|
|
||
| Jeffery Kooistra, 3 Jun 2002 |
![[Analog cover]](/images/analog_cover.jpg)
|
|
|
October 18, 2002
Dr. Stanley Schmidt
This cover letter accompanies a Letter to the Editor intended for your "Brass Tacks" section. My letter is a response to the egregiously misguided column of Jeffery Kooistra in your December 2002 issue, "How not to do aether theory." Accompanying this letter is another Letter to the Editor, by Dr. Paulo and Alexandra Correa, concerning the same column. I believe their letter proves conclusively that their experimental work is recklessly assaulted by Kooistra in that column. They will be sending you their letter under separate cover, but since I reference their response in my letter, I enclose it. My strong recommendation is for you to publish both my letter and theirs in Analog, since in my letter I briefly refer to their precise layout of the facts, which should be fully understandable to the Analog audience. I have checked their calculations and methodology and find no evident flaw with it. Perhaps this exercise will prompt others in your technically inclined audience to consider the implications of this historically important Reich-Einstein experiment. Sadly, though as expected, that experiment-the subject of a vast correspondence between Einstein, Reich, and their assistants-receives short shrift in standard Einstein biographies. Perhaps this now imperative response to Kooistra will add to the body of scientific and historical knowledge. That would be a positive value, in addition to helping rectify an egregious wrong. Mr. Kooistra in the letters section should certainly be allowed to attempt a rebuttal of the hard facts that will be staring him in the face, as laid out by me and the Correas. But if you do that, I hope that you will be cautious that Kooistra is not allowed thereby to cross any further borders of propriety. I had been anticipating such an eruption based on hints in his past columns. He now evidently feels that this "Alternate View" column gives him license to work out problems concerning his educational and employment background, his over- arching and now provably hazardous need to appear extraordinarily intelligent, and the particular reasons for his imperative termination from Infinite Energy. "...I'm the kind of guy who reads graduate-level electromagnetism textbooks for fun." Give me a break - please, no more! I very much hope that you will give our separate letters accelerated consideration for publishing in your next available issue, since the formal effect of Kooistra's patently incorrect -and in my view deliberately harmful column-is to put me, Infinite Energy Magazine, and the work of two exemplary scientists in a false and extremely bad light. Because of the damage now being done by the Kooistra column, its posting on the Analog Web site, and its inevitable elaboration on electronic discussion groups, we believe we are fully justified in publishing our attached letters as of today on www.aetherometry.com. This should not preclude your publishing the letters in a future print version of Analog and/or your linking to these rebuttal letters from the Analog site. We look forward to learning what you intend to do.
Sincerely,
Dr. Eugene F. Mallove
|
|
October 18, 2002
Dr. Stanley Schmidt
A Letter to the Editor for "Brass Tacks" - Jeffery Kooistra's column in your December 2002 issue, "How not to do aether theory," is egregiously misguided. Kooistra recklessly assaults the experimental and theoretical work of Dr. Paulo and Alexandra Correa, whose exemplary plasma physics-and more recent work on the Reich-Einstein and the Hyborac/Stirling experiments-has been profiled in Infinite Energy, beginning in 1996 with Issues #7 and #8. For a fellow of Mr. Kooistra's boasted talent and intelligence - (To wit, "... I'm the kind of guy who reads graduate-level electromagnetism textbooks for fun."), it is surprising that he is such a miserable failure when it comes to assessing the work of the Correas. He throws his hands up, and writes, "... I don't understand a damn thing about what it is they say they are doing." Ah, but that admitted ignorance of basic facts, definitions, and elaborate experiment descriptions-which others with technical backgrounds and interest have grasped in part or in full and have appreciated-doesn't deter him from a crude attempt at trashing the experimental technique of the Correas. He evidently did not carefully read the actual description of the Reich-Einstein experiment performed by the Correas, which was published in IE #37, May/June 2001 ("The Reproducible Thermal Anomaly of the Reich-Einstein Experiment Under Limit Conditions"), since he improperly describes the experiment's basic protocol and controls. I refer Analog readers for these particulars to the Correas' rebuttal of October 16, 2002, which is adjacent to my letter. Then, adding insult to injury, Kooistra brings up the red herring of "RF interference" to debunk their experiment, without making the slightest attempt to determine - either by easy calculation or by a search of the Correas' monographs on their Web site for further insight-whether this bogus "explanation" of the thermal anomaly above the Faraday cage could