| THE HUNT FOR ZERO POINT Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology Nick Cook New York: Random House, 2001 |
Rating: 3.5 Fair |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-7679-0628-9 | ||||
| ISBN 0-7679-0628-4 | 291p. | SC/BWI | $14.95 | |
| Page 13: | "In lab experiments carried out since the 1930s, G has consistently defied efforts to be measured to more than a few decimal places." |
| Apparently Cook wants us to conclude from this that next to nothing is known about gravity. The truth is that precise measurement of G, the gravitational constant, requires very delicate instruments, plus extreme isolation of those instruments from disturbances such as vibration and air currents. There's no mystery here, only the fact that weak signals are hard to distinguish from noise. |
| Page 14: | "Officially, it [project Shiva Star] had been terminated on cost grounds. But this made little sense. The program had been budgeted at $3.6 million per year for five years. Eighteen million bucks to produce a true quantum leap weapon system. Few people I spoke to bought the official version. Somewhere along the way, they said, Shiva must have delivered. Somewhere along the line, the program had gone black." |
| Small programs are easiest to cut; they have the fewest advocates. Begun in 1990, Shiva Star would have been one of the panoply of "Star Wars" programs; and the concept — firing a "plasma bullet" through the atmosphere and guiding it to intercept an incoming nuclear warhead — is one of the more outlandish of those. And notice that he doesn't name these doubters. |
| Page 17: | "If you break cover on this," he said, "you'll blow everything. For yourself, I mean." "Come on," I said. "It's a story. It may be an old story, but I'll apply the rules that I would on any other. If there's any truth in it, the answers will pop out. They usually do." "That's so bloody naive. If there's any truth in it, which I doubt, they'll already know you're interested and that's not going to help you one little bit. They'll stand in your way, like they may have done already with this old man . . . Trimble?" "They, Lawrence? Who's they?" "The security people. The keepers of the secrets. The men-in-black. You know who I mean." I didn't. To my ears, it sounded more than a little insane. |
| Here the spice of danger, that entered the tale with Trimble's change-of-heart refusal to be interviewed by Cook, is reinforced. Fine so far. But to my ears it sounds disingenuous for Cook, the veteran aerospace reporter, to portray himself as so unconcerned, especially since he's already written of technology that under the British system would be classified "Most Secret". |
| Page 21: | "Better, then, to do what I was doing; keep a lid on it." |
| Here I'd use a colon rather than a semicolon. |
| Page 58: | "In one account of the test, the craft had apparently risen toward the ceiling of the test facility 'trailing a glow of ionization.' This immediately elevated the report above the many others I had come across, for it signaled that, whatever was occurring within the implosion process, it had precious little to do with jet propulsion. If true, it could have only been an antigravity effect." |
| This is intriguing. But for all that much literature associates antigravity with high-voltage electricity, this conclusion is unwarranted. A better description of the "glow of ionization" would be welcome. |
| Page 67: | "Nothing comparable existed in the American inventory; or anywhere else, for that matter." |
| This is not the way I was taught to use the semicolon. I'd substitute an m-dash. |
| Page 69: | "I felt a knot of excitement in the pit of my stomach. The subject, as Sullivan put it, may be closed with negative result." |
| Cook mis-quotes this phrase from the paragraph immediately above. It should be "may be considered closed with negative result". The extra word changes the meaning somewhat. Instead of something along the vaguely sinister lines of "You should shut down this research effort", it becomes more akin to "this research has been found to be valueless and has been abandoned." |
| Page 75: | "The entire air vehicle, in other words, was a giant flattened jet engine, the hot gases that propelled it forward exiting from slots around its rim. By directing the exhaust, Silverbug would have been capable of almost instantaneous high-speed turns in any direction; maneuvers that would have included 180-degree reversals, the craft flipping this way and that, like a tumbling coin, and all with minimum discomfort to the pilot, because the g-forces would have been alleviated by the adjustable thrust." |
| It's hard for me to understand how anyone connected with the aerospace industry, even an editor not trained in science, could get this wrong. |
| Page 89: | " 'Up until 1939, atomic energy was still a matter of conjecture, even among physicists in the field. But by the following year, some of the brighter sparks in the community realized that it was doable, that if you split a neutron into equal parts, you'd quite likely get an enormous release of energy. Things that appear impossible usually aren't, even when the physics say they are.' " |
| This quote from "Dan Marckus", Cook's identity-blurred science expert, contains another goof. No one has yet split a neutron, and theory does say it's impossible: the three quarks comprising the neutron are regarded as inseparable. However, change "neutron" to "nucleus" and Marckus' statement makes sense. I think the mistake was an editor's typo. |
| Page 93: | "Today, NASA Marshall scientists still work on the same basic technology that von Braun developed under the auspices of the Third Reich, even though chemical rockets, his great invention, are today regarded as too slow, too unreliable, too expensive, and too inefficient." |
| No, von Braun did not invent chemical rockets, nor even liquid-fuel rockets. Also, while they are acknowledged to be less than ideal, they are the only practical technology we have, today, to get us into orbit. |
| Page 109: | "I'd already grasped the principles: that space—the air that we breathed, the atoms in our bodies, the far reaches of the cosmos, everything—was filled with a churning 'foam' of energy. Its presence was signified by the background static hiss of the universe—something you could hear on a transistor radio—but as far as visual detection went, was invisible. Which was what made it so controversial." |
