Anti-Gravity Research The World Needs to Know About
Transcript
The year is 1915. World War I rages on. Ford manufactures its millionth Model T, and Einstein formulates general relativity. This changed gravity from a force to the curvature of a certain structure called spacetime, spurring
a surge of interest and research into gravity and its effects. However, what most people don't know is that this enthusiasm for relativity began to wane shortly after this 1915 breakthrough. The transition from a decades-long season of inactivity to the so-called renaissance of general relativity is a tapestry woven
from the threads of political intrigue, changing scientific norms, and a tale of two wealthy investors' obsession with antigravity that changed the course of physics, the effects of which, much like spacetime itself, are still rippling to this day. My name's Curt Jaimungal, and on this channel, we explore theories of everything,
primarily in podcast form from a theoretical physics perspective, but today we have something different. Hold on, because this is a tale of secrecy, flying saucers, and some of the biggest names in physics. This rabbit hole goes deep.
In the period following World War II, a shift took place in the way physics was researched, in particular regarding the then-nascent field of quantum gravity. The study of quantum gravity, a now-trendy subject at the intersection of quantum field theory and general relativity, was not a popular choice among physicists at the time.
Other areas, such as the behavior of particles like quarks and gluons, held a more central place in theoretical physics discourse. This remained mainstream even until the 1980s, where physicist Marie Gell-Mann underscored this by exclusion.
Gell-Mann, in a famous talk, outlined four problems in physics. Number one, why is there chirality? Number two, why are there three families? Number three, how many sets of Higgs bosons are there? And lastly, why
is it this particular group instead of some other simple or semi-simple one? Notice the conspicuous absence of quantum gravity as one of the most important unresolved problems, according at least to one of the leading physicists of the day. Now, there are two major players in this story.
The first is Roger Babson. Born into a merchant family in 1875 Massachusetts, Roger Babson was a businessman and a writer. In fact, Babson was a highly successful businessman and the
founder of Babson College as well as Babson Statistical Organization. His company pioneered financial forecasting and investment analysis, earning him pedigree in the business world. For reasons that will become clear in a moment,
Babson had a morbid fascination with gravity and in particular, anti-gravity. The second player in this story is Agnew Bahnson, an industrialist born in North Carolina in 1915. Having grown his family's air conditioning business into a thriving aeronautical equipment
company, Agnew wasn't a physicist but developed an interest in gravitational physics later in life. Like Roger, he was intrigued by the concept of anti-gravity and its potential applications. Roger Babson and Agnew Bahnson leveraged their wealth to influence the course of gravitational physics.
Notice that I keep saying gravitational physics and not say general relativity. The reason is that Roger and Agnew, at least embryonically, were interested in modifications to Newton's laws as well as other accounts of gravity that weren't relegated to Einstein's formulation. For instance,
Roger took the principle of action slash reaction from Newton's third law as primary, even metaphysically relating it to consciousness, which as you could imagine, along with their interest in anti-gravity, made most researchers disinclined to associate with them in the early stages. Babson unfortunately lost his older sister
and grandson to drowning, which he attributed to gravity. Thus, his interest in this force wasn't mere curiosity, but rather a vendetta. Now why did he ascribe the fault of drowning to gravity rather than to the myriad other
potential contributors like H2O, the seizing up of muscles, or even the harmonic oscillator? I don't know. However, we're lucky that he chose gravity as a target given that you and I are interested in this subject, and directly because of his vengeance, there's now a profusion of work that we can research and showcase in podcast
form on this channel, all the way from loop quantum gravity to string theory to even alternative approaches to deriving general relativity from what doesn't look like spacetime, such as Wolfram's approach and others. Babson firmly believed that conquering gravity had the potential to revolutionize human life,
just as electricity had done some decades earlier. While Roger's impetus into grand unified theories was personal loss, as far as I can tell, Agnew's was intellectual curiosity, much like you and myself. In 1948, Babson
established what's called the Gravity Research Foundation. This is important to this story and is a continuing thread in the development of modern theories of gravity. Babson's friend, Thomas Edison, apparently suggested the creation of the Gravity Research Foundation to Babson as a way to encourage and support scientific research related to gravity, focusing on developing practical
technologies to control gravity, in other words anti-gravity. In the year of Einstein's death, 1955, Agnew Bahnson, on the other hand, initiated the Institute for Field Physics at the University of North Carolina. Both Agnew's
institute and Roger's foundation were hubs that attracted leading scientists from around the world to discuss problems related to gravitation and ultimately unified field theories. Note that there are two separate organizations that were initially independent, the Gravity Research Foundation and the Institute for
Field Physics. There's usually a large point of confusion here, and it's worth pointing out so that we're not befuddled, because the names of the patrons involved also sound similar, so I'll try to enunciate when I can. There's Roger Babson, and then there's Agnew Bahnson.
