Ken Shoulders and EVOs
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Ken Shoulders and EVOs
by Chromium6 Sat Nov 26, 2022 12:33 am
This is kind of "out-there" research on Exotic Vacuum Objects. Worth checking though in light of the Charge Field. Keep in mind Miles' paper below as well:
197b. EVO's and the Charge Field
http://milesmathis.com/evo.pdf
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-frontiersman
(more at link)
----------
The Frontiersman
In Silicon Valley’s renegade days, a hardheaded Texan chased dreams of a flying car.
By Kenton G. Jaehnig, Jacob Roberts | October 10, 2016
Ken Shoulder with drone, 1993Engineer and inventor Ken Shoulders holds a prototype of the Shadow, a flying drone marketed as a toy, 1993. Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
In the summer of 2016 Steve Shoulders was getting by on odd jobs, doing everything from tree trimming to electrical repair around Freestone, California, a rural community of 50 people in Sonoma County. It was honest work but less rewarding than the years spent under the tutelage of his father, Ken Shoulders. Working mostly from backyard laboratories, the pair spent decades designing flying machines and challenging scientific assumptions.
After his father died of cancer in 2013, Steve was left with the remains of a life spent inventing: drone prototypes, dust-covered lab equipment, brittle research papers, even an old gyrocopter, a type of helicopter with small wings and an airplane propeller. But now those objects were in danger of being lost forever. Unable to pay the rising rent, he was being forced out of his home and was scrambling to find storage space for his father’s legacy.
When we spoke with Steve, he was standing on a hilltop a couple of miles from his father’s lab, straining to maintain cell reception as wind battered his phone’s speaker. “Working with my father was an absolute joy,” he said. “He was just a really good friend of mine, if nothing else.”
Ken Shoulders would wake each morning between 3:00 and 3:30 to sit outside until sunrise. It was his private time to contemplate new ideas and experiments; no one was allowed to interrupt him. Each day he ate his breakfast from the same bowl and spoon; he would wash them and thereby extricate himself from the rest of the household chores. By simplifying tasks Shoulders hoped to save all his mental energy for his work.
“Anything added to simplicity was complexity,” explained his son. “Complexity was going to confuse him or do something to his thought processes that he didn’t need.”
Shoulders’s peculiar sense of pragmatism could alienate people who didn’t know him, and it was part of a larger rejection of convention that started at a young age. Born in Texas in 1927, he barely finished high school, shrugging off homework he found tedious to pursue his interests in electronics and what he later called “frontier science.” One of the few school subjects that captured his attention was aeronautics; his high marks in that class were an early indication of an enduring fondness for machines that could fly. Despite his mediocre grades young Shoulders was clearly bright. He had a remarkable ability to take a device apart and put it back together again to figure out exactly how it worked.
In following the ideas of ‘frontier science’ Shoulders made a life of taking the harder path.
Forgoing college, he spent the next decade bouncing among different electronics jobs at companies big (Magnavox, Texas Instruments) and small (radio station WKWF in the Florida Keys). By 1955 he settled into a research staff position at MIT’s Computer Components and Systems Laboratory. Three years later Shoulders’s self-taught knowledge in the booming field of microelectronics landed him a prestigious job at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California.
Shoulders founded SRI’s microelectronics program and directed the work of a team of engineers and technicians who made research machinery, such as mass spectrometers, ultra-high vacuum apparatuses, and electron-beam instruments. He would ride to work each day on a Vespa scooter, careening down twisting, redwood-lined roads into the congestion of Palo Alto. But he would have preferred to ditch the traffic of Bay Area streets for empty skies, and so he set his engineering mind to sorting out a solution.
Frontiersman_2
Handout for Gyrodyne Convertiplane
Promotional handout for the Gyrodyne Convertiplane, an aircraft Shoulders believed could change how people commuted to work.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
After working at SRI for a few years he convinced his bosses to allow him to design a car capable of flight. He called it the Gyrodyne Convertiplane, essentially a cross between a car, a helicopter, and an airplane. Although designed to be flown primarily like a small airplane, a rotor on the vehicle’s roof would allow it to take off and land from short stretches of road. Rigid wings and a rear propeller would let it travel farther and faster than most helicopters available at the time.
A 1965 proposal lays out Shoulders’s vision for the Convertiplane, complete with preliminary sketches and specifications, and addresses operational and logistical concerns. He saw the vehicle as the answer for a “large and growing” population of long-distance commuters who lived 80 or more miles from work and who were tired of battling hours of traffic each day.
Shoulders had hit on an unusual solution to a real problem. Since the end of World War II more Americans were buying cars than ever before and moving into suburbs farther and farther from urban centers. Existing highway infrastructure couldn’t handle the change. By 1960 there were more than 61 million registered passenger vehicles on American roads, double the amount of 10 years earlier. President Dwight Eisenhower foresaw the problem and convinced Congress to pass the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956.
By the time Shoulders was pitching his Convertiplane, a national system of interstate highways was slowly being built. But Shoulders saw a simpler fix; with his Convertiplane a person could bypass congested roads with the flip of a switch and launch into the sky. No more traffic, at least for the people lucky enough to own such a craft. (He never offered a solution, however, for managing the crowded airspace once everyone was flying.)
Why would SRI support such a far-fetched idea? In the decades following World War II it probably didn’t seem all that outlandish. The era was flush with government grants and an eagerness to experiment, especially if the results might keep the United States ahead of the Soviet Union. SRI was at the heart of this scientific free-for-all. A decade after Shoulders pitched his flying car, Harold Puthoff, a friend and physicist at SRI, began a bizarre project funded by the CIA. Puthoff had become fascinated with illusionists, including talk-show staple Uri Geller, who professed psychic powers. Puthoff began investigating whether those powers were real and whether they might have military applications. Puthoff and his collaborators conducted a number of experiments and concluded that Geller could, in fact, read minds and move objects through telekinesis. Other researchers couldn’t replicate the results.
Although many of these off-the-wall projects failed to produce anything tangible, the freedom given to employees at SRI paid off over time. Since the 1960s, SRI researchers have had a hand in innovations ranging from cancer drugs to Apple’s Siri voice-recognition software. Unfortunately for Shoulders the Convertiplane was a project that never took off. Aside from technical and logistical problems, a gamut of legal obstacles blocked the way.
Frontiersman_3
Helicopter Escape and Rescue Outfit (HERO)
Sketch of the military-focused Helicopter Escape and Rescue Outfit (HERO), one of two solo aircraft Shoulders designed while at SRI, ca. mid-1960s.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
Shoulders met with the California State Senate’s Transportation Committee in 1963 to ask permission to use his invention. He argued that flying cars were technologically and economically viable and would not require extensive changes to California’s existing transportation infrastructure. If he had to work within the bounds of government regulation, he suggested using a loophole: flying cars could be classified as motorcycles, which had fewer design restrictions when compared with cars. The Transportation Committee members said they would think about it.
No matter how outlandish, Shoulders never rejected a new theory before carefully thinking it over and, if appropriate, testing it. He wished others would extend him the same courtesy.
In early 1964 the California Highway Transportation Agency made a decision: his flying car would be allowed to drive on public roads. Shoulders was overjoyed, but he had only cleared the first of many bureaucratic obstacles. According to Steve Shoulders a number of nearby municipalities, including Palo Alto, forbade the Convertiplane from flying through their airspace, possibly because they were afraid that insurance companies wouldn’t cover flying cars. Ken Shoulders was baffled. He later wrote, “There is nothing intrinsically different between flying a helicopter and driving a car, but a gulf has been created between the two methods by some quirk of social and economic manipulation.”
In response Shoulders pulled back on research into manned aircraft and for the next few years concentrated on building mass spectrometers and drone aircraft. These setbacks coincided with a growing disillusionment at work. Shoulders believed that great inventions could only be conceived through the vision of an individual scientist, and that the boards and committees at SRI stifled his creativity. Late in 1968, and just shy of a decade spent at SRI, Shoulders decided he could no longer follow someone else’s research agenda and left SRI to pursue his own interests: designing and building experimental aircraft. It was a rash decision even for him. According to his son had Shoulders stayed just two more months, he would have left with a generous retirement package, giving him plenty of cushion to strike out on his own. But Shoulders could think only of flying away.
Shoulders was still convinced that a vehicle like the Gyrodyne Convertiplane could revolutionize transportation. While he tried to identify a new source of funding for the idea, he set up a backyard laboratory and workshop for developing remote-controlled drones. While most drones being built at the time were designed for military applications, Shoulders envisioned machines that would be used for everything from toys to crop dusters. He incorporated his work into a company he named Vertitek. In place of graduate students and technicians, Shoulders enlisted the help of novices who like himself had little formal education, often hitchhikers he would come across. Even his young son, Steve, would lend a hand in the lab.
As with his hiring practices Shoulders’s drone designs could be eccentric. The Boomerang looked like a giant maple seed, the kind that pinwheels down when thrown in the air. But the craft’s odd appearance belied the cutting-edge technology onboard. It was able to avoid collisions by bouncing sound waves off obstacles, similar to the way a bat uses echolocation to navigate. The inventions were marvels of engineering, says Steve, but they could be dangerous too. If something was to go wrong, the Boomerang’s large propeller could easily lop off the head of a bystander.
Frontiersman_4
Shoulders and assistants wrangling the Boomerang
Shoulders and assistants wrangling the Boomerang, a self-navigating drone of his design, ca. 1970.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
Shoulders built drones out of his backyard lab for many years, but eventually he realized that if he ever wanted to build a flying machine he could pilot himself, he needed a lot of money. He was also looking for a fresh area of research, something he’d later describe as “really nuts.” Who better to ask for help in this pursuit than his old friend Puthoff?
Shoulders went to see Puthoff at SRI one in day in 1976. As luck would have it, Puthoff had just spoken with his wealthy friend George “Bill” Church, the owner and CEO of the Church’s Fried Chicken fast-food chain. Church had told Puthoff about a recent dream in which a flying saucer landed before him, out of which walked a man with remarkably large shoulders. As soon as Puthoff hung up the phone, Shoulders walked into his office looking for money. To a man pursuing the paranormal it seemed prophetic. Puthoff called Church back immediately, exclaiming that he was face to face with a large-shouldered man named Ken Shoulders.
