The Realist's Dilemma

CHAPTER ONE

For more than thirty years, I've been working in high technology areas - rocketry, space flight, aviation, ad­vanced industrial processes, electronic instruments, and space industrialization, among others. I've managed an industrial research laboratory, designed escape pods for pilots of supersonic aircraft, and been involved in high-technology marketing. None of these jobs existed in 1885. In fact, these scientific and technical areas would have been considered "magic" as recently as a hundred years ago, and I would have been tagged a wizard or, even worse, a witch.

Mind Machines You Can Build

Many people still believe or would like to believe that much of the modern technology with which they must cope every day has indeed been created by wizards and witches.

We've all encountered machinery that seems to be magical or that doesn't or shouldn't work because our common sense or expertise tells us so. But in my career as an industrial research scientist and an engineer deal­ing with far-out areas of advanced high-tech, I've run onto a series of baffling, frustrating, and vexing machines and devices that shouldn't work at all according to what we presently know about the Universe.

But they do.

Sometimes they don't work for everyone. But they do work for some people.

The apparent fact that some things work for some people but not for others doesn't bother me. Although I enjoy good brass band music, I can't get a single mu­sical note to come from a trumpet. Some people can, and some people can't. But playing the trumpet isn't a magi­cal feat. It is mystical, however, as we'll see later. But people can teach other people how to do it. Perhaps I can't get music out of a trumpet because I've never been trained to play the trumpet. But I can't get music to come out of a trumpet or a violin.

I'm a "grubby-handed engineer." I can build things that work. I can usually discover why something doesn't work when it quits, and I can usually manage to fix it or

The Realist's Dilemma

get it working well enough to get me to a place where a real expert can make it work properly again. I'm at home in a scientific meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences as well as at the controls of an airplane. I'm a pragmatic and skeptical person. I've run onto a lot of wild and wonderful devices that don't work as claimed. But if a gadget works, I'll use it.

So I'm not a mystic in the way I look at the world around me. Murphy's Law notwithstanding, I believe that if something works in a demonstrable and reason­ably repeatable manner, there must be a reason why because the Universe isn't a place that behaves capri­ciously. Murphy's Law exists and the Universe only seems to be capricious occasionally because we still don't know everything there is to know about it. The nine­teenth century philosophy of materialism says that we do indeed know everything there is to know about the Universe, but that belief seems to be incredibly presump­tuous. As J.B.S. Haldane has observed, the Universe is not only stranger than we know, it's stranger than we can possibly imagine.

I've collected enough data and conducted enough experiments with these amazing gadgets now that it's time to put all the data together in a book so that other people with inquiring minds and an open outlook on the Universe can also try them for themselves.

Mind Machines You Can Build

But I didn't write this for mystics or for those who dabble in the occult. This is a collection of how-to instruc­tions for demonstrable gadgets that are somehow based upon technology we don't understand yet.

We don't know why or how some of these de­vices work, but apparently they work reliably for a large number of people. Scientists haven't explained them yet. But you don't have to accept the reality of these devices on blind faith. By following the directions given herein, you can build the strange device, test it, and determine for yourself whether or not it's a hoax.

Some of these machines may be precursors to the big scientific breakthroughs of the future. After all, the early parlor experiments with electricity and magnetism in the late eighteenth century are still used today in grade school and high school science classes to provide a back­ground for understanding electronics, radio, television, and computers.

I can't tell you what particular scientific principles these devices demonstrate because 1 don't know what the science of the twenty-first century will be all about. I'm a futurist but not a prophet. My crystal ball is very cloudy indeed when I try to look beyond the year 2010.

But I can tell you something about the basic principles behind scientific methodology that will be as valid tomorrow as they are today:

The Realist's Dilemma

The solid edifice called "Science" that looks so imposing and monolithic when viewed from a distance really isn't that way at all when you get close to it. As Dr. William O. Davis pointed out in 1962, "Science is a cracked and sagging edifice built upon the constantly shifting sands of theory." It's in the process of being continually built, re-built, modified, remodeled, and changed. Like New York City or the United States of America, it's never finished.

