might be discovered by accident by someone working on a quite different problem and in 500 years gravity insulators would be commomplace. One might go further than Birdseye and say that principles of the insulator would be as basic to the society as the difference today between the weight of one metal and another. But at the same time it would be wrong to infer from Birdseye's remark that a sudden isolated discovery will be the key to the science. The hardware will come at a time when the industry is ready and waiting for it. It will arrive after a long period of getting accustomed to thinking in terms of weightlessness and naturally it will appear after the feasibility of achieving it in one form or another has been established in theory. ([footnote] But this does not mean that the harnessed forces will be necessarily understood at the outset.)

The aim of companies at this stage must be therefore surely be to monitor the areas of progress in the world of high energy physics which seem likely to lead to establishment of the foundations of antigravity. This means keeping a watchful eye on electrogravitics, magnetogravetics, gravitics-isotopes and electrostatics in various forms for propulsion or levitation. This is not at the present stage a very expensive business and investment in laboratory manhours is necessary only when a certain line of reasoning which may look promosing comes to a dead end for lack of experimental data or only when it might be worth running some laboratory tests to bridge a chasm between one part of a theory and another, or in connecting two or more theories together. If this is right, antigravity is in a state similar to nuclear propulsion after NEPA findings, yet before the AMP project got underway. It will be remembered that was the period when the Atomic Energy Commission sponsored odd things here and there that needed doing. But it would be misleading to imply that hardware progress an electrostatic disks is presently so far along as nuclear propulsion was in that state represented by AMP. True the NEPA-men came to the conclusion that a nuclear propelled aircraft of a kind could be built, but it would be only a curiosity. Even at the time of the Lexington and Whitman reports it was still some way from fruition, the aircraft would have been more than a curiosity but not competitive enough to be seriously considered.

It is not in doubt that work on antigravity is in the realm of the longer term future. One of the tests of virility of an industry is the extent to which it is so self confident of its position that it can afford to sponsor R&D which cannot promise a quick return. A closing of minds to anything except lines of development that will provide a quick return is a sign of either a straitlaced economy or of a pure lack of prescience (or both).

Another consideration that will play its part in managerial decision is that major turning points in antigravity work are likely to prove far removed from the tools of the aircraft engineer. A key instrument for example that may determine the existence of negamass and establish posimass/negamass interaction is the super bevatron. It needs some 100 bev gammas on hydrogen to perform a Bragg analysis of the elementry particle structure by selective reflection to prove the existence of negamass. This value is double as much the new Russian bevatron under construction and it is 15 times as powerful as the highest particle accelerations in the Berkeley bevatron so far obtained. Many people think that nothing much can be done until negamass has been observed. If industry were to adopt this approach it would have a long wait and a quick answer at the end. But the negamass-posimass theory can be further developed, and, in anticipation of its existence, means of using it in a gravitationally neutralized body could be worked out. This moreover is certainly not the only possible approach, a breakthrough may well come in the interaction between gravitative action and heat. Theory at the moment suggests that if gravity could produce heat the effect is limited at the moment to a narrow range ([footnote] see Appendix 5). But the significant thing would be establishment of a principle.

History may repeat itself, thirty years ago, and even as recently as the German attempts to produce nuclear energy in the war, nobody would have guessed that power would be unlocked by an accident at the high end of the atomic table. All prophecies of atomic energy were concerned with how quickly means of fusion could be applied at the low end. In antigravity work, and this goes back to Birdseye, it may be an unrelated accident that will be the means of getting into the gravitational age. It is a prime responsibility of management to be aware of possible ways of using theory to accelerate such a process. In other words, serendipity.

