- Grisham, John.
The Confession.
New York: Doubleday, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-385-52804-7.
-
Just days before the scheduled execution of Donté Drumm,
a black former high school football star who confessed (during
a highly dubious and protracted interrogation) to the murder of
white cheerleader Nicole Yarber, a serial sex offender named
Travis Boyette, recently released to a nearby halfway house,
shows up in the office of Lutheran pastor Keith Schroeder and,
claiming to be dying of an inoperable brain tumour, confesses
to the murder and volunteers to go to Texas to take responsibility
for the crime, reveal where he buried the victim's body (which was
never found), and avert the execution of Donté. Schroeder
is placed in a near-impossible dilemma: he has little trust in the
word of Boyette, whose erratic behaviour is evident from the
outset, and even less desire to commit a crime assisting
Boyette in violating his parole by leaving the state to
travel to Texas, but he knows that if what Boyette says is true
and he fails to act, an innocent man is certain to be killed by the
state.
Schroeder decides to do what he can to bring Boyette's confession
to the attention of the authorities in Texas, and comes into direct
contact with the ruthless efficiency of the Texas killing machine.
This is a story with many twists, turns, surprises, and revelations,
and there's little I can say about it without spoiling the plot, so
I'll leave it at that. Grisham is clearly a passionate opponent of
the death penalty, and this is as much an advocacy document as a
thriller. The victim's family is portrayed in an almost
cartoon-like fashion, exploiting an all-too-willing media with
tears and anguish on demand, and the police, prosecutors, court
system, and politicians as uniformly venal villains, while those
on the other side are flawed, but on the side of right. Now, certainly,
there are without doubt people just as bad and as good on the sides
of the issue where Grisham places them, but I suspect that
most people in those positions in the real world are conflicted
and trying to do their best to obtain justice for all concerned.
Taken purely as a thriller, this novel works, but in my opinion it
doesn't come up to the standard set by Grisham's early work. The
arcana of the law and the legal system, which Grisham excels in
working into his plots, barely figure here, with racial tensions,
a media circus, and a Texas town divided into two camps taking
centre stage.
A mass market paperback edition will be
released in July, 2011. A Kindle edition is
available, and substantially less expensive than the hardcover.
- Aldrin, Buzz.
Magnificent Desolation.
London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-4088-0416-2.
-
What do you do with the rest of your life when you were one of
the first two humans to land on the Moon before you celebrated your
fortieth birthday? This relentlessly candid autobiography answers
that question for Buzz Aldrin (please don't write to chastise me
for misstating his name: while born as Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr., he
legally changed his name to Buzz Aldrin in 1979). Life after the Moon
was not easy for Aldrin. While NASA trained their astronauts for
every imaginable in-flight contingency, they prepared them in no way for
their celebrity after the mission was accomplished, and detail-oriented
engineers were suddenly thrust into the public sphere, sent as goodwill
ambassadors around the world with little or no concern for the effects
upon their careers or family lives.
All of this was not easy for Aldrin, and in this book he chronicles
his marriages (3), divorces (2), battles against depression and
alcoholism, search for a post-Apollo career, which included commanding
the U.S. Air Force test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base, writing
novels, serving as a corporate board member, and selling Cadillacs.
In the latter part of the book he describes his recent efforts to promote
space tourism, develop affordable private sector access to space, and
design an architecture which will permit exploration and exploitation
of the resources of the Moon, Mars and beyond with budgets well
below those of the Apollo era.
This book did not work for me. Buzz Aldrin has lived an extraordinary
life: he developed the techniques for orbital rendezvous used to this
day in space missions, pioneered underwater neutral buoyancy training
for spacewalks then performed the first completely successful
extra-vehicular activity on
Gemini 12,
demonstrating that astronauts can do useful work in the void, and was the
second man to set foot on the Moon. But all of this is completely
covered in the first three chapters, and then we have 19 more chapters
describing his life after the Moon. While I'm sure it's fascinating if
you've lived though it yourself, it isn't necessarily all that interesting to other
people. Aldrin comes across as, and admits to being, self-centred, and this is much
in evidence here. His adventures, ups, downs, triumphs, and disappointments in
the post-Apollo era are those that many experience in their own lives, and I don't
find them compelling to read just because the author landed on the Moon forty
years ago.