possibly be correct. Kooistra's performance is much like the behavior of Robert Park of Voodoo Science fame, that arrogant mouthpiece of the American Physical Society who obsesses against cold fusion, whom Kooistra has rightly cut down in an earlier column (Analog, October 2000). This was written when Kooistra was on his one-year stint at Infinite Energy. Kooistra characterizes the Correa work as "pretty sloppy." Kooistra is himself provably sloppy, since in a June 7, 2002 posting to a Vortex discussion group mudslinging fest against the Correas, he rejected the very RF hypothesis that he proclaims in his December 2002 column! He wrote: "Actually, this discussion has brought up so many other plausible mundane sources for the heat `anomaly' that I now think the RF heating probably is negligible most of the time." Since I trust that the Correa letter responding to the details of the Kooistra assault will be published along with mine, I will not re-state the details of their defense, which is strong indeed and demolishes Kooistra's reckless conclusions. I'll only add that to get a feel for levels of RF, I performed a simple calculation of the likely incident RF power from a 50,000-watt Boston-area FM radio station, 100km from the basement location in Bow, NH where my more limited Reich-Einstein experiment was performed. Applying a recommended factor-of-4 concentration of the omni-directional beam intensity value at 100 km, gave an RF intensity of only 1.6 micro-watts per square meter, which is much less than the maximum ambient RF that the EPA says 99 percent of the US population is exposed to (0.01 W/m2). As the Correas show, even that higher figure is insufficient to produce the temperature elevation immediately above the suspended Faraday cage. Now to other matters regarding Kooistra's columns. Kooistra fancies himself as an "aether theorist," which as far as I can tell amounts to studying the work of others and pronouncing his belief in this basic picture of nature, as described by him: "In aether mechanics, everything is reduced to one substance-aether- and particles are dynamic entities made of knotted vortices in the aetheric fluid, and forces are manifestations of motions in that fluid." (Analog, Oct. 2002). There is nothing wrong with that elegant picture per se, a conception, as he has pointed out, that was current among luminaries at the end of the 19th century, as well as among various proponents to this day. However, I do not know of any published material by Kooistra, in which he extends mathematically or otherwise this existing body of mathematical physics. Perhaps I have overlooked such a publication? I wish he would tell us where his treatise is to be found-published or unpublished-so that we could more readily accept his claim to be an "aether theorist," rather than a commentator on aether theories for Analog, and in the past for Infinite Energy. I fault another remark by Kooistra on the topic of aether science. He wrote, "It remains a mystery as to why it is still so commonly believed that special relativity eliminated the need for an aether. Einstein repudiated this idea a scant 15 years after the special theory appeared, and only five years after general relativity came out, when he was at the height of both his powers and his popularity...Now that I find myself in agreement with Einstein, this feels like a good state in which to remain..." (Analog, November 2001). Indeed, Einstein made remarks supportive of a "gravitational ether" which he later withdrew - so this is mere rhetorical flourishing by Kooistra. They are disingenuous remarks, inasmuch as the "aether" he talks about so much has no physical consequences: He does not specify any experimentally measurable-thermal, electromagnetic, gravitational, or electric-properties of said aether, such as have been made by the Correas. All that the Kooistra talk about "aether" amounts to is the age-old idea that particles may be "knotted vortices of aether fluid." Aside from such a mental image, there are no physical or mathematical functions which the "Kooistrian ether" proposes, say, for a particle such as an elementary charge, or for photons, and so on. Had he read the publications of the Correas, he would have found precise new functions for these and other particles-and he would have found such functions obey the superimposition of waves and energy, as in the generation of filamentary vortices or the very toroidal structure of electron mass-energy! So let us be certain, indeed, that whatever this "aether" is that Kooistra talks about, it's not to be confused with the aether investigated by the Correas (building upon what Tesla and Reich found), which-among other experimental and technological achievements-has resulted in motors run off modified Faraday cages (ORACs), which capture and modify the structure of said aether components in precisely calculable ways. Anyone who wishes to read statements about what I and others have observed and tested of these aether motors and other devices at the Correa laboratory should read the "Letters of Support" section on the Correa Web site. Virtually all mainstream commentators about "the ether (aether)" are always careful to reject its existence