Bahnson, Griggs, World War II Radar, and Nazi Bomb Scientists

How a car accident in 1936 turned physicist, David Tressel Griggs, into WWII radar test pilot who ferried other scientists to the European front to capture Nazi atom bomb scientists.

Here's what I already knew:
Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr., in a rather indirect manner, provided both the airplane and the test pilot used by MIT's Radiation Lab to test a new WWII technology, radar. In 1936, Bahnson, who was a resident of a Harvard dormitory, took one of his geophysicist dorm-mates, David Tressel Griggs on a hiking trip through the Caucasus Mountains. The Caucasus range connects the Black Sea with the Caspian Sea. Bahnson's and Grigg's hiking trip ended before it even began, however, when Agnew swerved off the road to miss a bicyclist and struck a tree[1]. Griggs narrowly missed losing both of his legs to amputation.

Hunter's father had taken out an insurance policy for the trip. Grigg's used his payment to purchase a Luscombe airplane. His injured legs made him ineligible for military duty. Still wanting to contribute in some way, Griggs piloted his plane for the test runs of the radar system being built at the MIT Radiation Labs. After the system became operational Griggs traveled with it to Europe and flew along on bombing runs that utilized the system. During one bombing run Griggs found himself hanging from the bottom of the plane after kicking open a blocked bomb bay door.

Here's What I Found out This Week
Grigg's did more than serve as a radar advisor. His wartime duties provided Griggs with a rather unique civilian privilege: clearance to fly over wartime Europe. Griggs made use of this privilege to shuttle scientists for the Alsos mission. The soldiers and scientists of the Alsos mission, (a predecessor to Operation Paperclip), captured and interrogated German A-bomb scientists. Samuel Goudsmit--one of the physicists who literally got the electron spin equations half right[2]--was the technical leader of the mission

Griggs would go on to lead his own scientific retrieval mission in Japan[4]. One of his cohorts on the mission was Karl Taylor Compton, brother of Arthur Compton of scattering fame, but who is better known around here for his water based Foucault Pendulum![3]

Here's what else I'd like to know
Why did Bahnson know Griggs at all? I've found evidence that he attended school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and that he knew about, (or should have known about), the Harvard society of Junior Fellows[5]. I haven't found any evidence yet though that Bahnson was ever a student at Harvard.

How close were Bahnson and Griggs after 1936? Bahnson mentions Griggs in reference to some of Bahnson's thoughts on anti-gravity. He seems to mention him as a bit of a bona-fides as he's asking Bryce and Cecile Morette-DeWitt to take the helm of the Institute for Field Physics which Bahnson helped get started at his alma-mater in North Carolina. Did Bahnson and Griggs sit around swapping gravity theories over brandies and cigars? Did Griggs feel that any of Bahnson's theories held any water? I don't know... yet.

References:
1. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/griggs-david.pdf

2. https://books.google.com/books?id=3v2ttYJ_d2kC&lpg=PP1&dq=alsos%20goudsmit&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

3. http://copaseticflow.blogspot.com/2013/02/turning-water.html

4. Combat Scientists
https://books.google.com/books?id=8gQ1AAAAIAAJ&dq=editions:nSe9H1JQMjoC

5. https://ia600400.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/35/items/dailytarheel_sep23_1932_jun5_1933/dailytarheel_sep23_1932_jun5_1933_pdf.zip&file=dailytarheel_sep23_1932_jun5_1933_pdf/dailytarheel_sep23_1932_jun5_1933_0443.pdf

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in...

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog