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Many are prepared but only one was called. That is how I would sum up Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s life.

This reminds me of the Bible verse, Matthew 22:14 “For many are invited, but few are chosen.” What an honor.

The New York Times described him as a “ … quiet, private man, at heart an engineer and crack test pilot …”

I was very moved on hearing of his final journey, and I don’t know why. I was 11 years old when I watched him walk on the moon, on black & white TV, in a small town in what was then considered the backwaters of Peninsula Malaysia.

Malaysia had just gone through the trauma of race riots of May 13th between the native born peoples of Chinese and Malay descent.

And here was America on the other side of the world, the other side of race relations, and the other side of the technological spectrum. They had put together a small band of engineers, called NASA, on a promise and a prayer that these engineers would do good with our tax payers’ money. Neil Armstrong was one of them.

They did.

When he set foot on lunar soil he did not say “… that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for America … ” instead he said “ … that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind …”

The Lord be with you, Neil.

Tim Ventura told me 2 days ago that American Antigravity is back. Congratulations Tim. Yours was a very popular site and it was a loss when it went dark.

Welcome back Tim. I look forward to more scoops from American Antigravity.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

I am very pleased to have received an email from Dr. Takaaki Musha of the Technical Research and Development Institute, Advanced Science-Technology Research Organization, Yokohama, Japan.

Dr. Musha and Prof. Mario J. Pinheiro will be publishing a book on electrogravitics including the electromagnetic propulsion systems, titled, “Physics of the Zero Point Field and Its Applications to Advanced Technology”, Nova Science Pub Inc. Publication date is Sept.25, 2012 (tomorrow).

To quote Dr. Musha:

“Space-time in a vacuum has generally been viewed as a transparent and ubiquitous empty continuum within which physical events take place. However quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics views the vacuum as the sum total of all zero-point fluctuations of the vacuum electromagnetic field, arising from the continuous creation and annihilation of virtual particle pairs. It is this latter more contemporary view that is, for the first time, more fully explored in text form with Physics of the Zero Point Field. The scope of applications in this book range from the Casimir effect, the variation in zero-point energy at the boundaries of a region observable in nano-scale devices, to ideas for a proposed inertial drive as first described by Puthoff.”

Congratulations Dr. Musha & Prof. Pinheiro on your publication and above all, the completion of a book on this topic. Having done one myself I know it was not an easy endeavor.

And congratulations to Dr. Musha’s & Prof Pinheiro’s co-contributors, Prof. Claus Turtur, Mr. Gary Stephenson, & Dr. Thomas Valone.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

Here is my attempt at interstellar black hole jokes. With the 2nd and 3rd I was attempting humor with a minimum number of words. I’ve managed a 2 word joke. I hope you finds these funny and please contribute your version of these interstellar black hole (family friendly) jokes.

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The Mechanic & The Owner

Spaceship owner tells spaceship mechanic, “I lost my black hole. Can you help me find it?”

Spaceship mechanic asks, “Where? You didn’t lose it around here, did you?”

Spaceship owner replies, “I’m not sure, the black hole warning light came on a few minutes ago, and I thought I’d come straight overrrrr …”

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Knock, Knock

Knock, Knockkkkkk …

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Murphy’s Law Experienced

I just found a black hhhhhhooooooolllllllleeeeeeeee .…

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Pervious blog post in this debunking series

Recently I had an interesting discussion about Laithwaite’s Big Wheel demonstration.

Note that the late Professor Eric Laithwaite was Professor of Heavy Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, and inventor of the linear motor, and the maglev train technology which Germany and China have taken the lead. The poor Brits they missed out on their own invention.

The Big Wheel experiment is basically this. Attach a wheel to the end of a 3-ft (1 m) rod. Spin this wheel to 3,000 rpm or more. Then rotate this rod with the spinning wheel at the other end. The technical description is, rotate the spin vector.

The Ni fields solves the Big Wheel experiment to give acceleration a=ωrωs√h is governed by the rotation ωr, spin ωs, and the physical structure √h, and shows that both weight loss and gain are observable. If the spin and rotation are of like sense to the observer, the force is toward the observer. If unlike then the force is away from the observer.

Then somebody pointed me to link at Imperial College that said that the late Prof Laithwaite had “coming to a series of false conclusions”. I was very surprised, especially since I did both my undergraduate and post graduate at UK Universities.

All this ‘exotic’ mathematics to prove Laithwaite was ‘wrong’. What arrogance. If Imperial College had asked very simple and obvious question they would not have posted such nonsense. How can the human wrist carry a 50lb (approximately 23 kg) weight at the end of a 3 ft ( 1 m) rod? Obviously this Imperial College ‘research’ was conducted by someone who had no idea how to do emperical validation.

This raises the question, are British Universities into closing off the minds of future generations or are they about empowering their future industry leaders to find the … truth?

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland co-authored the paper Are Black Hole Starships Possible? (http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803) that suggested that one could use Small Black Holes to propel starships close to the velocity of light for interstellar travel. To give them credit, they stated that this is at the “edge of possibility” and would only be possible in the very distant future:

“The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether it is possible to build artificial BHs of the appropriate size, and to employ them in powerplants and starships. The conclusion we reach is that it is just on the edge of possibility to do so, but that quantum gravity effects, as yet unknown, could change the picture either way… Many questions which arise in this program lead to calculations in general relativity which have not been done. Whatever the other merits of our proposal, we are confident it will pose many interesting problems for classical and quantum relativity.”

Note, BH = Black Holes

That is it. Crane & Westmoreland were presenting an academic exercise to pose “many interesting problems for classical and quantum relativity”.

However, others like James Messig and Paul Gilster and Marcus Chown have taken this to mean a real engineering problem that can be solved . . . Read their articles.

I only found out about Marcus Chown because Paul Gilster says “Chown does a good job with this material” quotes him, and I reproduce here,

“The resulting million-tonne black hole would be about the size of an atomic nucleus. The next step would be to manoeuvre it into the focal range of a parabolic mirror attached to the back of the crew quarters of a starship. Hawking radiation consists of all sorts of species of subatomic particles, but the most common will be gamma ray photons. Collimated into a parallel beam by the parabolic mirror, these would be the starship’s exhaust and would push it forward.”

What a parabolic mirror … with black holes in the same paragraph? This I must see. I traced Marcus Chown comments to his article Riding a black hole to reach the stars. Chown actually states this paragraph above.

Here are the problems with Marcus Chown statement & Paul Gilster’s unquestioning nod of authority to Chown’s statement.

1. How do you control a black how?
Small Black Hole radius = 0.6 x 10-18 m, in comparison assuming a spherical shape (Illinois University), the typical space between particles in the gas is 2×10-9 m, and the average distance between two bonded atoms in water is 2X10-10 m, and generally speaking the space between two bonded atoms is around 10-10 m. That is one can fit 108 or 100 million Small Black Holes between two atoms in an average chemical compound.

So how does one control a 1,000,000 ton black hole that is more than million times smaller than an atom?

James Messig had suggested “Now imagine that a 1,000 metric ton rest mass ship could be coupled to the black hole via electrically charging the black hole or otherwise setting up a coupling field between the ship and the black hole”

Funny, James Messig contradicts Crane & Westmoreland. Crane & Westmoreland write “Note that if an isolated SBH is initially endowed with an electric charge, then it will quickly, and almost completely, radiate this charge away”.

But wait, there is another problem. Even if you could somehow electrify this black hole contraption the electric field breaks down into a discharge in air at 3kV/mm or about 1kV/mm in vacuum. So you cannot hold an black hole in a container with an electric field.

If you try, one whiff of the electron cloud on the atom and the electron cloud is gone. Another whiff. Another whiff… and before you know it there are millions of naked nuclei without their electron clouds, and an electric force based explosion, because the black hole (BH) of this size could whiz past matter striking down electron clouds in its path without ‘colliding’ with their nuclei.

Crane & Westmoreland write “As to confinement, a BH confines itself. We would need to avoid colliding with it or losing it, but it won’t explode.” They weren’t thinking about massively ionized matter because they had already stated “need to avoid colliding with it”. In their paper they were comparing black hole with antimatter.

Never mind the naked nuclei explosion that is a small matter. The real problem is that the black hole gets lost (because it is 0.6 x 10-18 m small) and it sucks out the air or the Earth, maybe the Sun. Don’t forget black holes love a good meal and will consume anything in their path and get bigger, and bigger … Need a black hole in our neighborhood? No thanks.

2. How do you maneuver the spacecraft?
Remember you are lugging around at least 1,000,000 tons of black hole matter to your 1 ton. Oops, I misspoke, the laws of physics require that it is actually the other way around. 1 ton of spacecraft is lugged around by 1,000,000 tons of black hole matter.

So how does one alter the direction of the Hawking Radiation that this 1,000,000 ton black hole is producing? Archimedes is reported to have said that if you give him a fulcrum long enough he could move the Earth. So what would be the equivalent of a “large enough fulcrum”? Hmmm. I know! Another black hole!

3. How do you collimated gamma rays with a parabolic mirror?
Really? Gamma radiation passes through everything we know of, if the material is not thick enough. Maybe Chown was reporting science fiction? Remember this was 2009. What do you think?

In all fairness I think the gamma ray problem is a more realistic problem than the black hole control & maneuvering problem.

No wonder, Prof. Adam Franks stated in his July 24, 2012 New York Times Op-Ed, Alone in the Void, “Short of a scientific miracle of the kind that has never occurred, our future history for millenniums will be played out on Earth”.

Done. Black hole interstellar drive debunked.

The next blog post in this debunking series.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

It is with great bewilderment that I read the precautions that NASA rovers are sterilized to, to ensure that Life does not infect the Martian environment. I understand NASA want to explore Mars for signs of Martian life — but which is more important — to explore whether Life almost evolved on Mars, or to induce the whole process and allow it to occur?

We can get caught up in the concept that preservation of Human Life as the ultimate goal, in how do we colonize other worlds as soon as possible — but perhaps the most honorable pursuit is the propagation of Life itself — we should be introducing bacteria or simple xerophytic plants to Mars, algae to Europa and such worlds, in the anticipation that if a foothold can be taken, evolution could take hold — and we may not live to see it — but we have then passed on the gift of life to another world.

Whimsical Notions or Planning With Foresight? Unless we cause our own demise by inadvertently engineering our downfall, as often discussed here, or are struck by a statistically unfortunate large asteroid impact, Life is here on Earth for the long haul — it has been durable for billions of years, albeit with significant setbacks, and one can expect it will be here for billions more to come. We may well have time on our hands.

If we sow the seeds now, we may have other worlds to move to in a few million years — long before we may need it — such as in five billion years when the Sun has expired into a Red Giant. It is quite reasonable to expect that if we seed Mars with our bacteria now, and other basic forms of life at the bottom of the food chain — in some million years from now Mars may be flourishing with vegetation — evolved to suit the terrain — that a colony there could live off.

It has been considered, that Life on Earth started by a similar process, that a comet or asteroid carrying bacteria inseminated our planet with the seeds of life. So let’s pass on the gift and stop being so prudent. Lets start at the basics, and create lifeboats of Life around our solar system. Perhaps one day our descendants will thank us for nurturing such habitats.

iPhone 5 Hyper-Anticipation: It Didn’t Mean What You Think it Meant (AGAIN)
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/09/iphone-5-hyper-anticipation-it-didnt-mean-what-you-think-it-meant-again

Okay, now — bear with me on this — and check it out:
For now and for better or worse, The United States is home to a plurality of the world’s techiest technology, investment capital, productive creativity, and cutting edge research. As such, hiccups in those technology-driven economies of real currency and ideas can ripple around the entire planet.

Amid considerable anti-intellectualism and various public & private R&D funding issues, American tech leadership and innovation is stuttering and sputtering and might be in danger of faltering. While we’re not at that point just yet, there is an interesting harbinger with a peculiar manifestation: New iPhone Anticipation Loopiness. As I said, bear with me.

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This is a repost & redux from an October 5, 2011 Anthrobotic.com piece — published a day before the suspected-to-be-iPhone 5 was released as the iPhone 4S. While the fanboy drool and mainstream gee-whiz was considerably dialed down this time around (in part due to lots of leaking), the sentiment of this piece remains relevant and largely unchanged. Now, we did have the Nuclear-Powered Science Robot Dune Buggy with Lasers (AKA the rover Curiosity) this year, and that was very big, but on a societal level we still have a sad hole in our technology heart.