Church and Shoulders set up a meeting soon after. Although Shoulders distrusted businessmen in general, he was charmed by Church. Like many others living through the oil crisis of the 1970s, Church was interested in alternative sources of energy, and he was eager to fund research in that direction. Shoulders was game, and over the next few weeks the pair negotiated an arrangement in which Church would finance Shoulders’s experiments and pay him a salary to run a lab; in return Church would share the profits from anything Shoulders invented.
After working in California for nearly a decade—first from his home in Woodside, then later in a lab Shoulders designed and built himself closer to the coast—Church asked Shoulders in 1984 to take charge of a state-of-the-art lab he was building in Austin, Texas, Church’s home base. The promise of complete creative and financial freedom was too tempting to resist. They organized themselves as a new company, Jupiter Technologies, and hired a staff of scientists and technicians. Soon Shoulders had designed a number of microelectronics for market, including a millimeter-wave generator and a new type of digital display he pitched to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) without success.
Frontiersman_5
Caricature of Ken Shoulders, 1988
Caricature of Ken Shoulders drawn during his time in Austin, Texas, 1988.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
As time went on, the two men found they had a lot in common and became close friends. Both were Texans who loved science but harbored a disdain for the constraints of higher education. Church would often stay late at the lab to quiz Shoulders about his progress and research methods, phoning in to the local outlet of his restaurant chain to have a dinner of fried chicken delivered to keep the discussions rolling.
Funding and chicken in hand, Shoulders believed he finally had the stability he needed to build a personal aircraft. Using his experience with the Gyrodyne Convertiplane and the dozens of remote-controlled drones he had built over the previous decade, he created a prototype gyrocopter with a lightweight metal skeleton he intended to modify incrementally into a flying car. He designed and built a pair of rockets fueled by hydrogen peroxide that in theory would allow the gyrocopter to launch vertically from a city street. After launch the vehicle’s propeller would provide stable flight. Shoulders often flew the prototype around his property for fun, though the rockets never got past the testing stage.
Shoulders suffered from extreme motion sickness, which led him to fly very low to avoid turbulence and the upset stomach that came with it. His motion sickness grew so debilitating he couldn’t even look at a Ferris wheel without getting ill. Still, the freedom he felt while in the air, untethered from the snarl of traffic, made his trips worthwhile.
But Shoulders’s belly wasn’t the only obstacle to commuting by flying car. It turned out that actually building one of the things was harder than he thought. At the same time, the cheery façade presented by his friend and business partner Church was starting to flake away. In 1989 Church began delaying a promised $10,000 bonus and laid off part of Jupiter’s staff. Church’s enthusiasm for Shoulders’s work endured, but he could no longer afford to finance Jupiter by himself, especially when none of the lab’s projects were producing a profit.
Frontiersman_6
Shoulders in Bensen B-8M Gyro-Copter, 1962
Despite developing acute motion sickness, Ken Shoulders flew solo aircraft for much of his life. Here a young Shoulders sits in the cockpit of a Bensen B-8M Gyro-Copter in 1962.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
For a time Church tried to hide the depth of his financial straits. When Shoulders discovered the truth, he was outraged, and the partnership soon dissolved. By 1990 he wasn’t any closer to turning his gyrocopter into a full-fledged flying car, and he no longer had Church’s financial support. Jupiter Technologies shut its doors. For four years Shoulders finished off contractual obligations and continued his alternative-energy research out of Jupiter’s former lab before returning to California in 1994. In 1995 he found a new financier from Sonoma County, California, who would fund him for the next 10 years. According to Steve, “From a 30-minute meeting and a handshake agreement we moved to Freestone.”
At some point Shoulders abandoned manned aircraft altogether. When he received a request from two young family friends seeking advice for breaking into the personal-aircraft industry, Shoulders shooed them away from the idea. He warned them of the political and legal hurdles they would encounter, while bitterly recounting his own experience. The young men heeded the weary inventor’s warnings: one kept his job at Boeing, while the other, in Shoulders’s words, “took off for Tahiti in a sailboat with a beautiful lady.”
In the Freestone lab Shoulders returned to the experimental physics projects he had pursued early in his partnership with Church.
While working with his son sometime around 1980, Shoulders had replicated a phenomenon observed by William Bostick, an atomic physicist at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Shoulders would eventually dub his findings exotic vacuum objects, or EVOs. He described an EVO as a cluster of electrons that channels energy (though the source of that energy was uncertain). Shoulders believed he had used the electrons’ energy to melt microscopic holes in various materials. Church had offered their research to dozens of companies and government agencies, including the Office of the Vice President, but no one was interested.
EVOs break the laws of physics as they are currently understood. Electrons shouldn’t be able to cluster together, as Shoulders claimed, because an electron’s negative charge will repel other electrons. Anyone trying to hold together the north poles of two magnets will get a sense of the problem. And so when Shoulders presented his findings to established scientists, such as Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate physicist at Caltech, he was dismissed outright.
Shoulders’s credibility was not helped by his maverick reputation, his lack of formal education, or the company he kept. Puthoff, his closest friend at SRI, was a former Scientologist who was still convinced that Uri Geller had psychic powers. Shoulders had also become close to John Hutchison, who promotes himself as a lovemaking guru and the inventor of levitation and life-extending devices. These relationships, and many others with more conventional scientists, were the result of Shoulders’s openness to unusual ideas. No matter how outlandish, Shoulders never rejected a new theory before carefully thinking it over and, if appropriate, testing it. He wished others would extend him the same courtesy.
Frontiersman_7
EVO research photo
Photograph from Shoulders’s testing of EVOs, which he hoped would be key to an alternative-energy source.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
But was there any worthwhile science in Shoulders’s EVO research?
After dismissing the inventor’s findings, Feynman became aware of the discovery of similar clusters of charged particles made at the National Bureau of Standards and the work of a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who had noticed the same thing 10 years earlier but had not conducted further research. On January 31, 1986, Feynman mailed an apology letter to Shoulders: “When you were in my office I could not see how 1010 or 1011 electrons could be kept as a ball in a vacuum without ions. . . . I must apologize for it has come to my attention that it is indeed possible.” Feynman confirmed that the electron clusters Shoulders and his son witnessed were feasible, a small victory in the face of mass rejection. But the existence of a physical phenomenon is a far cry from an alternative energy source. Nonetheless, Shoulders declared in his self-published book, EV: A Tale of Discovery, “I believe this gateway will open into one of the greatest industries yet known.” Despite years of filing patents and pitching the research to various companies and government agencies, Shoulders never found a taker.
In following the ideas of “frontier science” Shoulders made a life of taking the harder path. The difficulties he would create for himself, whether based on principle or temperament, are perhaps best exemplified by his decision to turn down a doctoral degree from MIT while he was working there in the 1950s, a formality that could have boosted his credibility with his EVO work. Steve remembers, “[His boss Arthur] von Hippel said, ‘I will get you a PhD; it’s assured.’ [Shoulders] said, ‘It’s not a problem; I’m not interested. I’ll bypass, thank you,’ and continued his work and then left. That’s typical. He just wasn’t interested in following convention.”
197b. EVO's and the Charge Field
http://milesmathis.com/evo.pdf
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-frontiersman
(more at link)
----------
The Frontiersman
In Silicon Valley’s renegade days, a hardheaded Texan chased dreams of a flying car.
By Kenton G. Jaehnig, Jacob Roberts | October 10, 2016
Ken Shoulder with drone, 1993Engineer and inventor Ken Shoulders holds a prototype of the Shadow, a flying drone marketed as a toy, 1993. Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
In the summer of 2016 Steve Shoulders was getting by on odd jobs, doing everything from tree trimming to electrical repair around Freestone, California, a rural community of 50 people in Sonoma County. It was honest work but less rewarding than the years spent under the tutelage of his father, Ken Shoulders. Working mostly from backyard laboratories, the pair spent decades designing flying machines and challenging scientific assumptions.
After his father died of cancer in 2013, Steve was left with the remains of a life spent inventing: drone prototypes, dust-covered lab equipment, brittle research papers, even an old gyrocopter, a type of helicopter with small wings and an airplane propeller. But now those objects were in danger of being lost forever. Unable to pay the rising rent, he was being forced out of his home and was scrambling to find storage space for his father’s legacy.
When we spoke with Steve, he was standing on a hilltop a couple of miles from his father’s lab, straining to maintain cell reception as wind battered his phone’s speaker. “Working with my father was an absolute joy,” he said. “He was just a really good friend of mine, if nothing else.”
Ken Shoulders would wake each morning between 3:00 and 3:30 to sit outside until sunrise. It was his private time to contemplate new ideas and experiments; no one was allowed to interrupt him. Each day he ate his breakfast from the same bowl and spoon; he would wash them and thereby extricate himself from the rest of the household chores. By simplifying tasks Shoulders hoped to save all his mental energy for his work.
“Anything added to simplicity was complexity,” explained his son. “Complexity was going to confuse him or do something to his thought processes that he didn’t need.”
Shoulders’s peculiar sense of pragmatism could alienate people who didn’t know him, and it was part of a larger rejection of convention that started at a young age. Born in Texas in 1927, he barely finished high school, shrugging off homework he found tedious to pursue his interests in electronics and what he later called “frontier science.” One of the few school subjects that captured his attention was aeronautics; his high marks in that class were an early indication of an enduring fondness for machines that could fly. Despite his mediocre grades young Shoulders was clearly bright. He had a remarkable ability to take a device apart and put it back together again to figure out exactly how it worked.
In following the ideas of ‘frontier science’ Shoulders made a life of taking the harder path.
Forgoing college, he spent the next decade bouncing among different electronics jobs at companies big (Magnavox, Texas Instruments) and small (radio station WKWF in the Florida Keys). By 1955 he settled into a research staff position at MIT’s Computer Components and Systems Laboratory. Three years later Shoulders’s self-taught knowledge in the booming field of microelectronics landed him a prestigious job at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California.
