July 2, 2000
It was great! Get a group of people together who are not constrained by establishment dogma and everything seems possible. Reject the evidence for quantum entanglement? No problem! This audience was used to rejecting experimental evidence. They already knew all about the scandal surrounding the "evidence" for Einstein's general relativity - that curious business concerning Eddington, the University of Cambridge and a sensational headline in the New York Times (must look this up some time ...).
Anyway, my talk was very well received and the paper will almost certainly be appearing in Infinite Energy Magazine, whose editor, Eugene Mallove, was there. The magazine is not as sensationalist as its name suggests but disseminates facts on cold fusion, and similar phenomena that do not fit current theories.
I met a number of old friends and email contacts, including my staunch supporter Franco Selleri and others I'd met at the Athens conference he had run in 1997 (the proceedings from that conference are worth looking at - see my book list.) There were a few NPA members I'd have like to have met who could not make it in the end - Paul Wesley and Steve Rado in particular, though Steve sent Dennis McCarthy as a very able substitute.
But where to start in telling you the new physics I learned, and new support for ideas I'd already considered such as gravity being a push and not a pull force, for the red shift being just a matter of ordinary "damping"! What I shall try and do is extend my web links file - People - so that you can read their own versions of their ideas. Web sites, though, do not always do justice to the authors! They may look good, but I often find that what they have focused on is not what I would consider their most interesting ideas.
Many of the people there have not got web sites. Many are of the older generation, or have not had the time or money needed. There was a distinct bias at the meeting in favour of the elderly and the impoverished, and this seems to be the way of things in "dissident physics": it is only those who have either finished their working careers or lost their jobs as a result of unorthodox thinking or, like myself, got hooked on physics and become unemployable, who have time and the incentive to take an active part in this exciting movement in the history of physics.
So I shall add to my " People " file then come back to tell you something about the others.
You can see the full list of 50 or so talks (titles and authors only at present) at the NPA web site, but just to give an idea, they included:
Hal Fox, Eugene Mallove and Roberto Monti on new energy, mainly "cold fusion" (now known as chemically assisted nuclear reactions).
Francisco Müller and Peter Graneau on normal and retrograde "railgun accelerators" (I did not even know about normal ones before. Put a rod across a pair of rails connected to a battery and if it's made of brass it ought to roll away. If it's made of steel, though, which is magnetisable, it may after a little hesitation roll towards you! Francisco showed a video to prove it.)
Halton Arp on red shifts of quasars. These and many other celestial objects are pretty certainly much closer than current dogma thinks.
John Kierein on gravity as a push force of long wavelength background radiation. There has always been a strong lobby against gravity as push, but no argument is conclusive - especially when you realise that we don't have objective ways of measuring the masses of planets etc.. He mentioned in passing that quasars have spectra that seem to show that their temperatures are similar to those of ordinary stars.
Tom Van Flandern on various ideas that refute Einstein's that gravity can be modelled geometrically. He too is working on a model in which gravity is a push, but he thinks in terms of gravitons. With a pushing, not pulling, gravity, you don't get black holes as there is a natural limit. Tom and I still disagree about the speed of gravity, but neither of us are dogmatic about it.
Martin Kokus on red-shift quantisation and the possibility that the earth might be expanding. It is much easier to see how the continents used to fit together if you do so on a smaller globe. Martin thinks his theory tells us why it would be growing, possibly in fits and starts.
Waldyr Rodrigues on what he thought was wrong with Myron Evans' maths (see many articles on the B(3) field) and other controversies concerning his papers. There were fireworks here, with the editors of two of the journals concerned - the Journal of New Energy (Hal Fox) and Apeiron (Roy Keys) - present. [Addendum, 2003: We were told that Evans had been invited to attend, but he denies this.]
Guy Obolensky was there, and mentioned that he had had an awful experience when Pappas put his name on a paper ("36 Nanoseconds faster than light") that misrepresented his own work. The discussion was largely political, but also introduced Obolensky's work and other evidence for faster-than-light effects.
André Assis on the "principle of physical proportions", whereby all fundamental constants are redefined so as to be dimensionless. This has some interesting consequences. André is also knowledgeable about the theory and practice of electrodynamics.
John Chappell - the president - on why so many have been so wrong for so long!
And, of course, a there was a lot more, and if anyone feels they deserve special mention and I've left them out please do let me know! Much time was spent on why Einstein's relativity is wrong and on what the true law of electrodynamics of moving charges really is, but I fear that these subjects did not interest me so much. Once you've decided Einstein was wrong, it is not very productive to analyse the exact manner of his wrongness. In electrodynamics, I feel that if we understood the aether better the laws would become obvious. In my own pet subject it is the same: once you know that quantum entanglement does not happen, what need is there to study it? I only continue to talk about it so as to try and "convert" the many people still think it does happen, and because I happen to find the actual experiments interesting as sources of information about how light really behaves.
Anyway, it was - for me and I think for most others - a brilliant conference. I'm very grateful to John Chappell for inviting me, and the NPA for paying some of my expenses.
The meeting led to the formation of a new, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NPA_Dissidents. The quality of debate has, I regret to say, not always been high - in the early stages it was dominated by Viv Pope, who is eloquent but whose ideas seem to have little in common with anyone else's! It has, however, provided a very useful forum for me personally. I have used it to spread the gospel about those EPR experiments and to introduce my "phi-wave" aether ideas. I have also learned a little here and there, for instance about the behaviour of clocks.
I have been sent a web link to a document that is critical in relation to Special Relativity and the existence of the aether! At the Storrs conference, Héctor Múnera presented a paper on this same subject, but I did not fully realise its importance. He (or someone) handed out copies of a very important paper by Dayton Miller - a very comprehensive report, written in 1933, detailing all the experiments he had done checking the Michelson-Morley results, investigating the small but persistent periodic patterns that had been dismissed as a "null" result as they were smaller than the expected patterns if you use the theory under test. But if you approach the information with an open mind, you cannot avoid a different conclusion!
This 1933 paper has been totally ignored. In 1955, Shankland et al wrote report that discredited it, but this report is blatantly biased and a disgrace to the profession! I have read Miller's work. I wholeheartedly support James DeMeo in his condemnation of Shankland and interpretation of Miller's results as evidence of a preferred frame, the existence of the aether, and of the partial entrainment of the aether with solid bodies.