To UNDERSTAND at all how magnetic energy could be the quiet one behind all the current sound and fury concerning the presence and propulsion of flying saucers, it may be necessary to point out historically how this primary force got lost in the shuffle.
The Pentagonians obviously were ignorant of it. Otherwise they would have included references to it in their various communiques to us, their paymasters, before closing down Project Saucer. Scientists in related fields may know a little more than the Pentagonians, but because the former no longer enjoy the free exchange of ideas under the bugaboo of "security" they are either reluctant to give the devil his due or ignorant of his activities. The cell-by-cell method of research, further sealed off by the military's forceful phobias, has developed modern science into a self-limiting disease, as physicians would call it.
Thus it would be as fruitless to ask Vannevar Bush, Robert Millikan, Harold C. Urey, and possibly Albert Einstein to check on these findings as it would be to ask them to check on the end
results of a hydrogen bomb which fortunately hasn't been detonated as yet. So they as well as the lower orders of idealists, may find a briefing in the other man's field as not too gratuitous.
They know of course that the first law of magnetism is that like poles repel and unlike poles attract, that William Gilbert (1544-1603) was known as the father of magnetism (despite the fact that Thales of Miletus, the first Ionian physicist, had dis. covered the phenomenon of frictional electricity and hence of magnetism 2,000 years before Gilbert and Peter Peregrinus, 1269, discovered magnetic poles) and that it might have been better if Benjamin Franklin were known today as the patron of both these pioneers instead of as "the father of electricity," for with. out a knowledge of magnetism we would have had no knowledge of electricity.
The word magnet, according to Lucretius, was derived from the hills of the Magnesians where he thought it was first found, though Pliny credited it to a shepherd named Magnes who one day raised his iron crook on Mount Ida and found to his amazement that his staff stuck to a ledge which projected above his head. Centuries before this, however, the Chinese used a lodestone, which was as much of magnet as the stone Magnes contacted in the second century B.C.
Around the year 1000 Mediterranean navigators were using suspended magnets to help them home. These lodestones or "lead-stones" were the guides for Peter Peregrinus who by converging lines like meridians toward two points on a sphere's surface found that he had worked out the idea of magnetic poles. In fact he called them that.
From the open sea, magnetism next moved into the parlor where in the sixteenth century we find William Gilbert entertaining Queen Elizabeth with his parlor tricks. He rubbed two bodies together (one of them amber) and could pick up pieces of paper, thanks to the generated magnetism. This came close to black magic and witchcraft, but Gilbert was a court physician instead of a female on a broomstick and thus was spared the rod, which
if whacked hard enough on a wool-covered gluteus maximus would have generated more "static electricity," not less.
If Gilbert had not been so familiar with Greek and had not called bodies which, when rubbed, attracted lighter bodies to themselves, electrics (after elektron the Greek word for amber) a lot of the later confusion between electricity and magnetism never would have arisen. Between Gilbert's electrics and non-electrics developed what is today known as insulators and conductors of electricity.
The next great step away from simplicity was when Stephen Gray (1729) electrified two wooden cubes-one hollow and one solid. He showed they produced the same effects and concluded that the electrification is identified with the surfaces and not the volumes of objects. Thus began two hundred years of new discoveries, most of them wrong, because if Gray had realized that however you cut an object, its magnetic qualities remain the same, he would not have gone off on a tangent about electrification being the surface not the center of things.
After Gray came Du Fay, who developed the positive and negative phases of electricity. Franklin came on this discovery sometime later independently.
Then there was Von Kleist, Von Musschenbroek, Grallat, and finally Leyden, whose jar permitted the concentration and storage of electricity.
Of course everyone remembers Benjamin Franklin's famous kite and the key that drew off fire from the cloud, but few remember Coulomb (1785) who introduced a quantitative basis into the study of magnetism. Previously research had been exclusively qualitative. Coulomb showed that electric charges exert forces on each other inversely to the square of the distance. The same was true of magnetic poles.
This law of Coulomb's was merely a restatement of Newton (1680) who had applied the inverse-square law to the gravitational field. The two (gravity and magnetism) though obviously stemming from the same parent, remained unrelated until Ein-
stein, as late as 1950, sought to bring them together again, where in fact they had been from the beginning.
Around 1800, Volta made the first voltaic pile and found that by closing the circuits, he could get a continuous electrical effect. This differed from the Leyden jar which like a modern storage battery had to be re-electrified after each discharge.
Nicholson, Carlisle, Humphry Davy, Berzelius, and others moved into the physical field of electricity behind Franklin, Coulomb, and the pioneers. Berzelius advanced the theory that every compound contained two parts, and that the chemical combination resulted when oppositely charged ions united, thus giving stability to the compound and neutralizing the electricities therein. This is so close to the modern theory that everything is kept in magnetic balance, that it's fantastic it should have been lost sight of for 150 years.