Shoulders founded SRI’s microelectronics program and directed the work of a team of engineers and technicians who made research machinery, such as mass spectrometers, ultra-high vacuum apparatuses, and electron-beam instruments. He would ride to work each day on a Vespa scooter, careening down twisting, redwood-lined roads into the congestion of Palo Alto. But he would have preferred to ditch the traffic of Bay Area streets for empty skies, and so he set his engineering mind to sorting out a solution.
Frontiersman_2
Handout for Gyrodyne Convertiplane
Promotional handout for the Gyrodyne Convertiplane, an aircraft Shoulders believed could change how people commuted to work.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
After working at SRI for a few years he convinced his bosses to allow him to design a car capable of flight. He called it the Gyrodyne Convertiplane, essentially a cross between a car, a helicopter, and an airplane. Although designed to be flown primarily like a small airplane, a rotor on the vehicle’s roof would allow it to take off and land from short stretches of road. Rigid wings and a rear propeller would let it travel farther and faster than most helicopters available at the time.
A 1965 proposal lays out Shoulders’s vision for the Convertiplane, complete with preliminary sketches and specifications, and addresses operational and logistical concerns. He saw the vehicle as the answer for a “large and growing” population of long-distance commuters who lived 80 or more miles from work and who were tired of battling hours of traffic each day.
Shoulders had hit on an unusual solution to a real problem. Since the end of World War II more Americans were buying cars than ever before and moving into suburbs farther and farther from urban centers. Existing highway infrastructure couldn’t handle the change. By 1960 there were more than 61 million registered passenger vehicles on American roads, double the amount of 10 years earlier. President Dwight Eisenhower foresaw the problem and convinced Congress to pass the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956.
By the time Shoulders was pitching his Convertiplane, a national system of interstate highways was slowly being built. But Shoulders saw a simpler fix; with his Convertiplane a person could bypass congested roads with the flip of a switch and launch into the sky. No more traffic, at least for the people lucky enough to own such a craft. (He never offered a solution, however, for managing the crowded airspace once everyone was flying.)
Why would SRI support such a far-fetched idea? In the decades following World War II it probably didn’t seem all that outlandish. The era was flush with government grants and an eagerness to experiment, especially if the results might keep the United States ahead of the Soviet Union. SRI was at the heart of this scientific free-for-all. A decade after Shoulders pitched his flying car, Harold Puthoff, a friend and physicist at SRI, began a bizarre project funded by the CIA. Puthoff had become fascinated with illusionists, including talk-show staple Uri Geller, who professed psychic powers. Puthoff began investigating whether those powers were real and whether they might have military applications. Puthoff and his collaborators conducted a number of experiments and concluded that Geller could, in fact, read minds and move objects through telekinesis. Other researchers couldn’t replicate the results.
Although many of these off-the-wall projects failed to produce anything tangible, the freedom given to employees at SRI paid off over time. Since the 1960s, SRI researchers have had a hand in innovations ranging from cancer drugs to Apple’s Siri voice-recognition software. Unfortunately for Shoulders the Convertiplane was a project that never took off. Aside from technical and logistical problems, a gamut of legal obstacles blocked the way.
Frontiersman_3
Helicopter Escape and Rescue Outfit (HERO)
Sketch of the military-focused Helicopter Escape and Rescue Outfit (HERO), one of two solo aircraft Shoulders designed while at SRI, ca. mid-1960s.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
Shoulders met with the California State Senate’s Transportation Committee in 1963 to ask permission to use his invention. He argued that flying cars were technologically and economically viable and would not require extensive changes to California’s existing transportation infrastructure. If he had to work within the bounds of government regulation, he suggested using a loophole: flying cars could be classified as motorcycles, which had fewer design restrictions when compared with cars. The Transportation Committee members said they would think about it.
No matter how outlandish, Shoulders never rejected a new theory before carefully thinking it over and, if appropriate, testing it. He wished others would extend him the same courtesy.
In early 1964 the California Highway Transportation Agency made a decision: his flying car would be allowed to drive on public roads. Shoulders was overjoyed, but he had only cleared the first of many bureaucratic obstacles. According to Steve Shoulders a number of nearby municipalities, including Palo Alto, forbade the Convertiplane from flying through their airspace, possibly because they were afraid that insurance companies wouldn’t cover flying cars. Ken Shoulders was baffled. He later wrote, “There is nothing intrinsically different between flying a helicopter and driving a car, but a gulf has been created between the two methods by some quirk of social and economic manipulation.”
In response Shoulders pulled back on research into manned aircraft and for the next few years concentrated on building mass spectrometers and drone aircraft. These setbacks coincided with a growing disillusionment at work. Shoulders believed that great inventions could only be conceived through the vision of an individual scientist, and that the boards and committees at SRI stifled his creativity. Late in 1968, and just shy of a decade spent at SRI, Shoulders decided he could no longer follow someone else’s research agenda and left SRI to pursue his own interests: designing and building experimental aircraft. It was a rash decision even for him. According to his son had Shoulders stayed just two more months, he would have left with a generous retirement package, giving him plenty of cushion to strike out on his own. But Shoulders could think only of flying away.
Shoulders was still convinced that a vehicle like the Gyrodyne Convertiplane could revolutionize transportation. While he tried to identify a new source of funding for the idea, he set up a backyard laboratory and workshop for developing remote-controlled drones. While most drones being built at the time were designed for military applications, Shoulders envisioned machines that would be used for everything from toys to crop dusters. He incorporated his work into a company he named Vertitek. In place of graduate students and technicians, Shoulders enlisted the help of novices who like himself had little formal education, often hitchhikers he would come across. Even his young son, Steve, would lend a hand in the lab.
As with his hiring practices Shoulders’s drone designs could be eccentric. The Boomerang looked like a giant maple seed, the kind that pinwheels down when thrown in the air. But the craft’s odd appearance belied the cutting-edge technology onboard. It was able to avoid collisions by bouncing sound waves off obstacles, similar to the way a bat uses echolocation to navigate. The inventions were marvels of engineering, says Steve, but they could be dangerous too. If something was to go wrong, the Boomerang’s large propeller could easily lop off the head of a bystander.
Frontiersman_4
Shoulders and assistants wrangling the Boomerang
Shoulders and assistants wrangling the Boomerang, a self-navigating drone of his design, ca. 1970.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
Shoulders built drones out of his backyard lab for many years, but eventually he realized that if he ever wanted to build a flying machine he could pilot himself, he needed a lot of money. He was also looking for a fresh area of research, something he’d later describe as “really nuts.” Who better to ask for help in this pursuit than his old friend Puthoff?
Shoulders went to see Puthoff at SRI one in day in 1976. As luck would have it, Puthoff had just spoken with his wealthy friend George “Bill” Church, the owner and CEO of the Church’s Fried Chicken fast-food chain. Church had told Puthoff about a recent dream in which a flying saucer landed before him, out of which walked a man with remarkably large shoulders. As soon as Puthoff hung up the phone, Shoulders walked into his office looking for money. To a man pursuing the paranormal it seemed prophetic. Puthoff called Church back immediately, exclaiming that he was face to face with a large-shouldered man named Ken Shoulders.
Church and Shoulders set up a meeting soon after. Although Shoulders distrusted businessmen in general, he was charmed by Church. Like many others living through the oil crisis of the 1970s, Church was interested in alternative sources of energy, and he was eager to fund research in that direction. Shoulders was game, and over the next few weeks the pair negotiated an arrangement in which Church would finance Shoulders’s experiments and pay him a salary to run a lab; in return Church would share the profits from anything Shoulders invented.
After working in California for nearly a decade—first from his home in Woodside, then later in a lab Shoulders designed and built himself closer to the coast—Church asked Shoulders in 1984 to take charge of a state-of-the-art lab he was building in Austin, Texas, Church’s home base. The promise of complete creative and financial freedom was too tempting to resist. They organized themselves as a new company, Jupiter Technologies, and hired a staff of scientists and technicians. Soon Shoulders had designed a number of microelectronics for market, including a millimeter-wave generator and a new type of digital display he pitched to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) without success.
Frontiersman_5
Caricature of Ken Shoulders, 1988
Caricature of Ken Shoulders drawn during his time in Austin, Texas, 1988.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
As time went on, the two men found they had a lot in common and became close friends. Both were Texans who loved science but harbored a disdain for the constraints of higher education. Church would often stay late at the lab to quiz Shoulders about his progress and research methods, phoning in to the local outlet of his restaurant chain to have a dinner of fried chicken delivered to keep the discussions rolling.
Funding and chicken in hand, Shoulders believed he finally had the stability he needed to build a personal aircraft. Using his experience with the Gyrodyne Convertiplane and the dozens of remote-controlled drones he had built over the previous decade, he created a prototype gyrocopter with a lightweight metal skeleton he intended to modify incrementally into a flying car. He designed and built a pair of rockets fueled by hydrogen peroxide that in theory would allow the gyrocopter to launch vertically from a city street. After launch the vehicle’s propeller would provide stable flight. Shoulders often flew the prototype around his property for fun, though the rockets never got past the testing stage.
Shoulders suffered from extreme motion sickness, which led him to fly very low to avoid turbulence and the upset stomach that came with it. His motion sickness grew so debilitating he couldn’t even look at a Ferris wheel without getting ill. Still, the freedom he felt while in the air, untethered from the snarl of traffic, made his trips worthwhile.
But Shoulders’s belly wasn’t the only obstacle to commuting by flying car. It turned out that actually building one of the things was harder than he thought. At the same time, the cheery façade presented by his friend and business partner Church was starting to flake away. In 1989 Church began delaying a promised $10,000 bonus and laid off part of Jupiter’s staff. Church’s enthusiasm for Shoulders’s work endured, but he could no longer afford to finance Jupiter by himself, especially when none of the lab’s projects were producing a profit.