Buzz Aldrin is not just an American hero, but a hero of the human species:
he was there when the first naked apes reached out and set foot
upon another celestial body
(hear what he heard
in his headphones during the landing). His life after that epochal event has
been a life well-lived, and his efforts to open the high frontier to ordinary
citizens are to be commended. This book is his recapitulation of his life so far, but
I must confess I found the post-Apollo narrative tedious. But then, they wouldn't
call him Buzz if there wasn't a buzz there! Buzz is 80 years old and envisions
living another 20 or so. Works for me: I'm around 60, so that gives me 40 or
so to work with. Given any remotely sane space policy, Buzz could be the first
man to set foot on Mars in the next 15 years, and Lois could be the first
woman. Maybe I and the love of my life will be among the crew to deliver them
their supplies and the essential weasels for their planetary colonisation project.
A U.S. edition is available.
- Suarez, Daniel.
Freedom™.
New York: Signet, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-451-23189-5.
-
You'll see this book described as the sequel to the author's
breakthrough first novel Daemon
(August 2010), but in fact this is the second half of
a long novel which happened to be published in two volumes.
As such, if you pick up this book without
having read Daemon, you will have absolutely
no idea what is going on, who the characters are, and why
they are motivated to do the things they do. There is little
or no effort to fill in the back story or bring the reader
up to speed. So read Daemon first, then this book,
ideally not too long afterward so the story will remain fresh
in your mind. Since that's the way the author treats these two
books, I'm going to take the same liberty and assume you've
read my review of Daemon to
establish the context for these remarks.
The last two decades have demonstrated, again and again, just how
disruptive ubiquitous computing and broadband data networks can
be to long-established and deeply entrenched industries such as
book publishing and distribution, music recording and retailing,
newspapers, legacy broadcast media, domestic customer service call
centres, travel agencies, and a host of other businesses which have seen
their traditional business models supplanted by something faster,
more efficient, and with global reach. In this book the author
explores the question of whether the fundamental governance
and economic system of the last century may be next domino
to fall, rendered impotent and obsolete and swept away by a
fundamentally new way of doing things, impossible to imagine in
the pre-wired world, based on the principles used in massively
multiplayer online game engines and social networks.
Of course, governments and multinational corporations are not going
to go gently into the night, and the Daemon (a distributed mesh networked
game engine connected to the real world) and its minions on the
“darknet” demonstrate the ruthlessness of a machine
intelligence when threatened, which results in any number of scenes
just begging to be brought to the big screen. In essence, the Daemon
is creating a new operating system for humans,
allowing them to interact in ways less rigid, more decentralised and
resilient, and less hierarchical than the institutions they inherited
from an era when goods and information travelled no faster than a
horse.
In my estimation, this is a masterwork: the first compelling utopian/dystopian
(depending on how you look at it, which is part of its genius) novel of the Internet
era. It is as good, in its own way, as
Looking Backward,
Brave New World, or
1984, and it is a
much more thrilling read than any of them. Like those classics, Suarez
gets enough of the details right that you find yourself beginning
to think that things might actually turn out something like this, and
what kind of a world it would be to live in were that to happen.
Ray Kurzweil argues that
The Singularity Is Near. In this novel,
the author gets the reader to wonder whether it might not be a lot
closer than Kurzweil envisions, and not require the kind of
exponential increase in computing power he assumes to be the
prerequisite. Might the singularity—a phase transition in the
organisation of human society as profound as the discovery of
agriculture—actually be about to happen in the next few years,
not brought about by superhuman artificial intelligence but rather the
synthesis of and interconnection of billions of human intelligences
connected by a “social network” encompassing all of
society? (And if you think sudden transitions like that can't happen,
just ask anybody who used to own a record store or the boss of a major
newspaper.) Would this be a utopian solution to a system increasingly
perceived as unsustainable and inexorably crushing individuality and
creativity, or would it be a descent into a potentially irreversible
dark age in which humans would end up as peripherals in a vast
computing grid using them to accomplish its own incomprehensible
agenda? You'll probably close this book undecided on that question,
and spend a good deal of time afterward pondering it. That is what
makes this novel so great.
If the author can continue to rise to this standard in subsequent novels,
we have a new grandmaster on the scene.
- Taylor, Travis S. and Les Johnson.
Back to the Moon.
