Advances in the Theoretical Physics of Metric Engineering of Unconventional Flying Objects
AKA "Acceleration Field G-Engine" (Paul Hill & George Trimble in 1956) "Negative Matter Propulsion" (H. Bondi, Y. Terletskii)
From: Jack Sarfatti
A bit of history
I worked on the concept of a nuclear gamma ray laser using isomers with Hans Bethe back at Cornell in 1963.
It was my idea that I got when I was at Tech/Ops/Mitre in Burlington, Mass (USAF/CIA contractor) in George Parrent Jr.'s
group with British physicist Brian Thompson.
After a short while Bethe discouraged the idea, but I think maybe he took it "black"? I do not know. That was when I was back at Cornell with Lenny Susskind and Johnny Glogower working on quantum phase/time operator problem that I also got from working with George Parrent Jr who was a student of Emil Wolf's. Their main project was imaging targets on ground from high-level U2s and satellites. Paul Roman from BU was part of that on the periphery and George wanted me to stay at Tech/Ops and work with Roman at BU on Ph.D. I had also turned down an offer from Leonard Schiff in a phone call to go to Stanford and a job offer from Naval Surface Weapons Lab in California.
My nuclear isomer idea was one of the reasons Ron Bullough, head of Theory Division AERE Harwell, invited me there in 1966.
The other was my idea for using laser pressure to confine hot fusion plasma. I later was in Keith Brueckner's group at UCSD and he worked on that problem. Brueckner part of the JASONs who used to meet at UCSD. Also George Chapline Jr actually made a nuclear laser for Teller years later (triggered by an A Bomb). George got me my job at SDSU and he used to come down to UCSD from Cal Tech all the time. Greg Benford was part of this little circle in La Jolla. See his novel "Timescape" about future to past signals - another odd synchronicity!
It was at Harwell that I wrote paper with A. M. Stoneham (later head of Theory Division at Harwell) on the
"Goldstone Theorem and the Jahn-Teller Effect" in Proc London Physical Society cited in AIP "Resource Letter on Symmetry in Physics"
This paper (1967) may have been first application of Goldstone spontaneous broken ground state symmetry to a practical problem of interest to nuclear reactor engineers. I got interested in broken symmetry from going down to Imperial College, London to meet Abdus Salam & Kibble.
Stoneham, based on what I told him of my London journies, saw how to apply it to the Jahn-Teller effect in crystal distortions.
BTW I am reading Ch. 13 of Hunt For Zero Point.
The Townsend electrostatic stuff perhaps has the kinds of stealth/lowering drag applications you describe. But it is not "anti-gravity" in the precise technical sense that everyone, except it appears Hal Puthoff, today means it, i.e. negative zero point quantum pressure, which according to Einstein anti-gravitates! Dark energy is a good example.
Hal Puthoff, Mark Millis et-al from NASA BPP and at Mitre Conference never breathe a word of that, nor is it in Aviation Week "To The Stars" March 1, 2004.
It is this Einstein GR equation (not Hal's PV at all)
Guv + /\zpfguv = 0
for exotic vacuum where
/\zpf is the residual total random micro-quantum "normal fluid" ZPF field.
In the Newtonian limit of weak curvature Einstein's eq approximates Newton's gravity "Poisson" field equation
Laplacian of the Exotic Vacuum's Gravity Potential Energy per unit test particle ~ c^2/\zpf
where /\zpf > 0 is the negative pressure possibly strong repulsive "negative matter" field of "dark energy"
and
/\zpf < 0 is the positive pressure possibly strong attractive "dark matter."
/\zpf = (Quantum of Area)^-1[(Quantum of Volume)(Higgs Intensity) - 1]
Macro-Quantum Vacuum Coherence = (Higgs Intensity)^1/2e^i(Rigid Goldstone Phase)
hc/(Quantum of Area) = Witten String Tension (alpha') = (Sakharov Metric Elasticity)^-1
Hagen Kleinert's World Crystal Lattice distortion field is
du(x) = (Quantum of Area)(Rigid Goldstone Phase),u
i.e. Bohm guidance IT FROM BIT constraint like v = (h/m)Grad(phase of BIT pilot wave)
,u is partial derivative relative to x^u
The role of Quantum of Area from Penrose's spin-network pre-geometry has Susskind's "world hologram" generalized Bekenstein-Hawking black hole thermodynamics
S/k = (Area)/4(Quantum of Area)
implicit automatically.
