Commentary by the Correas

The Philadelphia Experiment is a well-known caper, as the Smyth interview explicitly acknowledges - so we can only wonder who is attempting to handle us by sending Akronos this information, for free, when a best-seller could be made of it, irrespective of whether it is fact or fiction.

However, just as Dr. W saw a backdrop of truth in Allen's caper, we see a great deal of truth in this interview. Yet, we cannot corroborate the sources, nor even the identities of the interviewer or the interviewed. Unremarkable men indeed!

Speaking of the unremarkable, we should like to draw the reader's attention to a curious, unremarked detail of the official biography of Einstein. Somehow, in the critical years between 1941 and 1944 he appears to have done nothing - not just nothing remarkable. In 1941, the year of his meetings with Reich, he is kept out of the Army's "Manhattan Project" that he indirectly helped initiate with his August 2, 1939 letter to President F.D. Roosevelt - because, most ironically, he is considered a security risk! He appears to have done nothing for that entire year, and positively the same for 1942. The same would seem to apply to 1943 and 1944, except that we're told that in 1943 he was employed by the Navy as an adviser on high explosives! That is all the curiouser as Einstein knew nothing of explosives, and the only 'high explosives' to which his advise could have been of any pertinence were the nuclear ones, the very same ones whose development at the time had been exclusively taken over by the Army, to the exclusion of Einstein and Einstein's presumed employer - ie the Navy. Einstein's inactivity is the more remarkable since these are the key war years during which Einstein had Infeld working as his personal assistant. In light of this, one can only wonder whether Smyth's text does not relate precisely what Einstein was up to during those critical years of 1942 to 1944.

So, we are left with what the text says - which is exactly what Smyth wants and says he wants. Dr. W's ideas in the text are curiously close to our own work and analytical model - ie Aetherometry - yet Dr. W does not seem to be familiar with it; he has not even realized that Aetherometry is precisely that purely algebraic theory that continued in Reich's last footsteps and has made Relativity obsolete. He's not a Reichian, but seems to employ some of the language and concepts that Reich used to describe phenomena, which the analytical and mathematical language of Aetherometry has long ago surpassed. This suggests to us that Dr. W has been retired from an active interest in the field of Aether Physics for some time.

Even though we have agreed to publish Smyth's text because we recognize its multiple virtues, we are compelled to disagree with Dr. W. As we have shown in our report on the replication of the Reich-Einstein Experiment, the problem of anomalous evolution of heat was really central to the disagreement between Einstein and Reich, not peripheral to it. On Reich's own admission in a 1943 letter to A. O'Neill, the exclamation 'a bombshell in Physics' referred directly to the consequences of Reich's discovery for thermodynamics, not to the implications of Reich's work with magnetism. It might have referred to the totality of the implications of his work, and have included Reich's views on magnetism - as he would have orally conveyed them to Einstein - but this is not, at the very least, how Reich chose to report it. Since Dr. W did not provide his sources, one can only be left to wonder about how he got his facts.