Riverdale, NY: Baen Publishing, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-4391-3405-4.
-
Don't you just hate it when you endure the protracted birthing process
of a novel set in the near future and then, with the stroke of a politician's
pen, the entire premise of the story goes ker-plonk into the dustbin of history?
Think about the nuclear terror novel set in the
second Carter administration, or all of the Cold War thrillers in the publishing
pipeline that collapsed along with the Soviet Union. Well, that's more or less
what we have here. This novel is set in, shall we say, the 2020s in a parallel
universe where NASA's
Constellation program
(now cancelled in our own timeline) remained on track and is ready to launch its
first mission to return humans to the Moon. Once again, there is a Moon race
underway: this time a private company, Space Excursions, hopes to be the first
enterprise to send paying passengers on a
free return
loop around the Moon, while the Chinese space agency hopes to beat NASA to the
Moon with their own landing mission.
Space Excursions is ready to win the race with their (technologically
much less demanding) mission then discovers, to the horror of their
passengers and the world, that a secret Chinese landing mission has
crashed near the lunar limb, and the Chinese government has
covered up the disaster and left their taikonauts to die unmourned to
avoid their space program's losing face. Bill Stetson (try to top
that for a Texas astronaut name!), commander of the soon-to-launch
NASA landing mission, realises that his flight can be re-purposed
into a rescue of the stranded Chinese, and the NASA back-room
experts, with the clock ticking on the consumables remaining in the
Chinese lander, devise a desperate but plausible plan to save them.
Thus, the first U.S. lunar mission since
Apollo 17 launches with an
entirely different flight plan than that envisioned and for which
the crew trained. Faced with a crisis, the sclerotic NASA bureaucracy is jolted
back into the “make it so” mindset they exemplified in
returning the crew of
Apollo 13
safely to the Earth. In the end, it takes co-operation between NASA,
the Chinese space agency, and Space Excursions, along with intrepid
exploits by spacemen and -women of all of those contenders in Moon
Race II to pull off the rescue, leading one to wonder “why can't we
all get along?”
Do not confuse this novel with the laughably inept
book with the same title by Homer Hickam
(April 2010). This isn't remotely as bad, but then it isn't
all that good either. I don't fault it for describing a NASA
program which was cancelled while the novel was in press—author
Taylor vents his frustration over that in an afterword included here.
What irritates me is how many essential details the authors
got wrong in telling the story. They utterly mis-describe the
configuration of the Constellation lunar spacecraft, completely
forgetting the service module of the Orion spacecraft, which
contains the engine used to leave lunar orbit and to which the solar
arrays are attached. They assume the ascent stage of the Altair lunar
lander remains attached to the Orion during the return from the Moon,
which is insane from a mass management standpoint. Their use of
terminology is just sloppy, confusing orbital and escape velocity,
trans-lunar injection with lunar orbit insertion maneuvers, and a
number of other teeth-grinding goofs. The orbital mechanics are
a thing of fantasy: spacecraft perform plane change maneuvers which
no chemical rocket could possibly execute, and the
Dreamscape lunar flyby tourist vehicle is said to brake
with rockets into Earth orbit before descending for a landing which is
energetically and mass budget wise crazy as opposed to a
direct aerobraking entry.
What is odd is that author Taylor has a doctorate in science and
engineering and has worked on NASA and DOD programs for two decades,
and author Johnson works for NASA. NASA is rife with science
fiction fans—SF is the “literature of recruitment”
for NASA. Without a doubt, hundreds of NASA people intimately
acquainted with the details of the Constellation Program would have
been thrilled at the chance to review and fact-check this manuscript
(especially because it portrays their work in an adulatory light),
and almost none of the revisions required to get it right would have
had any significant impact upon the story. (The heat shield repair is
an exception, but I could scribble a more thrilling chapter about doing
that after jettisoning the service module with the Earth looming
nearer and nearer than the one in this novel.)
This is a well-crafted thriller which will keep you turning the pages, but
doesn't stand up to scrutiny if you really understand orbital mechanics
or the physical constraints in going to the Moon. What is regrettable
is that all of the goofs could have been remedied without compromising the
story in any way.
- Lehto, Steve.
Chrysler's Turbine Car.
Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-56976-549-4.