Researching in the same general period were Ampere (the Newton of Electricity), Faraday (who had worked under Humphry Davy), Sturgeon, (who worked out the first electromagnet), and Ohm after whom Ohm's Law was named. Of this group perhaps Michael Faraday would be most worthy of long-time recognition because he worked out the principle on which present-day alternating currents are based. This particular discovery of his, however, lay dead for fifty years.
Another one of his researches might bear further study today. That is a study of the intervening space or substance subjected to electric or magnetic influence. Before Faraday's time, as of today, most people were interested in the end-results. That is to say, the phenomena themselves. But Faraday decided to find out what went on between the electricity and/or the magnetism which caused certain phenomena, and the phenomena themselves. Thus, if he were alive today it could be fairly well predicted that he would be neither fronting for the Air Force (denying such things as flying saucers), nor off in space somewhere trying to find what causes that, but would be right in the middle examining every part of the ships themselves.
After Faraday carne Lord Kelvin, who got his title because he was a distinguished physicist, not because somebody of the same name died. Kelvin did a great deal toward the accurate measurement of physical matter, and was largely responsible for the electrostatic and electromagnetic systems of units based on the point electric charge and the point magnetic pole, referred to in scientific circles as CGS.
In 1856, Weber and Kohlrausch worked out the unit of measurement between electrostatic and electromagnetic units and found it to be three times ten raised to the tenth degree. This in itself reads just like another algebraic figure, which ought to be avoided in a book of this sort at all costs, but actually it contains a secret that might be most revealing, if it ever penetrates the caverns of the Pentagon. Because 3 x 101° is very close to the velocity of light, and as all know, light travels at 186,000 miles per second.
By 1905, Einstein had concluded that nothing traveled faster than light. Today magnetic research scientists deny this, but rather than project their heresy into the discussion at this point, let us limit all speed to the speed of light. An object that could travel at such speed would make transportation between this planet and another no more time consuming than a commuter's trip from New York to New Haven. In fact a trip from Venus to this earth and back would take 42 minutes.
To return to our muttons, however, in 1852, Kelvin and Clausius laid down two laws of thermodynamics which still hold good. The first was that energy may be transformed from one state to another, its total amount remaining constant. This law of the conservation of energy was followed by a second law, which stated that wherever energy was transformed from one state to another some of it appeared in the form of heat, which was considered the lowest form of energy (to which in time it was feared all energy would degenerate).
Lenz contributed a law following the statement of the principle of the conservation of energy. He declared:
"Whenever a current is induced by the relative motion of the magnetic field and a conductor, the direction of the induced cur- rent is always such as to set up a magnetic field which opposes the motion."
In other words, the electrical energy (EMF) is gained in this case at the expense of mechanical energy.
Clerk Maxwell (1873) was the next pioneer in the field. I fact it was he who cleared up many of the obscurities of Kelvin, Weber, Kohlrausch, and Faraday. In Maxwell's equations, he asserted that electric and magnetic fields, if changing in time, generate each other and by their combined action, propagate energy as waves out into space with the velocity of light.
From here to the assertion that light was nothing more than an electromagnetic wave was but a short step, but it nearly got Maxwell's legs blown off. Today it is as accepted as the presence of the electric light itself.
After these great men came many whose names are known to the present generation. But one not so well known was Max Planck, who discovered that Maxwell's marvelous definitions failed to explain certain facts about radiant energy. It was assumed that light was propagated through space in the form of continuous waves. Planck said it wasn't so, that the radiant energy was transmitted from the originating source in "clusters" or "quanta" and thus began the quantum theory, the beginning of the belief that all matter is atomic in nature. Of course, some argue that Maxwell's old theory was better able to explain the interference of light than Planck or the quantum theory, but the modern magnetic scientist believes that both can be gathered under one canopy because everything is magnetic in its origin.
From Planck to Einstein was a short walk but it involved a great change of scenery, and from that great change in 1905 to today has seen all science moving further away from Gilbert's original error in calling matter electric and Newton's error in calling the law of magnetic balance gravitation.
Early in the career of science there was only one godhead and that was magnetism. But by the time the twentieth century got
really going the physical world had been split into as many parts as an automobile. Chiefly they were electricity, physics, chemistry, and light, with poor old Father Magnetism shoved off in the attic somewhere. The electronic theory sought to unite them by holding that all matter was essentially electrical in its constitution, but, as I have pointed out, this was Gilbert's original error in associating the word with the Greek word for amber.
The wars brought them all under one roof again, but the injection by the military of secrecy, security, and such unscientific jargon broke them into unrelated cells again. Their postwar efforts to get together have been stamped as proof of disloyalty by one political division or another.
Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was another step toward an attempt at unity, and further attempts, such as the dropping of electromagnetic term for the simpler magnetic term may bring the whole inquiry back to where it began.