Frontiersman_6
Shoulders in Bensen B-8M Gyro-Copter, 1962
Despite developing acute motion sickness, Ken Shoulders flew solo aircraft for much of his life. Here a young Shoulders sits in the cockpit of a Bensen B-8M Gyro-Copter in 1962.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
For a time Church tried to hide the depth of his financial straits. When Shoulders discovered the truth, he was outraged, and the partnership soon dissolved. By 1990 he wasn’t any closer to turning his gyrocopter into a full-fledged flying car, and he no longer had Church’s financial support. Jupiter Technologies shut its doors. For four years Shoulders finished off contractual obligations and continued his alternative-energy research out of Jupiter’s former lab before returning to California in 1994. In 1995 he found a new financier from Sonoma County, California, who would fund him for the next 10 years. According to Steve, “From a 30-minute meeting and a handshake agreement we moved to Freestone.”
At some point Shoulders abandoned manned aircraft altogether. When he received a request from two young family friends seeking advice for breaking into the personal-aircraft industry, Shoulders shooed them away from the idea. He warned them of the political and legal hurdles they would encounter, while bitterly recounting his own experience. The young men heeded the weary inventor’s warnings: one kept his job at Boeing, while the other, in Shoulders’s words, “took off for Tahiti in a sailboat with a beautiful lady.”
In the Freestone lab Shoulders returned to the experimental physics projects he had pursued early in his partnership with Church.
While working with his son sometime around 1980, Shoulders had replicated a phenomenon observed by William Bostick, an atomic physicist at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Shoulders would eventually dub his findings exotic vacuum objects, or EVOs. He described an EVO as a cluster of electrons that channels energy (though the source of that energy was uncertain). Shoulders believed he had used the electrons’ energy to melt microscopic holes in various materials. Church had offered their research to dozens of companies and government agencies, including the Office of the Vice President, but no one was interested.
EVOs break the laws of physics as they are currently understood. Electrons shouldn’t be able to cluster together, as Shoulders claimed, because an electron’s negative charge will repel other electrons. Anyone trying to hold together the north poles of two magnets will get a sense of the problem. And so when Shoulders presented his findings to established scientists, such as Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate physicist at Caltech, he was dismissed outright.
Shoulders’s credibility was not helped by his maverick reputation, his lack of formal education, or the company he kept. Puthoff, his closest friend at SRI, was a former Scientologist who was still convinced that Uri Geller had psychic powers. Shoulders had also become close to John Hutchison, who promotes himself as a lovemaking guru and the inventor of levitation and life-extending devices. These relationships, and many others with more conventional scientists, were the result of Shoulders’s openness to unusual ideas. No matter how outlandish, Shoulders never rejected a new theory before carefully thinking it over and, if appropriate, testing it. He wished others would extend him the same courtesy.
Frontiersman_7
EVO research photo
Photograph from Shoulders’s testing of EVOs, which he hoped would be key to an alternative-energy source.
Kenneth R. Shoulders Papers, Science History Institute
But was there any worthwhile science in Shoulders’s EVO research?
After dismissing the inventor’s findings, Feynman became aware of the discovery of similar clusters of charged particles made at the National Bureau of Standards and the work of a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who had noticed the same thing 10 years earlier but had not conducted further research. On January 31, 1986, Feynman mailed an apology letter to Shoulders: “When you were in my office I could not see how 1010 or 1011 electrons could be kept as a ball in a vacuum without ions. . . . I must apologize for it has come to my attention that it is indeed possible.” Feynman confirmed that the electron clusters Shoulders and his son witnessed were feasible, a small victory in the face of mass rejection. But the existence of a physical phenomenon is a far cry from an alternative energy source. Nonetheless, Shoulders declared in his self-published book, EV: A Tale of Discovery, “I believe this gateway will open into one of the greatest industries yet known.” Despite years of filing patents and pitching the research to various companies and government agencies, Shoulders never found a taker.
In following the ideas of “frontier science” Shoulders made a life of taking the harder path. The difficulties he would create for himself, whether based on principle or temperament, are perhaps best exemplified by his decision to turn down a doctoral degree from MIT while he was working there in the 1950s, a formality that could have boosted his credibility with his EVO work. Steve remembers, “[His boss Arthur] von Hippel said, ‘I will get you a PhD; it’s assured.’ [Shoulders] said, ‘It’s not a problem; I’m not interested. I’ll bypass, thank you,’ and continued his work and then left. That’s typical. He just wasn’t interested in following convention.”
Last edited by Chromium6 on Mon Dec 19, 2022 11:42 pm; edited 3 times in total (Reason for editing : Added link to Miles' EVO and Charge Field paper)
Chromium6- Posts : 826
Join date : 2019-11-29
Re: Ken Shoulders and EVOs
by Chromium6 Sun Nov 27, 2022 12:23 am
Journal article by William Bostick on Plasma Directed Energy devices :
http://wlym.com/archive/fusion/ijfe/19850101-IJFE.pdf
http://wlym.com/archive/fusion/ijfe/19850101-IJFE.pdf
Chromium6- Posts : 826
Join date : 2019-11-29
Re: Ken Shoulders and EVOs
by Chromium6 Sun Nov 27, 2022 1:00 am
Excerpt of Bostick's section from .PDF above:
------------
The Morphology of the Electron
by Winston H. Bostick
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, N] 07030 and
University of New Mexico
Air Force Weapons Laboratory
Albuquerque, NM 87106
Abstract—The author's experimental work in plasma physics for the last 36 years has shown that under many different circumstances plasmas containing nonrelativistic or relativistic electrons can spontaneously organize themselves into force-free, minimum-free-energy vortex filaments of a Beltrami morphology. So abundant are these manifestations of nature's ability to create macroscopic filamentary structures that the author has been inspired to try a filamentary model for the electron in order to explain the existence of the de Broglie waves, electron spin (via the Poynting vector), electron mass via electric and magnetic vectors, electron self-equilibrium and stability—ultimately equilibrated by the self-gravity of its own intense electric and magnetic fields. The result is a concept of the electron, photon, and all other elementary onta (never say "particles") that philosophically brings the quantum theory, the prodigal son of physics, back into the family of classical physics.
No vexing self-energy infinities occur. Newtonian lump point mass and lump point charge are banished. Since the electron's charge circulates as a continuous filament it will not radiate as it lies in a stationary atomic state. The concepts of onta of finite rest mass and zero rest mass are geometrically clarified as never before. The correct dispersion relationship for the de Broglie waves of a free electron are geometrically exhibited by the filamentary model with incandescent clarity. Since the model shows how all mass and momentum must be electromagnetic in character, it becomes obvious that all forces—the strong, the electroweak, the gravitational—must be electromagnetic in character. The mysterious strong short-range nuclear force will go the way of the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy. It is demonstrated that the de Broglie waves have an analogue in the inertial waves of fluid mechanics.
Introduction
The calculation procedures according to the prescriptions of quantum mechanics or wave mechanics, most of which apply to the behavior of electrons, are highly successful and yield accurate numbers. This author bows before the strain of genius in the human race that has brought about these achievements. The early introduction of simplistic concepts of the point-mass, point-charge electron and the strictly probabilistic wave function was an expediency that enabled the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics to develop to its present useful state.
But the author wishes to enter his philosophical dissent against the continuation of the unqualified and unquestioningly accepted "portrait" of this mathematical-point electron that is presented in texts and treatises on quantum mechanics. This catechism about the intrinsic nature of the electron has already been perpetuated for more than two generations, the only serious challenge being mounted by Albert Einstein in his friendly arguments with Niels Bohr. It is the author's belief that this catechism on the basic nature of the electron and other onta (from the Greek OVTC*, "existing things, reality, truth"— our improvement on the term particle), useful though it has proved to be, represents the weakest philosophical link in that portion of our cosmology that attempts to reconcile quantum physics with classical physics. The author takes issue with the narrowness and nonphysical nature of Max Born's (Born 1971) interpretation of the quantum-mechanical wave function as merely a "probability wave" ^(z,^, where the probability of finding the electron of infinitesimal size between z, and z2 at the time t is given by f^W*dz, with V* the complex conjugate of yV. Niels Bohr's strong and effective advocacy of this interpretation earned it the name of "the Copenhagen School." Perhaps this school was mesmerized by the Greek name electron, whose Greek mystique conjures up something like a smooth sphere of unblemished white marble, like the Ptolemaic "heavenly body,"
albeit of infinitesimally small radius.
The electron of the Copenhagen School has a lump, leadlike Newtonian mass m that generates a lump momentum mv when the mass has a velocity v. The electron carries an electric charge e that is generally assumed to be uniformly painted on the surface of the sphere, which would cause the electron to have infinitely large selfelectrical energy and hence an infinite mass m if its radius r goes to 0. Quantum mechanics (wave mechanics) is built upon the wavelike nature of the electron [discovered theoretically by de Broglie and Einstein (Born 1971, Pais 1983) and confirmed experimentally by Davison, Germer, and Thomson]. In the Compton effect, the electron acts more like a "particle" than a wave as it is bounced away when an X-ray photon collides with it. The electron is thus said to have a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde type of duality, sometimes behaving like a spherical particle, sometimes masquerading as a wave.
By some mysterious, unknown, unexplained mechanism, this spherical particle is then said to be coupled to an unphysical probabilistic wave that is described by the wave function "9 (or "9*), which satisfies Schrodinger's wave equation (or Heisenberg's wave mechanics). By some unexplained hokus pokus, completely outside the processes of classical mechanics, this lump mass m is supposed to produce a spin angular momentum equal An expansion of this work will appear later in book form that shows that similar conceptions work equally well for other elementary onta—the proton, neutron, meson, and so on.
10 International Journal of Fusion Energy, Vol. 3, No. 1,,
to /Z/4TT = hll, and the spinning charge e somehow pro-
duces a magnetic moment |x = ehl2tnc. The electric and
magnetic energies somehow are not very closely related
to the mass m.
However, the wavelike properties of the electron as delineated by the Schrodinger equation or Heisenberg's wave mechanics and Dirac's equation are all important in explaining the construction and properties of all atoms and molecules with numbers that agree well with experimentally determined quantities. Because of these spectacular numerical triumphs, all of the philosophical sins of the conception of the electron as a point charge and a point mass are forgiven and forgotten in current acceptance and practice.