-
There were few things so emblematic of the early 1960s as the jet
airliner. Indeed, the period was often referred to contemporarily
as the “jet age”, and products from breakfast cereal
to floor wax were positioned as modern wonders of that age. Anybody
who had experienced travel in a piston powered airliner and then took
their first flight in a jet felt that they had stepped into the
future: gone was the noise, rattling, and shaking from the
cantankerous and unreliable engines that would knock the fillings
loose in your teeth, replaced by a smooth whoosh which
(although, in the early jets, deafening to onlookers outside), allowed
carrying on a normal conversation inside the cabin. Further,
notwithstanding some tragic accidents in the early days as pilots
became accustomed to the characteristics of the new engines and
airframes, it soon became apparent that these new airliners were
a great deal safer and more reliable than their predecessors: they
crashed a lot less frequently, and flights delayed and cancelled due
to mechanical problems became the rare exception rather than something
air travellers put up with only because the alternative was so much
worse.
So, if the jet age had arrived, and jet power had proven itself to be
so superior to the venerable and hideously overcomplicated piston
engine, where were the jet cars? This book tells the long and
tangled story of just how close we came to having turbine powered
automobiles in the 1960s, how a small group of engineers plugging
away at problem after problem over twenty years managed to produce
an automotive powerplant so clearly superior to contemporary piston
engines that almost everybody who drove a vehicle powered by it immediately
fell in love and wished they could have one of their own, and ultimately
how financial problems and ill-considered government meddling destroyed
the opportunity to replace automotive powerplants dependent upon
petroleum-based fuels (which, at the time, contained tetraethyl lead)
with one which would run on any combustible liquid, emit far less pollution
from the tailpipe, run for hundreds of thousands of miles without an oil
change or need for a tune-up, start instantly and reliably regardless of
the ambient temperature, and run so smoothly and quietly that for the first
time passengers were aware of the noise of the tires rolling over the
road.
In 1945, George Huebner, who had worked on turboprop aircraft for
Chrysler during World War II, returned to the civilian automotive
side of the company as war work wound down. A brilliant engineer as
well as a natural-born promoter of all things he believed in, himself
most definitely included, by 1946 he was named Chrysler's chief engineer
and used his position to champion turbine propulsion, which he had already
seen was the future in aviation, for automotive applications. The
challenges were daunting: turboshaft engines (turbines which delivered power
by turning a shaft coupled to the turbine rotor, as used in turboprop
airplanes and helicopters) gulped fuel at a prodigious rate, including
when at “idle”, took a long time to “spool up” to
maximum power, required expensive exotic materials in the high-temperature
section of the engine, and had tight tolerances which required parts to be
made by costly and low production rate
investment casting,
which could not produce parts in the quantity, nor at a cost acceptable
for a mass market automotive powerplant.
Like all of the great engineers, Huebner was simultaneously stubborn and
optimistic: stubborn in his belief that a technology so much simpler and
inherently more thermodynamically efficient must eventually prevail, and
optimistic that with patient engineering, tackling one problem after
another and pursuing multiple solutions in parallel, any challenge could
be overcome. By 1963, coming up on the twentieth year of the effort,
progress had been made on all fronts to the extent that Huebner persuaded
Chrysler management that the time had come to find out whether the driving
public was ready to embrace the jet age in their daily driving. In one of
the greatest public relations stunts of all time, Chrysler ordered 55
radically styled (for the epoch) bodies from the Ghia shop in Italy, and
mated them with turbine drivetrains and chassis in a Michigan factory previously
used to assemble taxicabs. Fifty of these cars (the other five being retained
for testing and promotional purposes) were loaned, at no charge, for periods
of three months each, to a total of 203 drivers and their families. Delivery
of one of these loaners became a media event, and the lucky families instant
celebrities in their communities: a brief trip to the grocery store
would turn into several hours fielding questions about the car and offering
rides around the block to gearheads who pleaded for them.
