Copasetic Flow

 I'm getting some bandwidth to put more work into my book about Boleslaw Gladych and his connections to the gravity (and antigravity) research communities that included characters like Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr. during the 1950s.  I found an article [pdf], (pamphlet? it's 42 pages), that sheds more light on the woork DeWitt did with superconductors and gravitomagnetic fields in the '60s. Take a look at page 34 where DeWitt comments on his work to try to verify Bahnson's fringe pet project: Thomas Townsend Brown's gravitators. There you'll find a reference to DeWitt looking into superconductor theory .  I also found a nice little JSTOR blog post on the whole Babson and Bahnson Gravity Days era. I haven't seen anything new in it yet, but I aslo haven't taken the time to focus on it. Speaking of DeWitt, this history of the UNC Field Institute is interesting in that it mentions DeWitt's work related to 'large spaceships'.  One final note, Wolfgan...

Given the fascinating history of the author, I was very excited to read the book.  Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr. is featured in the near sci-fi non-fiction book, "The Philadelphia Experiment".  A wealthy industrialist that fancied himself a potential astronaut, Bahnson funded fringe physics projects, (that's how he landed in The Philadelphia Experiment"), as well as mainstream general relativity research, (he raised the funds to sponsor the Institute for Field Physics at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill). More on Agnew's history" The book alas, did not live up to the author.  While the story is more interesting if you allow yourself the gratuitous fantasy that Bahnson was dreaming about the ship he himself hoped to build, that's about all the book has to offer.  He had a potentially spectacular female character, a pilot the equal of the book's main character.  Unfortunately, Bahnson squandered her, using only as a romantic prop.  It...

I've recently started reading Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr.'s "The Stars are Too High".  Given the history of physics research I've done regarding Bahnson, I can't believe I haven't read it before, but I'm reading it now.  My copy arrived a few days back, and even though I'm only about a fifth of the way through the book, it's been very intriguing! First off, I seem to have come into possession of a copy that was owned by two different sci-fi fanzine editors, one of whom became a published sci-fi author.  The name Tim Eklund by itself wouldn't have meant much, but when coupled with the name on the opposite side of the book's opening, Hank Lutrell, it began to come into focus.  Hank turns up immediately as the editor of a fanzine.  In the context of fanzines, I quickly found a link that indicated that Tim Eklund was more formally known as Gordon Eklund.  I haven't been able to confirm this is the case yet, but in any event, I learned ...

*Physics, Phyne Art and Physicians* The +Google Art Project is featuring one my favorite artists today, Thomas Eakins[1].  He's not my favorite because of his rather colorful life, (see [1] it' entertaining), or even because of his art as such. Although, I have to admit, I'm quite fond of his sailboat pictures, see below, and [2]!  Nope, as it turns out, Eakins has a connection to both fringe and mainstream science through the person of one Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr. Agnew Hunter Bahnson was a wealthy North Carolina industrialist who funded both fringe physicists like Thomas Townsend Brown and mainstream quantum gravity researchers.  He was the driving force behind the formation of the Institute for Field Physics at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.  The institute was direted by Bryce and Cecile DeWitt and Peter HIggs of Higgs boson fame did some of his work there. But, what does any of this have to do with Thomas Eakins and his art?  The stor...

In the  comments  to yesterday's  post  on the Lamb shift[1][2],  +Bruce Elliott  and I were discussing how physics history could make for great movie ideas .  This morning, it occurred to me that several of the journal articles I've read recently share a common theme, the goings on in and around the MIT and Columbia radiation, (radar), labs circa World War II. The whole thing might make a great intertwined stories movie.  So, without further ado, here's a brief summary of a few of the players, final exams are coming up, so I'll spread this out a bit over the next few weeks. Schwinger Schwinger (picture 1), Feynman,and Tomonaga are three of the biggest names in quantum electrodynamics, (QED).  In addition to his QED work, Schwinger was apparently a pivotal figure at the MIT radiation laboratory where he did theoretical work on radar.  The Swinger-Lippmann scattering theory[3], a sort of framework for building other scatterin...

A while back, I reported that Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr. was named after the pair of doctors that removed his grandfather's elbow. The elbow bone wound up in the possession of another grandson, Dr. Henry Theodore Bahnson M.D. I turns out that Dr. Bahnson was the first surgeon to successfully perform a heart and liver transplant. He studied under Alfred Blalock and in the Bahnson family tradition named his son Alfred Blalock Bahnson. Dr. Bahnson is shown with Dr. Blalock below, and, (I believe), Agnew. Dr. Blalock was featured in the movie about the life of Vivien Thomas , the African-American surgical technician who developed procedures for treating blue baby syndrome in the 1940s.