However, some scientists have tried to convince people this isn't so and that they alone know everything there is to know about the Universe. Therefore, these scientists occasionally need to be shaken out of their rut. Scientific and technical controversy must be generated from time to time to stir the pot and promote progress in human knowledge. As the famous aerospace scientist, Dr. Theodore von Karman, once observed, "How can we possibly make progress without controversy?"

My formal academic education is that of a physi­cist. After I'd graduated and obtained that important academic degree that amounts to a scientific union card, I was given my real education in the big outside world beyond the groves of academe. My work became more and more involved with applying scientific principles in order to solve technical problems. Thus I was converted from a scientist into an engineer who had to deal with things as they are, not with the reasons why the Universe worked in that particular manner. ("Never mind theoriz-

Mind Machines You Can Build

ing why; just get it built or working and in saleable condition by next Wednesday!") By and large, however, the principles of physics and other sciences that I'd learned in college comfortably supported my engineer­ing work.

But an unquestioning faith in what they'd told me was true during my formal academic education and even some of the pragmatic principles I'd learned after­wards was shattered by my first encounter with an inex­plicable machine in 1956.

John W. Campbell, Jr., the late editor of ANA­LOG magazine, published a science-fact article describ­ing a strange device known as a "Hieronymous ma­chine" for which a U.S. patent existed. He gave explicit instructions on how to build one and invited the readers of the magazine to try it for themselves before they la­belled it an impossible fraud.

The device - which is described in this book is an electronic instrument whose purpose is to determine the qualitative constituents of a metallic alloy. It uses a "tactile" detector that is stroked and that "feels different" when the device detects a given metallic component in an alloy.

However, Campbell reported that the Hieronymous machine worked whether or not it was plugged into a wall socket. He also claimed that it would work if you made one simply using the diagram of the electronic circuit and substituted thread for wire.

The Realist's Dilemma

This open invitation to blow away an obvious sham, fraud, and hoax was too much for me. I built one of the "symbolic" Hieronymous machines to prove to the world once and for all that it was a total impossibility.

It worked.

I still have it, and it still works.

But it works for some people and not for others.

I don't know why it works or how it works, but it does. I don't know how to begin conducting truly scien­tific research to answer these questions because I don't know what questions to ask or even what measurements to make. It's just not possible with the current state of the art in science and technology to be Kelvinian about it, and I am a firm believer in the advice given by Lord Kelvin (William Thompson) in 1886:

"I often say that when you can measure something and express it in numbers, you know something about it. But when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, progressed to the level of science, regardless of what the matter may be."

Obviously, therefore, the Hieronymous machine and other amazing mind devices that shouldn't work but do are not scientific and are not yet amenable to scientific analysis. Various hypotheses concerning how they might

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work have been put forth, but these hypotheses have yet to be rigorously tested and thereby transformed into theories.

In the meantime, the machines are fascinating. Most of them are simple to build. Most of them will work for most people. Once a group of "garage gadgeteers," the sort who have created the basic foundations for most modern science, begin playing around with them, some­one stands a good chance of eventually coming up with a testable hypothesis that will at last provide a basis for the establishment of the scientific field which embraces these machines.

Or perhaps not. The history of science and tech­nology is not only rife with serendipitous discoveries that changed the world but also ideas, concepts, and gadgets that didn't work out rightin spite of everything. Be aware that there are more failures than successes, more frauds and hoaxes than straight arrows.

In any event, here are some impossible machines that work for some people, that anyone with some manual dexterity can build in a home workshop, that anyone can build and test for himself.

