by Tom Baugh
Similar things have happened. The next energy breakthrough may, literally, be in your neighbor's garage. Sprinkled around the planet, a few diehard hobbyists, known as fusioneers, play with miniature fusion reactors in their garages and basements. Following in the footsteps of Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of the television, they make reactors, known as Farnsworth Fusors. These little miracles of nuclear science are built from mixing bowls and HVAC pumps, and generate little glowing balls of purple plasma in near-vacuum. That plasma is powered by nothing more than the normal power outlet and some stuff they ripped out of some old TVs or microwave ovens. But in that plasma these guys smash deuterium atoms together in a purple haze and watch the fun. And twiddle with their equations and calculators. And think.
Meanwhile, gigantic labs build fantastically expensive contraptions to, uh, smash deuterium atoms together in a purple haze and watch the fun. And twiddle with their equations and supercomputers. And think about their next funding proposal.
The fusor was the last research Farnsworth ever did. This guy, who invented the television, and hid in a corner of ITT to try to protect his work from piracy, was crushed out of existence under the wheels of tax law. How close was he to unlocking the power of fusion? We will never know. And rest assured that should one of these fusioneers come close, the collective will have no choice but to squash them out, having made fools of their trillions of dollars and millions of jobs. Perhaps they will just simply have their purple plasma balls labeled as environmental hazards. Or just brand them as nuclear terrorists and lock them away.
A more well-known example springs to mind. In 1989 two researchers, Martin Fleischmann, in England, and Stanley Pons, in Utah, collaborating on an experiment, reported having measured tabletop fusion at near-room temperature in a liquid apparatus they had been fooling around with. This discovery turned into a media circus, and soon led to a discrediting of the pair and the entire concept.
"Room-temperature fusion on an apparatus which sits on a lab bench? Impossible! Cast them out!" the orthodox shouted from their lairs atop fantastically expensive government-funded labs.
Lost in all of this furor was what Fleischmann and Pons actually said. They hadn't claimed that they had unleashed a source of free power for everyone forever, as the media reported and the orthodoxy fanned. All they really claimed was that they had observed an unexpected phenomenon. Instead, their simple statement was twisted into hype, and that hype was then used to destroy them and their credibility, and cast them as crackpots. So intense was this hype that a few others who had actually reproduced their limited results later withdrew their claims to avoid controversy.
And lost in all of this was the idea that perhaps the pair had stumbled upon a marble table effect which had escaped all the fantastically expensive wooden tables used elsewhere. All that mattered is that their observation challenged the orthodoxy of the collective, and had to be extinguished.
So what are the answers to the speed-of-light question? Or cold fusion? I don't know. But I would like to see an experiment to find out. Because if not, we are keeping ourselves from the stars. To hell with finding out how the universe started. The answer doesn't really matter much at this point. I want to find out what we can do with it.
"But we have experimented," they shout in zealous unison. Oh yeah, there was that star peeking out from behind the Sun thing. About a hundred years ago some guy took some fuzzy pictures of stars which should have been concealed behind the Sun during a solar eclipse. If Einstein was right about this whole speed-of-light and gravity thing, then the Sun should have bent the light from these stars as it passed by. Lo and behold, the fuzzies on the photo seemed to show exactly that. To great acclaim. Never mind that similar experiments repeated by other researchers didn't match that one. Or that the Sun, surrounded by gas, acts like a lens and can bend light from that alone.
Try this experiment sometime. Grab a magnifying glass, or a telescope, or binoculars or a rifle scope. Tape a little paper dot right in the center of the magnifying glass or the front glass of the telescope, or whatever. Right in the center might be some fuzzy, but guess what. You can see stuff behind the dot. Just like you can behind the sun, ever so slightly, during an eclipse, as we look through the largest lens in our solar system, the moon acting like that paper dot in the center. Only now, instead of the stars appearing in the circle of the moon, their light is dragged out from behind the sun to appear near the edge beyond the circle.
"But the measurements were different than a lensing effect!" they shout as they look about for stones with which to welcome their latest infidel. How do you know? Those fuzzy pictures were awfully fuzzy. And how do we know that a solar flare hadn't been erupting at that time to distort the lens, the flare acting like a lens within a lens? Or perhaps the Sun's gravity acts on light in some marble-table way which we don't yet understand, but happens to appear as if it supports their god. At least close enough to allow the elect to avoid looking too closely.
Of course, we can repeat the experiment. And someone did, and was shouted down when the results conflicted. Surely, with our technology today we can do much better experiments. But to even suggest such a thing would challenge the orthodoxy. So the suggestion itself must be shouted down.
"We also have as proof experimental data from orbiting atomic clocks" they shout. Again, atomic clocks in space are in an entirely different environment than those on Earth. Plus, they are whipping around the Earth, accelerating laterally at every moment. How do we know that this strange environment, like Fermi's marble lab tables, aren't having an effect which we can't see on our wood tables on Earth? A wood table, no matter how ornately decorated and at whatever cost, would still not have revealed the effect which Fermi found.
