Assistive Technology Principles and Applications for Communication Disorders and Special Edu... Book

I am unsure how I ended up with this book on my Kindle. I don't remember where I found it or why I thought to read it. The author (Nick Cook) was at one point the aviation editor for Jane's Defense Weekly, a famous defense industry magazine that is read worldwide. The author’s journalism chops stand to recommend this book.

The subject matter is another thing, and needs to be dealt with very carefully: it describes the investigative exploits of Nick Cook as he travels the world, trying to discern if there is any truth to rumors about anti-gravity research taking place in the highly secretive clandestine engineering departments of defense industry contractors. In other words, Cook is probing the fuzzy line between crackpottery and classified innovation.

It’s no secret that firms such as Boeing or NASA fund small, internal departments dedicated to testing highly speculative, long-shot proposals for “breakthrough propulsion”. The fact that the Gravity Research Foundation was created in the 1950s, for example, is not controversial. What’s controversial is any suggestion that such research bore fruit.

In the current, accepted, rigorously-tested corpus of physical theory, producing any sort of gravitational effect testable in a lab is considered prohibitively difficult due to the sheer size of the energies required. Einstein has shown that gravity is sourced by mass-energy, with a coupling constant of G / c^4, and therefore very large amounts of mass-energy are always necessary to obtain gravitational effects of some importance. Any claim to provide anti-gravity effects in a lab setting, therefore, implies new physics beyond the boundaries of conventional physics.

Which isn’t immediately damning, but it makes the entire subject a massive crank magnet. Physics cranks exist in large numbers, possibly even outnumbering conventional researchers. They produce prodigious amounts of pseudo-theory, perpetual motion machine schematics, free energy devices, revolutionary physical theories, even their own vanity pseudo-scientific journals, etc., while evangelizing with the force and urgency of a religious fanatic. Because they couch their arguments in terms that sound sciencey (hence the term pseudo-science), and occasionally employ deliberate trickery, they can be very convincing to an untrained observer.

This all means that the simultaneous collision of pseudoscience, speculative physics, and big-money top-secret defense industry research makes for a heady and misleading subject matter that needs to be handled with the utmost care and an expert’s discerning eye. Nick Cook plainly admits that he has only a rudimentary grasp of physics, making him extremely unqualified to navigate these waters which are so fraught with deliberate deception and outright fraudulent claims. He even gets some very basic physics things wrong throughout the book, such as confusing the cosmic microwave background radiation with quantum zero-point energy.

He is well-meaning, but naive. Sending Nick Cook to investigate this stuff is like sending the adolescent president of the Harry Potter Fan Club to investigate Uri Geller. The kid wants badly to believe magic is real, but Uri Geller is playing a con man’s game, and the kid is not an expert on how stage magic is effected, resulting in an earnest but meaningless mess of a result.

Nick Cook spends the first third of the book stressing how much the anti-gravity subject is a career killer for journalists and scientists, I suspect as a way to soften the reader’s reaction to all this. It starts out well enough, with a bit of digging into the research of the 1950s, NASA, and Lockheed-Martin. My eyes began to roll, however, as we delved into the “secret Nazi flying saucer projects” mythos, which, sure enough, led directly to the secret Nazi “bell” experiment. After this, I thought for a moment that Nick Cook would pull up, let sanity prevail, and realize he had been lead astray, before he dove headfirst into Boyd Bushman (the former Lockheed engineer who is on youtube claiming a picture of an alien doll is an actual extraterrestrial), Tesla urban legends, and, of all things, the Hutchison effect.

The Hutchison effect! It is hard to explain to someone unfamiliar with all this stuff (somebody, no doubt, with saner interests than yours truly) how the so-called “Hutchison effect” is the crown jewel of physics crackpottery. Promising everything from free energy to death rays, a Canadian man who has crammed his apartment full of impressive-looking cold war radio equipment has created for the unwitting press “demonstrations” of his magical electromagnetic effect, whereby he creates fishing-wire “levitations”, reversed-film-footage spooky effects, and even antigravity by flipping his camera upside-down. His explanation is just hand-waving about high frequencies and high voltages. It is the lowest, bottom-of-the-barrel, carnival-barker snake oil, beyond all standards of reason and good sense, and Hutchison has been exposed for the fraud he is on multiple occasions. It only works because of the average person’s credulity and trust, and to whom electromagnetism might as well be a spooky magical thing with unknown and unknowable potential.

Poor Nick Cook. This is where his earnest naivete led him: he wanted to write a book about NASA and antigravity, and ended up finishing his book on the theoretical physics equivalent of the jackalope.

Overall, the book is well written, in that Cook employs lots of methods to make a dry, journalistic investigation into a historical subject somewhat gripping. The bit in the middle about Nazis drags a bit. The guy is good, but the editor really needed an expert to keep him from walking straight off into the deep end. At the very least, don’t allow someone to publish claims that a fancy electric fan made by an Austrian forester in the 1930s could spin air molecules “into such a state of super-excitement” that they coupled to a “zero-point field”. It’s embarrassing to everyone involved: the publisher, the reader, and the author.