The turbine engines, as turbine engines are wont to, once the bugs have
been wrung out, performed superbly. Drivers of the loaner cars put more
than a million miles on them with only minor mechanical problems. One
car was rear-ended at a stop light, but you can't blame the engine for
that. (Well, perhaps the guilty party was transfixed by the striking design of
the rear of the car!) Drivers did notice slower acceleration from a
stop due to “turbine lag”—the need for the turbine to
spool up in RPM from idle, and poorer fuel economy in city driving. Fuel
economy on the highway was comparable to contemporary piston engine
cars. What few drivers noticed in the era of four gallons a buck gasoline,
was that the turbine could run on just about any fuel you can imagine:
unleaded gasoline, kerosene, heating oil, ethanol, methanol, aviation
jet fuel, diesel, or any mix thereof. As a stunt, while visiting a peanut
festival in Georgia, a Chrysler Turbine filled up with peanut oil, with
tequila during a tour through Mexico, and with perfume at a French auto
show; in each case the engine ran perfectly on the eccentric fuel
(albeit with a distinctive aroma imparted to the exhaust).
So, here we are all these many years later in the twenty-first
century. Where are our jet cars? That's an interesting
story which illustrates the unintended consequences of well-intended
public policy. Just as the turbine engine was being refined and
perfected as an automotive power plant, the U.S. government started to
obsess about air quality, and decided, in the spirit of the times, to
impose detailed mandates upon manufacturers which constrained the
design of their products. (As opposed, say, to imposing an excise tax
upon vehicles based upon their total emissions and allowing manufacturers
to weigh the trade-offs across their entire product line, or leaving
it to states and municipalities most affected by pollution to enforce their
own standards on vehicles licensed in their jurisdiction.) Since almost
every vehicle on the road was piston engine powered, it was inevitable that
regulators would draft their standards around the characteristics of
that powerplant. In doing so, they neglected to note that the turbine
engine already met all of the most stringent emissions standards
they then envisioned for piston engines (and in addition, ran on unleaded
fuels, completely eliminating the most hazardous emission of piston
engines) with a single exception: oxides of nitrogen (NOx). The latter
was a challenge for turbine engineers, because the continuous combustion
in a turbine provides a longer time for nitrogen to react with oxygen.
Engineers were sure they'd be able to find a way to work around this single
remaining challenge, having already solved all of the emission problems
the piston engine still had to overcome.
But they never got the chance. The government regulations were imposed with
such short times for compliance that automakers were compelled to divert all of
their research, development, and engineering resources to modifying their
existing engines to meet the new standards, which proved to be ever-escalating:
once a standard was met, it was made more stringent with another near-future
deadline. At Chrysler, the smallest of the Big Three, this hit particularly
hard, and the turbine project found its budget and engineering staff cannibalised
to work on making ancient engines run rougher, burn more fuel, perform more
anæmicly, and increase their cost and frequency of maintenance to satisfy
a tailpipe emission standard written into law by commissars in Washington who
probably took the streetcar to work. Then the second part of the double whammy
hit: the oil embargo and the OPEC cartel hike in the price of oil, which led
to federal fuel economy standards, which pulled in the opposite direction from
the emissions standards and consumed all resources which might have been devoted
to breakthroughs in automotive propulsion which would have transcended the
increasingly baroque tweaks to the piston engine. A different time had arrived,
and increasingly people who once eagerly awaited the unveiling of the new models from Detroit
each fall began to listen to their neighbours who'd bought one of those oddly-named
Japanese models and said, “Well, it's tiny and it looks odd, but it
costs a whole lot less, goes almost forever on a gallon of gas,
and it never, ever breaks”. From the standpoint of the mid-1970s,
this began to sound pretty good to a lot of folks, and Detroit, the city and the
industry which built it, began its descent from apogee to the ruin it is
today.
If we could go back and change a few things in history, would we all be
driving turbine cars today? I'm not so sure. At the point the turbine was
undone by ill-advised public policy, one enormous engineering hurdle remained,
and in retrospect it isn't clear that it could have been overcome. All turbine
engines, to the present day, require materials and manufacturing processes which
have never been scaled up to the volumes of passenger car manufacturing. The
pioneers of the automotive turbine were confident that could be done, but
they conceded that it would require at least the investment of building an
entire auto plant from scratch, and that is something that Chrysler could not
remotely fund at the time. It's much like building a new semiconductor fabrication
facility with a new scaling factor, but without the confidence that if it
succeeds a market will be there for its products. At the time the Chrysler
Turbine cars were tested, Huebner estimated their cost of manufacturing at
around US$50,000: roughly half of that the custom-crafted body and the rest the
powertrain—the turbine engines were essentially hand-built. Such has been
the depreciation of the U.S. dollar that this is equivalent to about a third
of a million present-day greenbacks. Then or now, getting this cost down to
something the average car buyer could afford was a formidable challenge, and
it isn't obvious that the problem could have been solved, even without
the resources needed to do so having been expended to comply with
emissions and fuel economy diktats.