Of course any hand-wringing about the underlying catalyst for weird iPhone fervor is a so-called first-world luxury, but to that I say “Shhhh, Trickle Down Technonomics©® is real.“
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The Great Want
I was half-seriously saying to my friend Jason last night that waiting for the iPhone 5’s release is like waiting for Christmas morning when we were 10. Except that the reveal of this present will be more like “Here’s what we got you, but you can’t actually have it for another two to four weeks.“ That part’s kinda cruel. He’s at 3G, I’m at 3GS — upgrade is ferociously justified (and cheap here in Japan). So, like lots and lots of Americans and other people around the world, we’ve been not so patiently waiting for Tuesday morning; we have also been part of this peculiar intensity.

Troubling Telecommunication Technolust
Now, is there any other product, across any and all areas of industry, for which a pending release has been the subject of such anticipation, such broad media coverage, and so much conjecture? And how is it that the key marketing strategy for a company’s flagship revenue source is their absolute refusal to talk about the product until after its launch? Do we consumers really want the new hotness that badly? How are all these strings being pulled? How can so many otherwise reasonable adults have so much longing for this device?

Even if one’s not an iPhone user and has no plans to convert, chances are one is at least curious about what Apple’s got. I mean, be honest, even if you’ve got only a very general interest in technology, you’re going to be paying attention to the announcement. And if you’re not actively following the story, you’ll hear about it passively — it will be everywhere for a few days or a week or so.

So… what’s this all about?
It’s just a pretty new phone, right?

No.
We know that a phone hasn’t been just a phone for several years now — a lot of us hardly use the telephone part of the device at all. And, they’ve become, well, you know — smart. This guy (Mike Elgan) and this woman (Amber Case) have developed theories suggesting that smartphones are actually highly personalized digital information prosthetics, and we users are already cybernetic organisms (Anthrobotic.com nods in agreement). Smartphones connect us as individuals to the vast stream of human communication; they non-invasively enable the RAM & ROM of all recorded human history into the palm of our hands, and devices’ elegantly rapid penetration into everyday life has been… (drama pause) profound. Ask organizers and participants in the Arab Spring. Ask villagers in developing countries who lack roads and electricity — but do have respectable data plans. And ask again, if you like.

Mobile phones have become much more than the name implies, and as a practical tool, the iPhone 5 in particular will be an exciting addition to comms and gaming and entertainment blah blah blah. As per usual, Apple will probably introduce hardware and software features that will shape mobile technology on a global scale — that’s what Apple does.

And all that’s awesome whoo-hoo way to go, but still, it’s #5, just the latest iteration.
Not really THAT big of a deal, so why the hell do we care so much?

Deep-Seated Social-Psychological Phenomena Available in Red, White, & Blue
It seems to me that shallow, mindless American consumerism, certainly a well-documented species, is not the primary force driving our overblown iPhone 5 excitement and anticipation and media coverage and hyperbole. You’d think so, but…

Listen for the thud — here drops a cheesy armchaired macro-diagnosis:
Subconsciously — in my country — the rabid anticipation for the iPhone 5 is actually about hope, inasmuch as it’s about the American Dream. In a way.
Or, more accurately, the corpsification thereof. In a way.

And that is because we the people have almost nothing else to be excited about.
(except: The Nuclear-Powered Science Robot Dune Buggy with Lasers)

We of the Uninspiring Slump
Over at Anthrobotic.com, fundamental to my silly-ass take on tech is the primary tenet of the 51%+ Positive Technological Utopianism Movement (that I totally just invented), which is:

Technology is the fundamental precursor to civilization and is therefore the most powerful social force in the universe, yo. Srsly.

Humanity is in the midst of a rapid upswing in almost all facets of human development. Things are just getting better, all across the board. BUT, there are still some crappy little downward notches in the larger upward curve. We’re in one of those — the American Dream has lost coherence - and we are desperate for something big, something to inspire and unite us, something more than, oh I don’t know, the impotent & mentally retarded discourse of America’s pathetic political charade, for example.

A leap too far? Overgeneralizing? Pandering to the Dumb? Just dumb?
Well, I suppose it’s possible that the population of the U.S. who find themselves anywhere on the mildly-curious-to-completely-rapt scale of interest in the iPhone 5’s pending release are a poor sample from which to gauge the attitude of a nation. But for that to be the case it would have to be in another universe with different rules. Because A: There are around 310 million people in the U.S., and about 100 million are smartphone users, and I’d guess (and read survey data reporting) that a strong percentage of them are pretty interested in learning about or buying the iPhone 5 — so if you think such a massive population block that is engaged and ready to take action on an issue provides a poor statistical sample, well then, you can’t count. And because B: those 100 million people have nothing else to give a shit about.

The iPhone 5, Insidiously Alluring in a Vacuum!
So what the hell am I saying here? Well, The iPhone is an incredible device that quite literally represents a truckload of previously impossible mobile functionality. Think about it — just 4.5 years ago it didn’t exist, and the App Store (which has been copied by, ummm… everyone) is barely over 3 years old. It’s a beautifully designed tool, elegantly powerful in so many ways. But, it’s no revelation, it’s just a very precedented technological creation of late 2011; it’s a consumer product — and in another year, we’ll want the next version, and the next, and so on.

Physical artifacts are usually outshined by big ideas, but the thing is this: while we’re lousy with the former, we’re fresh out of the latter.

Projecting
Now this isn’t about dorks like myself and those inhabiting this higher ranks of sciencyness and geekdom — we’ve got plenty to excite us. But everyday humans in the U.S., where traditional notions of culture are diffuse and diluted, tend to unite around ideas and ideals — and very often those drive and/or are a product of scientific or technological advancement of some kind — and sometimes, that can inspire others around the world. The mass-production of automobiles and human flight inspired notions of the freedom of movement, TV launched and inspired vast visual creativity, and following the Soviet advances, the Apollo missions united the nation, gave new appreciation for the Pale Blue Dot, ROI-ed ten$ of billion$, and inspired the rest of the world to continue pushing into the frontier of space. And, American computer technology, much of it pioneered by Apple, jumpstarted what will probably be the single largest paradigm shift in the history of our species. It’s become natural for us to see great positivity and opportunity in our technological achievements.

Americans fundamentally appreciate and embrace innovation, and we want look to the future with hope, longing for new ideas and new developments that create new economies and new possibilities. But for the time being now, our American Dream is stuck in neutral and we have no common rallying point. Our nation’s greatest point of unity and excitement and anticipation is for the release of another mobile telecommunications device — the best thing we have to look forward to is Tim Cook, 10:00am, PST.

