"Conquest of Gravity Aim of Top
Scientists in U.S."
Source: NEW YORK HERALD-TRIBUNE:
"ANTI-GRAVITY RESEARCH - Dr. Charles T. Dozier, left,
senior research engineer and guided missiles expert of the Convair
Division of General Dynamics Corp., conducting a research experiment
toward control of gravity with Martin Kaplan, Convair Senior
electronics engineer."
"IN CHARGE - George S. Trimble jr, vice-president in
charge of advanced design planning of Martin Aircraft Corp., is
organizing a new research institute for advanced study to push a
program of theoretical research on gravitational effect"
"CHANGES FAR BEYOND THE ATOM ARE THE PRIZE"
(Revolution in Power, Air, Transit Is Seen)
This is the first of a series on new pure and applied
research into the mysteries of gravity and efforts to devise ways to
counteract it. Written by Ansel E. Talbert, military and aviation
editor, N.Y.H.T.
The initial steps of an almost incredible program to
solve the secret of gravity and universal gravitation are being taken
today in many of America's top scientific laboratories and research
centres. A number of major, long-established companies in the United
States aircraft and
electronics industries also are involved in gravity research.
Scientists, in general, bracket gravity with life itself as the
greatest unsolved mystery in the Universe. But there are increasing
numbers who feel that there must be a physical mechanism for its
propagation which can be discovered and controlled.
Should this mystery be solved it would bring about a
greater revolution in power, transportation and many other fields than
even the discovery of atomic power. The influence of such a discovery
would be of tremendous import in the field of aircraft design - where
the problem of fighting gravity's effects has always been basic.
A FANTASTIC POSSIBILITY
One almost fantastic possibility is that if gravity can
be understood scientifically and negated or neutralized in some
relatively inexpensive manner, it will be possible to build aircraft,
earth satellites, and even space ships that will move swiftly into
outer space, without strain, beyond the pull of earth's gravity field.
They would not have to wrench themselves
away through the brute force of powerful rockets and through
expenditure of expensive chemical fuels.
Centres where pure research on gravity now is in
progress in some form include the Institute for Advanced Study at
Princeton, N.J. and also at Princeton University: the University of
Indiana's School of Advanced Mathematical Studies and the Purdue
University Research Foundation.
A scientific group from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, which encourages original research in pure and applied
science, recently attended a seminar at the Roger Babson Gravity
Research Institute of New Boston, N.H., at which Clarence Birdseye,
inventor and industrialist, also was present. Mr. Birdseye gave the
world its first packaged quick-frozen foods
and laid the foundation for todays frozen food Industry: more recently
he has become interested in gravitational studies.
A proposal to establish at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C., an 'Institute of Pure Physics'
primarily to carry on theoretical research on gravity was approved
earlier this month by the University's board of trustees. This had the
approval of Dr. Gordon Gray who has since
retired as president of the University. Dr. Gray has been Secretary of
the Army, Assistant Secretary of Defence, and special assistant to the
President of the United States.
FUNDS COLLECTED: Funds to make the institute possible
were collected by Agnew H. Bahnson jr., an industrialist of Winston
Salem, N.C. The new University of North Carolina administration is now
deciding on the institute's scope and personnel. The directorship has
been offered to Dr. Bryce S. Dewitt of the Radiation Laboratories at
the University of
California at Berkeley, who is the author of a Roger Babson
prize-winning scientific study entitled, 'New Directions for Research
in the Theory of Gravity.'
The same type of scientific disagreement which occurred
in connection with the first proposals to build the hydrogen bomb and
an artificial earth satellite -now under construction - is in progress
over anti-gravity research. Many scientists of repute are sure that
gravity can be overcome
in comparatively few years if sufficient resources are put behind the
project. Others believe it may take a quarter of a century or more.
REFUSE TO PREDICT:Some pure physicists, while backing
the general program to try to discover how gravity is propagated,
refuse to make predictions of any kind. Aircraft industry firms now
participating or actively interested in gravity include Glenn L.
Martin Co. of Baltimore, builders of the
nation's first giant jet-powered flying boat; Convair of San Diego,
designers and builders of the giant B-36 intercontinental bomber and
the world's first successful vertical take-off fighter; Bell Aircraft
of Buffalo, builders of the first piloted airplane to fly faster than
sound and a current jet take-off and landing airplane, and Sikorsky
Division of United Aircraft, pioneer helicopter builders.
Lear, Inc., of Santa Monica, one of the world's largest
builders of automatic pilots for airplanes; Clarke Electronics of Palm
Springs, California, a pioneer in its field, and the Sperry Gyroscope
Division of Sperry-Rand Corp., of Great Neck, L.I., which is doing
important work on guided missiles and earth satellites, also have
scientists investigating the gravity problem.