outright when discussing its supposed abolition by Einstein. This is a state of affairs that Einstein most definitely intended to persist, and it has. Einstein might have toyed with the notion of a "gravitational aether," but in the end discarded this as he had earlier discarded the stationary electromagnetic Aether of 19th century physics. So when Kooistra illegitimately turns Einstein into another "aether theorist," this is only to get the applause of those who actually believe that Space is either empty or filled with electromagnetic foam-that is, so-called "zero point energy." It is but a tactical maneuver, but it illustrates well how Kooistra's disdain for the Correas and Reich does not allow any possibility for a serious consideration of the multi- components of the aether they have investigated. Kooistra actually blurted out recently on the Vortex discussion forum: "I don't know Marett, and I'm automatically suspicious of anyone who would spend years studying Reich. But the guy could be an axe murderer and it still won't improve Paulo's experimental technique." There is one sentence in Kooistra's screed, in which he appears to be on the right track, although it is gratuitously written and he clearly offers it for rhetorical effect so that the "possibility" should not be considered: "Of course, my inability to understand their work doesn't mean they're wrong- maybe they're just a lot smarter than the rest of us." Indeed, they are far, far smarter and accomplished scientifically than Kooistra. Right or wrong, they are true aether theorists and experimental investigators of the aether-of both its physics and biophysics (the latter not an insignificant area of discovery, owing to its relevance to possible future explanations of some evidently effective "complementary medicine," such as acupuncture, which present physics cannot explain.) They are not in the pattern of that sham "scientist" that Kooistra claims to be in so many of the boastful comments that pepper virtually all of his columns. This is the nature of his particular form of scientific bigotry, which has expressed itself against the Correas, ironically so much like the prejudices of a Robert Park: That in order to elevate one's status, intelligence, and cleverness beyond what it really is, the science bigot is driven to knock down the accomplishments of others. While it is not directly pertinent to the facts and conditions of the Correa reproduction of the Reich-Einstein experiment, and how Kooistra has confused them, I think the following documented attempts by Kooistra (since his termination from Infinite Energy) to be "less than charitable" to Infinite Energy and me (when previously he was effusive in his praise - and self-praise for having been hired!), illuminate this pernicious trend:
There is hope that Kooistra will eventually learn the hard lesson that Truth is far more important than power. The Correa rebuttal, printed and posted, and my comments in support of them, suffice to deal with the particulars of the sorry episode of his Analog column of December 2002. Given Kooistra's voiced determination to always win in such back-and-forths, one can well anticipate what kind of new attacks and self-adulation by Kooistra will come from this exchange. They will be repelled, as time allows. But as far as I am concerned, this is pretty much the last word. It is an object lesson in how Kooistra, a supposedly open-minded scientist and seeker of the truth, can so easily take leave of objectivity and decency when his own scientific paradigms and qualifications are called into question. In closing, let me say that I was very glad to have been allowed space for "Cold Fusion: The `Miracle' is No Mistake," in Analog (July/August 1997). That science has progressed much further and the 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF10) will be held August 24-29, 2003 at the Royal Sonesta Hotel near MIT, which should be accessible to many Analog readers. ICCF9 was held in Beijing last spring; out of it came a definitive report on low-energy heavy element transmutation (with no electric energy input!) from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. This article by Y. Iwamura et al has now been published by the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics (http://jjap.ipap.jp) and is available for viewing at that site. It may or may not be that conventional quantum mechanics can explain such phenomena; I think it unlikely that it can. A new physics may be required, and perhaps it could learn something from the formulations and experiments of the Correas. All tools need to be pressed into the understanding of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR). But is clear to me now that LENR (a.k.a. "cold fusion") is by no means the only potentially technologically useful new energy source. Aether energy, as it is manifested in already operating laboratory devices, appears to be a more direct, and possibly much less problematic source of tapping the environment for electricity and heat. Therefore, it is imperative that this poisonous Kooistra column and the various rumblings from its author on the pages of Analog, be given this powerful reply and antidote.