I repeat: This is not an occult book. It's a book of experiments with weird machines. I haven't included any machine or device that I haven't built, worked, or tested myself. I don't ask the reader to believe that these machines work. I merely present a description of each machine, what it's purported to do, how it worked for

The Realist's Dilemma

me, exactly how to build it, and precisely how to operate it. The remainder of the exercise is left up to the reader who's free to experiment or to snort "Impossible!"

But be careful before you snort, "Impossible!"

We often have the tendency to snort, "Impos­sible!" when confronted with a radically new idea, con­cept, or device. But these machines are different. They can be built. They can be tested. They are tweakers of the curiosity. They shouldn't work, but often they do.

And if you don't believe this, why don't you see for yourself?

The basis of scientific endeavor is the reproduc-ible experiment. And the concept of reproducibility also includes the possibility that the experiment will fail the same way every time.

Right down at the basic level, this is a book about magic, after all. But it's "magic" as defined by Robert A. Heinlein: "One man's magic is another man's technol-

ogy-

And Arthur C. Clarke advises, "Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic."

The book is a "how-to" instruction manual. Its individual chapters are each devoted to a single strange machine. Each chapter starts out with a brief description of the device followed by a brief history, and step-by-step instructions for building it. A set of instructions for using the device is provided along with a suggested program of

Mind Machines You Can Build

experiments that can be conducted. The only thing I'm telling you is: Here it is; build it and try it for yourself, because it appears to work for some people, it can be built, and the author has either tried it and can work it, or tried it and can't work it. (I'm pretty good with most of the gadgets.)

I have gone out on a limb (as if some of my colleagues won't believe that I've already done so) by daring to suggest one or more hypotheses concerning why the machine is doing what it's doing. But in many cases, there is no tenable hypothesis, and I'm forced to simply say, "I haven't the foggiest notion why it works."

I don't believe any of the gadgets are dangerous. No reports have been received that any of them or the use of any of them has caused physical or mental injury to anyone. However, I must state the following caveat which the reader must keep firmly in mind at all times: It's possible to be hurt by anything and it's possible to misuse any device made with any level of technology. People continue to be burned by campfires, and the technology of fire is millennia old. However, there have been no reported problems with anything herein. Most of us have internal "programming" that trips our internal "circuit breakers" to keep us from going over the edge.

Don't dismiss any of the devices as an impossible hoax just because it sounds impossible to you or because you think it's fraudulent and can't work. Or because somebody told you it was one or more of these. Here's

The Realist's Dilemma

your chance to find out for yourself. You'll then be able to say that the gadget works or doesn't work because you tried it yourself. You didn't take someone else's word for it.

These gadgets may indeed work because of magic (a technology we don't yet understand) but they aren't mystical because I can tell you how to build one and how to operate it without subjecting yourself to ten years' of guru training, fasting, and all the rest of the curriculum of oriental mysticism.

Some people won't be able to make some of these devices work. Others may be able to make only a few of them work. Some will be able to work all of them. This will create enormous controversy.

(If you don't pucker your lips just right and blow with just the right force into the mouthpiece, you'll never get a single musical note to come out of that trumpet. But the trumpet is there, and other people can make great music come out of it. Are trumpeters magicians?)

I've been forced to draw the conclusion that these mind machines are examples of future science. They're in the same situation today that electricity and thermo­dynamics were in the early part of the nineteenth century and as some folk medicine was at the beginning of this century. The mere fact that these devices exist and work for some people means there must be some sort of sci­entific basis for them. Therefore, we will be able to un-

Mind Machines You Can Build

derstand and explain them some day. They can't and shouldn't be ignored. They're going to provide the foun­dations for the science of the next century.

Besides, it's exciting, fascinating, frustrating, and perplexing to build and work with them, if you can.

But don't be upset if one doesn't work; try it on someone else. And if the other person can make it work and you can't, why? What's really going on here?

The scientists of the twenty-first century may know, and they may have found out from some flash of insight that came as a result of someone experimenting with these mind machines and others.

You may be the founder of a whole new field of scientific investigation and technological endeavor!

Have fun.

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