Is This What Townsend Brown Knew All Along

[Paul Schatzkin]

Something came across my news feed this morning that caught my attention, and I've posted it to the blog here:

https://www.ttbrown.com/knew-all-along/

Discusss...

[Jan Lundquist]

The elements of Sidereal Radiation and sidereal periodicity always pique my attention. It seems to be one of the subjects we come back to frequently.

search.php?keywords=sidereal+radiation

[natecull]

Did Townsend Brown know – early in the 2oth century – what scientists in the 21st century are just figuring out?

Sadly, I feel that the answer to that question is "no".

First, General Relativity is not new. It's a theory from 1915. LIGO has made no change to this theory; they just built a lot of hardware and sensitive detectors and put some very powerful computers and algorithms on top to filter out all signals which are not in keeping with the predictions of this 1915 theory.

(Okay, there was a bit of maths and theory added in the 1950s/1960s General Relativity Renaissance, and perhaps some assumptions overlaid on top of GR which Einstein himself might not have approved of. Einstein, for example, did not believe in black holes, and saw singularities as a mistake in GR, so any theory of the production of GR-compliant gravitational radiation which depends on merging black holes, is something that's quite alien to Einstein's idea of what GR was about back when he was creating it. But, I think he was more open to the idea of propagating waves in spacetime.)

So scientists are not just now figuring out the ideas that LIGO is based on. All the figuring out was done by 1915. They are just now getting data that appears to confirm century-old ideas which, for multiple generations now, physicists have always expected to be true.

Second, Townsend Brown claimed to be producing and detecting a form of radiation which is completely unlike GR radiation, and that's why he was never taken seriously by the students of General Relativity: his ideas simply were not compatible with Einstein. Or at least with the contemporary interpretation of Einstein.

Townsend's idea of gravitational radiation was variously:

a) a static/repulsive/anti-gravitational force coming from empty space that could be "a push not a pull". A form of Le Sage gravity, which a little glance at Wikipedia reminds me yes, is still considered extremely non-mainstream. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage%2 ... ravitation ) That's not GR waves. At best, in a GR framework, that's something a little like the "cosmological constant" which Einstein thought of as his greatest mistake.

b) a radiation perhaps like (a) but which - based on Charles Brush's idea of "thermogravity" that also goes back to Michael Faraday - might cause anomalous heat buildup inside massive objects such as rocks. This again is not something predicted by Einstein in GR, and is not accepted by the current GR community.

c) in Structure of Space, a longitudinal as opposed to transverse mechanical wave in a very real mechanical spatial ether (GR in the modern sense doesn't allow speaking of an ether at all) produced at radio frequencies by a dipole antenna facing forward, which he expected to produce mechanical oscillations in an antenna. This seems essentially the same as Tom Bearden's 1980s idea of "scalar radiation" or "longitudinal EM waves" and may have also been something Tesla claimed to produce and detect. There has been, as far as I'm aware, no verified detection of longitudinal waves, but it's possible that that's because the subject might be classified.

e) in his 1950s "gravity radio", radiation produced by a (small, desk-sized, not city-sized) massive high-K radio antenna, which might or might not be the same thing as (c). If in fact the Gravity Radio really worked as Townsend described it in his letters, it certainly didn't need a black hole to produce this radiation or a detector the size of LIGO to receive it.

e) in his 1930s-1950s "differential electrometer" and his 1970s-1980s "petrovoltiacs", not even an actual "radiation" but rather just an abstract statistical correlation between a slowly time-varying electric field in a detector, and with various astronomical alignments of the Earth with the Sun, moon, and stars. The electrical signals that were correlated with the stars specifically being assumed to be caused by "sidereal radiation" - radiation from either the stars or the space between the stars. And if from the space between the stars, then that might be the same thing as (a) or (b). Note that GR does not predict any form of gravitational radiation from space itself - the radiation in GR travels through space, but has to originate from a point source of very rapidly moving matter or very rapidly changing energy.

I'm a Townsend fan, and I very much want to believe that he detected something strange and real which the GR community completely missed, and which is, perhaps, being put to use in some classified military communications system. But I don't think it helps our case at all to confuse his very specific and idiosyncratic - and very pre-Einsteinian - ideas about gravity, with what Einstein and Einstein's followers in the GR community actually taught and predicted and are now, after over a hundred years of being soaked in Einstein's ideas, claiming to have detected.

If Townsend Brown's ideas of gravitational radiation are compatible with Einstein's GR, then we now have the quite large problem of explaining why the post-1950s GR Renaissance community - with military sponsorship and the top scientific brains in the world, in multiple countries on both sides of the Cold War - apparently came to the conclusion that GR forbids these ideas.