Well That’s not so Uplifting Now, is it?
We desperately want good news, we desperately want a new great project stabbing toward some awesome goal — and there’s just… nothing there. The economy is crap, there is no great leader to inspire us, and there is no great undertaking for the betterment of all humankind. That’s where the iPhone 5 anticipation energy comes from. Americans want what is new, we want to push forward, we want profound ideas to inspire us now and for decades to come — it’s in the fabric of the nation. If we were about to launch a manned mission to Mars, or a Manhattan Project-style energy initiative, or building hotels on the moon, this announcement would be but a spark.

Myself and millions will soon have a state of the art, super cool new phone. And the Dream will stay on break. Such is life. But it’s not gone, and do check back later — we might have space tourism and near-infinite fusion energy pretty soon!

It’s Tuesday night here in Japan — going to sleep.
I’ll check the morning news straight away, and I’ll be excited about the phone I will own in a few short weeks. It’ll be awesome, I’m sure. And the world’s most valuable company will get more valuable, I’m sure.

Aside from the next-next iPhone and a new figurehead, will another year bring anything new? Not so sure.

(The Nuclear-Powered Science Robot Dune Buggy with Lasers came close, didn’t it?)

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Thanks for reading!

-Reno at Anthrobotic.com

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Complexity decomplexified: A List of 200 Results Encountered over 55 Years

Otto E. Rossler

Faculty of Science, University of Tubingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 8, 72076 Tubingen, Germany

Abstract

The present list was compiled by a “specialist for non-specialization” who owes this scientific identity to the masters of three disciplines: physicist Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker, biologist Konrad Lorenz and mathematician Bob Rosen. With the best findings compressed into a line or two by heart, the synopsis brings hidden patterns to the fore. Simultaneously the individual results become maximally vulnerable – so as to facilitate improvement or falsification.

(August 28, revised September 16, 2012)

Philosophical Preface

Descartes re-invented the rational world of Heraclitus. Specifically, he asked the following question (paraphrased): “Do the ‘assignment conditions’ that we find ourselves glued to (the body, the now, the qualia including color and joy) represent an acceptable state of affairs?” The answer is “yes,“ Descartes proposed: if and only if the other two conditions that hold us in their grip (the “laws” and the “initial conditions”momentarily applicable within the laws, to use Newton’s later terms) are consistent. As long as this “machine conjecture” is empirically fulfilled, an infinite privilege separates the conscious observer from all other inhabitants of the world: The others become “mere machines” in the experience of the first (so that he may, for example, do a brain operation on one of them to save his life). Levinas called this state of one’s being totally outside the other’s interior side, “exteriority.” The subject has the option of not misusing the infinite power of exteriority by acting fairly towards the poor “machine” of the other so as if it possessed a subjective side of its own – even though this cannot be proven and indeed is absurd to assume (were there not the miracle of the consciousness of the first). A single act of not misusing the infinite power of exteriority, performed by the inmate of the dream of consciousness on a fellow machine, would then put the Dream-Giving Instance to shame – unless it is benevolent itself. The fact that this risk is being taken by the DGI is a living proof, according to Descartes, that the chain of colorful subjective nows imposed on the victim of consciousness is not a “bad dream.” But this applies only as long as the “steel fibers” of the Cartesian coordinates, proposed to mathematically fit the colorless sub-portion of experience (its “Hades part”), prove to be consistent. This empirical question endows the study of their properties with a maximal dignity. In the Greek Hades, all quantitative relations valid in our upper world were preserved – except for the “blood” that endows them with color and substance. Hence the merely relational (“shadow”) part becomes an instrument by which to do good to one’s fellow inhabitants of the dream who, by their being machines, are totally given into the dreamer’s hand as hostages. This “exteriority theory” (Levinas) endows science with an infinite dignity – as long as it is empirically consistent. The task to include quantum mechanics – with its indeterminism and nonlocality explained by micro assignment – was singlehandedly taken up by Everett in the footsteps of Einstein. (I thank Ali Sanayei and Ivan Zelinka for discussions and Stephen Wolfram for encouragement. For J.O.R.)

The List

• Energy-saving voice-signal proportional amplitude-modulation (made distortion-free by negative feedback between rectified high-frequency output and low-frequency input)

• Z-incision (a non-mutilating circumcision method)

• “Invisible machines”: virtually infinitely many non-negative chemical variables that are almost all zero for most of the time (with arbitrarily long delays incurred at very low concentrations)

• Chemical evolution as a special case: forms an Erdoes-type growing automaton (similarly Stu Kaufmann, Joel Cohen and Koichiro Matsuno)

• Far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics and chemical kinetics jointly predict the emergence of life with C-C-C- backbones in liquid water on earth and Europa (and with B-N-B-N- backbones in liquid ammonia inside Jupiter)

• Teilhard’s “second arrow” in statistical thermodynamics is a valid description of the implied asymptotic approach towards “point Omega”

• “Recursive evolution”: evolution improves evolution in the first place (with Michael Conrad, in the footsteps of John Holland and John von Neumann)

• Unlike “metabolic adaptation” (Darwin) which is non-predictive in its history-dependent details, “positional adaptation” (discovered in a discussion with Konrad Lorenz as being of equal rank) is predictive

• “What are brains for?” is a well-posed scientific question (in the new science of deductive biology)

• “The Rossler task” (Michael Conrad) or the “decision-type traveling salesman problem” (as its re-discoverers, Garey and Johnson, called it in their book “Computers and Intractability”)

• Ric Charnov’s “optimal foraging theory” is closely related (finding things “just in time” is what brains are made for)

• Goedel’s incompleteness theorem can be seen as a limiting solution to the NP-complete traveling salesman problem (so incompleteness becomes intuitive)

• “The bacterial brain” (residing in the cell membrane with both sensors and motors) implements a local solution to the “smoothed-out” traveling-salesman problem (with Hans Bremermann)

• “The brain equation” yields a highly efficient local solution to the decision-type traveling-salesman problem

• The brain equation attaches a positive or negative weight to all neighboring sources of different types in a distance-, angle- and time-dependent fashion (so that an optimum “sum direction” results, with all directions attached an either finite or infinite, positive or negative weight)

• Nonexistence of an “eusocial brain equation” (with Thimo Böhl and Oswald Berthold)

• “A universal brain”: the brain equation combined with a powerful “universal simulator” (or synonymously “cognitive map system” or Virtual-Reality machine “VR”)

• The combined system (brain equation plus artificial cognitive map system with overlap buffer and long-term storage device) is what Bill Seaman calls a “Neosentient”