Einstein's curved space-time metric field for LNIF timelike non-geodesic observers guv(x) is the "elastic strain tensor" of du(x) as shown by Hagen Kleinert.
Show this to "Markus" and he can connect the dots.
These are the basic concepts necessary, though not sufficient, to "Make Star Trek Real."
The big breakthrough in metric engineering time travel Star Gates to parallel worlds as well as inside this world and for weightless warp drive of the Paul Hill "acceleration field" to Alcubierre class is the discovery of dark energy in precision cosmology.
Yet none of this found in NASA BPP publications, in Aviation Week? Why?
Puthoff mentions "five" ZPE potential technologies that are NOT in his words:
"Casimir force"
"Bubble sonoluminiscence"
"Ken Shoulders' charge clusters"
Then what are these "five"?
On Apr 16, 2004, at 6:00 AM, Nick Cook wrote:
Gary,
Just wanted to thank you for your seriously excellent and informative
article on Dark Energy, which greeted me on my recent return from vacation.
When I'm further down the track in my endeavours on 'Zero Point Two', I'd
really like to talk in greater depth with you about it.
Good to hear from you - and thanks again.
Best wishes,
Nick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary S. Bekkum"
To:
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 9:31 PM
Subject: washingtonpost.com Scary Things Come in Small Packages
washingtonpost.com: Scary Things Come in Small Packages
washingtonpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22099-2004Mar24?language=printer
Scary Things Come in Small Packages
The Pentagon says what Carl Collins is cooking up in his lab could power
the
most devastating bomb this side of a nuke. A long list of heavyweight
physicists calls that dangerous bunk. Either way, it'
By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page W15
It came from Los Alamos, express delivery. Refined, processed and sealed
in
plastic, it looked more like the grime that clings to the car after a hard
winter than something that might cost as much as $28 billion an ounce.
In a barnlike lab at the University of Texas at Dallas, among massive
accelerators, old pieces of cannibalized metal, layers of dust, broken
knobs, bits of wire and discarded electronics, the precious material was
placed atop an upside-down Styrofoam coffee cup.
A dental X-ray machine -- the kind used in hundreds of strip malls around
the country -- focused on the cup. A man with a radiation tag on his shirt
flipped a switch. A few days passed. To the naked eye, nothing happened.
But
during that time an invisible X-ray beam, modulated by a commercial audio
amplifier, slammed into the minute amount of material on the Styrofoam
platform. Protected behind cinder blocks, a flickering computer screen
registered jagged graphs.
And just like that, physicist Carl Collins either proved he was on the way
to the next Manhattan Project, or perhaps proved nothing at all.
That was 1998. Six years later, a scientific dogfight rages over Collins's
result. Was it really the beginning of a new super-bomb, or the biggest
fizzle since cold fusion?
But the Pentagon hasn't waited for the dust to settle. Despite
increasingly
outraged protests by some of the country's most respected nuclear
physicists, the Department of Defense has sunk millions into something
that
sounds to some like science fiction: Collins's efforts to get
near-nuclear-level energy from a rare radioactive element without
splitting
any atoms.
As the debate has raged, a defense official has been promoting Collins's
work with a picture of a "nuclear hand grenade," some agencies have
promised
an entirely new class of "isomer weapons," and the Central Intelligence
Agency and the military have raised fears that the Russians might get
there
first.
The Big Pop
Although he didn't know it at the time, Carl Collins began his pursuit of
isomer weapons in Romania. It was 1978, the height of the Cold War. While
the nuclear physicists of the world's leading laboratories and
universities
attended meetings in Paris and London, Collins spent the better part of a
decade in Bucharest working with scientists behind the Iron Curtain.
He ended up marrying a Romanian and, with his East European colleagues,
began trying to tap a possibly immense source of energy from an atom with
a
hopped-up nucleus called an isomer.
In the simplest conception, imagine the nucleus of an atom as a deflated
balloon. Blow up the balloon and tie it at the end, and you have a nuclear
isomer -- the same balloon, but now filled with the stored energy of the
enclosed air. Under ordinary circumstances, the filled balloon will
gradually lose air, and pressure, from slow leakage.
The energy that isomers "leak" is in the form of gamma rays. Gamma rays
are
the most energetic wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. In
extremely
high doses, they could act like ray bombs in low-budget films, vaporizing
living tissue and heating materials until they explode.
And theoretically that's what would happen if you could find a way to
release all of an isomer's energy in an instant, like popping the balloon
with a pin.