USE EUROPEAN EXPERT:Martin Aircraft has just put under
contract one of Europe's leading theoretical authorities on gravity
and electromagnetic fields - Dr. Burkhard Heim of Goettingen
University where some of the outstanding discoveries of the century in
aerodynamics and physics have been made, and Dr. Pascual Jordan of
Hamburg University, Max Planck Medal winner whose recent work called
'Gravity and the Universe' has excited
scientific circles throughout the world.
Dr. Heim, now professor of theoretical physics at
Goettingen, and who was a member of Germany's Bureau of Standards
during World War II, is certain that gravity can be overcome. Dr. Heim
lost his eyesight and hearing, and had both arms blown off at the
elbow in a World War II rocket explosion. He dictates his theories and
mathematical calculations to his wife.
Martin Aircraft, at the suggestion of George S. Trimble,
its vice-president in charge of advanced design planning, is building
between Washington and Baltimore a new laboratory for the Research
Institute for Advanced Study... A theoretical investigation of the
implications for future gravity research in the 'United Field Theory'
of the late Dr. Albert Einstein is now underway here.
Although financed by Martin, the Institute will have no
connection with the day-to-day business of building airplanes. Its
general manager is Welcome Bender.
Up to now no scientist or engineer - so far as is known
in the scientific circles - has produced the slightest alteration in
the magnitude or direction of gravitational 'force' although many
cranks and crackpots have claimed to be able to do this with
'perpetual motion machines.'
NO ACCEPTED THEORY: There is no scientific knowledge or
generally accepted theory about the speed with which it travels across
interplanetary space, making any two material particles or bodies - if
free to move - accelerate toward each other. But the current efforts
to understand gravity and
universal gravitation both at sub-atomic level and at the level of the
Universe have the positive backing today of many of America's
outstanding physicists.
These include Dr. Edward Teller of the University of
California, who received prime credit for developing the hydrogen
bomb; Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton; Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, theoretical
physicist at the Institute, and Dr. John A. Wheeler, professor of
physics at Princeton University who made important
contributions to America's first nuclear fission project.
PURE RESEARCH VIEW: It must be stressed that scientists
in this group approach the problem only from the standpoint of pure
research. They refuse to predict exactly in what directions the search
will lead or whether it will be successful beyond broadening human
knowledge generally.
Other top-ranking scientific minds being brought to bear
today on the gravity problem are those of Dr. Vaclav Hlavaty, of the
University of Indiana, who served with Dr. Einstein on the faculty of
Charles University in Prague and later taught advanced mathematics at
the Sorbonne in Paris; and of Dr. Stanley Deser and Dr. Richard
Arnowitt of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.
Dr. Hlavaty believes that gravity simply is one aspect
of electromagnetism - the basis of all cosmic forces - and eventually
may be controlled like light and radio waves.
HOPE TO FIND KEY: Dr. Deser and Dr. Arnowitt are of the
opinion that very recently discovered nuclear and sub-nuclear
particles of high energy which are difficult to explain by any
present-day theory, may prove to be the key that eventually unlocks
the mystery. It is their suggestion that the new particles may prove
to be basic gravitational energy which is being converted continually
and automatically in an expanding Universe directly into the most
useful nuclear and electromagnetic forms.' In a recent scientific
paper they point out:
'One of the most hopeful aspects of the problem is that
until recently gravitation could be observed but not experimented on
in any controlled fashion, while now with the advent in the past two
years of the new high-energy accelerators (the Cosmotron and the even
more recent Berkeley Bevatron) the new particles which have been
linked with the gravitational
field can be examined and worked with at will .'
An important job of encouraging both pure and applied
gravity research in the United States through annual prizes and
seminars as well as, the summarizing of new research for engineers and
scientists in industry looking forward to a real 'hardware solution'
to the gravity problem is being performed by the Gravity Research
Foundation of New Boston, N.H.
This was founded and endorsed by Dr. Roger Babson,
economist, who is an alumnus of M.I.T. and a lifelong student of the
works of Sir Isaac Newton, discoverer of gravity. Its president is Dr.
George Rideout of Boston.
BLACKBOARD MATH - Dr. Vaclav Hlavaty, of the University
of Indiana's graduate Institute of Advanced Mathematics, who has
stimulated research on gravity control, working on a problem."
"ANTI-GRAVITY AND AVIATION - George S. Trimble jr.
vice-president in charge of advanced design planning of Martin
Aircraft Corp., left discussing the application of anti-gravitational
research to aviation with two Martin scientists, J.D. Pierson, centre,
and William B. Yates."
Sunday, November 20, 1955
pp. l & 36