| There is a cosmic background signal, and it does contribute to static. But it is the fading afterglow of the Big Bang, not emissions from quantum foam. And there are other sources of static, near at hand and quite well understood. Indeed, if quantum foam emitted a signal that could be so easily detected, it would hardly be controversial. |
| Page 121: | "Only one, the last of the five, seemed to have resulted in any kind of payoff. And Podkletnov had tripped over it by accident because of somebody's pipe smoke, which meant it had been out there, waiting to be discovered, for as long as anyone needed it." |
| Note how this assumes that the gravity shielding effect Podkletnov claims to have discovered is real. |
| Page 124: | "While conventional wisdom had it that the B-2's outer skin was composed of a highly classified radar-absorbent material (RAM) that made it invisible to radar, LaViolette plausibly argued that the RAM was in fact a ceramic dielectric material able to store high amounts of electric charge. The material was said to be made from powdered depleted uranium—an incredibly hard substance, commonly used to tip armor-piercing tank shells— with three times the density of the "high-k" ceramics proposed by Brown in the 1950s. This would give the B-2 "three times the electrogravitic pull" of the Mach 3 saucer at the heart of the Winterhaven study." |
Here, Cook is confusing density, hardness and dielectric constant (or k). Depleted uranium (DU) is very dense. In fact it is the densest stable substance known. That is why it is used in armor-piercing shells; when the shell hits, the DU becomes a molten lance that powers through the lighter metal of the armor. This has nothing to do with hardness; uranium is in fact rather soft. As for dielectric constant, uranium as a metal has none; it conducts electricity. Converted to an oxide, it would act as a dielectric. But since its outer electrons are so far from the nucleus, and screened by inner orbitals, it should not have a high value of k. The other thing to note is this "urban legend" that the B-2, because of loaded weight versus engine thrust, needs antigravity to get airborne. This comes under the "dumb conspirators" heading. If antigravity exists and is top-secret, why would the B-2's published gross weight and engine performance numbers be permitted to tip off the public? |
| Page 162: | "Voss described the activities of the scientists at the Kammlerstab as beyond any technology that had appeared by the end of the war—working on weapons systems that made the V-1 and V-2 look pedestrian. Among these were nuclear power plants for rockets and aircraft, highly advanced guided weapons and antiaircraft lasers. The latter were so far ahead of their time that by the end of the 20th century there was still no official confirmation of laser weapons having entered service, despite the best efforts of the Russians and the Americans." |
| This distorts the situation in several ways. First, the fact that German scientists were working on something does not guarantee its feasibility as a weapon. Second, it provides no technical detail to establish that the Reich's antiaircraft laser concepts were ahead of their time — or even of their time. Third, laser weapons have entered service: Russian lasers have blinded U.S. spy satellites, and there are hints that one satellite was destroyed by laser. It's true that no airplane or missile has been downed by a deployment-ready laser, but the U.S. is developing the Airborne Optical Adjunct — a chemical laser for that role, mounted in a modified 747 — and the Russians no doubt are working on similar weapons. |
| Page 179: | "Heisenberg had calculated that a 50 percent increase in the size of the reactor would produce a sustained nuclear reaction. Had he done so, Hitler would have had the means to enrich enough fissionable material to construct a bomb." |
| Cook's misunderstood something here, but I'm not sure what. There's no way to enrich uranium in a nuclear reactor. You can "breed" plutonium-239, which is fissionable, but it's a stretch to suppose that Hitler's scientists could jump right to a breeder reactor when they'd barely mastered reactors at all. Or it could be a problem of electricity supply. Enriching uranium takes a lot of juice, and the Allies were daily attacking Germany's generating capacity. Maybe what Cook means is using the reactor to produce power to drive an enrichment process. |
| Page 194: | "In the '20s and '30s, Witkowski discovered, Gerlach had immersed himself in phenomena such as "spin polarization", "spin resonance", and the properties of magnetic fields—areas that had little to do with the physics of the bomb, but much to do with the enigmatic properties of gravity." |
| Again Cook shows his ignorance of nuclear physics. Such phenomena have everything to do with nuclear physics, and thus with nuclear fission. |
| Page 259: | "From then on, his career was dogged by a series of business disasters, but as an inventor—and the man who gave the world AC current into the bargain—Tesla was without parallel. In 1891, he developed the Tesla Coil, a remarkable invention that remains the basis for radios, televisions and other means of wireless communication." |
| You know the Tesla Coil. It's a transformer with a high turns ratio such that it can develop thousands of volts on its secondary when the primary is plugged into house mains. It's most often seen powering the vee-shaped "Jacob's Ladder" up which a crackling spark climbs. While it might have figured in very early spark-gap radio transmitters, it has nothing to do with modern wireless communication devices. |
| Page 259: | "According to legend, Tesla, who had built a powerful transmitter at Wardencliff on Long Island, beamed the 'message' on June 30 and awaited news from Peary. The explorer saw nothing, but thousands of miles away, in a remote corner of Siberia, a massive explosion equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT devastated 500,000 acres of land centered on a place called Tunguska." |
| The story continues on page 260, where Cook relates that Tesla himself apparently believed he had caused the Tunguska Explosion, for he dismantled his transmitter afterward and turned to other pursuits. In fact, my understanding is that Tesla moved to Colorado and continued work on wireless transmission of power. |
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