The day - should it ever come - when we know everything there is to know
about the universe will be a very sad day, because with nothing to wonder
about, and no more chance to "do science", it will be a very boring old
world.
Fortunately, it doesn't look as though this will happen any time soon.
You can download Tesla's autobiography
here.
To be fair, Tesla did receive accolades during his lifetime, much of which
coincided with the exciting romantic era, when new ideas - in both
the arts and the sciences - were having an enormous impact. His numerous
inventions, including the induction motor, the speedometer, early versions
of fluorescent lights, and the humble spark plug - as well as his
championing of AC power - were in many ways set to make the world a better
place to live.
Tesla was also one of the early researchers into radio. Indeed, in 1943, his
great contribution was recognized (posthumously) when the US Supreme Patent
Court finally acknowledged that he was the
true pioneer,
rather than his rival Marconi.
So, even though somewhat of an oddball, Tesla commanded respect - at first.
However, one of the things that may well have led to his later being
regarded as a "mad scientist" was his statement that he was receiving
messages from Mars.
Let's not get into the debate about what the signals really were that Tesla
was picking up. Instead, let's "fast forward" to 1967, some 24 years after
his death, to an incident which had my Dad eagerly following the news
broadcasts, as well as being of interest to a teenaged Mad Teddy.
By the mid-to-late 20th century,
radio astronomy
was an established science. No longer was anybody calling anyone a "mad
scientist" who was picking up signals from space. However, there were plenty
of surprises still in store.
A graduate student named
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
had found a radio source "out there" which had a definite regular pulse.
The object, whatever it was, was very sensibly dubbed a "pulsar". Nearly
four decades on, most astronomers agree that pulsars are actually
spinning
neutron stars.
To hear the noise of some pulsars as their beams sweep past the Earth, click
on
this link.
Really freaky stuff...
To read about different types of pulsars, as well as other possibly
related objects, click on
this
Wikipedia link.
In the intervening time, science has addressed many of the details about
the weird things that inhabit the universe. Most people have at least heard
of
black holes.
The intriguing properties of neutron stars and black holes have been
addressed in numerous science fiction stories since the 1970's, or even
earlier (see
this link,
and
this one,
for example); so to that extent these concepts are fairly well-known.
- Which brings us to
quasars.
Quasars, however, are another matter altogether. If you carefully read the
excellent Wikipedia article about them (see the link above), you may feel -
as I do - that there is still a great deal of confusion about what these
peculiar beasts really are.
Quasars made their appearance in radio telescopes in the late 1950's, before
there was any news of either neutron stars or black holes . Something
"out there" was generating high-energy radio emissions; but the
nature and distance from Earth of such objects were not clear.
The term "quasar" is generated from the words "quasi stellar" - meaning
somewhat starlike, but not a star. There is more than a hint of uncertainty
inherent in the very word.
So why am I raising quasars as an issue?
A few weeks ago I bought, in a secondhand bookshop, a copy of Arthur C.
Clarke's book "Report on Planet Three and other speculations" (Pan SF, 1984,
originally published by Victor Gollancz in 1972). This book is a series of
essays on various topics in a format that appeals to the kind of person who
likes quirky ideas and/or science fiction.
One of the essays (Chapter 7 in the book), written in 1968, is entitled
"Next - the Planets!". In this essay, Clarke addresses the possibility of
space travel not only to the moon (which would happen in the following year,
1969), but also to the other planets in the solar system - and, ultimately,
to other star systems. As he says in his introduction, this was originally
presented as a paper at a conference in 1968. In the final paragraph of this
introduction, he says:
"The suggestion, at the end of the essay, that we are observing new sources
of energy which may far exceed those of the atomic nucleus now seems more
and more probable, thanks to recent researches on 'quasars'. The Universe
can provide all the power that we shall ever need to drive real star
ships - if we are clever enough to tap it..."
It seems to me that the evidence from astronomy and particle physics which I
have described makes it possible that we are on the threshold of great and
far-reaching discoveries. I have spoken of processes which, mass for mass,
would be at least a thousand times more productive of energy than nuclear
energy ... it seems to me that there are prodigious sources of energy in the
interior regions of some galaxies, and possibly in the "quasars", far
greater than those produced by the carbon cycle occurring in the stars. ...
And we may one day learn how to employ them.
As soon as I read this essay, I decided that it was necessary for me to
follow up the matter of whether there is some connection between quasars and
ZPE. So I started hunting around on the WWW to see what I could find out
about it.