The electron theory rests on the belief that all matter is electrical in its constitution. It isn't much to admit that magnetism and electricity are one and from there to the acceptance that all matter is magnetic in its constitution is but a step.
Einstein briefly, stripped of 24 pages of equations, was trying to prove the following points:
Only one person was supposed to have understood Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity when he advanced it in 1905. That was when he handed down a decision that nothing exceeded the speed of light. His exception to the general law of travel, however, was that whereas two automobiles traveling at 30 miles an hour would meet head on at 60 miles an hour, two light waves traveling at 186,000 m.p.h. would meet head on at 186,000 m.p.h. That would be their relative speed in space.
By 1916 when Einstein released his General Theory of Relativity the number who understood him had increased to 12. The rest of us had to be satisfied with the suspicion that it meant that parallel lines eventually meet, that a fourth dimension (the time-space factor) would have to be accepted to understand the theory at all, and that for average men it would be only necessary to understand that if they were on a train, which was standing at the station, and a train on the next track moved, confusing the passengers in the first train as to whether they or the people in the other train were moving, all parties had got all they needed to know about the Theory of Relativity.
By now maybe more people understood Einstein's latest theory, the Unified Field Theory, which is the last of his many attempts to integrate Newton's law of gravity with modern theories of radiation, light, and magnetic energy, generally classed under the head of electromagnetism.
But for all who may claim to understand Einstein's latest attempt to simplify the law of the universe, from theologians who may rejoice in gathering the once professed atheist into God's pastures, to fellow scientists who may feel he bit off more than
he could chew if he lived another hundred years (which he readily conceded), there is grave doubt if there are a dozen persons, Einstein included, who have a thorough grasp of electromagnetic energy.
Even those scientists from the magnetic field, who supplied Einstein with a good deal of original material, don't quite know yet after thousands of years what makes a lodestone work, or why. If they did they could power planes on this earth and send them spinning to Venus and back like perfectly controlled boomerangs.
Einstein's twenty-page resume of his latest theory left the conflict between two kinds of physics unreconciled. What happens to an atom and what happens to the universe at large still don't match, and they won't match, magnetic scientists contend, until all accept the theory that there are things faster than light, that in this atmosphere it is possible for an object to travel on a magnetic wave at 282,000 miles per second and that beyond the magnetic forces of this planet, travel at a million miles per second, is not only possible but routine.
Just as Einstein was positive that nothing exceeded the speed of light and that all energy was "frozen" energy and that matter differs from energy only temporarily (as, for example, a ball on a shelf and the same ball falling to the floor) so are the magnetic scientists positive that everything from a pencil to a flying saucer has its magnetic frequencies and that any force which can disturb or break (for even a split-second) these frequencies, can disintegrate the object so disturbed. This moves us ahead of atomic fission, into, in fact, magnetic fission.
It explains why our concern need no longer be about enemies on this earth, but what protection we have from visitors from other planets who may have mastered the means of moving from their magnetic field on magnetic lines of force into ours and disintegrating our whole planet while we are working out ways to disintegrate cities of earthbound "enemies" by atomic or hydrogenic bombs. We could of course give some serious thought to the use of countermagnetic disintegration as a perfect method of shielding this fair land in case of air invasion, but since the
observers have shown no belligerence unless positively threatened perhaps the emphasis should be on politesse rather than pugnacity.
The Air Force as well as scientists and people generally need to be trained to politeness on an interplanetary level. This may be as difficult as it is for strangers to make friends with babies. Some of our scientists are reported to have whistled at a group of grounded Saucerians and when the Saucerians ran, the scientists ran after them, only to have the Saucerians disappear in the blue.
Felix Frazer tells me that in discussing the question with Air Force pilots, colonels no less, they said they had no instructions as to how to act if they met a saucer above our mainland. The procedure, they informed him, is let the ship have it first and ask questions afterward. If met on the ground the procedure is to take the aliens into custody, by force, naturally, if necessary, and to shoot them if they attempted to run away.
Of course the proper procedure is not to lay hands on them, any more than you would on a wire carrying a current of 2,000 volts. An act of friendliness might change the world at such a time. Since the Saucerians are obviously so far ahead of us scientifically, it would be utterly silly for us to try to outsmart them. We are really where the Japanese in Hiroshima were in defense against the A-bomb in 1945. Whatever way we could learn from the Saucerians as to how they got on without blowing each other to pieces would be welcome information to us. It is quite possible that in many ways we may have developed techniques in civilized living which would be helpful to them, for we have done many good things in peace as well as bad things in war.
The worst feature of our present predicament is that the military has first crack at everything and is the poorest equipped for handling such delicate matters as the birth of communication on an interplanetary level. For this work we should be training an army of Emily Posts instead of trigger-happy bombardiers.
I hereby turn this suggestion over to the Nobel committee for consideration before they award their next peace prize.