We're not even willing to ask the question, so deep is our faith in the godlike Einstein. And so we may be missing a principle of nature as profound as that Fermi discovered. And so useful.
The orthodoxy has good reason to be threatened. Imagine the revolution of thought which would accompany such a discovery. Assume for a moment that it is discovered that Einstein was wrong, and objects can go faster than the speed of light, and without trickery such as wormholes or so on. Just assume that simple push, push, push is enough. Or pull, pull, pull on a gravity string. However the mechanism, suppose that simple faster-thanlight is shown to be fine and dandy, just like we can go faster than the speed of sound. Don't forget that exceeding that barrier was also thought to be impractical not too long ago.
At once, every science classroom in the world would be wrong. Each teacher or professor, who shouted down such questions from their students for decades would be wrong. Each man on the street who didn't believe or understand what he had been told on TV his entire life is vindicated. Each scientific journal, or author, or lab director or peer reviewer who stifled crackpots would be wrong, each oppression against free thought shown as what it is. And their god lying broken at their feet, revealed to simply be an idol made by men. Trillions of dollars diverted, worldwide and wrongly, into programs which were flawed at their core. Because of a faith.
There is a powerful incentive for this to never be discovered. At one time, the discovery that the world is not the center of the universe helped to topple the stranglehold of the Catholic Church on humanity's mind. In defensive response the Church subjected the proponents of this radical idea to torture and humiliation. Similarly, discovery of the possibility for classical faster-than-light motion would be the most important example in human history to date of how the group would have been so terribly wrong, and acted in unspoken concert to stifle dissent.
How many careers and lives would have been destroyed in this centuryold farce? For nothing more than unwillingness to tolerate free thought and free expression.
But someone may yet discover that this is possible. If so, there remains a way for the collective to save itself the embarrassment:
The discovery must be announced by a heavily funded lab which justifies the money spent on s
uch labs, and the vast pyramids of jobs which support these things. No outsider will be allowed to announce such a profound and simple thing.
The discovery, in the age of political correctness, must be credited to a woman, or a minority, or anyone who speaks with an accent other than an American white male. Nor can the discoverer be anyone in the traditional scientific ethic, such as a secular Jew of any nationality, as was Fermi. Indian or Chinese ethnicity would be best.
The discovery must not directly challenge their god, but will instead be wrapped in an esoteric theory which is said to complement, rather than contradict, their god.
The discovery will be explained in terms which justify the labeling of previous detractors as crackpots, as well as explaining away the arguments that schoolchildren had made against it as naive and simplistic. You probably think I'm a racist or sexist for claiming what I have about how the discovery process is rationed out for political purposes. Consider that, although our entire space program was based on the work of Nazi scientists, it is only after about a half-century that we are able to finally just come out and say this. Hitler put us on the moon. And saved us from the New Deal. Does that make me a neo-Nazi? Nope. Just a student of history and of the nature of the collective.
Still not convinced about how credit will be politically allocated after a major, paradigm-shifting discovery? Consider this:
Recently, in March of 2009, in the same city in which the cold fusion hype began twenty years before, the American Chemical Society held a symposium on new energy technologies. One speaker presented results from experiments, performed by researchers working for a lab funded by the U.S. Navy. This experiment substantially recreated the cold-fusion results, but using techniques which were more sophisticated than those of Fleischmann and Pons, of course. The discoverer credited? Analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss.
Reviewers of this Navy experiment agree that neutrons are being produced, which are indicative of nuclear reactions, which include fusion. But, some reviewers hedged that although neutrons were observed, they might instead be caused by "new, unknown nuclear processes."
Source: Steven Krivit, editor of the "New Energy Times"
Consider those words "new, unknown nuclear processes." Really? Like Fermi's marble table, for example? Or processes which Fleischmann and Pons merely said might be interesting enough for someone else to take a look at?
And, as reported, what is some of the preliminary work which Pamela based her work on? Not Fleischmann and Pons, of course. No, those guys are just crackpots, everyone knows that. Instead, work by scientists in places such as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, in India.
Similarly, a discovery such as faster-than-light travel, should it ever be made, must never be allowed to vindicate the tens of millions of schoolchildren who have asked these simple questions. After all, the vindication of schoolchildren and their wonder about the world would undermine the entire fabric of belief which the collective demands. Children, their minds not yet fully programmed, tend to ask impertinent questions which threaten to reveal truth. Only later do these children learn bias and shut down their minds to earn acceptance by the group. And then join the group in silencing the next crop of children.
The discovery itself, in whatever field, is unimportant. Options include faster-than-light, simple fusion energy, the dangers of greenness. Or how a single environmental mandate has been silently destroying almost anything electronic which you have purchased since about mid-summer 2006. Or how the USDA is spending millions right now to poison you.