This link popped up (have a look):
http://www.helical-structures.org/BSM_highlights.htm
Well, if that's piqued your interest, have a look at this one!
http://www.rense.com/general58/bbang.htm
I must say that I was delighted to find, in that page, a challenge to the
notion of "dark matter" (mentioned briefly in my earlier page on
metals)
- which has always seemed to me to be in the nature of a colossal,
obfuscating "fudge factor", with no possible justification in scientific
terms. (How can the absence of something which, by definition, is
not observable, be used to prop up any self-respecting
theory?)
On the other hand, there may be a classic irony in this: perhaps the
emergence of such a idea is, in itself, evidence for the existence of
super-massive black holes after all - between the ears of those who
subscribe to it. (Pardon me; that's a cheap shot, I know, and unworthy of me
- especially since the idea is not even original, a similar joke having been
used by
Larry Niven
in his story
"The Hole Man"
- but I couldn't resist it...
Note that the "fingers of God" link, in the "bbang" page whose link appears
above, doesn't work. However, not to worry - the URL of the article has
changed, that's all. It's now
here
- check it out!
Whew! What are we to make of that?
Here are another couple of links on this topic:
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm
- about Halton Arp's research on redshift. The "fingers of God", featured
in the last link, are also presented here; in addition, the very existence
of neutron stars, black holes, and again (YAY!) "dark matter", is
called into question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_Arp
- a Wikipedia article about Halton Arp, which (it seems to me) attempts to
steer a "middle course" and be fair to both sides of the debate.
Okay? Now have a look at one of Dr. Arp's own web-pages and see what he has
to say about redshift, quasars, and related matters:
http://www.haltonarp.com/?Page=Abstracts&ArticleId=6
(Check out other pages on his site too, while you're about it. In
particular, have a good, hard look at
this
one.)
I'll admit I find material like this refreshing. I've reached a point in my
life where I find myself challenging accepted wisdom in all sorts of areas.
I believe that a true scientific attitude demands that we should - indeed,
must do this. As reported in the "big bang" page just mentioned,
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Percy Williams Bridgman once said:
"There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new
idea."
Yes, I'm deliberately being provocative - just as I have been elsewhere in
these pages. But I'm not doing it just for the sake of it. I'm trying my
best to encourage people to think, because that is the only way any of us
will ever really understand anything - which, in turn, gives us the
chance to make the world a better place to live.
I believe that the true scientific minds in history - heroes like Faraday
and Tesla, among several others mentioned elsewhere in this website - would
have adopted a similar point of view.
I don't know what quasars are. I don't know if they have anything to do with
zero-point energy. I may never know. But it's nice to know that I'm not the
only person who wonders about it.
By way of closing this page, let's allow Arthur C. Clarke to have the final
say.
In the first of those two links above which I found while hunting on the WWW
for a link between quasars and ZPE, at the end of the page are references to
two papers both by (or partly by) H.E.Puthoff.
In his book "Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!" (Harper Collins Publishers,
1999), in Chapter 30: "When Will the Real Space Age Begin?", Arthur C.
Clarke refers to a paper by Dr. Hal Puthoff and colleagues in the February
1994 Physical Review which suggests that gravity and inertia are both
"functions of the vacuum or zero point energy, which pervades the whole
universe and is the real residue of the Big Bang".
In the following paragraph, Clarke writes:
Physics may be about to face a revolution similar to that which occurred
just a century ago. Don't be surprised if the fossil-fuel and nuclear age
comes to a screeching halt in the very near future.
I can't wait...
My home page
Preliminaries (Copyright, Safety)
Quasars: some thoughts...
Nikola Tesla
(1856-1943), who is increasingly honoured by those who
understand as "the man who invented the 20th century", was a strange,
tortured man. There is no question, even among those who think his
importance may be somewhat over-exaggerated, that he was a genius. Like most
geniuses, he was (or at least appeared to be) "flawed"; being
over-endowed mentally does not sit easily in a world in which half the
population are of below average intelligence. 
(People who are "special", either by being super-intelligent or sadly
lacking in that regard, frequently don't have stress-free lives, because
they don't fit in easily with society's mores.)
Whatever are they?
Neutron stars and black holes have a certain appeal, because of their
obviously interesting characteristics. It's not too hard to get one's head
around the concepts; people such as myself who like ideas for their own sake
enjoy the mental exercise involved in thinking about them.
Toward the end of the essay itself, as promised in the introduction, Clarke
quotes Professor C.F.Powell, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, as saying:
Now, if you've had a bit of a look around this website, you may have noticed
that a recurring theme is something called "Zero-Point Energy" (ZPE).
Indeed, there is a page devoted to this very topic (click
here
to see it).
)
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