Sincerely,
Dr. Eugene F. Mallove
|
|
October 16, 2002
Dr. Stanley Schmidt
We recently read in Analog (December, 2002) Jeff Kooistra's attack on our replication of that which, most adequately, we have called the Reich-Einstein experiment. If Analog were simply a fiction magazine - we would probably not have bothered with this response; but since it also claims the rubric of Science Fact, the matter is more serious. Indeed, the Kooistra feature is pure Fiction without Fact, or simply facta ficta. And it is written in a tone of plaintive arrogance that dares invoke the right to be stupid and remorselessly flaunts it, to boot - playing with total disregard for what are, after all, simple facts. Indeed, the reason why we are responding to this gratuitous attack is precisely because the so-vaunted-as-precious "column inches" in Analog managed to pass so much erroneous and false information from Kooistra's pen. Imagine you enter - half-way through the session, and after having missed all the previous lectures - a class in cellular biology, or in electrical engineering, or in ancient Greek. Imagine you interrupt it to demand that the instructor - or the pupils, for that matter - cease employing the words, concepts and functions that are being taught, and, instead, "speak like everybody else does" - all because you have not bothered to do your homework and learn the language of the people, or the facts and phenomena under study. And imagine that you fail whatever course it was; but, completely undeterred, you go to the Ombudsman and demand to be given a passing grade, because your teacher refused to use everyday language - he failed you, for instance, because you referred to striated muscles as stringy meat, or to an oscilloscope as a mini-TV, or to Pi as a double T. This exemplifies the essence of Kooistra's sorry performance for Analog's readers. To get back that passing grade he didn't earn (given the scarcity of his effort), he would pugnaciously declare that "I don't understand a damn thing about what it is you're teaching!", or "You seem hell-bent on inventing new words" (does one invent old words?), or "maybe you just think you're smarter than the rest of us." Kooistra's article is filled with factual errors. He states that Reich, in the experiment he presented for Einstein to replicate, used a suspended Faraday cage. Well, he did not: as is clear from our article that Kooistra refers to but apparently didn't even have the decency to read, we alone did that, precisely as one of the missing controls! The experiment that Reich presented to Einstein did not involve suspension. And it did not involve a Faraday cage - not per se - but an ORAC, which Einstein, on his own, proceeded to dismantle by removing the insulation panels, effectively converting it into a simple Faraday cage. But this Faraday cage was not just any Faraday cage - for the chemical nature of the metal employed was shown by Reich to be critical for the observation of the thermal phenomenon. The most remarkable idiocy, however, is the free prediction Kooistra makes: "Put a Faraday cage inside another Faraday cage and the interior won't have any local signals to null out, and hence no temperature difference"! Well, we have news for Mr. Kooistra: this is precisely what we have done in the companion report he failed to read (our monograph AS2-05 on the web, at www.aetherometry.com), and which demonstrates that the difference not only remains but can be made to increase! This is stark proof of the fact that Kooistra is careless about his statements and is not only wrong, but also dated in his predictions. It is regrettable that article space in Analog is devoted to such irresponsible, uninformed and disinformative discourse. We should also note how poorly chosen is the title of this Kooistra feature - "How not to do Aether theory" - when what was, and is, at stake in the cited material is not Aether theory - not per se - but a simple experiment whereby anomalous heat is produced. But since Kooistra is, as he claims, "an aether theorist himself", he proceeds to teach us something fundamental about the Aether: that ambient RF can account for the positive temperature difference that can be observed atop a simple Faraday cage made of galvanized iron. He did not discover this difference, did not study it, did not replicate the experiment - but already knows the "trivial explanation". How about that - and no one has thought of it before! And by virtue of this - so he argues - the Correas are guilty of having written a "pretty sloppy" paper that fails to recognize such "a mundane source of heating". It is worth noting that this is not the first time that Kooistra has taken it upon himself to 'explain' this thermal anomaly without bothering to acquaint himself with the facts. A few months back he decided, totally out of the blue, to attack us publicly on the Vortex forum - an attack he began by extolling the virtues of soap bubbles in studies of convection currents he conducted while playing with his kids. Back then he 'thought' that the positive delta T's in our experiment were merely the result of convection. Now, however, it's RF. Kooistra is not a complete fool: he is not going to go