• The “sinc algorithm” (real-space equivalent to a Fourier window in frequency space) can be approximated by a multi-level, multi-resolution, both ascending and descending Reichardt-von-Foerster type neural net (with Bernhard Uehleke)

• “Tolerance attractors”: form under recurrence in such a neural net (implementing Poincaré-Zeeman-Poston-DalCin “tolerance theory” in their realizing von Foerster’s prediction of “Platonic ideation”)

• The technical problem of “fast picture-shifting” in such multi-resolution level neural nets or wavelets, while solved by nature, still eludes science (with Michael Klein)

• “Pandaka-pygmaea Institute“ proposed to solve the Platonic and other brain problems by investigating the smallest fish’s brain (along with that of its normal-sized close relative, Gobius niger)

• The positive sum potential in the brain equation – “happiness” – is displayed by the young of social animals

• One of the sub-potentials in the brain equation – “bonding” – is displayed by all social animals

• Two distinct displays (like happiness and bonding) can acquire a functional overlap through an evolutionary accident called “Huxley evolutionary ritualization”

• Huxley’s accident happened independently in the evolution of two mammalian species: tail-wagging signals both bonding and happiness in wolves, and the Smiley face signals both happiness and bonding in humans (similarly Jan van Hoof and Frans de Waal)

• “All Animals Are Autistic” (AAAA): because the brain equation, an autonomous optimizer, is autistic by definition

• Every brain-equation-carrier is “alive” independently of hardware because it solves the positional-adaptation problem which is no less vital than the metabolic-adaptation problem (“chemical life” and “brain life” have equal ranks)

• Universal brains are “mirror-competent” (owing to their high simulational capability)

• Unlike humans and some other species, wolves do not have a universal brain (their VR component is too weak for mirror-competence)

• Smile-laughter overlap + strong bonding + mirror-competence = sufficient condition for an “epigenetic function change” in the sense of Robert Rosen to occur: the “personogenetic function change” (PFC)

• The PFC consists in the invention of the “suspicion of benevolence shown by the other” (which then leads to a state of “being moved” in a positive feed-back comprising both sides in the elicited bonding bout)

• The PFC represents an example of “creation out of nothing” (the suspicion of, and then production of, benevolence)

• “Was Mom totally moved like scrambled eggs?” [the German word “geruehrt” means both being moved and being stirred], asked 3-year-old Jonas (in “Jonas’ World – The Thinking of a Child” edited by Reimara Rossler and the author)

• “Person attractor” (Detlev Linke): the new stable mode of functioning arising in the PFC

• The PFC can be seen to be nothing but a misunderstanding (a mistaken convergence concocted in the universal simulator): were it not interactively confirmed

• The fact that the PFC represents a joint functional trap allows one to speak of “Nature’s Shadchen trick” (with Roger Malina)

• The person attractor resembles a “folie à deux” (a form of “animal schizophrenia”) compared to the physiological autistic functioning of the two autonomous optimizers with cognition

• The PFC constitutes a miracle, worked by the toddler

• Watching this creation-out-of-nothing being achieved by the toddler is a maximally moving event (there appears to be no recorded documentation of this “holy of holies” of humankind)

• The mutually confirmed suspicion of benevolence acquires the character of an “objective truth” (there is no older objective truth)

• The “miracle” goes still further: a third fictitious person is involved in the personogenesis (called “god” or “Buddha” etc. in different cultures): the Dream-Giving Instance DGI or synonymously the “non-I” (or even the “palpable emptiness behind the dream”)

• The “non-I” arises concomitantly with the “I” and the “you” (the two other persons created in the PFC)

• Women are probably more religious (they statistically have more “heart” in the sense of bonding and in regard to the presence of the bonding hormone oxytocin, and moreover form in the majority of cases the partner in the PFC

• Friendly teasing jokes (“humor”) are implicit in the PFC

• Being able to ask a factual question is a new behavioral trait made possible by the PFC

• “Nonautistic languaging” automatically develops as a consequence of the PFC (similarly C. Andy Hilgartner)

• Human society in all its essential aspects is formed as a consequence of the PFC: society is based on asking questions and giving answers on the basis of the mutual trust between persons

• “Personology” – “Adam” means: person made out of soil (with Michael Langer)

• The “physiological autism” of every autonomous optimizer with cognition persists in human beings with an innate “smile blindness” (if the latter is strong enough to prevent the epigenetic PFC from occurring)

• Most alleged autism in humans is “pseudo-autism” (a lesser fluency in some social conventions)

• The causal explanation of autism enables a causal therapy: the caretaker can deliberately produce an “acoustic smile” whenever momentarily happy (the acoustic smile consists in a tender bonding noise made)

• The fact that the caretaker must be the essential bonding partner proves that modern child cribs are a collective tragedy (their uninformed use explains the global rise in autism)

• The “causal therapy of autism” has been shunned by the profession for 37 years (only Gregory Bateson approved of it)

• The reason for the silence seems to lie in the fact that the person attractor is “too easy to elicit”: young mirror-competent bonding animals can predictably be lured into the personogenetic function change, too

• “Galactic export” is the technical term for the export of the personogenetic bifurcation towards non-human mirror-competent bonding animals (since the “small step” of recruiting a second terrestrial life form is the “giant leap” involved)

• Evolutionarily speaking, the epigenetic PFC is a “lethal factor” (since it replaces natural selection by person-controlled caring)

• The PFC nevertheless is the opposite of being “evolutionarily lethal” since it represents a jump up into the heart of point Omega (which thereby ceases to be asymptotic in the sense of being unreachable in finite time)

• The planet-wide shying-away from galactic export is an example of a collective-subconscious “speciesism”

• The fear is palpable ever since Gregory Bateson and John C. Lilly’s joint student, Margaret Howe, tried to adopt a male dolphin 47 years ago; Koko (Francine Patterson’s gorilla life partner) and Kanzi (Susan Savage-Rumbaugh’s grown-up bonobo child) are both underrated

• Stephen Spielberg played on the same taboo in his movie “AI” – which brings-in the added feature that his non-biochemical person is potentially immortal (a fact he played down tactfully)

• Leo Szilard introduced non-human persons in his 1948 sci-fi story “The Voice of the Dolphins” (written in the aftermath of his failure to prevent his other brainchild, the bomb, from being dropped)