This catechism is completely at a loss to give a physical reason for the necessity that all onta have a wave function, why most onta should possess a spin, why most of them should be charged. The catechism has no straightforward, clearly visualizable explanation for the fact that some onta have zero rest mass and others have finite rest mass. The catechism hides behind the "quantum curtain" through which no one is allowed to see. The "quantum curtain" is automatically lowered on the stage of inquiries by the invocation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Ap^Ax 3= hll-rt, which is interpreted as saying that an investigator cannot legally entertain fantasies (no matter how attractive) about hidden variables whose dimensions or momenta might be smaller than the limit of Apx or Ax set by the Heisenberg principle. The catechism does not seem at all embarrassed over the fact that it makes no attempt to show that the electron's momentum mv and spin might be associated with its Poynting vector ExHc/4ir, and that its energy (or mass) might be electromagnetic in character, although for the photon, it is conceded that the momentum, spin, and energy must be electromagnetic in character. How can the catechism have the audacity and inconsistency to preach that the Almighty in constructing the elementary onta indulged in the use of two different kinds of mass and momentum, lump and electromagnetic? This inconsistency in itself is sufficiently gross to validate the necessity of making philosophical corrections in the manner in which quantum mechanics is now taught.
Since 1948, the author has been an experimental worker in the field of plasma physics, and beginning in 1954 this work has led to the observation of the spontaneous formation of interesting structures out of ionized gas and magnetic fields, structures that are now called plasmoids. Some of these structures have the shape of barred-spiral and ring-spiral galaxies. Some of these structures have the morphology of the pairs of flux tubes seen in Type II superconductors, and others have some of the char-
References are given alphabetically following Chapter 3 of the paper and
appear in the text in parentheses in name-date style.
anuary 1985
Charcteristic diamagnetic effects of Type I superconductors.
Some of these structures can be observed to bounce off one another like billiard balls. Other of these structures are observed to "eat each other up" and accelerate electrons and positive ions to MeV energies (the solar flare effect).
This experimental work, which began at Tufts University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and has since been carried out largely in the Physics Department at Stevens Institute of Technology with the author's colleagues Vittorio Nardi, William Prior, and a number of graduate students, has been amply reported in standard scientific journals and proceedings of conferences of the International Atomic Energy Agency and elsewhere. We recognize that these spontaneously arising structures are force-free, minimum-free-energy structures that have a certain amount of equilibrium and stability, or nature would not have produced them. It is the author's belief that the emergence of spontaneously arising macroscopic structures in the laboratory that replicate cosmic phenomena, such as barredspiral galaxies, as well as quantum phenomena, such as superconductivity, represent a stage of unification in our understanding of nature at least as important as the currently much-sought-after "Holy Grail"—the "unification" of the strong forces, weak forces, electromagnetic forces, and gravity.
In 1955, the author began to think along these lines:
In plasma physics we can observe nature making spontaneously out of plasma (that is, electrons, positive ions, and magnetic fields) macroscopic structures (plasmoids) that are relatively force-free and minimum-free-energy, that have integrity so that they can bounce off one another, that have sharp boundaries, that have spin and magnetic moment, that can react with one another and give off energy. Why cannot these plasma structures be macroscopic models that suggest the manner in which submicroscopic elementary onta (usually called particles) like the electron might be molded force-free and minimum-free-energy, equilibrated and stable in all frames of reference, out of the electric and magnetic fields? Our objective is to produce a model of a structure having a physical wave, a wave function ty, that preserves the probabilistic properties so dear to quantum mechanics, its complex conjugate *P*, its mass being entirely electromagnetic (as is the photon's), its spin h/2 being carried by the Poynting vector (that is, by the electric and magnetic fields), a magnetic moment that can be computed by classical means. Furthermore, we can try to construct a model of the electron that has such a shape and such dimensions that it can be held together by the cohesive forces of the self-gravitational effects of its own concentrated electric and magnetic fields. This article presents in detail the electromagnetic filamentary model of the electron that the author has developed beginning in 1955. It contains a number of significant improvements and additions beyond the more sketchy treatment published earlier (Bostick 1978). In Chapter 1 we present the basic construction that yields a "high-fidelity" model of the electron accounting for the rest energy, spin, anomalous gyromagnetic ratio, and dispersion relationships. A heuristic model of the photon is also presented. The elementary hydrodynamics analogue of the electron model is described, and implications for the relationships between c, e, me, h, and a = 1/137 are discussed. The de Broglie waves are interpreted as transverse "acoustical" waves on the electron filament.
In Chapter 2 we consider the morphology and dynamics of the filamentary electron in a potential well (for example, in an atom). Novel insights are derived into the underlying geometry of the various "energy levels," helping, among other things, to demystify the "Pauli exclusion principle."
In Chapter 3 we describe in detail the spectacular array of spontaneously formed plasma structures observed in the plasma focus and related devices. The creation of these structures in energy-densification processes suggests an invariant, geometrical action-principle reflected in the similar morphology of macroscopic systems (for example, galaxies) and microscopic systems ("elementary particles").
The idea of a spatially extended, dynamic electron has been suggested by a number of authors, including Conant (1978) and Yadava (1976).
The structure of the electron as developed by the author, in contradistinction to the electron of the Copenhagen School, could actually exist. We could call it the existential electon. But better than the French existential or Greek for the verb "to be," we should use a dynamic, robust, life-possessing Hebrew word. The Hebrew word "to live" in this robust sense is hayah, which comes from the same root as the Hebrew toast I'chaim—to life! The corresponding Hebrew word for living is chaiyah (kl ee' yah). Let us thus call our living electron the chaiyah electron to give it some of the robustness that the Hebrew Jesus must have conveyed to his congregation when he declared in Aramaic, "I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly!"
We must also choose a suitable name for the general process whereby Nature in spontaneously producing organized structures seems to fly in the face of the famous Boltzmann declaration that "Entropy Strebt nach Maximum" (entropy, or the measure of disorganization in nature, tends to increase to the maximum: water runs downhill, heat flows from high temperature to low temperature, and so on). The term "negentropy" has been coined for this process, but the author feels that "negentropy" is far too inelegant a name for such an elegant and lively process. The author suggests the Hebrew toast, "U chaim," for this process that brings nature to life and life through nature.
The Chaiyah Electron
In this chapter we shall construct a filamentary model for a chaiyah electron in which all momentum, mass, spin, and energy are electromagnetic in origin. The striking similarity between the harmonic characteristics (dispersion relationships) of an electron, on the one hand, and an electromagnetic wave (photon) in a waveguide, on the other, suggests that the electron arises as a singular form of electromagnetic "energy storage." Whereas the photon in the waveguide has been confined by external constraints, we must seek a means whereby the electromagnetic energy associated with the electron might be self-confined in a filamentary configuration.
One energy confinement and densification process is well known in plasma physics and electron-beam physics as the "pinch effect": a beam or filament of rapidly flowing charge generates a magnetic field that opposes the explosive Coulomb force between like charges. In the relativistic limit, when the velocity of the charge flow approaches that of light, the "pinch" force exactly cancels out the electric force, and the current channel becomes locally stable and self-confined. One might indeed be tempted to think of an electron as a circular filament in which an evenly distributed negative charge e flows at the speed of light. However, this model fails, among other things, to provide insight into the anomalous relationship observed between electron spin and magnetic moment—the fact that the observed moment is twice that which would be expected for a rotating charge having the observed electron spin.
This and other considerations dictate that our electron model must have a richer inner structure, must possess additional degrees of freedom. A clarification is provided by the example of energy storage in a rapidly spinning elastic ring. Here the additional degree of freedom is represented by the elasticity. In this case, when the tangential velocity goes to the speed of light, we find that only one halt of the stored energy expresses itself in terms of angular momentum; the other half of the energy is stored in the potential energy of elastic deformation of the ring.
Figure 1. Detail showing the way in which the gravitationally equilibrized, charged fiber produces the surface charge and current for the torus core radius r0. Note that the surface charge is negative.
Returning to the problem of the electron model, we find that the required "elasticity" for a current filament can be supplied by the self-gravitation associated with the electromagnetic mass of the current configuration, if the filament is configured in the form of a closed helix wound around an imaginary torus (Figure 1). Appropriate choice of parameters makes it possible to match very closely the observed characteristics of the electron. In addition, the famous de Broglie waves now appear as simple transverse deformation waves propagating along the elastic filament.
How Is an Electron Like a Photon and How Not?
Albert Einstein, who invented the photon, wrote in his latter days a letter to O. Klein in which he declared that there were many oafs who thought they understood the photon, but they were deluding themselves. Einstein also stated that before he tried to understand the meson he would like to understand the electron. In an attempt to further our understanding of both the electron and photon let us contemplate their similarities and differences.
Even though the photon is traditionally considered to be an "uncharged particle of zero rest mass" and the electron a "charged particle of finite rest mass," the formal similarities in their dispersion relationships suggest that there is a strong similarity between these "particles" (onta), when the photon is confined to a waveguide, as in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Electromagnetic wave (made up of photons) with
free-space wavelength \0 propagating in the TE01 mode be-
tween two parallel plates (a waveguide) at y = 0 and y =
a: \z = \g = \0/(sin 6); vr = c/(sin 6); and c = \0v. The cutoff
wavelength X.^ = 2a. Wave fronts are shown propagating
at a normal velocity c.
For such a waveguide photon we have
co2 = wj + kzV,
(1)
where coco
2 is the cutoff frequency Ivclla, and kz = 2TT/\S, where \ = X, is the guide wavelength. The observed energy of the photon (in or out of the waveguide) is ftto = hv, where v = w/2ir is the observed frequency of the photon as it passes by in the waveguide and also as it flies by in free space. A similar relationship obtains for an electromagnetic wave (photon) propagating in an ionized gas of electron density n, and plasma frequency
cop = (4Trn2/me)V2;
in this case
co2 = cop
2 + k:
2c2,
(2)
where kz is the wave number of the wave in the direction of propagation. The dispersion relationships for a photon show that there is a kind of "rest mass energy" for the photon given by huco for the waveguide mode (and ftto,, for the plasma mode) of propagation. Indeed, for the waveguide case, if we make co = wco, \ s -> », vg = 0, the photon (or electromagnetic wave) will be boxed up inside the cavity with no net momentum in any direction.
