Hollington & Kyprianou

Simon's Weblog

Monday 11th August .Day 9

I have just returned from London, I feel I must mention the unusual occurrences of the weekend.
Essentially this was the hottest weekend in England since records began. Friday’s temperatures only being surpassed by Saturday, with Sunday finally achieving above the 100 degrees mark. It was quite remarkable. London was burning; its inhabitants driven to new levels of animalistic and chaotic behaviour. Six people are alleged to have died of the heat alone; god knows how many died at the hands of fellow humans, driven to murderous extremes by the insufferable temperatures.
The infrastructure is collapsing, and with the developing extreme meteorological patterns I feel no government will ever take on the necessary work to upgrade it, even by piecemeal.

It was so hot that, for the first time, the citizens of my street left their front doors open in the vain attempt to elicit a through draught, a draught that did not exist. In the cities we no longer breathe air, but thick, humid smog, devoid of oxygen. It is more like a soup, a primordial soup rather than an atmosphere fit for modern Homo Sapiens.
I can’t speak for global warming, as I have not travelled the globe, and so have only scientific orthodoxy and unorthodoxy to rely on, but one thing is for sure, that times are a changing.

What we, me and Kyp are investigating could be part of the solution, or could be part of the problem. I don’t really know, there is not enough verifiable data out there. There are lots of cranks, who claim force fields are all part of the clean energy / perpetual motion machine/ Tesla axis that makes up one of the central planks of fringe science and its unwarranted adoption by conspiracy theorists.

Much of the time, the maths of fringe science just doesn’t add up, and it seems that a lot of these people have skipped both the first and more importantly second law of thermodynamics. However, maybe this is needed to progress our understanding of the universe. After all didn’t Einstein, at the end of his life, recant his dismissal of dark matter, and consider his original stance to be his greatest mistake. Some laws are just there to be broken, and without the dismissal of accepted orthodoxy, humans would have been unlikely ever to have left their caves, let alone land on the moon.

For me, science like art means nothing unless there is a utopian intent, and with the displacement of Newtonian physics by the far more, in a way, philosophical quantum mechanics, art and science are at a strange cross roads.

Everyone understands art these days, even if it is by total dismissal, whereas science feels like it has just entered its maturity and so has replaced the traditional modernist position of art, that of extending the boundaries of human philosophy.

I just feel that it is not just our reason or logic that is being stretched, it is our ability to act upon it. Karl Popper talks of ‘clocks and clouds’ in relation to Newtonian and quantum physics, and that neither allow any scope for true free will. We are either trapped in the pre-ordained mechanical ‘Clockwork’ universe of Newton, or are cast adrift in the abstract and chaotic sea of a quantum universe, where our individual actions amount to an exhalation of breath in a hurricane.

At this point, now back in The Forest, where it is still too hot to move, and I think of my neighbours in London, their doors wide open waiting not for a murderer, or a burglar to enter their house, but a simple, breeze, I am reminded of a quote from the situationists (who may lack in substance but had a damn good way with words). It again brings into focus why I got involved with the invisible force field experiments in the first place, why extreme science seems so important.

‘To make the world dance, first you have to turn off the music’.

Maybe the best way to truly open people’s eyes, we need to create the invisible.

Enough already, I need to sleep. The heat will not let me, but I need to try. The silence of the forest still disturbs me. There is no human sound, only that of animals, wailing under the moon and the unbelievable temperature.
I know I have only been here for one week, but I feel I could never get used to the quiet.
At least in a city you are never allowed to hear all of your own thoughts.

Tuesday 12th. Day 10.

Today the temperature had dropped a little, not enough not to cause a slight overheating in the refrigeration unit, but enough for us to monitor it without constantly wiping the sweat from our eyes. With minor tweaking it held up, and the magnatron seemed to be in working order. In the afternoon we tried some minor experiments with the auxiliary electromagnets. They held up fine, but again the temperature level in the main coil was a bit high. It is hard to tell in this heat whether it is a technical malfunction or environmental conditions.
I must admit, I’m not sure if Kyp’s maths adds up. I need to go through them with him again tomorrow. There is something, and I am not quite sure what, that I feel uncomfortable with. The ampage is fine, I’ve been through that with a fine toothcomb. It’s the required humidity levels that leave me unconvinced. However I am sure by trial and error we shall know soon. I think it may just be the heat, but I am becoming increasingly worried that we have missed something very important in our calculations.

Tonight was a full moon, and so an excellent opportunity to test just how sensitive our light receiving diode circuit is.
There are no streetlights round here, and all the other residents seem to go to sleep early, so it was just the moon and the stars.
Luckily, there was no wind, and so the bushes and trees were stoically silent which gave us pretty good testing conditions.
These diodes picked up not only the merest hint of cloud travelling in front of the moon, but also a strange formation of military helicopters. Flying in formation, in some strange stealth operation, one tiny light each flashing on their fuselage. You could hear them way before you could pick them out in the dark sky above us.

Kyp reminded me of the story of the development of radar at the beginning of the Second World War. Basically, it was a minority sport, and the military and the Government put very little faith in it and allocated funds accordingly. Anyway these two chaps managed not only to develop one, but finally got the top brass down to witness it. Not relying on chance, the said top brass organised a flyover of I think a Lancaster bomber, a big machine that should be easily detectable.