down the well-trodden path of denying the presence of any positive delta T, as others have done after their flawed or non-existent reproductions of the Reich-Einstein experiment. He knows that the temperature difference is there - because Einstein and Infeld both saw it, and the Correas and Mallove report it. So he plays it safe. But this great 'experimentalist', who starts his Analog piece by instructing his readers - and us - in the true art of experimental physics (just what physics has this fellow ever done?? He was not even able to fathom the Marinov motor effect by listening to Harold Aspden's explanation...), has never replicated the experiment, and playing it safe means he should not have to (that's what most self-styled experimentalists do, avoiding the hassle by drastically simplifying matters). So he accepts there is a positive delta T, but with this proviso: it is not anomalous but artifactual. How so? Because, and simply because, it could be created by absorption of ambient RF. But could it? Kooistra never bothers to check whether in fact it could. He, the self-appointed didact of experimental physics, does not feel called upon to do the requisite calculations before asserting this 'simple truth' to his readers. And since he finds a public forum in which to disseminate his completely gratuitous speculations, it falls upon the scientists whose research is being disparaged to do the work, which Kooistra should have been obligated to do, before submitting his statements for publication. There is something profoundly wrong with this picture. But, for the sake of those Analog readers who do want to learn the facts, here follow some actual facts that illustrate how Kooistra's 'simple truths' are but simple-minded fictions: First, the conditions of the experiment - and these were all described in both our reports on the Reich-Einstein experiment (one of which Kooistra boasts to have read) - preclude an argument such as Kooistra's:
1. The tests were conducted in a basement room located below ground, where
radio reception is always poor. It should also be noted that the experimental thermometer was placed at 3 cm atop the cage, with insulation surrounding it, and at the same height of the control thermometer. Most stunning, however, is that our 'experimentalist' doesn't even know the basics of what he refers to as 'well established facts'. And so now we're no longer faulting him for talking about new ideas which he does not understand because he is unable to read or to make an effort to read; no, now it is about 'well established' things which he should have made it his business to know properly before attempting to write what he did. For the simple fact is that ambient levels of the so-called RF radiation normally encountered in urban and semi-urban environments are far below the levels required to produce significant heating of our bodies or the objects and structures all around us. Let us demonstrate this. As we verified it, the stringent Reich-Einstein experiment presents positive delta T's on the order of 0.05 to 0.4°C (IE, Vol. 7, #37, p.18). These are significant temperature changes - a physiological temperature increase of 0.4°C constitutes a functional fever. In fact, a study of RF radiation fields for all spectral frequencies conducted by the EPA within US metropolitan areas has estimated that 99% of the population is exposed to less than 0.001 mW/cm2, ie 0.01 W/m2 in typical environments (Klauenberg, B. Jon, Martino Grandolfo, David N. Erwin, ed., Radiofrequency Radiation Standards - Biological Effects, Dosimetry, Epidemiology, and Public Health Policy, NATO ASI Series, Plenum Press: New York, 1995). (The remaining 1% presented high exposures generally found in close proximity to high power broadcast stations). Now, as we have just explained above, our test environment was not even typical, but atypical, in that the RF density was substantially lower than that figure. Given that the Faraday cages (8-inch cubes) we tested were suspended in the air (and not earth grounded, as antennas are), and that they have highly reflective, polished surfaces, we can expect at least 50% of the so-called RF to be reflected. A more realistic figure for the receiving efficiency of the antenna would be 15% of the incoming flux. Since significant 'RF absorption' will not occur on the side facing the ground, the total target area of interest is ca 0.206 m2. Hence, the maximum power of thermal dissipation one could normally extract from exposure of those cages to the typical environmental RF flux is: (0.01 watt/m2) (0.206 m2) (0.5) = 0.001 watt.Can this quantity of power account for the temperature differences observed in the Reich-Einstein experiment? Experimental testing at room temperature shows that when the same cage is artificially heated from inside, an insulated thermometer suspended at 1 cm from the top of the cage loses heat (above the delta T that it already registers and once the heat source is removed) at a rate of 0.7°C/360 sec = 0.001944°C/sec (range examined for the cooling: 24 to 22°C; start-up delta T of 0.4°C at 20.9°C, before any heating was performed). In accordance with thermometric experiments reported in our second monograph