Rather than using their last names, I'll attempt to use their first to avoid ambiguity. Their involvement wasn't just about giving out funds to universities. Both gentlemen played an active role in the research, and their financial resources allowed
certain universities to focus on these subjects, a subject which at the time was considered unfruitful and even fringe. So why did private individuals need to come in to fund research into gravitational physics? Why wasn't this being studied by academia much after the 1920s? A combination of world events and shifting academic furor to the quantum world.
The atomic bomb's success, if we can even call it that, had nations investing heavily into atomic and subatomic physics. The private patronage of Roger and Agnew was unprecedented in physics. Remember this is the
1950s. Most of the time, when you wanted something funded academically, you sourced it from tuition or the government directly. Sure there were donations here and there, but they didn't prescribe specific research directions generally speaking.
Roger Babson and Agnew Bahnson are seminal in that regard. In fact, they meticulously selected the researchers and institutions to fund, focusing on those that shared their interest in gravitational physics along with other idiosyncratic qualities like radial distance from a major city sufficient enough to evade fallout from a nuclear
bomb. Hey, this was the Cold War after all. Each of these organizations were involved in manifold activities including theoretical studies, experimental design and setup, data analysis, and even scientific communication. This latter point is especially the case with
the Gravity Research Foundation's Essay Contest. This is an annually organized essay competition open to physicists around the world. These essays actually continue on to this day and play a crucial role in this story. The winners of this contest were awarded cash prizes and a degree of prestige in the scientific community.
At least that was the intention, though it didn't work out like that originally and we'll talk more about that later. In other words, the story of post-war physics is often framed as this surge in federal spending on research, namely defense-related agencies. However, Babson and Bahnson changed that.
Their private funding induced research from outside the government. In particular, it did so for gravitational studies, which was actually by necessity since quote-unquote gravity didn't align with the government's particle physics-dominated focus. This is a theme Noam Chomsky talks about in
Manufacturing Consent. We tend to think that academics just pursue what they're interested in, motivated purely by the love of truth and science. However, professors are just like anyone else and they need and want payment and prestige. Thus, wherever the grants go, the research follows.
The contest attracted a variety of participants, some of whom were already eminent in their field, while others were yet to make their mark. Notable participants and even winners include Cecile and Bryce DeWitt, Stanley Desser and
Richard Arnowit, Philip Morrison and Thomas Gold, John Wheeler, Maurice Alais, Stephen Hawking, Ilya Prigogine, and Roger Penrose. We'll get into each of these individuals, as well as their research, later. Cecile and Bryce DeWitt play a pivotal role here, as they helped legitimize the Gravity Research Foundation.
Most intellectuals don't want to associate with something if they perceive other intellectuals distancing themselves from it. However, someone needed to be there at the inception of burgeoning fields. In this case, it was the DeWitts.
The physics enthusiasts among us know about Bryce DeWitt through the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, as well as because he was the popularizer of Everett's Many Worlds interpretation. Some of you may even recognize the name DeWitt from Bioshock Infinite, as the
inspiration for the quantum mechanical explosion of multiverses and time travel was indeed DeWitt's research. Cecile and her husband Bryce spent their academic life aiming to unify all interactions, akin to Einstein, though they had more of a quantum algebraic approach compared to Einstein's classical geometric one. What you
may not know is that Bryce DeWitt's work gained considerable traction thanks to the resources and platform afforded to him by the Gravity Research Foundation. Topics explored in these contests ranged from the relationship between magnetism and gravity, with some participants even echoing thoughts attributed to Nikola Tesla, while some others,
including Oppenheimer, a physicist known for his role in the Manhattan Project, explored the cosmological implications for general relativity and the nature of singularities. The notion that progress in the disjoint fields of particle physics and gravity could be achieved through a union of them was further reinforced by the victorious submission the following year. This time it was penned by two postdoctoral researchers at the Institute for Advanced
Study, namely Arnowit and Desser, both of whom were protégés of Julian Schwinger at Harvard. You may recognize their name as the AD in the ADM decomposition. However, their paper was a ruse.
It was submitted for fun and was nonsense. This apparently upset Oppenheimer. Desser apologized to Oppenheimer, stating the sin of the entry was to win when it was only meant to entertain. Nevertheless, the paper's concept that gravity could be transformed into nuclear energy was
lauded by the less informed, and eventually it caught the attention of military and industrial sources... If you enjoyed this TOE Clipping, then the full video is linked in the description. You should also sign up for TOEmail, which is again in the description and the pinned comment. You'll receive immediate
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