Just about anything which slips in under the expensive orthodoxy will do, such as an understanding of how niceness destroys individualism and liberty. Not just the concept itself, such as faster-than-light, but the entire social principle of doubting yourself, relying instead upon experts, would itself be called into doubt.
Once again, men might choose thought as their counsel, rather than the collective. The monkeys have spent generations trying to stomp out that nasty thinking habit. Too late to turn back now.
Or so they think.
Chapter 13, The Idea Factory
In our industrialized culture, in which education is used primarily as a means of thought and behavior control, very few learn how to think. Most of our day is consumed with stumbling around from task to task, hardly thinking about anything other than how we are going to get it all done. So how do we learn to think? The first step is easy.
Stop. Stop participating in the endless compliance rituals which you are expected to perform each day.
Reading Assignment
Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini That book, written with a heavy sales and marketing perspective, also has an excellent description of the utility of simple triggers in encouraging compliance. We are all surrounded by more information than we can possibly absorb. Even if you stripped away all the technology and blinking lights and flashing screens there would be too much information, too much detail, in the world around us to comprehend. If we focused on all this detail, we would all become autistic, swimming around in just understanding the details rather than getting anything done. Like eating.
Over the ages our minds evolved ways to handle all this detail and developed certain shortcuts, as described in the book referenced above. As Dr. Cialdini notes, compliance professionals take advantage of our reliance on these shortcuts to slip past our defenses. The most important of all of these shortcuts is to do what we see others doing. If suddenly everyone in a room jumps up and runs out, the typical person would be inclined to jump up and run out also. If everyone else around you starts eating, the typical person would start eating, too. If everyone else started spitting food out, you wouldn't be as likely to start shoveling it in.
I remember hearing about this idea in military psychology classes at the Naval Academy. Classical American success on the battlefield derives from a high level of training, combined with a generous dose of small-unit leadership and leading by example. I contrast this with the eras of collective battlefield strategies, such as those employed by the Union in the Civil War, or World War I, selected battles in World War II, or the meat grinder operations of Korea and Vietnam, in which individual initiative was deliberately suppressed in favor of mass compliance. Not surprisingly, all of those examples cited led to disproportionately higher casualties.
Historically, Americans hardly ever had the best weapons. Although our modern military relies heavily on clever weapons, individual initiative and leadership is ultimately far superior, and not to be counted out just yet. Leading by example is simply a compliance technique which gives the crowd someone to watch in action, which then spurs them to act similarly.
One day, I had a chance to put these ideas to the test. While waiting around in the lobby of Rickover Hall I noticed that there was a sumptuous buffet set up outside a smallish auditorium. This buffet was defended by a sign on a stand clearly identifying this auditorium for a group of Washington VIPs due to arrive in about a half-hour. Midshipmen are notorious for eating just about everything in sight, but all present were keeping a respectable distance, no one getting closer than about ten feet.
After sizing things up I wandered away from the group I was in, and approached the buffet from a different angle. Walking briskly to the buffet, and confidently grabbing a plate and tongs, I announced, "good, it's here," and proceeded to help myself. Within moments, all uncertainty disappeared and the midshipmen gathered there attacked the goodies. Within a few minutes, it was mostly gone. Toward the end of the experiment, the horrified host for the event, who was setting up his projector in the auditorium, came running out and shooed us away like so many flies. But, it was far too late by then. Serves him right for not posting a guard.
Only later, decades later, did I realize that it is only easy to get a mass of people to do things which resemble monkey behavior. Running out of a room, or gobbling down a pile of food, or stoning the infidels are the easy ones. Try leading a crowd into designing something u
seful or working more efficiently, as opposed to simply working pointlessly harder. Or performing some highly individualist function. Any of these will help you appreciate the power the collective has to motivate its adherents versus the individualist.
Even the presumably noble act of risking life and limb in storming the enemy requires a pre-existing belief in the righteousness, or at least rightfulness, of the goal. This is why the enemy must be demonized before the campaign begins, or else too many of the lance corporals might wind up asking themselves whether this is a good thing to do. As we will discuss later, this also has implications for your personal liberty. Should the day arise in which a constitutional crisis develops on our own shores, many rest assured that the soldiers will know better than to suspend your civil rights. This fantasy is dangerous and downright foolish.
Should that day arise, each and every soldier or law enforcement professional will be convinced, to their core, that your demand for constitutionality is precisely what makes you a bad American. We've already seen that preparation being started as I write this. Don't expect some corporal or sergeant or lieutenant or captain or major or colonel or general to say, "hold on fellas, let's think about this." If you think this will happen in sufficient numbers to make a difference to your personal situation, then you are out of your mind. These professionals work for the collective, not you.
The techniques by which they are prepared to destroy you is the same as that which prepares you to destroy yourself. Their mechanism is the suspension of your independent thought. To test this statement, try a few simple exercises, and notice how powerful the pull is on your mind, even when you know what is going on. Then imagine how much more powerful this pull is on someone who isn't self-aware, and is the product of a public school education.
Here are some simple ones:
Don't check email for two days.