I just finished reading Donald Scott’s The Interconnected Cosmos, which is an update to his book The Electric Sky. In the chapter on galaxies, Scott quotes from Kristian Birkeland’s most important work on the aurorae: The Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expeditions 1902-1903
Very interesting, I didn't know they tried to give Birkeland the Velikovsky treatment, there seems to be a consistant theme of great thinkers being destroyed by academia.
A friend's father was a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then for Bell Labs for many years. He said that there was a golden age when science was more open that he lived through in the 30s and 40s but that we were unlikely to experience such times again during our lives. He said scientists can be extremely petty and competitive and they do scientific progress no favors. This piece, while fascinating and eye opening, helps me to understand what he was saying. Thank you.
My dad worked for NASA in the 60s and so the subject of space has always held an interest to me. My younger brother, age five, watched the first launch of the Mercury series and said, "Stupid! Why didn't they just take the weight off?" An intriguing question for sure.
Having studied the collegial version of astrophysics as well as the Velikovskian (and Talbott/Thornhill continuation) I have always considered the most important part of outer space to be the thing everyone else seems to ignore.
We pay great attention to the planets, stars, and clouds that float in space but we never seem to study the space itself. What if the dark matter/dark energy was space? What if we did not have to think of propellants to move us through space - simply ride on the flow of the space itself?
A recent article I read (somewhere on pocket) said there could never be a galactic civilization because the distances to travel would take too long. Aside from the fact that the article was written by a person with no visionary genetics, it shows that our concept of propulsion on galactic scales is woefully short-sighted.
There is travel faster than the speed of light, very much so; we just haven't found it yet and may not unless the rigid construct we like to claim makes us curious [science] would stop restricting the search. Continued funding in particular areas (and restrictive research in others) is entirely by design to control the discipline. Yes, that's the conspiracy theorist in me speaking up.
William Corliss had a brilliant idea years ago to catalog all the anomalies found in scientific publications over the years. I don't know if anyone has yet attempted combining them all into a cohesive theoretical structure.
E=mc2 is a marvelous tagline but does it actually prove anything?
During my career I worked with physicists and engineers who worked on the Apollo program and early hypersonic and plasma propulsion fields. They were all brilliant, dedicated to their craft, and desire to pass that knowledge forward.
However, my impression working with NASA, DARPA, and the government in general was that they existed to channel that expertise and mine intellectual property for the government. A kind of engineering education development program to have a useful talent pool, but ultimately not helpful for advancing public facing atmospheric and space travel. There are however non-public activities behind secrecy firewalls that benefit from this arrangement.
Very interesting, I didn't know they tried to give Birkeland the Velikovsky treatment, there seems to be a consistant theme of great thinkers being destroyed by academia.
A friend's father was a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then for Bell Labs for many years. He said that there was a golden age when science was more open that he lived through in the 30s and 40s but that we were unlikely to experience such times again during our lives. He said scientists can be extremely petty and competitive and they do scientific progress no favors. This piece, while fascinating and eye opening, helps me to understand what he was saying. Thank you.
I think that's right. All came to end soon after the turn of the century, and now Tesla, Steinmetz, Alexanderson et al are dismissed as 'pre-modern'.
Excellent! Thanks. Look forward to the next install
Perfidious Albion.
Fantastic. Just re-read it. MORE. MORE PLEASE 😃
My dad worked for NASA in the 60s and so the subject of space has always held an interest to me. My younger brother, age five, watched the first launch of the Mercury series and said, "Stupid! Why didn't they just take the weight off?" An intriguing question for sure.
Having studied the collegial version of astrophysics as well as the Velikovskian (and Talbott/Thornhill continuation) I have always considered the most important part of outer space to be the thing everyone else seems to ignore.
We pay great attention to the planets, stars, and clouds that float in space but we never seem to study the space itself. What if the dark matter/dark energy was space? What if we did not have to think of propellants to move us through space - simply ride on the flow of the space itself?
A recent article I read (somewhere on pocket) said there could never be a galactic civilization because the distances to travel would take too long. Aside from the fact that the article was written by a person with no visionary genetics, it shows that our concept of propulsion on galactic scales is woefully short-sighted.
There is travel faster than the speed of light, very much so; we just haven't found it yet and may not unless the rigid construct we like to claim makes us curious [science] would stop restricting the search. Continued funding in particular areas (and restrictive research in others) is entirely by design to control the discipline. Yes, that's the conspiracy theorist in me speaking up.
William Corliss had a brilliant idea years ago to catalog all the anomalies found in scientific publications over the years. I don't know if anyone has yet attempted combining them all into a cohesive theoretical structure.
E=mc2 is a marvelous tagline but does it actually prove anything?
During my career I worked with physicists and engineers who worked on the Apollo program and early hypersonic and plasma propulsion fields. They were all brilliant, dedicated to their craft, and desire to pass that knowledge forward.
However, my impression working with NASA, DARPA, and the government in general was that they existed to channel that expertise and mine intellectual property for the government. A kind of engineering education development program to have a useful talent pool, but ultimately not helpful for advancing public facing atmospheric and space travel. There are however non-public activities behind secrecy firewalls that benefit from this arrangement.