William Rockefeller, the father of John D. Rockefeller, the man who stabilized the price of oil after the civil war making the incredible industrial expansion of the United States possible, was, in the euphemistic words of the Rockefeller Family history, a man who spent his life "busy with trading expeditions and the herb- and patent-medicine vending." According to more general accounts, including those of his son, he disappeared for long periods of time into the vast American frontier, always returning with a pocketful of gold coins (which he would give one each to his sons, and then spend the rest of the time he was there trying to cheat them out of it by guile or other means, some of the best lessons he ever learned, John D. later said). General accounts have William as a snake oil salesman, one of those guys running around with a buckboard selling bottles of elixir out of the back. Snake oil, whose origin is claimed for China, in America came from the surface puddling of petroleum, and actually did have beneficial affects. However, given the fact that snake oil was of China, and given that its sister medicine, a group called patent medicines was actually just about anything with a flashy name containing laudanum, which is opium, I suspect the snake oil was also laced with laudanum and that William didn't run around with a buckboard, but actually manufactured and bottled the stuff on the rim of advancing civilization. After all, he came from a family that had roots going back a hundred years and possessed a medical education. The fact that laudanum was eventually outlawed demonstrated that, even if it had no medicinal value, the people were getting what they paid for.
However, snake oil came to be used as a term for a rip off, taking money by making extravagant promises, then never delivering on those promises. One of the biggest rip offs of recent times that readily comes to mind, is the Superconducting Super Collider project. Like all of empirical science projects, the Superconducting Super Collider project promised to uncover the final secrets of the universe. More, it promised a panacea for mankind, analogizing itself to the electrification of the world as a result of, oh, I don't know, Maxwell's equations, perhaps, and forecasting similar technological advances. The project was formulated deep in the bowels of the empirical community, first at a 1982 meeting sponsored by the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society (boy, those societies sure know how to butter their bread) and gained widespread credence when Cornell and Berkeley,. seeing the green, jumped on board followed closely by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel in 1983.
The idea was to use superconducting magnets in a particle accelerator, not just some sniveling little accelerator that would fit on the corner of a college campus, but one that would provide enough employment for a dozen campuses. Intent on its empirical goal of naming, the first stage was to create an injection complex, a tunnel .15 miles long. That's not long is it? Pretty good start. The next stage was the first in the circular accelerator group, the Low Energy Booster, a tunnel a third of a mile in circumference. Not too big either. Next came the Medium Energy Booster, a tunnel 2.5 miles in circumference (these guys sure know how to keep the buckboard in town a long time), then the High Energy Booster, a tunnel 6.7 miles in circumference. Enough? Not on our pocketbook, it isn't. Finally, the collider ring was added, a tunnel an astounding 54 miles in circumference.
Now comes the really important part of the experiment. It generated more than 45,000 contracts in 48 states. Talk about political science! The laboratory staff itself amounted to over 2,000 credentialed empirical scientists. The axe fell abruptly in 1993, but not before over 11 billion dollars was spent on it, with the huge circular holes deep under the Texas ground presumably used as a depository for empirical knowledge, which means they're empty.
A second, a rip off that's been going on forever, is the Tokamak, the absurd idea of controlled fusion, confine it within a magnetic field. I won't go into this, but there a million and a half references on Google. Multiply that by 20,000 and you'll probably come close to how many bucks this little piece of chicanery has diverted into empirical science's pockets, I compute 30 billion or so, and believe me, computation is something empirical science is really good at. There's little chance this boondoggle will continue for much longer, so the empirical community has been casting around for another way to siphon our funds into its already bulging pockets, and it's come up with one that dwarfs digging huge tunnels or making expensive failed experiments more expensive on the promise they'll succeed, and the distance here is incredible, no less than 62,000 miles. This is the space elevator, a proposition so preposterous, us drones will mindlessly buy it at any price, and clap while we're being fleeced. It has several problems that simply can't be overcome, but that's never a problem with inventive empiricists greedy for jobs, grants, and honors.
