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...

 We have new software projects to play with here at the KD0FNR/KO6BTY ham shack in December. First, Datasette announced a new toy to play with! Enrichments If you've been regularly reading, or watching the repository for the logging software the kids and I have been building for oursevles, you've seen me mention Datasette before. It's a tool for browsing data sets using SQLite, and then applying various analyses to the data. The kids and I have used it to map  QSOs in a number of different ways. Simon Willison announced that the tool now feautres something called enrichments . What do they do? In short, they allow the user to apply operations to data that can subsequently be written back into a database. The post linked to above demonstrates how enrichments work using a geocoding example. The example uses OpenCage to geocode addresses. We've been using the Google Maps API here to do a similar thing, so the first obvious project is  Creating a Datasette enhancement th...

"Sure," I hear you saying, "Michael Gladych is cool and all, but what does this have to do with the history of physics?" Read on and find out how Gladych reported on the events that would fund Higgs Particle research as well as the relativistic framework that inspired the Alcubierre drive. The same events that inspired Nick Cook's antigravity classic, "The Hunt for Zero Point" The article that brought Mike Gladych to the attention of fringe physics buffs everywhere, “The G-Engines are Coming”, appeared in its first incarnation in the pages of the November, 1956 issue of American Modeler.  The article begins with the bold assertion that nuclear airplanes will be made obsolete—by the artificial control of gravity—before they ever leave the design phase.  It then goes on to state that many aircraft companies were currently engaged in the study of the control of gravitation including: Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Co., Convair, Bell Aircraft, Lear, Inc.,...

Scientific research in post-war America during the 1950s and ‘60s as seen through the eyes and life of ace fighter pilot turned science journalist, Michael Gladych, reveals a time when scientific possibilities were grander and fairly dripped with the promise of sci-fi style adventure.    Michael Gladych enters our story in the “The Hunt for Zero Point” , the fringe physics classic, by Nick Cook:  “The strapline below the headline proclaimed: "By far the most potent source of energy is gravity. Using it as power, future aircraft will attain the speed of light." It was written by one Michael Gladych…” Gladych, portrayed by Cook as merely the random author of a science journalism article , (figure 1), rapidly fades from the story amidst numerous claims of government and aerospace industry conspiracies to cover-up the ‘true’ anti-gravity programs of the 1950s. Ironically, Gladych is a far more interesting, and ‘true-to-life’ character than any of the...

While doing some research on science journalist of the '50s, Michael Gladych, I come across other interesting science journalists as well.  One of them is Ansel Talbert of the New York Herald Tribune.  Looking into Mr. Talbert's travel in the '50s, I found that he'd taken a flight from Denmark to Alaska.  At first, the only remarkable thing about the flight was that HRH Prince Axel of Denmark and Iceland was on board, (if you're from the Sates like me, I bet you didn't know there was a prince of Denmark and Iceland!) A little investigation made even this fact seem trite when Prince Axel was revealed as the CEO of SAS airlines, the carrier for the flight in question.  Not all was lost though... Far from it! It turns out the flight was the first commercial flight to take advantage of the U.S. Air Force's newly released polar maps!  For the first time ever, a group of passengers flew from Denmark to Tokyo, stopping only in Alaska, in just 8,000 mile...