• The “Rosette phenomenon” of sperm whales (the carriers of the most sophisticated brains on earth) deserves to be taken seriously: what function has their daily meeting? (Cf. the unpublished sci-fi story “The Tale of the Whale” mentioned in the book “Neosentience” by Bill Seaman and the author)

• “Horizontal exteriority” in the sense of Emmanuel Lévinas is the omnipotence of the PFC, re-activated in an act of fairness

• “Vertical exteriority” is the matching term in the theological sense of Edmond Jabès (with Nils Roeller, Kai Grehn and and Klaus Sander)

• “A program can force the programmer to reply” (with Christa Sommerer and Adolf Muschg)

• “Simulacron Three” (by Daniel F. Galouye 1964) and “A Puppeteer’s World” (‘Welt am Draht’-movie by Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1973) are anticipations of the same insight, followed by the “Matrix” movie and Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity Theory”

• The “Turing test” – a test for personhood – got first passed in ancient Rome by the Cretan slave and subsequent stoic philosopher Epictetus (as I learned from Bob Rosen)

• A mathematical proof that the orangutan brain is functionally superior to the human brain (with Michael Langer, homage to Willie Smits)

• An equation for a universal immune system (with Robert A. Lutz)

• A chemical universal circuit (with Dietrich Hoffmann)

• Differentiable automata exist mathematically (because certain ordinary differential equations can, approximately-if-consistently, be described by automata theory)

• Well-stirred automata exist physically

• Reaction scheme for a temperature-compensated chemical clock

• An “ultra long-term continuous-stirred-tank-reactor version” of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, proposed: to check for a “late explosion” in the number of variables produced (with Michael Conrad)

• “Traffic-light” version of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction (with Wolfgang Engelmann and Reimara Rossler)

• “Slinky attractor” (with Okan Gurel and Eberhard Hopf)

• “Reinjection principle”: is valid in more than two-dimensional phase spaces (independently Floris Takens and Christian Mira)

• A chaotic electronic multivibrator (built with Hartmut Waible)

• “The Rossler attractor” (Norman Packard and Ralph Abraham)

• “Spiral chaos”

• “Screw-type chaos”

• “The sound of chaos” known to everyone (idling motor, hoarse voice)

• Chaos (a stereoscopic sound movie made with Reimara Rossler and Thomas Wiehr 1976)

• “Chaos = disciplined tangle” (with Alfred Klemm who turns 100 this year)

• Hyperchaos (name courtesy Paul Rapp)

• “The sound of hyperchaos” (like raindrops falling on a car’s roof)

• “Running electric fan suspended from a long rope” (Olafur Eliasson’s experimental hyperchaos)

• X-attractor in 3 D (still unidentified)

• “Playdough task” (to be given to thousands of toddlers to find the hoped-for X-attractor)

• Atrio-ventricular heart chaos (with Reimara Rossler and Herbert D. Landahl)

• “Endocrinological chaos” (with Reimara Rossler and Peter Sadowski, independently Colin Sparrow)

• Chaos in the Zhabotinsky reaction (with Klaus Wegmann, in parallel to John L. Hudson)

• “Cloud attractor” (with James A. Yorke)

• “Folded-towel map” (in parallel with Masaya Yamaguti’s “folded handkerchief map”)

• “Punctured hyperchaos” as the source of any transfinitely exact 2-D self-similarity or self-affineness (with Michael Klein)

• “The chaotic hierarchy” (the simplest equation was subsequently found by Gerold Baier and Sven Sahle)

• Explicit differentiable Smale-Urysohn solenoid (with Pal Fischer and W.R. Smith)

• “Transfinitely invertible attractors” (almost everywhere so)

• An explicit Poincaré recurrence (with Georg C. Hartmann)

• A generic Milnor-like attractor (with Francisco Doria and Georg C. Hartmann)

• “Flare attractors” (with Georg C. Hartmann, and with Vela Vilupillai in late homage to Richard Goodwin)

• A “society of flare attractors” (with Georg C. Hartmann)

• “Hyperfat attractors” (with John L. Hudson)

• “The fat etc. hierarchy” (with Erik Mosekilde)

• Particle indistinguishability is transfinitely exact (with Hans Primas, Martin Hoffmann and Joe Ford)

• Deterministic entropy (with Hans Diebner)

• “Gibbs-Sackur cell” in phase space

• Classical unit action (the system-specific Sackur cell)

• Micro time reversals in the Sackur cell of the observer (with Richard Wages)

• An estimate of Planck‘s constant (based on Sackur cell)

• Causal (exo) explanation of quantum mechanics (with Peter Weibel)

• Endophysics (with David Finkelstein and John Casti)

• “Boscovich covariance” (with Edgar Heilbronner, Jens Meier and Matthias Schramm)

• Causal (exo) explanation of spin (with Michael Conrad and Debbie Conrad)

• “Single-spin chemistry” in ultra-strong magnetic fields (with Dieter Froehlich, Guenter Haefelinger and Frank Kuske)

• Second Periodic Table of Elements (single-spin chemistry)

• “Cession twin of action” with h/c as its quantum (with Claudia Giannetti)

• Everett’s global Psi-function is replaced by Boltzmann’s global H-function on the exo-level (with Siegfried Zielinski)

• Everett’s observer-centered explanation of nonlocality (1957, p. 149, left column), confirmed

• The momentarily consciousness-bearing Sackur cell in the brain determines both h and c - a conjecture (with Reimara Rossler and Peter Weibel)

• “VX-diagram” (correlated photons measured in two mutually receding spaceships): the completed Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox (with John S. Bell, in parallelism to Susan Feingold and Roger Penrose)

• Partially satellite-based VX experiment: will prove that more than one quantum world exists (with Anton Zeilinger)

• Locally-counterfactual superluminal telegraph (with Uwe Niedersen and Jürgen Parisi)

• Everett immortality (with Markus Fix and Bryce DeWitt)

• Aging equation (with Reimara Rossler and Peter Kloeden)

• An evolutionary explanation of the higher female longevity (with Reimara Rossler, Peter Kloeden and Bob May)

• A constant-temperature physico-chemical time-of-life clock in the body, predicted (with Reimara Rossler)

• Melatonin as a likely “handle” of the time-of-life clock (with Reimara Rossler and Peter Kloeden)

• Lampsacus, hometown of all persons on the Internet (with Valentino Braitenberg and Gerhard J. Lischka)

• An attempt to found Lampsacus in homage to Anaxagoras (with Ezer Weizmann and Mohamed ElNaschie) [quote from Beer Sheva: “This is what Israel was meant for”]

