The Structure of Space treatment.

[Jan Lundquist]

Halfway through book 2, and still enjoying the fresh take. Kudos on sticking with the deciphering the SoS document. Maybe I will be able to make sense of it now, when/if I read it again.

[natecull]

Kudos on sticking with the deciphering the SoS document. Maybe I will be able to make sense of it now, when/if I read it again.

Hi Jan. Is it possible to get hold of a copy of Structure of Space? I remember this as one of the "holy grail" Townsend documents and I'm trying to remember if I ever did manage to read it, or not. If I did, I think it must not have registered on my mind as unexpected, but I'd love to recheck my assumptions.

What does stick in my mind, whether from SoS or somewhere else, is that Townsend was one of, I think, a small number of people who were deeply interested in the idea of a variable speed of light mediated by the Permeability and Permittivity of the vacuum. This is sometimes called a "polarizable vacuum" model and is quite an "old-school", "ether" approach to electromagnetics and gravity. It is very simple and intuitive and therefore is deeply unfashionable in today's complex and baffling modern physics. Nevertheless, I find myself attracted to it.

Someone who has (self) published quite recently on this model is Larry Reed, in the book "Quantum Wave Mechanics", of which several chapters are available for free online. Larry Reed seems to describe himself as "a retired aerospace engineer" from Lockheed Martin.

See: https://independent.academia.edu/LarryReed

[Jan Lundquist]

Thanks, Nate. I will take a look at it and it's always helpful to know the mindset someone brings to their work.

I hope the SoS is out there, somewhere accessible. Did you look in the old TTB documents Library that Andrew Bolland started?

I once looked at in a quick glassy-eyed, mathophobic, way and saw it as a guide for radar/antenna design. Paul, after meditating on it for years, has apparently figured out something deeper.

[Paul Schatzkin]

Is it possible to get hold of a copy of Structure of Space? I remember this as one of the "holy grail" Townsend documents and I'm trying to remember if I ever did manage to read it, or not. If I did, I think it must not have registered on my mind as unexpected, but I'd love to recheck my assumptions.

To the best of my knowledge, 'Structure of Space' is NOT available from any public forum, digital or analog.

And.... well, ya know what?

That's all I'm gonna say (publicly) on the subject.

--PS

[natecull]

To the best of my knowledge, 'Structure of Space' is NOT available from any public forum, digital or analog.

And.... well, ya know what?

That's all I'm gonna say (publicly) on the subject.

After a search, it appears that I have located a copy of a document that begins with "Part II: Structure of Space". It appears to be a journal from 1943. This is the document that I was looking for in March.

I'm never quite sure what is and is not allowed to be discussed about this subject, or why. Given your comment above, would I be breaking some kind of unwritten rule of the Townsend Brown club by posting a link to this document?

Regards, Nate

[Jan Lundquist]

I say post it. Townsend was a civilian, the document is not classified nor copyrighted, though some of the docs on the family website are.

From my POV, SoS is directly related to the the Temple Hill/Wonderland Lab that would be for "the study of cosmic radiation of all kinds." No one needed to know that it was also going to be the film analysis lab for the A-bomb tests. Would telemetry have been the hot new thing, then?

[Paul Schatzkin]

i’m going to feature it on the primary website this week.

[Paul Schatzkin]

Done:

https://www.ttbrown.com/structure-of-space/

--PS

[Jan Lundquist]

Thanks, Paul.

Odd that these Part 2 notes, though dated 1943, were included with Journal V, which seems to have been compiled in the 'seventies.

Also, I could though the SOS document I saw was related to antennae and communications, but if it was the same as this Part 2, clearly it wasn't. I should have paid more attention the first time.

[Paul Schatzkin]

I don't see what you're getting at there, Jan.

The 'antenna' was part 1of the 'Vega Notebooks'.

Structure of Space was part 2.

Neither of those papers has anything to do (directly?) with the notebooks started in the 1950s, which is what else is on the RexResearch site. I have no idea how/why they got lumped together.

--PS

[natecull]

Neat! By the way, I made a transcription of the SoS document, which might make it easier to read.