In what concerns magnetism, we should note that Dr. W also does not make any reference to how Reich changed his views on magnetism, between 1941 and 1947. In the Cancer Biopathy, Reich will no longer regard magnetism - ordinary magnetism or ferromagnetism - as a manifestation of orgone energy. Curiously, he arrives at this conclusion by experimentally observing that the North-pointing end of sensitive magnetic needles placed inside of 1 cubic foot Faraday cages, regardless of their orientation, point upwards towards the center of the four upper edges of the box, and never downwards or towards any vertex. A perfectly balanced needle placed horizontally on the earth's magnetic field does not orient itself horizontally; rather, in the northern hemisphere its N pole will dip downwards, and in the southern hemisphere its S pole will do the same. The earth's magnetic field is not horizontal, and neither do the magnetic meridians coincide with the geographic meridians. An iron rod is more easily magnetized by the local field when it is set, not horizontally, but at the angle of the dip. The resultant magnetic field of the Earth points therefore to the inside of the Earth. The angle between the field's direction and the horizontal plane is called the magnetic dip, and the angle between magnetic and geographic meridians is called the magnetic declination (in naval language, the variation of the compass). Reich's argument is therefore that, inside the Faraday cage and in the northern hemisphere, there is 'an inverse geomagnetic relationship' whereby, independent of the orientation and position of the cage, the N pole of the needle will point up to the center of the top four corners, not down along the direction of the dip. That's the anomaly which he claims, and which made him state in 1947 that orgone was different from magnetism. In the Feb. 1941 letter to Einstein, he reports this finding, but states that sometimes the needle points up, sometimes down. This is the same letter in which Reich proposes that we should regard geomagnetism as being due, not to ferromagnetism, but to the flux of orgone energy. He never explained how this was to be construed. If geomagnetism and gravitation are interlinked, magnetic dip - with its complex variations as a function of solar radiation, atmospheric structure and thickness, air temperature, atmospheric electrification, oxygen mass of the columns of air, etc, etc - would have to be construed as a function of an Aether flux that was nearly vertical to the Earth's surface. If we put this together with our aetherometric theory where gravitation is caused by horizon-incident, downward-curving spinning lattice flows of massfree energy (see A Note on Dayton Miller, and Mysteries of Inertia) responsible for the Earth's rotation and the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, it becomes easy to see a possible link between geomagnetism and gravitation, and the cause of the magnetic dip. Assuming that Reich would have done proper controls with different cages placed in different orientations, that the needles were properly centered and not simply pointing towards the opposite poles of a permanent magnetization that was geomagnetically induced in the cages, the observed reversal of the magnetic dip would then suggest that a local reversal of the field had taken place. If we make one more correlation - with the observation of anomalous sensible and latent heats evolving, respectively, atop and beneath the top of these cages (see Vol. I of Experimental Aetherometry and our last communication on the HYBORAC technology) - it is tempting to conclude that this dip reversal confirms the antigravitational properties of the trapped latent heat in the kinetoregenerative phenomena of electroscopes. One could easily take one more step and argue that dip-reversal is a genuine diamagnetic response of the massfree Aether -- and thus connect pole-independent magnetic repulsion with antigravitation.

Why have we not done so? Certainly not because we believe in field theory so much as to argue that, at the South Pole, the geomagnetic field has exiting 'ex-cident' lines, not incident ones. If magnetic polarity is not real, lines enter or exit only in a relative way and in a manner of speaking. But this relative way is what specifying relative helicity or direction of vortex rotation is all about - so it cannot be entirely discarded. For the Earth to present a near coincidence of the magnetic and rotary axes, they must be connected in some fashion, and the magnetic field can only be the product of longitude-oriented electric currents, back- to-back northern and southern vortices - which are pretty much reflected in atmospheric flows. The geomagnetic field can only originate where those electrical currents also originate. They regeneratively feed on each other - geomagnetism working as an energy storage system that feeds back the dynamo currents which, in turn, sustain the magnetic field. But their energy must come from somewhere. Had Smyth or Dr. W been familiar with Aetherometry, they would have realized that magnetic fields of particles of matter in a 'vacuum', or the 'medium of pure space', or still, in a plenum of massfree energy, correspond to very different densities of magnetic lines than are found for the magnetic fields of the same massbound particles travelling through a material medium, be it a gas or a solid, a diamagnetic or a ferromagnetic medium. And they would have realized that the same cyclotron frequency will produce different magnetic line densities, according to whether the medium is a material one (and what its magnetic nature is) or is, instead, composed solely of massfree energy; or, still, according to whether the field itself is created by massbound charges or massfree charges. However, there may well be deep truth to the idea that, if antigravitation has magnetic effects or is to result from an interaction with magnetic fields, only a diamagnetic system which secured same-pole induction, irrespective indeed of the polarity of the local hemisphere, could make sense. The typical 'free-energy' (para)magnetic approach, whether ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic, could never make any sense. These thoughts tie directly into the failure of electromagnetic field theory.

Perhaps the greatest failure common to Maxwell, Lorentz, Einstein and Reich is that not one of them succeeded in correctly understanding what electric and magnetic fields are. The functions and the concepts have to this day remained imprecise, so imprecise that even the physical dimensions of magnetic fields have remained erroneous. From first principles, we have provided a radically new approach to the problem of magnetism and its practical applications [AS2-15, AS2-16], one that distinguishes between the magnetic field, the magnetic reaction of a medium (composed of massfree charges), the magnetic wave functions of kinetic energy, and the corresponding magnetic functions intrinsic to the structure of matter (electrons, protons, neutrons). We compared, for the first time in the history of physics, the magnetic field effects of massfree and massbound charges, and provided the correct value of the gauss. And we went further - we demonstrated how only the impedance of the vacuum to electromagnetic waves is a constant (conventionally set at 376.728 ohms, and aetherometrically at 303.87 ohms) and how - with respect to massfree and massbound charges - the vacuum impedance is a variable that directly takes into account the inertial or noninertial status of those charges, including the precise nature of the charge carrier. Yet...