It is a common thought in industry to look upon the nuclear experience as a precedent for gravity, and to argue that gravitics will similarly depend on the use of giant tools, beyond the capabilities of the air industry; and that companies will edge into the gravitational age on the coat tails of the Government as industry has done, or is doing, in nuclear physics. But this overlooks the point that the two sciences are likely to be different in their investment. It will not need a place like Hanford or Savannah River to produce a gravity shield or insulator once the knowhow has been established. As a piece of conceptual engineering the project is probably likely to be much more like a repetition of the turbine engine. It will be simple in its essence, but the detailed componentry will become progressively more complex to interpret in the form of a stable flying platform and even more intricate when it comes to applying the underlying principles to a flexibility of operating altitude ranging from low present flight speeds at one extreme to flight in a vacuum at the other, this latter will be the extreme test of its powers. Again the principle itself will function equally in vacuum. Townsend Brown's saucers could move in a vacuum readily enough but the supporting parts must also work in a vacuum. In practice they tend to give trouble, just as gas turbine bits and pieces start giving trouble in proportion to the altitude gained in flight.

But one has to see this rise in complexity with performance and with altitude attainment in perspective; eventually the most advanced capability may be attained with the most extremely simple configurations. As is usual however in physics developments, the shortest line of progress is geodesic, which may in turn lead the propulsion trade into many roundabout paths as being the shortest distance between aims and achievement.

But the aviation business is understandably interested in knowing precisely how to recognize early discoveries of significance, and this Gravity-Rand report is intended to try to outline some of the more promising lines. One suggestion frequently made is that propulsion and levitation may be only the last - though most important - of a series of others, some of which will have varying degrees of gravitic element in their constitution. It may be that the first practical application will be in the greater freedom of communications offered by the change in wave technique that it implies. A second application is to use the wave technique for anti-submarine detection, either airborne or seaborne. This would combine the width of horizon in search radar with the underwater precision of Magnetic Airborne Detection, and indeed it may have the range of scatter transmissions. Chance discoveries in the development of this equipment may lead to the formation of new laws which would define the relationship of gravity in terms of usable propulsion symbols. Exactly how this would happen nobody yet knows; and what industry and government can do at this stage is to explore all the possible applications simultaneously, putting pressure where results seem to warrant it.

In a paper of this kind it is not easy to discuss the details of the wave technique in communications, and the following are some of theories, briefly stated which require no mathematical training to understand, which it would be worth management keeping an eye on. In particular watch should be made of quantative tests on lofting, and beneficiation of material. Even quite small beneficiation ratios are likely to be significant. There are some lofting claims being made of 20% and more, and the validity of these will have to be weighed carefully. Needless to say much higher ratios than this will have to be attained. New high k techniques and extreme k materials are significant. High speeds in electrostatic propulsion of small discs will be worth keeping track of (by high speed one means hundreds of m.p.h.) and some of these results are beginning to filter through for general evaluation. Weight mass anomalies, new oil-cooled cables, interesting megavolt gimmicks, novel forms of electrostatic augmentation with hydrocarbon and nonhydrocarbon fuels are indicative, new patents under the broadest headings of force and motion may have value, new electrostatic generator inventions could tip the scales and unusual ways of turning condensers inside-out, new angular propulsion ideas for barycentric control; and generally certain types of saucer configurations are valuable pointers to ways minds are working.

Then there is the personal reaction to such developments. Managements are in the hands of their technical men, and they should beware of technical teams who are dogmatic at this stage. To assert electrogravitics is nonsense is as unreal as to say it is practically extant. Management should be careful of men in their employ with a closed mind or even partially closed mind on the subject.

This is a dangerous age when not only is anything possible, but it is possible quickly. A wise Frenchman once said "You have only to live long enough to see everything and the reverse of everything" and that is true in dealing with very advanced high energy physics of this kind. Scientists are not politicians, they can reverse themselves once with acclaim, twice even with impunity. They may have to do so in the long road to attainment of this virtually perfect air vehicle. It is so easy to get bogged down with problems of the present; and whilst policy has to be made essentially with the present in mind, and in aviation a conservative policy always pays - it is management's task and duty to itself to look as far ahead as the best of its technicians in assessing the posture of the industry.

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