This, very crudely, was what Collins and his colleagues were attempting --
they wanted to use a small amount of energy to release a large amount of
energy; they were looking for the pin that could pop the balloon. The
potential was immense: Instead of the approximately one electron volt of
energy stored in a single molecule of dynamite, each atom of the isomer
Collins's group would eventually use could store 2.5 million electron
volts.
Carl Collins, above center, with his colleagues in their barnlike facility
in suburban Dallas. (Photograph by Silvia Otte)
Collins called the process "isomer triggering." His first attempts
involved
tantalum-180 -- the only naturally occurring nuclear isomer. The idea,
roughly, was that he could use a beam of energy to act like a spark
igniting
dynamite. He eventually concluded that you could release energy from
tantalum -- something that most physicists concede is possible -- but it
required far more energy to "trigger" tantalum than the isomer released.
In
other words, there was no gain in energy, and thus there were no
applications.
But Collins looked at his tantalum experiment as proving that triggering
could work, and the issue was just a matter of finding a different, better
isomer.
His belief in the potential of the right isomer was persuasive enough
that,
in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defense
Initiative (what became known as the Star Wars program), Collins's project
got substantial Pentagon funding in the hopes that isomer triggering would
become the energy source for a powerful gamma-ray laser, a weapon that
might
vaporize incoming missiles in outer space. But when the space-based Star
Wars fell by the wayside in the 1990s -- too expensive and technologically
uncertain -- Collins was left to carry on in obscurity.
Which Collins and his colleagues did, performing thousands of experiments
over the span of a decade to find the best candidate for isomer
triggering.
In 1995, at a NATO workshop on isomers attended by Ukrainian and Russian
scientists who had been conducting gamma-ray research during the Cold War,
a
consensus emerged that the isomer should be hafnium-178. A small supply
had
been found in minute quantities as an unintended byproduct of a Los Alamos
accelerator. One ounce of hafnium-178 stores enough energy to boil 120
tons
of water. One tankful of it could fuel a car on a trip around Earth 520
times. And, most to the point, one gram of the material would have up to
50,000 times the explosive power of a gram of TNT.
A Bomb And A Prayer
Collins's lab -- at the far edge of the University of Texas at Dallas
campus -- gives no hint of its dramatic mission. Its entrance is marked
only
with the Greek letter g, the scientific symbol for gamma rays, and outside
there's a sign made from a discarded highway marker.
The entrance to Carl Collin's lab is marked with the scientific symbol for
gamma rays and a makeshift sign. (Photograph by Silvia Otte)
It was here, in the summer of 1998, that Collins and his group hooked up
the
dental X-ray machine and fired it at the hafnium sample. Today, the head
of
a similar X-ray machine, still attached to its swivel arm, sits discarded
on
the floor. The original audio amplifier, which Collins describes as the
"type used in rock concerts," remains encased in concrete below the test
bed, its final burying place.
Back in the office, behind a glass case, is the original Styrofoam cup,
marked "Dr. C's memorial target holder," and next to it sits a second,
identical cup ironically labeled "A cheap imitation."
The jury-rigged equipment is a testament to the resourcefulness of
Collins's
graduate students, the kind that only the command economies of communist
Eastern Europe could have produced. A few of Collins's students picked up
the X-ray machine from a dental-salvage business with a little
sweet-talking
and $1,500. Another student came up with the idea of using the 5-kilowatt
amp to modulate the energy output.
The X-ray machine was left beaming on the hafnium for several weeks
through
a series of tests. There was no flash and bang -- even if hafnium proved
to
be everything Collins hoped it was, the microscopic sample's energy would
be
visible only to the most sensitive instruments. Instead, there was the
painstaking recording and analysis of gamma-ray levels. Hafnium-178 has a
half-life of 31 years, which means it gives off half of its stored energy
over three decades. What Collins was looking for was clear evidence that
his
X-rays were accelerating that process, even a little bit.
Nothing about making the measurements or analyzing them was easy. It
involved probability and margins of error, and required careful scientific
rigor. But in a subsequent 1999 article in the respected scientific
journal
Physical Review Letters, Collins wrote that the experiment had been
successful. The results were unambiguous, he claimed. He had been able to
"trigger" the release of energy.
Among nuclear physicists, those results were met with some curiosity, some
doubt and a great deal of ridicule. The results Collins claimed were
absurdly out of whack with what conventional physics would allow for
hafnium.
Critics also challenged his statistical accuracy, the high margin of error
he reported and the overall significance of his results. Collins responded
that the history of experimental physics was filled with examples of
naysaying theoreticians being proved wrong. He dismissed the criticism as
"judgmental opinion" and "logical fallacy."