The photon's energy in this mode is all "rest mass energy" and can be determined by weighing the cavity before and after the photon is placed inside the resonant cavity. One is weighing the energy of the photon or the electromagnetic wave, and it is perfectly straightforward to assume that all of this energy is contained in the E and H vectors. Thus, there is no necessity to invoke the assumption of Newtonian lump mass or lump momentum for the photon.
For the electron, in comparison, we have
w2 = coComp
2 + k2c2,
(3)
where cdComp = mc&lh is the Compton frequency and
kz = 2-rr/X (with X = h/mv = h/p the de Broglie-Einstein
wavelength). The total energy of the electron is mc2 =
ha) = hv, where v = CO/2TT is the observed frequency of
the electron as it passes by with a velocity v. The electron
dispersion relationship corresponds exactly to Einstein's
formula for the relativistic electron mass:
m = mj\/
1 {vlcf
(4)
or
(mc1)2 = (mec2)2 + {mvcf,
(5)
where mc2 = fna is the total energy and mec2 = ftwComp is
the rest energy of the electron.
Now, if an entity like a photon or an electromagnetic wave, when boxed up in a waveguide or resonant cavity, can have a "rest energy," as does the electron, can one create a model of a chaiyah electron that exhibits some of the characteristics of a boxed-up photon or an electromagnetic wave in a guide? One must recognize that such a model must embody an electric charge, a spin Vz, a magnetic moment, and an anomalous gyromagnehc ratio.
In attempting to construct such a model we shall search for some broad philosophical, global, guiding principles such as those employed by Einstein in his formulation of special relativity: Since we observe the electron to live as a stable entity in a variety of frames of reference, we shall, as much as possible, search for a model of the electron that is in equilibrium and is stable in all frames of reference. This chaiyah criterion will be the first of our guiding principles, and we might add that such a principle has been largely ignored heretofore in all models of elementary onta in which the onta are assumed to be mathematical points.
Our second guiding principle will be that all energy, mass, and momentum must be electromagnetic in character as it is in an electromagnetic wave and also in a photon. There should be no Newtonian "lump" mass or "lump" momentum. Our third guiding principle will be that the de Broglie-Einstein waves and the wave functions ¥ and ty* of quantum mechanics should have more than the Born probabilistic interpretation: The wave functions should have a physical reality, like transverse waves on a tensioned string, for example. Indeed, the author is obliged to concede that the only way he can accomplish these aforestated chaiyah objectives is through a filamentary model of the electron.
The construction of a filamentary electron model stems from a rationale to which the founding fathers of quantum mechanics (Bohr, Born, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, de Broglie, Einstein, and others) were not privy. This rationale is based on fairly recent experimental results (Bostick 1956,1957, 1958,1977; Bostick, Nardi, and Prior 1972a, 1972b, 1980; Bostick et al. 1966; Laurence 1956; Wells 1976) concerning plasmoids—minimum-free-energy, equilibrium structures with a certain degree of stability. These structures spontaneously spring into existence in high-energy-density, magnetized plasmas. This rationale is a compelling reason for constructing an electron model out of a filament (rather than conceptualizing it as a point or a sphere, for example): the Figure 3. The perfectly elastic flywheel.
observed macroscopic, spontaneously arising structures for carrying current in a plasma are thin vortex filaments. In a plasma where the electrons are relativistic, these filaments have been observed to have diameters as small as 0.2 urn. The condensation of energy density and plasma density into these current-carrying filaments is essentially a phase-transition phenomenon, as is superconductivity in metals. The formation of a chaiyah electron or a chaiyah photon out of electric and magnetic fields would be an analogous type of phase transition.
The Elastic Flywheel Model
In considering a model for the energy storage in onta like the electron, let us contemplate first the storage of both kinetic energy Vim^ and elastic potential energy 1/2/C(2TTK)2 in the rim of a perfectly elastic flywheel (Figure 3), where mr is the mass of the rim and k is the elastic spring constant of the rim. It can be shown easily that for an equilibrium radius, VmiaV2 = VJi(2-nR)2; that is, the virial theorem holds.
The elastic rim on the elastic flywheel could be visualized as a toroidal, massless elastic sausage casing with a spring constant k, in which the sausage meat of mass m0 circulates without friction with a velocity v. We shall assume that the initial radius R0 = 0.
An interesting example evolves in the relativistic gedanken experiment where the velocity of the sausage meat v approaches the speed of light c.
------------
The Morphology of the Electron
by Winston H. Bostick
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, N] 07030 and
University of New Mexico
Air Force Weapons Laboratory
Albuquerque, NM 87106
Abstract—The author's experimental work in plasma physics for the last 36 years has shown that under many different circumstances plasmas containing nonrelativistic or relativistic electrons can spontaneously organize themselves into force-free, minimum-free-energy vortex filaments of a Beltrami morphology. So abundant are these manifestations of nature's ability to create macroscopic filamentary structures that the author has been inspired to try a filamentary model for the electron in order to explain the existence of the de Broglie waves, electron spin (via the Poynting vector), electron mass via electric and magnetic vectors, electron self-equilibrium and stability—ultimately equilibrated by the self-gravity of its own intense electric and magnetic fields. The result is a concept of the electron, photon, and all other elementary onta (never say "particles") that philosophically brings the quantum theory, the prodigal son of physics, back into the family of classical physics.
No vexing self-energy infinities occur. Newtonian lump point mass and lump point charge are banished. Since the electron's charge circulates as a continuous filament it will not radiate as it lies in a stationary atomic state. The concepts of onta of finite rest mass and zero rest mass are geometrically clarified as never before. The correct dispersion relationship for the de Broglie waves of a free electron are geometrically exhibited by the filamentary model with incandescent clarity. Since the model shows how all mass and momentum must be electromagnetic in character, it becomes obvious that all forces—the strong, the electroweak, the gravitational—must be electromagnetic in character. The mysterious strong short-range nuclear force will go the way of the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy. It is demonstrated that the de Broglie waves have an analogue in the inertial waves of fluid mechanics.
Introduction
The calculation procedures according to the prescriptions of quantum mechanics or wave mechanics, most of which apply to the behavior of electrons, are highly successful and yield accurate numbers. This author bows before the strain of genius in the human race that has brought about these achievements. The early introduction of simplistic concepts of the point-mass, point-charge electron and the strictly probabilistic wave function was an expediency that enabled the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics to develop to its present useful state.
But the author wishes to enter his philosophical dissent against the continuation of the unqualified and unquestioningly accepted "portrait" of this mathematical-point electron that is presented in texts and treatises on quantum mechanics. This catechism about the intrinsic nature of the electron has already been perpetuated for more than two generations, the only serious challenge being mounted by Albert Einstein in his friendly arguments with Niels Bohr. It is the author's belief that this catechism on the basic nature of the electron and other onta (from the Greek OVTC*, "existing things, reality, truth"— our improvement on the term particle), useful though it has proved to be, represents the weakest philosophical link in that portion of our cosmology that attempts to reconcile quantum physics with classical physics. The author takes issue with the narrowness and nonphysical nature of Max Born's (Born 1971) interpretation of the quantum-mechanical wave function as merely a "probability wave" ^(z,^, where the probability of finding the electron of infinitesimal size between z, and z2 at the time t is given by f^W*dz, with V* the complex conjugate of yV. Niels Bohr's strong and effective advocacy of this interpretation earned it the name of "the Copenhagen School." Perhaps this school was mesmerized by the Greek name electron, whose Greek mystique conjures up something like a smooth sphere of unblemished white marble, like the Ptolemaic "heavenly body,"
albeit of infinitesimally small radius.
The electron of the Copenhagen School has a lump, leadlike Newtonian mass m that generates a lump momentum mv when the mass has a velocity v. The electron carries an electric charge e that is generally assumed to be uniformly painted on the surface of the sphere, which would cause the electron to have infinitely large selfelectrical energy and hence an infinite mass m if its radius r goes to 0. Quantum mechanics (wave mechanics) is built upon the wavelike nature of the electron [discovered theoretically by de Broglie and Einstein (Born 1971, Pais 1983) and confirmed experimentally by Davison, Germer, and Thomson]. In the Compton effect, the electron acts more like a "particle" than a wave as it is bounced away when an X-ray photon collides with it. The electron is thus said to have a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde type of duality, sometimes behaving like a spherical particle, sometimes masquerading as a wave.
By some mysterious, unknown, unexplained mechanism, this spherical particle is then said to be coupled to an unphysical probabilistic wave that is described by the wave function "9 (or "9*), which satisfies Schrodinger's wave equation (or Heisenberg's wave mechanics). By some unexplained hokus pokus, completely outside the processes of classical mechanics, this lump mass m is supposed to produce a spin angular momentum equal An expansion of this work will appear later in book form that shows that similar conceptions work equally well for other elementary onta—the proton, neutron, meson, and so on.
10 International Journal of Fusion Energy, Vol. 3, No. 1,,
to /Z/4TT = hll, and the spinning charge e somehow pro-
duces a magnetic moment |x = ehl2tnc. The electric and
magnetic energies somehow are not very closely related
to the mass m.
However, the wavelike properties of the electron as delineated by the Schrodinger equation or Heisenberg's wave mechanics and Dirac's equation are all important in explaining the construction and properties of all atoms and molecules with numbers that agree well with experimentally determined quantities. Because of these spectacular numerical triumphs, all of the philosophical sins of the conception of the electron as a point charge and a point mass are forgiven and forgotten in current acceptance and practice.