I feel like Townsend's physical ideas expressed in Sos are...... well. They're certainly bold. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're anywhere near correct.

He's taking one very specific idea (Faraday's concept of electrogravity, I believe) and absolutely pushing it as hard and as far as it could possibly go. In fact, he pushes it the same way Faraday did: not only trying to make electric potential exactly equal gravitational potential, but also to make electricity itself not be a dual force (negative/positive) but simply a non-dual force (just "amount of space pressure"). Thinking about the potentials is fine, but he's not even thinking about magnetic vector potential at all. That.... feels like it's pushing too far to possibly work, for me. I just don't know. It is extremely simple. It feels too simple. Every high school kid has thought of this, right?

But. I will say that there are very strong hints of "Structure of Space" in weirdly Townsend-adjacent books like Deyo's "Cosmic Conspiracy". (Specifically the part where Deyo lays out a metaphor for gravity being like density/flotation in water, and I've always wondered "huh? Why? That's not how we think gravity works, at all! Who told you that?"). And I'm sure I've seen that idea in "the weird literature" elsewhere. I can see how that idea could have come into the weird physics community straight from reading Structure of Space, which means copies must have been floating around in the late 1970s (again: see William Moore, isn't that when he copied the TTB notebooks?)

Moore copying the TTB notebooks -> and/or the Psychotronics CIA/Navy community meeting Townsend -> people in the fringe physics world reading Structure of Space and the notebooks -> the late-70s New Age scene (who were already thinking about gravity as a mechanism for psi, because EM was not working) getting all excited about Townsend Brown's "nervous system of the universe", and then going all off in different directions from there.... that might be the simplest explanation for the way some of his weirder ideas, like "gravity = flotation", seem to have filtered into the psi and UFO scenes.

I am not convinced however, that just because TTB wrote someting in a notebook, that he meant it to be completely taken seriously. Or, if he did take it seriously, that he had the ear of the Universe and that the Universe was taking him seriously.

Nate

[Paul Schatzkin]

Neat! By the way, I made a transcription of the SoS document, which might make it easier to read.

Wow. That's some neat work, Nate. When I started looking at the document over the weekend I wondered "how can we digitize this..? And look... you've already done it. Thank you

If you have no objection, I am going to add that file to the post (with credit where it is due!)

Thanks,

--PS

[Jan Lundquist]

Nate, you are a hero. Having this transcription will make it available to the whole generation that was never taught cursive!

Paul, Thank you. Yes, this must have been the document I recall from that era:

The 'antenna' was part 1of the 'Vega Notebooks

I have not spend much time delving into Townsend's Vega/Lockheed work, though I see a poetic resonance in the fact that Lockheed would later design and build the high altitude recon aircraft flown by the US throughout the Cold War. In addition to photo reconnaissance, the U-2 was also tasked with collecting evidence from nuclear tests that were being carried out within the Soviet Union.

[natecull]

If you have no objection, I am going to add that file to the post (with credit where it is due!)

You're very welcome! But, I just checked and I think I've lost some images.

Edit: I uploaded two replacement files, but there were still some typos in the first part, so here's a single-file corrected version. I think this is the best I can get so far.


Regards, Nate

[natecull]

A weird idea that occurs to me, which may or may not be helpful:

Edit: Yeah, it's probably not helpful and distracting at this point, so I've removed it. It owes more to Tom Bearden than to Townsend Brown, so let's table it for much later if ever. (The idea was "what if mu, like the magnetic vector potential, were a vector rather than a scalar", and the "what would that imply" is "I dunno". I do feel that there's probably a deep connection between the electromagnetic potential 4-form and the way pre-Einstein quaternion form of spacetime, and I am fascinated by the idea of the quaternion nabla, but it also disturbs me because how it mixes vectors and pseudovectors in one algebraic form just ain't right. And probably tensors and/or geometric algebra can do more things than quaternions can with the exception of being a division algebra, and we still don't quite know what division would bring to physics. I mean, it's amazing to me that we don't know this! But this whole thing is not the trail of reasoning that Townsend Brown ever seemed to follow himself.)

Nate