• “Earth-Moon University” in Lampsacus (with Wilfried Kriese, Artur P. Schmidt and George E. Lasker)

• The 16-level “pyramid of knowledge” in Lampsacus

• “WM-diagram”: simultaneous signals sent up and down in time across different levels, in gravity (with Dieter Froehlich)

• A gravitational-redshift proportional size increase, implicit in the WM diagram (with Dieter Froehlich, Heinrich Kuypers and Jurgen Parisi)

• The most energetic photon possible (with Heinrich Kuypers)

• All black holes are “almost-black holes” since they are never finished in finite time (with Dieter Froehlich, Heinrich Kuypers, Hans Diebner and Mohamed ElNaschie)

• Non-uniqueness of simultaneity on the rotating cylinder (with Dieter Froehlich, Normann Kleiner and Francisco J. Muller)

• Correct proof of angular-momentum conservation in gravity (with Heinrich Kuypers and Martin Pfaff)

• Only apparent invariance of transverse size in the new locally isotropic gravitational size increase (in parallel to the only apparent invariance of the transverse size in the likewise locally isotropic Lorentz contraction)

• Einstein’s gravitational Time dilation possesses three new corollaries: Length, Mass and Charge suffer a proportional or antiproportional change (“TeLeMaCh” theorem)

• General relativity is in for a far-reaching mathematical and physical re-interpretation

• c is globally constant (Max Abraham rehabilitated)

• Nonexistence of gravitational waves (as a corollary)

• Nonexistence of gravitons (as a corollary)

• The famous “indirect evidence for gravitational waves” (Hulse-Taylor) explained instead by tidal friction (with Dieter Froehlich and René Stettler)

• A “Reeb foliation in spacetime” exists around every rotating black hole (with Dieter Froehlich following stimulation by Art Winfree)

• Kerr metric disproved (as a corollary)

• Ur-meter disproved (via Telemach theorem)

• Ur-kilogram disproved (via Telemach theorem)

• Charge conservation in physics disproved (via Telemach theorem)

• Black holes are haved of one of their 3 hairs: charge (while mass and angular momentum remain)

• Reissner-Nordstrom metric disproved (via Telemach theorem)

• Eddington-Finkelstein transformation disproved (with apology to my good friend David)

• Bekenstein theory disproved (via Telemach theorem)

• Hawking radiation disproved (with apology to a world hero)

• “Coordinate singularity at the horizon”: rehabilitated as a physical singularity (via Telemach theorem)

• “Interior Schwarzschild solution” disproved

• “Singularity theorem” inside black hole horizon disproved (with apology to my friend Roger)

• “Wormholes” disproved

• Upper half of “Flamm’s paraboloid” replaced by a generic 3-pseudosphere (the lower half disappears)

• The Sackur-cell explanation of h entails non-existence on the exo level of all field particles

• The exo-nonexistence of the field particles implies that Supersymmetry is nonexistent

• The human Lorenz matrix of facial expressions: a universal natural facial-expressions simulator (with Wilfried Musterle)

• An equation for a one-dimensional – purely temporal – brain (with Michael Conrad, similarly Susie Vrobel)

• Evil is a contagious disease (unlike the good, evil cannot arise spontaneously)

• Children and adults form two different species, ethologically speaking (with Konrad Lorenz)

• “Pongo goneotrophicus” (meaning “the parent-feeding ape”) is a more appropriate biological name for Homo sapiens

• Biochemical life (including Robert Forward’s nuclear-chemical life) on the one hand, and “brain life” on the other, are functionally disjoint (Hanns Ruder introduced me to Forward’s book “The Dragon’s Egg”)

• Electrons have finite volume (owing to Telemach)

• As a corollary, string theory is qualitatively (but not quantitatively) confirmed

• The empirical confirmation of string theory implies that a successful generation of black holes at particle colliders has become much more likely

• Freshly generated black holes are undetectable by the detectors of particle colliders

• The empirical ten-orders-of-magnitude “quasar scaling law” extends downwards by some 50 orders of magnitude (owing to the new properties of black holes)

• There exist no more unstoppable and voracious parasites in the universe than black holes

• Miniature black holes grow exponentially inside solid matter (once they get stuck)

• “Clifford conjecture”: finite-universe solutions to the Einstein equation are unphysical (with Walter Ratjen); if so, there exists no “Gödel solution” and no time travel

• Fractal dimensionality of the cosmos is close to unity, not only empirically but also theoretically (“Fournier-Mandelbrot solution” to the Einstein equation)

• A first consistent history of galaxy formation is taking shape

• The newly discovered very far-away mature old galaxy BX442 (more than ten billion light years) is only the first – optically little-distorted – example of its kind (besides the many still older quasars)

• Low-surface-brightness galaxies (“black galaxies”) are about 50 billion years old (with Henry Gebhardt)

• Giacconi’s ultra-faint equidistributed X-ray sources most likely are ultra-distant ultra-high-redshift quasars – so that redshift measurements are highly desirable (with Dieter Froehlich)

• The microwave background radiation is predicted to merge smoothly with equal-temperature galactic-halo objects (hence the raw data of the Planck mission deserve to be published)

• There exist differentiable dynamical systems that are made up, not of 1-D locally parallel threads as customary, but of 2-D locally parallel surfaces (Bouligand-Winfree theory)

• Inadvertent re-discovery of Zwicky-Chandrasekhar “dynamical friction” (with Dieter Froehlich and Normann Kleiner, in contact with Ilya Prigogine, Alfred Klemm, Joachim Peinke and Jurgen Parisi)

• The not quite straight Hubble-Perlmutter line holds true in a non-expanding Fournier-Mandelbrot cosmos (with Dieter Froehlich, Ramis Movassagh and Anthony Moore)

• Dynamical friction numerically confirmed (with Klaus Sonnleitner)

• “Deterministic statistical thermodynamics” (with Hans Diebner)

• “Deterministic statistical cryodynamics”: exists as a new fundamental science side by side with deterministic statistical thermodynamics (with Klaus Sonnleitner, Frank Kuske and Christophe Letellier)

• “Deterministic ectropy” in statistical cryodynamics (with Ali Sanayei)

• The smaller (almost) black hole in a pair-collision predictably gets re-circulated with all the still in-falling particles which jointly make it up (with Dieter Froehlich)

• Black hole mergers are a source of both charged and uncharged cosmic rays of moderate energies