So all these chief of staff are in this cramped room, with these two scientists, looking at a small round screen, a flat line on a grid waiting for a peak and an audible beep. They waited for something like ten minutes, looking at their watches, knowing that the aeroplane should be overhead any minute.
The display remained stubbornly static.
It was as the sound of approaching droning engines were heard clearly inside the bunker that the radar finally woke up and gave a solitary ‘blip’ and went back to it’s rest.
Obviously, on hearing the aircraft fly almost overhead before the radar reacted, the military top brass left in disgust, and refused to
fund the project any further.

Eventually the radar experiments were funded to a far greater degree, and put into production within a years time, but only after they had been proved to work by two blokes working in a shed.

Wednesday 13th Day 11.

Finally the temperature has dropped to a bearable degree.
Our refrigeration unit was on its last legs, and if it blew, so would the magnatron and belly up goes the experiment.
The power fluctuated a couple of times, and the back up generator failed to kick in. So most of today was spent tinkering with it.
It seemed that one of the sumps had given in.
By chance we had another sump and the replacing of the faulty one was quite easy, although as we did it there was a brief electrical storm. It was quite a worry that the grid would be taken out, being as we are, in the country.
Our worries were ill founded, and we got the generator
up and running and back on line within a couple of hours.

Thursday 14th day 12.

The day started with a difficult breakfast with Kyp.
We heard on the world service that half of the electrical grid went down in the northeast seaboard of America.
I’m not surprised it did, it was an accident waiting to happen. The state of the ailing infrastructure and the power hungry habits of our American cousins has been apparent for a long time. I mean it happened a couple of years ago, albeit on a lesser scale in California, and it was caused purely by demand outstripping the ability to deliver.
Kyp got a bit agitated over this and almost spit out his toast.
Kyp, for all his natural intelligence, always allows the personal to be secondary to his logic, and his logic is often based on, what some would see as paranoia, and others would see as the deep and ugly truth. Anyway, Kyp claimed that some cult armed with Tesla coils took out the whole network, and it was no accident at all.
Now, I’m not saying this is not possible or indeed probable, but I need more evidence to let me believe this.
When I explained this to Kyp, he merely did the old the gag about measuring a circle from any point, which I have heard many times before, and although momentarily arresting, and often applicable to many abstract conundrums, does not mean that just because the American Government has finally been forced to admit (although they are still blaming the Canadians, which I suspect will be proved false) that they are running the power delivery system into the ground due to non interventionist policies and to keep up short term profit margins.

Now Kyp’s logic, which is not without its basis in truth, is that ALL governments constantly lie, and if they are admitting that they and the big energy companies are all part of the same cabal, with shared interests and agendas, that it is all a double bluff, the reality of the situation being something like some terrorist cult have launched a spectacular attack on Americas economic infrastructure armed with home made Tesla coils. We’ve all heard that one before, and I’m sure will do again. The truth of the matter is that most empires fall due to the inertial decline of their political, bureaucratic and trade systems, and not due to the intervention of any form of revolutionary science. Japan maybe have been the only exception to this.

Anyway, after we breakfasted we went to the lab.
I spent most of the morning running through our maths.
Most of it seemed to be bang on. I must admit that I am glad we decided on the static induced force field as opposed to the cold plasma option.
At least the static way has a chance of working, not that cold plasma does not. It has been proved to work, but our initial theories of ways of producing the amount of cold plasma needed would have proved to have been totally inadequate, and we just could not have manufactured anywhere near the volume needed.

I guess we just got excited about producing it in a table top Pyrex bowl, like NASA have. However we soon realised that we are not in the business of rocket science and do not have two million dollars to throw at it. Ionised particles, whatever the ampage seems far more reasonable. At the end of the day, it’s just electricity, humidity and air of which, unlike our American cousins, we in England have plenty of all three.
Unless of course you are in London, then you have an abundance of two, but a stifling lack of one.

The Maths took me most of the day, while Kyp booted up the magnatron and tested the oscillator coil.
By the looks of things we will be able to run an active test next week, but not here. We will need to go into the heart of the forest, away from any kind of built up area. However much Sway gives me the creeps, I don’t wish to wipe out an entire village due to a misplaced decimal point.
Kyp is a bit more gung-ho, but this is not always a bad thing.
I guess he drives the experiments on, and he has a vision of achieving the impossible, which he believes only takes a little more time than achieving the possible. For example, at the local pub, this evening, he has convinced me to reconfigure the magnatron, and do some anti-gravity experiments.
For some reason, (that’s a lie, I know the reason, I have always been obsessed with replicating a static zero G environment I made, albeit briefly a few years ago) I agreed, and so now we are carrying out two experiments instead of one.

Tonight I will not sleep. Not due to the heat, which thankfully has ebbed, or fear of failure within the invisible force field experiments, and not of nightmares of falling, but of fantastic thoughts of flying. To escape ‘ the surly bonds of earth’, we do not need to go to the moon, but in a way, we need to bring the moon to us. We should not send the chosen few ordained to act for all mankind to tell us what we are missing, but it should be made available to all of us, every single being on the planet.

The birds have started singing, so dawn is near.
I think this might all turn out well after all.
I need to go back to London again tomorrow, I have several meetings to attend throughout the weekend. You never know, there might even be a breeze awaiting me back in the city.