Turning to Einstein and the Unified Field Theories: our own understanding of the ambivalent relation which Reich entertained towards Relativity is very close indeed to the one that Dr. W. presents in Smyth's text. However, Reich never provided a systematic criticism of Special and General Relativity, nor of the Unified Field Theory, for that matter. We have tried to do just that, respectively, in our publicly available communications - Consequences of the Null Result of the Michelson-Morley Experiment, The Sagnac and Michelson-Gale-Pearson Experiment and The cosmic background microwave radiation as evidence for cosmological creation of electrons with minimum kinetic energy and for a minimum of cosmic ambipolar massfree energy. Dr. E. Mallove, then Editor-In-Chief of Infinite Energy, thought these systematic deconstructions to be of such critical importance that, in 2001, he placed the first two as the centerpieces of issues #38 and 39 dedicated to the Special and General Relativity theories. Yet the second latest issue (100 years: Einstein's legacy, #59) of the new IE - now under the technical direction of W. Cantrell - manages to entirely omit the contributions of both Aetherometry and Dr. Harold Aspden to this very subject! To our grim amusement, Cantrell wants to ressurrect the Aether, but in its near-original condition - as a 'luminiferous Aether', once again. Mallove repeatedly spoke against the viability of such an outdated notion - even in its incarnation of the partially entrained or dragged Aether of Miller which the belated DeMeo has recently put on his banner. This is precisely where Cantrell leads the incautious with his one-sided editorial: back to the tired notion that the only alternative to Special Relativity is to assume that the residuals of the Michelson-Morley have the physical meaning of a non-rotating, partially-dragged luminiferous Aether. The same 'political line' continues on in the latest issue (#60) with the R. Cahill reprint - where, once again, the same Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction is taken to heart to illustrate how sense can be made of selected residuals from the Miller experiment. Mathematically, it is always possible to find residual data that permits one to keep the faith in absolute space (an absolute quantum foam) and a nearly-stationary Aether. But as Einstein saw it - it would be a queer neo-classical Aether, one that occupied an absolute space with variable lengths...All of Mallove's patient and insistent pedagogical efforts are thus obliterated at once with the new editorial line, just as Massfree Energy is wished away, as if consigned, in the new IE, to retrograde oblivion...

The entire work carried out by Mallove to enlighten the world about the non- electromagnetic and massfree nature of the Aether and the powerful new tools of Aetherometry is thus erased in favor of Cantrell's old-style college-boy bias. Long live the old luminiferous static Aether renamed as foam! Long live unsystematic residuals! For good measure, Silvertooth is thrown back into the pile and the argument about discrepant directions, which we made back in 2001, is repeated but without, of course, any credit being given to us! Brave new IE! But it gets better - by way of a fudged reference in his #59 editorial, Cantrell has Einstein publishing his Special Theory without knowledge of the Michelson-Morley experiment!!!

That was a good one, that made us laugh, especially because, in the very same IE issue (#59), a reprint of one of Cantrell's 'pet articles' - authored by L. Essen - states precisely the contrary: Einstein's Special Relativity "was essentially the electromagnetic theory of Maxwell and Lorentz modified to incorporate the Michelson-Morley result"!! Does Cantrell bother to read his references? Apparently not.

But better still - the role of weight distribution and inertia in real, imperfect clocks, employed for physical measurement (an issue that should be of no greater concern than electric, magnetic or thermal influences, and which arises because of the interaction between the uneven mass-distribution in the fabricated parts and the accelerated states of the mechanism) is taken by Cantrell to mean that "there is absolutely no argument that time-keeping mechanisms do slow down when moving at high speed, and that they obey the time dilation formula of Lorentz and Poincaré."

Stunning idiocy!

At the end of the day, one is never too sure of what this truly retrograde resurrection of the stationary Aether - and its fixation on the infamous residuals - wants to blame Einstein for: after all, like Special Relativity, they swallow not just the Lorentz length transformation but just as well, for good measure, time-dilation...

Like Kafka's Oedipus, these are so-called Aether Theories that serve only for laughter. Faith in the residuals, careful selection of these, combined with a few tried and true mathematical tools and, presto, space is absolute because it is static, or nearly so. As if the Lorentz formula were any different from that of Special Relativity, as if invoking Lorentz would somehow save the luminiferous Aether, as if one could have time-dilation without length contraction, and as if the latter were not a shortcut concocted by Lorenz to save the dying theory of an electromagnetic Aether! Step by step, Cantrell manages to rewrite our papers in absentia, upside down, for the benefit of a last-ditch re-interpretation of the old stationary, electromagnetic Aether (no real student of Reich would be found here, only DeMeo - who, we expect, will soon jump on the bandwagon of this revamped IE that now makes a point of avoiding even a mention of Aetherometry).