The idea originated with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky after he looked at the Eiffel Tower and envisioned it held in a geosynchronous orbit with a cable. Something in a geosynchronous orbit circles the Earth in exactly one day, so it has to be attached to the equator, or so Newtonian Mechanics would dictate. According to NASA's Website, where space elevator appears under the heading of Audacious & Outrageous, although NASA itself is putting together plans for what is already an existing project all the same, articles were published in 1960 and 1967 and a technical paper in 1975. The technical paper caught the eye of that comparable science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke. Author Arthur, you see, lived in Sri Lanka, which is pretty close to the equator where the space elevator would have to be attached.
Without referring to Clarke's recent troubles with the authorities in his land of choice, I'll never forget the story Julia Phillips, the producer of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, tells of her 1981 visit to Clarke on Sri Lanka in You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (Signet, 1991). While the title refers to the fact that after the book is published, no one will ever take a deal with her again (lunch is where deals are made in Hollywood), Phillips was there because Clarke was her idol and she wanted him to write the screenplay for a sequel to Close Encounters. A committed drug addict, she was traveling with another committed drug addict, a man, and the first thing he did when he got to the hotel was to try to procure some drugs. No matter how many pushers he approached, he found the only thing they pushed to tourists were young boys. Later, while attending the Perahera, a giant celebration of the locals, she noted that Clarke kept "readjusting his sarong, a discreet flasher" which makes her think,"Never meet your idols." Clarke popularized the space elevator in his 1978 novel, Fountains of Paradise, which takes place on a Sri Lanka located on the equator, and we all know that when it comes to empirical science, science fiction trumps reality.
Bruited as now being possible because of the development (empirical science's definition of technological breakthroughs in spite of their theoretical impossibility) of carbon nanotubes. These nanotubes would be strung together into a 62,000 mile wire on the end of which would be placed a counterweight, note the term weight, which would, as a result of the centrifugal force of the Earth's rotation, hold the wire taught. Then, electromagnetic cargo cars would run up and down the cable, delivering everything, including the kitchen sink, into orbit at little or no cost.
This is just so wrong, I don't know where to begin, but I know where not to begin. Discussing the technology of the carbon nanotubes or the electromagnetic cargo cars would be similar to discussing the technology involved in boring giant circular holes in the Texas underground. It's not relevant, but if the principles involved were accurate, I have no doubt the technological community could produce satisfactory results. The problem is that the principles involved defy both conventional empirical wisdom, and practically any wisdom anyone wants to apply.
The example of the centrifugal force popularly used is taking a bucket of water and whirling it around in an arc that takes it upside down over your head. The water stays in the bucket because of the force your exerting on the bottom of the bucket by whirling it around.
Hold that thought in mind, because this is what the counter weight is supposed to do, the force of it swirling around out there 62,000 miles will make the thread of carbon nanotubes so taught, the magnetic cars can climb up and down it.
Now let's go back to Newton's, and the world's, Celestial Mechanics. All the motion in the solar system was imparted to it by a swirling mass of gas, or dust, or whatever, and that motion is contained in the objects moving in the form of momentum. We all know the basic law of motion dealing with momentum, it will be affected by a force acting upon it. This isn't Newton's law, it's an observation as old as recorded history, and it's embodied in my all-encompassing law of motion, that everything comes to rest with respect to the forces acting upon it.
So, the Earth is rotating on its axis as a result of the momentum imparted to it a supposed multi-billion years ago, and anything that would work to affect that momentum would slow the Earth down. That's why meteorology is such a dismal mess, the surface of the Earth can't be causing friction with the atmosphere, otherwise the atmosphere would slow it down, and as a result, meteorologists leave this obvious fact out of their absurdly complex models, coming up with all sorts of explanations for wind and, for that matter, the weather.