Further, turbine engines become less efficient as you scale them
down—in the turbine world, the bigger the better, and they work
best when run at a constant load over a long period of time.
Consequently, turbine power would seem optimal for long-haul trucks,
which require more power than a passenger car, run at near-constant
speed over highways for hours on end, and already run on the diesel
fuel which is ideal for turbines. And yet, despite research and test
turbine vehicles having been built by manufacturers in the U.S.,
Britain, and Sweden, the diesel powerplant remains supreme.
Truckers and trucking companies understand long-term
investment and return, and yet the apparent advantages of the turbine
haven't allowed it to gain a foothold in that market. Perhaps the
turbine passenger car was one of those great ideas for which, in the
final analysis, the numbers just didn't work.
I actually saw one of these cars on the road in 1964, doubtlessly driven
by one the lucky drivers chosen to test it. There was something sweet about
seeing the Jet Car of the Future waiting to enter a congested tunnel
while we blew past it in our family Rambler station wagon, but that's
just cruel. In the final chapter, we get to vicariously accompany the author on
a drive in the Chrysler Turbine owned by Jay Leno, who
contributes the foreword to this book.
Mark Olson's turbinecar.com
has a wealth of information, photographs, and original documents relating
to the Chrysler Turbine Car. The History Channel's documentary,
The Chrysler Turbine, is available
on DVD.
- Bethell, Tom.
Questioning Einstein.
Pueblo West, CO: Vales Lake Publishing, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-9714845-9-7.
-
Call it my guilty little secret. Every now and then, I enjoy nothing
more than picking up a work of crackpot science, reading it with the
irony lobe engaged, and figuring out precisely where the author went
off the rails and trying to imagine how one might explain to them the
blunders which led to the poppycock they expended so much effort getting
into print. In the field of physics, for some reason Einstein's
theory of
special
relativity attracts a disproportionate number of such authors, all
bent on showing that Einstein was wrong or, in the case of the present
work's subtitle, asking “Is Relativity Necessary?”. With a little
reflexion, this shouldn't be a surprise: alone among major theories of
twentieth century physics, special relativity is mathematically accessible
to anybody acquainted with high school algebra, and yet makes predictions
for the behaviour of objects at high velocity which are so counterintuitive
to the expectations based upon our own personal experience with
velocities much smaller than that they appear, at first glance, to be
paradoxes. Theories more dubious and less supported
by experiment may be shielded from crackpots simply by the forbidding
mathematics one must master in order to understand and talk about them
persuasively.
This is an atypical exemplar of the genre. While most attacks on special
relativity are written by delusional mad scientists, the author of the present
work,
Tom Bethell, is a respected
journalist whose work has been praised by, among others, Tom Wolfe and
George Gilder. The theory presented here is not his own, but one
developed by
Petr Beckmann,
whose life's work, particularly in advocating civil nuclear power, won
him the respect of Edward Teller (who did not, however, endorse his
alternative to relativity). As works of crackpot science go, this is one of the
best I've read. It is well written, almost free of typographical and factual
errors, clearly presents its arguments in terms a layman can grasp, almost
entirely avoids mathematical equations, and is thoroughly documented with
citations of original sources, many of which those who have learnt
special relativity from modern textbooks may not be aware. Its arguments
against special relativity are up to date, tackling objections including the
Global Positioning System,
the Brillet-Hall experiment, and the
Hafele-Keating
“travelling clock” experiments as well as the classic tests. And
the author eschews the ad hominem attacks
on Einstein which are so common in the literature of opponents to relativity.