Regards, Nate

[Paul Schatzkin]

I'm a Townsend fan, and I very much want to believe that he detected something strange and real which the GR community completely missed, and which is, perhaps, being put to use in some classified military communications system. But I don't think it helps our case at all to confuse his very specific and idiosyncratic - and very pre-Einsteinian - ideas about gravity, with what Einstein and Einstein's followers in the GR community actually taught and predicted and are now, after over a hundred years of being soaked in Einstein's ideas, claiming to have detected.

Whew.

Thanks Nate, for this very detailed and illuminating dissertation.

I see what you mean re: confusing what TTB was possibly on to with the whole GR perspective, but it gets confusing for me from there because 'bending the space time continuum' with 'synthetic gravitation' is central to how I've been able to wrap my head around any of this. But I can also see how what TTB was postulating is outside the realm of GR.

I also want to believe - and do believe - that he "detected something strange and real which the GR community completely missed, and which is, perhaps, being put to use in some classified military communications.." I think there are several instances throughout the narrative where others concurred with that premise – starting with Paul Biefeld in the Navy affidavit in (I forget now what year that was).

So like you I do believe that we are confronting something, we're just not sure what, and I guess I confused that something with the whole LIGO / gravitational waves business.

--PS

[Jan Lundquist]

Townsend wrote On the Possibilities of Optical-frequency Gravitational Radiation in 1976

https://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/radiate/optical.htm

It seems to have taken a a half century for public science to catch up. Among the numerous papers that have been published in the past decade are such reports as On the Generation and Detection of High-Frequency Gravitational Waves Optically Excited in Dielectric Media*, an, more recently, High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Detection via Optical Frequency Modulation**

This latter paper, from CERN, opens with what seems to me to be a most startling sentence:

Our Universe is filled with gravitational waves (GWs) which render space and time themselves highly non-static.

I suspect this is what Townsend Brown knew all along.


*Vladimir Gladyshev et al. 2018 https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... 0analyzed.

**Bringmann et al. 2023 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.10579.pdf

[Jan Lundquist]

This is a worthy read. https://physicsdetective.com/lifters/

For example the Wikipedia Anti-gravity article says “Anti-gravity is often used to refer to devices that look as if they reverse gravity even though they operate through other means, such as lifters, which fly in the air by moving air with electromagnetic fields”. Oh come on. Antigravity is antigravity. For example you create an artificial gravitational field, then when it’s vertical and it balances the Earth’s gravitational field, things don’t fall down:

[Paul Schatzkin]

Hey Jan...

I'm just going through the fora to see what to bring forward to the main website and I saw this one and spent a little time link-following.

On top of that there’s the 2003 Wired article on The Antigravity Underground. Note this: “Brown’s scientific credibility crumbled when, obsessed with UFOs and their means of propulsion, he founded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena to hunt for little green men”.

https://www.wired.com/2003/08/pwr-antigravity.

That's behind a paywall so I pulled a .pdf:

https://www.ttbrown.com/files/AGUnderground.pdf

I guess... once a prairie chicken, always a prairie chicken....

--PS

[Jan Lundquist]

“Brown’s scientific credibility crumbled when, obsessed with UFOs and their means of propulsion, he founded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena to hunt for little green men

”

This is one of the Big Myths that have shaped the public's impression of Townsend.

The first and biggest of them all is that he "left" the Navy in 1943 because he had a nervous breakdown. But we can be certain that Townsend's publicly proposed Temple Hill lab was an elaborate front for the actual Wonderland lab where the analysis of the MEP test results would take place. . Townsend's prior experience with the Thorium reactor project at PNY would have qualified him to be read into the project.

The next Big Myth is that he returned from Hawaii to peddle flying saucers and sell stock tips to civilians. Pshaw. He arrived with a whole Space based Reconnaissance R&D program roughed out in his mind, if only the USAF would let go of their death grip on Space.

The Third Big Myth is that Townsend's abiding interest in UFOs drove him to create NICAP. More likely, he saw that the U-2 spy plane flights were going to generate many UFO reports and that an organization like NICAP would be ideal collection point for them.

The Fourth Big Myth is that his death was a pitiable one of ignomy and poverty. I think he scripted it wonderfully well. As his death approached, he organized his papers, handing off a subset to some mysterious organization that was honored by his personal visit; and leaving a selective significant few behind for Linda to share in a more public legacy.

And, though there were not a lot of elder care options on Catalina, he created his own loving, supportive hospice environment by moving into the Quonset hut with Linda, George, and Jennifer. He would leave his Jo in their hands to support her through the days, weeks, years ahead. He walked the beach and took Linda to see his final chosen resting place in the Avalon Cemetary (4 star Yelp reviews!)

We should all have such a conscious dying experience when the time comes.




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