Getting back to swirling a bucket around in an arc over our head, how long do the empirical fantasists think anyone could keep this up? Apparently forever, because they think the Earth's momentum could swing a counterweight around in a circle with a 66,000-mile radius without affecting the momentum of the Earth. I'm sure if they ever have to seriously confront the issue, which makes me a fantasist to even contemplate the notion, I'm sure they'd come up with some sort of mathematical equation that proves the affect on the momentum would be in the nature of one nanosecond every ten thousand years. But I got to tell you, if the atmosphere, which touches the Earth at every point on its surface with quite a bit of force, can be ignored, so can this little problem with the counterweight.
So let's look at another feature of Celestial Mechanics, one I covered in column 10-06. Newton's genius was that he envisioned a cannon shooting off a cannonball. If too little force were applied, the cannonball would never make it off the Earth. If too much, it would disappear into space. When just the right amount of force is applied, it inserts itself into an orbit around the Earth, i.e., just like the moon's orbit, so that's what the moon's orbit is, a big old orbiting cannonball. The notion here is the momentum of the moon's motion, obtained, Newton said from God, empiricists say from a swirling mass of gas, exactly balances, through some mystery of the universe, at least that part of it that practices empirical science here on Earth, the force of attraction between the two bodies. That means the moon has momentum that is constantly being overcome.
So, we shoot the counterweight into orbit and attach it to the carbon nanotube thread. Where's it going to get the force to pull the thread taught? It's got enough force to get in orbit, and presumably stay in orbit, although there hasn't yet been a satellite that stayed in orbit without the application of current force to keep it in orbit. So, where's the math that computes the amount of force that will have to be exerted on the counterweight to get it to stay in orbit? Well, let's concede that half the time the cargo cars will be ferrying up fuel to keep the counterweight in orbit, what happens if the, let's call it a counterweight rocket, needs a little bit of maintenance. These things have been known to fail. What might happen to our space elevator?
Hmmm. Picture a guy with a yo-yo doing around the world (okay, I used to yo-yo, and actually won a few contests). In around the world, the idea is to position string on the finger so it turns with the yo-yo. If something keeps the string from turning, the yo-yo will quickly travel in ever-shorter arcs until it reels the yo-yo in, hitting your hand painfully. The opposite will happen to the counterweight rocket with the same result. The Earth will keep turning at 1,000 mph, and the counterweight rocket won't. As it lags behind, the 62,000 mile long thread will wrap itself around the Earth, crashing everything in exactly 2 days 8 hours (62,000-1/2 Earth's radius or 4,000, equals 58,000, with one day equaling 25,000 miles, the circumference of the Earth at the equator). Because it would take that time to ferry the technicians up on an increasingly unstable nanotube thread as it wrapped itself around the Earth, looks like we'll have to maintain a permanent space station at the counterweight, which is now a counterweight, rocket, space station.
What a delightful wallet stuffer all this folderol makes.
I should, for the sake of completeness, mention a few things in passing. Since we have been sending stuff up into orbit around the Earth, and since we did so using Celestial Mechanics, we've lost so much stuff up there that it's often referred to as a flying junkyard. Even the stuff we maintain in orbit with jet blasts is subject to unexpected stresses. While this has been clearly associated with solar flaring on the sun, something that would produce an increase in the Earth's temperature, and by my lights, an increase in gravity, empirical science says, the solar flares cause the atmosphere to expand, and the atoms affect the satellites motion. So, let's see, solid atmosphere here on Earth can't affect it's momentum, but itty bitty atoms of atmosphere can slow a satellite down in space. If the long-range result of ignorance weren't extinction, empirical science's stupidity would make me laugh to death.
In any event, what's going to happen when one of those uncharted pieces of space junk slices through the carbon nanotube thread?
And finally, not to suggest it's even possible on the equator, where the weather is just peachy, what would a Katrina-like storm do to it?
And, I guess the cargo cars, and the contents had better not contain anything that attracts lightning. Oh, wait. Their propulsion systems are electromagnetic. Another 20 billion dollar project, researching lightning rods for electromagnetic cargo cars used on the space elevator.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com