• Conjecture: 50 percent of all matter in the cosmos is (almost) black holes (with Dieter Froehlich)

• “Metabállon anapaúetai” (metabolizing it remains at rest): Heraclitus’ transfinitely recycling cosmology, proven valid after 2 ½ millennia

• Abramowicz’s “topology inversion” near a black-hole’s horizon, confirmed (with Dieter Froehlich)

• “Identity jumps” between 3 indistinguishable classical particles on a ring (with Peter Weibel and Richard Wages)

• In a classical radiationless atom containing two indistinguishable electrons, two spherical shells are formed (with Dietrich Hoffmann and George Kampis)

• Is the “flotor” (Ralph Hollis) a transluminally fast measuring device? (with Peter Plath)

• The counterfactual superluminal telegraph is “subluminally confirmable (with Uwe Niedersen)

• A counterfactual world-change machine (with Jürgen Parisi and Koichiro Matsuno)

• History of the transfinitely exact indistinguishability (Anaxagoras, Gregorius of Naziance, the Mutakallimún, Bruno, Spinoza, Leibniz, Gibbs, Pauli), in exchanges with Martin Hoffmann, Joe Ford, Hans Primas, Peter Weibel, Alexandre Ganoczy, Richard Wages, Rudolf Matzka Elisabeth von Samsonow, Jurgen Heiter, Anna-Sophie Mahler)

• “Everett-Schrödinger Russian Roulette” (with Markus Fix)

• Unit “el-action” is a new universal conserved quantity (like the unit action)

• Unit “el-cession” is a new universal conserved quantity (like the unit cession)

• “G-zero” is a new fundamental constant replacing the universal gravitational constant G and the universal vacuum permeability constant mu-zero, which both remain unchanged locally (similarly Richard J. Cook and György Darvas)

• The nonlinear simultaneity generator in the brain forms a qualitative analog of general relativity (with Eva Ruhnau)

• Cryodynamics and thermodynamics, combined, allow for an eternal cosmology in the footsteps of Heraclitus

• No WIMPs since cold dark matter was disproved

• No dark energy, in the absence of accelerated expansion

• No Big Bang and no space expansion since cryodynamics explains the Hubble-Perlmutter law in a stationary fractal cosmos

• “No Big Bang” also follows directly from the global constancy of c

• No inflation, in the absence of space expansion

• No “primordial” nucleosynthesis, in the absence of space expansion

• No Sunyaev-Zel’dovich cutoff, in the absence of a distant origin of the background radiation

• The decades-old problem of the “survival conditions of the scientific-technological world” (C.F. von Weizsäcker) remains a pressing problem of humankind

• The new results on black holes (facilitated production, non-evaporation, unchargedness, exponential growth inside matter) change the safety equation of any attempt at producing them on earth

• The LHC experiment, designed for producing black holes (amongst other courageous aims like finding the Higgs field), is being run at history-making energies and luminosities for almost two years

• Simultaneously CERN refuses to update its 4-years old LHC safety report – even though a stop may soon come too late

• An attempt to convene an “LHC safety conference” (with Markus Goritschnig and many other scientists) fizzled, although a court would humbly suggest it and a whole country had briefly left CERN out of concern (and the United Nations’ Security Council is concerned with the matter for more than a year – which fact explains the media curfew)

• Leo Szilard’s 1948 proposal to slow-down scientific progress by introducing the modern peer review system (which admits only differentiable increments in the fractal landscape of truth) is co-responsible for the current “Sleeping Beauty” period in science which may prove suicidal

• Proposal to employ the new science of cryodynamics to stabilize Tokamak-type fusion reactors so as to generate unlimited free energy for humankind just got published (I thank Eric Klien for encouragement)

(Friedrich Valjavek kindly compiled an annotated bibliography in 2002: http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/RosslerBibliography.pdf )

There four camps that comprise the present day interstellar travel community and only one camp will succeed.

The first camp, the conventional rocket camp, believes it is possible using conventional rockets (chemical, ion, nuclear or antimatter) to realize interstellar travel to our nearest star Alpha Centauri. One of the problems is the costs, estimated at an unthinkably large $238,596 billion and upwards. It is several thousand times greater if we choose to use antimatter.

Further, John Eades, a former senior scientist with CERN, in his March/April 2012 Skeptical Inquirer article “Antimatter Pseudoscience”, lays down the reasons why antimatter based propulsion will never be technologically feasible.

Black Hole of wealth. One down three to go.

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The second, the hypothesis camp, believes that there is some equation that will allow us to reach 1,000 x velocity of light and upwards based on quantum foam. Nonsense. Be very clear, the experimental evidence proves that anything with mass cannot be accelerated to exceed the velocity of light. Sure, we have hypotheses (i.e. mathematical guesses without experimental proof) that point every which way, but at best these are guesses and they have not or cannot be proven experimentally. In addition, Robert Nemiroff’s three photon discovery suggests that both quantum foam and quantum gravity may in part or whole invalidated while upholding relativity.

Wrong turn. Two down and two to go.

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The third, the impossible camp, believes that interstellar travel is impossible. As Prof. Adam Franks stated in his July 24, 2012 New York Times Op-Ed, Alone in the Void, “Short of a scientific miracle of the kind that has never occurred, our future history for millenniums will be played out on Earth”. Obviously the impossible camp disagrees with the hypothesis camp on the basis of the physics.

Don’t argue. Three down one more to go.

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I belong to the fourth, the new physics camp, that there is a new physics that the other three camps do not subscribe to. There are 57 of us physicist-engineers from 16 countries, US, Russia, UK, China, Japan, Romania, Austria, India and more, who have researched or are researching new propulsion technologies that are not based on chemical, ion, nuclear or antimatter engines or untested hypotheses. We search out and investigate anomalies.

Change is coming. We will be successful.

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Based on my work as evidence, several important phenomena have been discovered

1. A new formula for gravitational acceleration that does not require us to know the mass of the planet or star. This is an immense discovery, never before accomplished in the 346-year history, since Newton, of the physics of gravitational fields, as all theories on gravity require us to know the mass of the planet or star.

2. Solved Laithwaite’s Big Wheel experiment, which nobody else could in the last 35 years.

3. Asked questions that neither relativity nor quantum theory has. For example, how is probability implemented in Nature?

Because we have learned to ask questions that the other three camps have not, we the new physics camp will find different answers and reach the stars before anyone else.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.