This catechism is completely at a loss to give a physical reason for the necessity that all onta have a wave function, why most onta should possess a spin, why most of them should be charged. The catechism has no straightforward, clearly visualizable explanation for the fact that some onta have zero rest mass and others have finite rest mass. The catechism hides behind the "quantum curtain" through which no one is allowed to see. The "quantum curtain" is automatically lowered on the stage of inquiries by the invocation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Ap^Ax 3= hll-rt, which is interpreted as saying that an investigator cannot legally entertain fantasies (no matter how attractive) about hidden variables whose dimensions or momenta might be smaller than the limit of Apx or Ax set by the Heisenberg principle. The catechism does not seem at all embarrassed over the fact that it makes no attempt to show that the electron's momentum mv and spin might be associated with its Poynting vector ExHc/4ir, and that its energy (or mass) might be electromagnetic in character, although for the photon, it is conceded that the momentum, spin, and energy must be electromagnetic in character. How can the catechism have the audacity and inconsistency to preach that the Almighty in constructing the elementary onta indulged in the use of two different kinds of mass and momentum, lump and electromagnetic? This inconsistency in itself is sufficiently gross to validate the necessity of making philosophical corrections in the manner in which quantum mechanics is now taught.
Since 1948, the author has been an experimental worker in the field of plasma physics, and beginning in 1954 this work has led to the observation of the spontaneous formation of interesting structures out of ionized gas and magnetic fields, structures that are now called plasmoids. Some of these structures have the shape of barred-spiral and ring-spiral galaxies. Some of these structures have the morphology of the pairs of flux tubes seen in Type II superconductors, and others have some of the char-
References are given alphabetically following Chapter 3 of the paper and
appear in the text in parentheses in name-date style.
anuary 1985
Charcteristic diamagnetic effects of Type I superconductors.
Some of these structures can be observed to bounce off one another like billiard balls. Other of these structures are observed to "eat each other up" and accelerate electrons and positive ions to MeV energies (the solar flare effect).
This experimental work, which began at Tufts University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and has since been carried out largely in the Physics Department at Stevens Institute of Technology with the author's colleagues Vittorio Nardi, William Prior, and a number of graduate students, has been amply reported in standard scientific journals and proceedings of conferences of the International Atomic Energy Agency and elsewhere. We recognize that these spontaneously arising structures are force-free, minimum-free-energy structures that have a certain amount of equilibrium and stability, or nature would not have produced them. It is the author's belief that the emergence of spontaneously arising macroscopic structures in the laboratory that replicate cosmic phenomena, such as barredspiral galaxies, as well as quantum phenomena, such as superconductivity, represent a stage of unification in our understanding of nature at least as important as the currently much-sought-after "Holy Grail"—the "unification" of the strong forces, weak forces, electromagnetic forces, and gravity.
In 1955, the author began to think along these lines:
In plasma physics we can observe nature making spontaneously out of plasma (that is, electrons, positive ions, and magnetic fields) macroscopic structures (plasmoids) that are relatively force-free and minimum-free-energy, that have integrity so that they can bounce off one another, that have sharp boundaries, that have spin and magnetic moment, that can react with one another and give off energy. Why cannot these plasma structures be macroscopic models that suggest the manner in which submicroscopic elementary onta (usually called particles) like the electron might be molded force-free and minimum-free-energy, equilibrated and stable in all frames of reference, out of the electric and magnetic fields? Our objective is to produce a model of a structure having a physical wave, a wave function ty, that preserves the probabilistic properties so dear to quantum mechanics, its complex conjugate *P*, its mass being entirely electromagnetic (as is the photon's), its spin h/2 being carried by the Poynting vector (that is, by the electric and magnetic fields), a magnetic moment that can be computed by classical means. Furthermore, we can try to construct a model of the electron that has such a shape and such dimensions that it can be held together by the cohesive forces of the self-gravitational effects of its own concentrated electric and magnetic fields. This article presents in detail the electromagnetic filamentary model of the electron that the author has developed beginning in 1955. It contains a number of significant improvements and additions beyond the more sketchy treatment published earlier (Bostick 1978). In Chapter 1 we present the basic construction that yields a "high-fidelity" model of the electron accounting for the rest energy, spin, anomalous gyromagnetic ratio, and dispersion relationships. A heuristic model of the photon is also presented. The elementary hydrodynamics analogue of the electron model is described, and implications for the relationships between c, e, me, h, and a = 1/137 are discussed. The de Broglie waves are interpreted as transverse "acoustical" waves on the electron filament.
In Chapter 2 we consider the morphology and dynamics of the filamentary electron in a potential well (for example, in an atom). Novel insights are derived into the underlying geometry of the various "energy levels," helping, among other things, to demystify the "Pauli exclusion principle."
In Chapter 3 we describe in detail the spectacular array of spontaneously formed plasma structures observed in the plasma focus and related devices. The creation of these structures in energy-densification processes suggests an invariant, geometrical action-principle reflected in the similar morphology of macroscopic systems (for example, galaxies) and microscopic systems ("elementary particles").
The idea of a spatially extended, dynamic electron has been suggested by a number of authors, including Conant (1978) and Yadava (1976).
The structure of the electron as developed by the author, in contradistinction to the electron of the Copenhagen School, could actually exist. We could call it the existential electon. But better than the French existential or Greek for the verb "to be," we should use a dynamic, robust, life-possessing Hebrew word. The Hebrew word "to live" in this robust sense is hayah, which comes from the same root as the Hebrew toast I'chaim—to life! The corresponding Hebrew word for living is chaiyah (kl ee' yah). Let us thus call our living electron the chaiyah electron to give it some of the robustness that the Hebrew Jesus must have conveyed to his congregation when he declared in Aramaic, "I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly!"
We must also choose a suitable name for the general process whereby Nature in spontaneously producing organized structures seems to fly in the face of the famous Boltzmann declaration that "Entropy Strebt nach Maximum" (entropy, or the measure of disorganization in nature, tends to increase to the maximum: water runs downhill, heat flows from high temperature to low temperature, and so on). The term "negentropy" has been coined for this process, but the author feels that "negentropy" is far too inelegant a name for such an elegant and lively process. The author suggests the Hebrew toast, "U chaim," for this process that brings nature to life and life through nature.
The Chaiyah Electron
In this chapter we shall construct a filamentary model for a chaiyah electron in which all momentum, mass, spin, and energy are electromagnetic in origin. The striking similarity between the harmonic characteristics (dispersion relationships) of an electron, on the one hand, and an electromagnetic wave (photon) in a waveguide, on the other, suggests that the electron arises as a singular form of electromagnetic "energy storage." Whereas the photon in the waveguide has been confined by external constraints, we must seek a means whereby the electromagnetic energy associated with the electron might be self-confined in a filamentary configuration.
One energy confinement and densification process is well known in plasma physics and electron-beam physics as the "pinch effect": a beam or filament of rapidly flowing charge generates a magnetic field that opposes the explosive Coulomb force between like charges. In the relativistic limit, when the velocity of the charge flow approaches that of light, the "pinch" force exactly cancels out the electric force, and the current channel becomes locally stable and self-confined. One might indeed be tempted to think of an electron as a circular filament in which an evenly distributed negative charge e flows at the speed of light. However, this model fails, among other things, to provide insight into the anomalous relationship observed between electron spin and magnetic moment—the fact that the observed moment is twice that which would be expected for a rotating charge having the observed electron spin.
This and other considerations dictate that our electron model must have a richer inner structure, must possess additional degrees of freedom. A clarification is provided by the example of energy storage in a rapidly spinning elastic ring. Here the additional degree of freedom is represented by the elasticity. In this case, when the tangential velocity goes to the speed of light, we find that only one halt of the stored energy expresses itself in terms of angular momentum; the other half of the energy is stored in the potential energy of elastic deformation of the ring.
Figure 1. Detail showing the way in which the gravitationally equilibrized, charged fiber produces the surface charge and current for the torus core radius r0. Note that the surface charge is negative.
Returning to the problem of the electron model, we find that the required "elasticity" for a current filament can be supplied by the self-gravitation associated with the electromagnetic mass of the current configuration, if the filament is configured in the form of a closed helix wound around an imaginary torus (Figure 1). Appropriate choice of parameters makes it possible to match very closely the observed characteristics of the electron. In addition, the famous de Broglie waves now appear as simple transverse deformation waves propagating along the elastic filament.
How Is an Electron Like a Photon and How Not?
Albert Einstein, who invented the photon, wrote in his latter days a letter to O. Klein in which he declared that there were many oafs who thought they understood the photon, but they were deluding themselves. Einstein also stated that before he tried to understand the meson he would like to understand the electron. In an attempt to further our understanding of both the electron and photon let us contemplate their similarities and differences.
Even though the photon is traditionally considered to be an "uncharged particle of zero rest mass" and the electron a "charged particle of finite rest mass," the formal similarities in their dispersion relationships suggest that there is a strong similarity between these "particles" (onta), when the photon is confined to a waveguide, as in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Electromagnetic wave (made up of photons) with
free-space wavelength \0 propagating in the TE01 mode be-
tween two parallel plates (a waveguide) at y = 0 and y =
a: \z = \g = \0/(sin 6); vr = c/(sin 6); and c = \0v. The cutoff
wavelength X.^ = 2a. Wave fronts are shown propagating
at a normal velocity c.
For such a waveguide photon we have
co2 = wj + kzV,
(1)
where coco
2 is the cutoff frequency Ivclla, and kz = 2TT/\S, where \ = X, is the guide wavelength. The observed energy of the photon (in or out of the waveguide) is ftto = hv, where v = w/2ir is the observed frequency of the photon as it passes by in the waveguide and also as it flies by in free space. A similar relationship obtains for an electromagnetic wave (photon) propagating in an ionized gas of electron density n, and plasma frequency
cop = (4Trn2/me)V2;
in this case
co2 = cop
2 + k:
2c2,
(2)
where kz is the wave number of the wave in the direction of propagation. The dispersion relationships for a photon show that there is a kind of "rest mass energy" for the photon given by huco for the waveguide mode (and ftto,, for the plasma mode) of propagation. Indeed, for the waveguide case, if we make co = wco, \ s -> », vg = 0, the photon (or electromagnetic wave) will be boxed up inside the cavity with no net momentum in any direction.