Again, it's curious to note that in that same abovementioned reprint, Essen himself concludes the obvious - that the 300 nanoseconds of time delay reported indicates only that the clocks were not made accurate to that resolution!

No, Mr. Cantrell, no! - the question of how to avoid confusing the artifacts of the density and distribution of mass with corroboration of time-dilation is not metaphysical (as if one could not readily ascertain where the error lies...), and neither can the confusion be indulged without importing everything else, beginning with the length-contraction...Well, that shows us the quality of the new Technical Editors of IE...

Since 2003, and with the active support of Mallove, we have been publishing the foundations for an aetherometric theory of gravity, directly integrated with the behavior of electric and magnetic fields, and the electric properties of massfree energy -- but have stayed away from commenting directly on Einstein's repeated failures to derive a Unified Field Theory from General Relativity. A good way to begin would be to realize that there is an alternative theory as to why light-rays or photon-distributions appear to bend in gravitational fields, and that it has everything to do with how photons are emitted from decelerating charges, the globular and not fascicular nature of light (yes, yet another part of Reich's work that Reichians like DeMeo simply and arbitrarily discard), and the fact that these gravitational fields can be physically and mathematically explained by the differential (electric and nonelectric) structure of massfree energy lattices. Until aetherometric thought came along, even the nature of the graviton was elusive and mysterious. Mallove was well aware of the breakthroughs of Aetherometry in this critical chapter of Physics, and he would certainly not have missed the 100th anniversary of Einstein's three seminal papers (on Special Relativity; on the relation E = mc², which was first formulated by Jeans a year earlier; and on the photoelectric effect) as an opportunity to disseminate the entirely new, nonrelativistic and nonelectromagnetic theory of a dynamic Aether. The last thing he would have done would be to engage, as Cantrell has, in a re-hash of the siren sing-a-song of the entrained static luminiferous Aether of yesteryear.

This text of Smyth's, by contrast, has some rare virtues. It takes Einstein seriously, and feels no need to judge or deride him. The UFT failure appears only as the straightforward theoretical and experimental failure that it is. Such "failures" are the lifeblood of basic science, and it's quite tragic that only military budgets, and only in times of emergency, support this lifeblood -- that society has become so disfunctional as to no longer value basic science. And if Smyth does not suggest that Aetherometry is the answer, his or her text has at least the courage of not appearing to proselytize a return to half-assed theories even more useless than Relativity has been. Or to still greater miscomprehensions of Wilhelm Reich.

Perhaps the main reason why we think that most of Smyth's text is factual is that the author or authors seem to have gotten the main facts of the science and history right - those, at least, that we can check, because indeed a curtain of secrecy seems to have descended upon the lives of most of the prominent characters of the story - scientists like Gebhardt, Hulbert, Berkner, Lorenzen, etc - even if they were once made famous by their achievements.

The lesson of the story, it also seems to us, is indeed that matters of science and natural philosophy should never be left to authorities - neither the authority of wise men, nor that of Generals and Admirals, nor of Editors and Peers. As Reich was fond of saying, there are no judges in matters of natural science. If scientists are condemned to making errors - and especially those of interpretation - then we had better learn from those errors, if we are to become real scientists. If there is one greatness to Einstein, it is that he had the courage to kill all of that useless and confused talk of an electromagnetic or luminiferous Aether. And if there is one great failure of Einstein's - and a failure of all General and Unified theories - it is that he did not succeed in understanding what the gravitational Aether was, nor how it was produced from Massfree Dark Energy, the energy source of all unitarian fields.

Even the Pre-socratic Anaxagoras appears to have been closer to natural reality, when he first taught that the Aithr was a substance and its principle was nous, the principle of Levity...

Somehow, modern science is too massified, too heavy, too weighty, too cumbersome, too allied with social powers, to grasp the inner workings of nature -- in all likelihood, because of its over-reliance on operational formalism and a form of empirical democratism where ad hoc models are judged by academic peer-systems entrenched in professional interest societies. The character of modern science lacks lightness and speed - and without Levity or Celerity, the thought and practice of science will find neither the principle, nor the substance of nature. Only the crassest of phenomenologies.