Beckmann's theory posits that the
luminiferous æther
(the medium in which light
waves propagate), which was deemed “superfluous” in Einstein's
1905 paper, in fact exists, and is simply the locally dominant gravitational
field. In other words, the medium in which light waves wave is the gravity
which makes things which aren't light heavy. Got it? Light waves in any experiment
performed on the Earth or in its vicinity will propagate in the æther of its
gravitational field (with only minor contributions from those of other
bodies such as the Moon and Sun), and hence attempts to detect the
“æther drift” due to the Earth's orbital motion around the
Sun such as the
Michelson-Morley experiment
will yield a null result, since the æther is effectively “dragged” or
“entrained” along with the Earth. But since the gravitational field
is generated by the Earth's mass, and hence doesn't rotate with it
(Huh—what about the
Lense-Thirring effect,
which is never mentioned here?), it should be possible to detect the much smaller
æther drift effect as the measurement apparatus rotates around the Earth, and it
is claimed that several experiments have made such a detection.
It's traditional that popular works on special relativity couch their examples
in terms of observers on trains, so let me say that it's here that we feel the
sickening non-inertial-frame lurch as the train departs the track and enters
a new inertial frame headed for the bottom of the canyon. Immediately, we're
launched into a discussion of the
Sagnac effect and its
various manifestations ranging from the original experiment to practical
applications in
laser ring gyroscopes,
to round-the-world measurements bouncing signals off multiple satellites. For
some reason the Sagnac effect seems to be a powerful attractor into which special
relativity crackpottery is sucked. Why it is so difficult to comprehend, even by
otherwise intelligent people, entirely escapes me. May I explain it to you? This
would be easier with a diagram, but just to show off and emphasise how simple it
is, I'll do it with words. Imagine you have a turntable, on which are mounted four
mirrors which reflect light around the turntable in a square: the light just goes
around and around. If the turntable is stationary and you send a pulse of light
in one direction around the loop and then send another in the opposite direction, it
will take precisely the same amount of time for them to complete one circuit of
the mirrors. (In practice, one uses continuous beams of monochromatic light and
combines them in an interferometer, but the effect is the same as measuring the
propagation time—it's just easier to do it that way.) Now, let's assume you
start the turntable rotating clockwise. Once again you send pulses of light around
the loop in both directions; this time we'll call the one which goes in the
same direction as the turntable's rotation the clockwise pulse and the other
the counterclockwise pulse. Now when we measure how long it took for the
clockwise pulse to make it one time around the loop we find that it took
longer than for the counterclockwise pulse. OMG!!! Have we disproved Einstein's
postulate of the constancy of the speed of light (as is argued in this book at
interminable length)? Well, of course not, as a moment's reflexion will reveal.
The clockwise pulse took longer to make it around the loop because it
had farther to travel to arrive there: as it was bouncing from each mirror
to the next, the rotation of the turntable was moving the next mirror further away,
and so each leg it had to travel was longer. Conversely, as the counterclockwise
pulse was in flight, its next mirror was approaching it, and hence by the time it
made it around the loop it had travelled less far, and consequently arrived sooner.
That's all there is to it, and precision measurements of the Sagnac effect confirm
that this analysis is completely consistent with special relativity. The only possible
source of confusion is if you make the self-evident blunder of analysing the system
in the rotating reference frame of the turntable. Such a reference frame is trivially
non-inertial, so special relativity does not apply. You can determine this simply by
tossing a ball from one side of the turntable to another, with no need for all the
fancy mirrors, light pulses, or the rest.
Other claims of Beckmann's theory are explored, all either dubious or trivially
falsified. Bethell says there is no evidence for the
length contraction
predicted by special relativity. In fact, analysis of
heavy ion collisions
confirm that each nucleus approaching the scene of the accident “sees” the
other as a “pancake” due to relativistic length contraction. It is
claimed that while physical processes on a particle moving rapidly through a
gravitational field slow down, that an observer co-moving with that particle
would not see a comparable slow-down of clocks at rest with respect to
that gravitational field. But the corrections applied to the atomic clocks in GPS
satellites incorporate this effect, and would produce incorrect results if it
did not occur.
I could go on and on. I'm sure there is a simple example from gravitational lensing
or propagation of electromagnetic radiation from gamma ray bursts which would
falsify the supposed classical explanation for the gravitational deflection of light
due to a refractive effect based upon strength of the gravitational field, but why
bother when so many things much easier to dispose of are hanging lower on the tree.
Should you buy this book? No, unless, like me, you enjoy a rare example of
crackpot science which is well done. This is one of those, and if you're well
acquainted with special relativity (if not, take a trip on our
C-ship!) you may find it entertaining
finding the flaws in and identifying experiments which falsify the arguments
here.