The photon's energy in this mode is all "rest mass energy" and can be determined by weighing the cavity before and after the photon is placed inside the resonant cavity. One is weighing the energy of the photon or the electromagnetic wave, and it is perfectly straightforward to assume that all of this energy is contained in the E and H vectors. Thus, there is no necessity to invoke the assumption of Newtonian lump mass or lump momentum for the photon.
For the electron, in comparison, we have
w2 = coComp
2 + k2c2,
(3)
where cdComp = mc&lh is the Compton frequency and
kz = 2-rr/X (with X = h/mv = h/p the de Broglie-Einstein
wavelength). The total energy of the electron is mc2 =
ha) = hv, where v = CO/2TT is the observed frequency of
the electron as it passes by with a velocity v. The electron
dispersion relationship corresponds exactly to Einstein's
formula for the relativistic electron mass:
m = mj\/
1 {vlcf
(4)
or
(mc1)2 = (mec2)2 + {mvcf,
(5)
where mc2 = fna is the total energy and mec2 = ftwComp is
the rest energy of the electron.
Now, if an entity like a photon or an electromagnetic wave, when boxed up in a waveguide or resonant cavity, can have a "rest energy," as does the electron, can one create a model of a chaiyah electron that exhibits some of the characteristics of a boxed-up photon or an electromagnetic wave in a guide? One must recognize that such a model must embody an electric charge, a spin Vz, a magnetic moment, and an anomalous gyromagnehc ratio.
In attempting to construct such a model we shall search for some broad philosophical, global, guiding principles such as those employed by Einstein in his formulation of special relativity: Since we observe the electron to live as a stable entity in a variety of frames of reference, we shall, as much as possible, search for a model of the electron that is in equilibrium and is stable in all frames of reference. This chaiyah criterion will be the first of our guiding principles, and we might add that such a principle has been largely ignored heretofore in all models of elementary onta in which the onta are assumed to be mathematical points.
Our second guiding principle will be that all energy, mass, and momentum must be electromagnetic in character as it is in an electromagnetic wave and also in a photon. There should be no Newtonian "lump" mass or "lump" momentum. Our third guiding principle will be that the de Broglie-Einstein waves and the wave functions ¥ and ty* of quantum mechanics should have more than the Born probabilistic interpretation: The wave functions should have a physical reality, like transverse waves on a tensioned string, for example. Indeed, the author is obliged to concede that the only way he can accomplish these aforestated chaiyah objectives is through a filamentary model of the electron.
The construction of a filamentary electron model stems from a rationale to which the founding fathers of quantum mechanics (Bohr, Born, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, de Broglie, Einstein, and others) were not privy. This rationale is based on fairly recent experimental results (Bostick 1956,1957, 1958,1977; Bostick, Nardi, and Prior 1972a, 1972b, 1980; Bostick et al. 1966; Laurence 1956; Wells 1976) concerning plasmoids—minimum-free-energy, equilibrium structures with a certain degree of stability. These structures spontaneously spring into existence in high-energy-density, magnetized plasmas. This rationale is a compelling reason for constructing an electron model out of a filament (rather than conceptualizing it as a point or a sphere, for example): the Figure 3. The perfectly elastic flywheel.
observed macroscopic, spontaneously arising structures for carrying current in a plasma are thin vortex filaments. In a plasma where the electrons are relativistic, these filaments have been observed to have diameters as small as 0.2 urn. The condensation of energy density and plasma density into these current-carrying filaments is essentially a phase-transition phenomenon, as is superconductivity in metals. The formation of a chaiyah electron or a chaiyah photon out of electric and magnetic fields would be an analogous type of phase transition.
The Elastic Flywheel Model
In considering a model for the energy storage in onta like the electron, let us contemplate first the storage of both kinetic energy Vim^ and elastic potential energy 1/2/C(2TTK)2 in the rim of a perfectly elastic flywheel (Figure 3), where mr is the mass of the rim and k is the elastic spring constant of the rim. It can be shown easily that for an equilibrium radius, VmiaV2 = VJi(2-nR)2; that is, the virial theorem holds.
The elastic rim on the elastic flywheel could be visualized as a toroidal, massless elastic sausage casing with a spring constant k, in which the sausage meat of mass m0 circulates without friction with a velocity v. We shall assume that the initial radius R0 = 0.
An interesting example evolves in the relativistic gedanken experiment where the velocity of the sausage meat v approaches the speed of light c.
Chromium6- Posts : 826
Join date : 2019-11-29
Re: Ken Shoulders and EVOs
by Chromium6 Sun Nov 27, 2022 1:25 am
Wikipedia on Bostick:
--------
Winston H. Bostick (March 5, 1916 – January 19, 1991) was an American physicist who discovered plasmoids, plasma focus, and plasma vortex phenomena. He simulated cosmical astrophysics with laboratory plasma experiments, and showed that Hubble expansion can be produced with repulsive mutual induction between neighboring galaxies acting as homopolar generators. His work on plasmas was claimed to be evidence for finite-sized elementary particles and the composition of strings, but this is not accepted by mainstream science.
Contents
1 Biography
2 Scientific contributions
3 References
4 External links
Biography
Winston H. Bostick, born in Freeport, Illinois, received both his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. His Ph.D. thesis on cosmic rays was completed under the direction of Nobel laureate Arthur Compton. While working at the MIT Radiation Laboratory from 1941 to 1948, he helped build a microwave linear electron accelerator. As an associate professor of Tufts University from 1948 to 1954, he researched magnetic pinch effects, which led to his later work on plasma pinch effects. His discoveries of plasmoids and other plasma-related effects began between 1954 and 1956 at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where he continued to act as consultant. A 1956 New York Times front page story featured Bostick's "plasma gun".[1][2] He served as Professor of Physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology from 1956 until receiving Professor Emeritus status at his retirement in 1981, and as head of the physics department from 1968. While visiting Tijuana, Mexico in 1991, he died of lung cancer at age 74.[3]
Scientific contributions
In 1956 Bostick demonstrated the existence of "plasmoids", force-free, charge-carrying "strings".[4] Ten years later he postulated an electron composed of helical plasmoids forming vortex "loops" around a "ring", similar to the Parson Magneton.[5] Bostick maintained that this model could account for atomic structure, strong and weak forces within the nucleus, and that it was a physical basis for string theory, but this view received no support from the mainstream scientific community and is considered fringe science.[by whom?][citation needed]
References
William L. Laurence, "Physicist 'Creates' Universe in a Test Tube; Atom Gun Produces Galaxies and Gives Clues to Creation Cosmos 'Created' in a Test Tube", The New York Times, Wednesday, December 12, 1956.
"Physicists Depict New Concepts Of Universe and Its Basic Laws", The New York Times, Sunday, February 3, 1957.
"Dr. Winston Bostick, Atomic Physicist, 74", The New York Times, Friday, January 25, 1991.
Winston H. Bostick, "Experimental Study of Ionized Matter Projected across a Magnetic Field", Physical Review, V104, N2, pp. 292-299 (Oct 1956).
Winston H. Bostick, "Pair Production of Plasma Vortices", Physics of Fluids, V9, N10, pp. 2078-2080 (Oct 1966).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_H._Bostick
https://www.plasma-universe.com/winston-h-bostick/ (has his list of papers)
--------
Winston H. Bostick (March 5, 1916 – January 19, 1991) was an American physicist who discovered plasmoids, plasma focus, and plasma vortex phenomena. He simulated cosmical astrophysics with laboratory plasma experiments, and showed that Hubble expansion can be produced with repulsive mutual induction between neighboring galaxies acting as homopolar generators. His work on plasmas was claimed to be evidence for finite-sized elementary particles and the composition of strings, but this is not accepted by mainstream science.
Contents
1 Biography
2 Scientific contributions
3 References
4 External links
Biography
Winston H. Bostick, born in Freeport, Illinois, received both his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. His Ph.D. thesis on cosmic rays was completed under the direction of Nobel laureate Arthur Compton. While working at the MIT Radiation Laboratory from 1941 to 1948, he helped build a microwave linear electron accelerator. As an associate professor of Tufts University from 1948 to 1954, he researched magnetic pinch effects, which led to his later work on plasma pinch effects. His discoveries of plasmoids and other plasma-related effects began between 1954 and 1956 at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where he continued to act as consultant. A 1956 New York Times front page story featured Bostick's "plasma gun".[1][2] He served as Professor of Physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology from 1956 until receiving Professor Emeritus status at his retirement in 1981, and as head of the physics department from 1968. While visiting Tijuana, Mexico in 1991, he died of lung cancer at age 74.[3]
Scientific contributions
In 1956 Bostick demonstrated the existence of "plasmoids", force-free, charge-carrying "strings".[4] Ten years later he postulated an electron composed of helical plasmoids forming vortex "loops" around a "ring", similar to the Parson Magneton.[5] Bostick maintained that this model could account for atomic structure, strong and weak forces within the nucleus, and that it was a physical basis for string theory, but this view received no support from the mainstream scientific community and is considered fringe science.[by whom?][citation needed]
References
William L. Laurence, "Physicist 'Creates' Universe in a Test Tube; Atom Gun Produces Galaxies and Gives Clues to Creation Cosmos 'Created' in a Test Tube", The New York Times, Wednesday, December 12, 1956.
"Physicists Depict New Concepts Of Universe and Its Basic Laws", The New York Times, Sunday, February 3, 1957.
"Dr. Winston Bostick, Atomic Physicist, 74", The New York Times, Friday, January 25, 1991.
Winston H. Bostick, "Experimental Study of Ionized Matter Projected across a Magnetic Field", Physical Review, V104, N2, pp. 292-299 (Oct 1956).
Winston H. Bostick, "Pair Production of Plasma Vortices", Physics of Fluids, V9, N10, pp. 2078-2080 (Oct 1966).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_H._Bostick
https://www.plasma-universe.com/winston-h-bostick/ (has his list of papers)
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