[EAS]What's New for Aug 02, 2002

pjk pjk at design.eng.yale.edu
Sat Aug 3 00:06:25 EDT 2002


Mail*Link¨ SMTP               What's New for Aug 02, 2002

Another fun "What's New" from Bob Park.  --PJK

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WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 2 Aug 02   Washington, DC

1. ANTI-GRAVITY: A GRAVITY SHIELD WOULD BE VERY NICE, BUT...
Never has an idea with no prospect for success so captivated
corporate research managers who either never studied or never
understood the most basic laws of physics.  Both Boeing in the US
and BAE Systems, the British aerospace giant, are trying to make
the Podkletnov gravity shield work.  BAE has already been at it
for two years (WN 31 Mar 00), with no success.  When NASA
couldn't make the Podkletnov shield work, they invested another
million dollars (WN 22 Jan 99).  When it still didn't work, they
decided the tests were "inconclusive" and sank another mil into
it (WN 12 Oct 01).  I have identified seven warning signs of bad
science http://www.bobpark.com.  The Podkletnov gravity shield
fits all seven.  So why would Boeing choose to spend millions to
test a ridiculous claim by an obscure Russian physicist that has
failed every test and is a physical impossibility to begin with? 
OK, so the Pentagon is paying for it.  But there's also this
goofy book by Nick Cook, who writes for Jane's Defense Weekly.

2. BOOK REVIEW: "THE HUNT FOR ZERO POINT," by NICK COOK.  If this
book is about controlling gravity, what's with the "zero point"?
The confusion is natural; both lie within the province of fringe
scientists who haven't a clue of where the real world stops and
the fantasy world of Atlantis and UFO's begins.  Cook is not a
scientist of any sort; in his world, these guys are the insiders. 
Don't look for them in the pages of Phys Rev; they're not a bunch
of pointy-headed academics.  They are part of the black world of
really important top secret stuff like -- well, electrogravitics. 
So who exactly fed Nick Cook this enormous pile of horse manure? 
If you're a regular reader of WN, you've already met them all. 

3. FRINGE: WHERE EVERYTHING IS SECRET, AND NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE.
When Cook set out on his search for "the biggest secret since the
atom bomb," he went straight to the Integrity Research Institute,
in Washington, DC, where you can buy books and videos with titles
like "Holistic Physics and Consciousness" (WN 5 Mar 99).  IRI is
really Tom Valone, a former patent examiner who lost his job in
the fallout from the Conference on Free Energy (WN 21 May 99). 
He had recruited Paul LaViolette, who claims the B-2 uses anti-
gravity, reverse engineered from a crashed flying saucer.  He was
also fired (WN 18 Aug 00).  They sent Cook to the Institute for
Advanced Study.  Not the one in Princeton; the one in Austin, TX.
It consists of Harold Puthoff, who wants to extract energy from
the zero point of the vacuum.  He used to run the CIA's "remote
viewing" program, which was inspired by "Mind Reach," a book he
wrote with Russell Targ (WN 11 Mar 94).  Finally, Cook sought
advice from Charles Platt, founder of CryoCare, a company that
keeps human heads bobbing in liquid nitrogen until scientists can
figure out how to restart them (WN 21 Jul 00).

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the
University or the American Physical Society, but they should be.

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