on the Reich-Einstein experiment (AS2-05) - which Kooistra failed to read before undertaking his gratuitous 'report' on our findings - this corresponds to a loss of 0.0203 joules/sec or 20 milliwatts. If the energy spent on heating the cage to a given delta T is the same as the energy it loses by cooling from that delta T, then, to sustain a delta T = 0.4°C in a naked, suspended Faraday cage for one hour would require 73 joules of energy. This is more than one order of magnitude greater than that mundane 'RF source' can supply. However, we must keep in mind that the experimental thermometer was suspended over the top of the cage - and not at its surface or within the cage. Here, there's nothing like a little experimentation. Our reference is to another communication of ours that Kooistra also failed to read (AS2-13, Fig. 8). There, with what is conventionally considered to be an 'RF point-source' of 5 watts, we irradiated an identical calibrated thermometer at 1 cm of distance and found that it took four minutes to heat to a maximum delta T of 0.45°C. The exposed area of the target bulb (0.6 cm OD) corresponds to ca 1/40th of the area of a sphere with a 1 cm radius; accordingly, at the source, the power emitted to produce such a delta T is ca 0.125 watts. Effectively then, for that suspended experimental thermometer (at 1 cm above the top plate of the cage) to reach a delta T = 0.4°C and maintain it for a single hour, the top plate would have to function as a point source dissipating ca 0.125 watts, or over two orders of magnitude more than the mundane 'RF heating' could account for. Since in the experiments cited by Kooistra the thermometer was suspended at 3 cm above the plate, the power at the source would have to be even greater than that. The amusing fact is that Kooistra also suggested, a while ago, that 'RF heating' could explain how we drove Stirling engines from special cages that developed delta T's of 30°C. This would be off by yet another two orders of magnitude. It would require that the integral 'RF' in our environment would have to be 4 orders of magnitude greater than is typical, ie a flux on the order of 10mW/cm2, which is the highest power density observed at the base of broadcast towers! Hence, the simple truth is that Kooistra's argument is both facile and ill-founded. The mundane RF facts of life are negligible and insignificant when confronted with the magnitude of the thermal differences. Kooistra has neither read the material on which he so glibly comments nor - what is much, much worse - has he even bothered to do the basic calculations that any schoolboy or schoolgirl of median intelligence would scribble on the subject. We can only wonder what it is he does with those graduate textbooks he takes the time to brag to all of us about reading "for fun". Since we did take all the above-mentioned precautions to place the boxes in an environment with minimized electromagnetic blackbody radiation (either in the optical or the thermal and radio ranges), what is left for us to ask is what motivation is behind the negligent attacks that individuals like Kooistra promote to sow confusion and disinformation about scientific experiments which: (1) they have never replicated, (2) they have never studied and (3) they aren't even - ostensibly - prepared to study or replicate? Indeed, such 'commentators' will not even bother to pen a simple calculation that would answer their irrelevant objections had they actually looked at the data. When dealing with the precious work of others, their negligence is complete, and their self-indulgence apparently infinite. What is most amusing in all this is that in that same monograph which Kooistra boasts he has neglected to read (AS2-05), it is experimentally demonstrated how even a near-perfect blackbody absorber cage exposed to solar-atmospheric radiation develops delta T's of >30°C, which equally cannot be accounted for by the experimentally-determined blackbody spectral photon energy absorption characteristic of those boxes. We can only guess that Kooistra does not consider the Analog readership worth an effort on his part to learn what he so glibly writes about. After this, can anyone trust this fellow when he states that if one wants to read about the "long- ago-discredited" orgone energy "in detail", "just do a web search on it - you'll likely find much more information on it than you care to". The truth is that, aside from our work and one's own critical reading of Reich's work (the horse's mouth, and not the web where Messrs. Ogg, Marett, DeMeo, Reiter and their likes abound), you will find no information whatsoever of any value - for, besides us, no one actually *knows* this orgone - or is capable of defining it scientifically, formally, physically and mathematically, and proving experimentally its existence. Those who have made the effort to read our monographs know exactly what orgone energy means and what its spectrum is. Most regrettably, it is precisely the issues of interest - those of science - which the easy claims and falsifications of Kooistra and his like becloud and distort to the benefit of maintaining widespread ignorance.
Sincerely,
Paulo N. Correa, M.Sc., PH.D.
|