But as the scientists fought out isomer triggering in the pages of
Physical
Review Letters, a number of dedicated isomer believers set out to show
that
Collins's results could be harnessed as a weapon. The isomer bomb began
its
roller-coaster ride from a controversial experiment in a relatively
unknown
science center to the inner sanctum of the military -- the E-Ring of the
Pentagon. All it took was five years, an administration preoccupied with
the
war on terror, a new wellspring of support for nuclear and nuclear-type
weapons, and an agency willing to ignore its own advisers.
Do You Believe In Isomers?
Based on Collins's reported success in the 1998 triggering, the Air Force
moved in to support his work. Meanwhile, Pat McDaniel, an Air Force
researcher who collaborated on the dental X-ray experiment, used his
personal contacts to build interest at Sandia National Laboratories in New
Mexico.
Sandia, along with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California
and
Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is operated by the
Department
of Energy. The labs make up the three legs of the U.S. nuclear weapons lab
system. (As the "Z Division" of the Manhattan Project -- the super-secret
World War II program to develop the atomic bomb -- Sandia was assigned the
engineering task of designing and building the weapons, while Livermore
and
Los Alamos were at the heart of physics work.)
McDaniel found a receptive hearing from his friend and Sandia program
manager Nancy Ries. Shortly after the 1998 experiment, Ries and McDaniel
started handing out campaign-style buttons that read, "I believe in
isomers," according to Peter Zimmerman, then a senior arms control
official
in the Clinton administration. Ries, McDaniel and intelligence officials
began giving briefings touting isomer research as "the best thing for
weapons research since sliced bread," Zimmerman said. Hafnium could be
used
to build a more powerful bomb or, more to the point of what the military
was
looking for, a small bomb with a huge bang, the believers argued. And even
better, building a weapon using hafnium wouldn't violate internationally
negotiated restrictions on testing nuclear weapons or congressional limits
on developing new nuclear weapons. Because it wouldn't involve splitting
atoms, a hafnium bomb would be a totally new class of weapon.
Zimmerman had long heard talk about isomers as a potent energy source for
weapons, but had never taken it very seriously. He was well versed in the
scientific issues -- with a PhD in nuclear physics. His 30-year career
spanned the overlapping worlds of science and national security. The "I
believe in isomers" campaign hit him just as he prepared to take over his
new job in Foggy Bottom as chief scientist of the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency, whose mission was to both promote arms control and be
on
the lookout for new developments in weapons. As chief scientist, Zimmerman
was responsible for preventing "technological surprise" in the weapons
field. Though the science of an isomer bomb seemed to him to be
questionable
and the promises vastly unrealistic, he couldn't stop thinking about the
1939 decision by the Navy's research laboratory to ignore an Italian-born
physicist, Enrico Fermi, who tried to convince the U.S. military that the
fascists were working on a new weapon based on nuclear fission. The
military
thought he was talking science fiction.
Now, with talk of an isomer weapon, Zimmerman said recently, "I had the
science fiction reaction, and a rather bad science fiction at that. But
what
I wanted to know was that if I discouraged DOD from funding it, I wouldn't
be like the admiral who turned down Enrico Fermi in 1939."
Zimmerman had somewhere to turn: an elite, secretive group of senior
scientists called the Jasons. Thought to be named after the Greek mythical
hero Jason, the group of approximately 55 advisers has been around since
1959, most of the time as part of the Defense Advanced Research Proj-ects
Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's primary R&D arm. Operating mostly under
the
radar screen of public view, the Jasons pick their own members from among
the nation's top scientists. Often called upon to evaluate controversies
beyond the scientific understanding of government officials, the Jasons
have
weighed in on items ranging from obscure technology to weighty policy
issues, and their influence over the years has been enormous. A 1966
report
by the Jasons cast doubt on the use of strategic bombing to cut the Viet
Cong's supply lines during the Vietnam War. In another report, the Jasons
concluded that low-yield nuclear testing wasn't necessary for the United
States to maintain a robust stockpile of nuclear weapons, a recommendation
that figured prominently in the Clinton administration's support for a
moratorium on nuclear testing.
Most important to Zimmerman with regard to the hafnium-triggering
experiment, the Jasons had the scientific clout that would allow them to
say
whether a given scientific pursuit was outright harebrained. Zimmerman
asked
the Jasons to look at four principal questions: Did Collins indeed
demonstrate that an "enhanced decay rate," or triggering, really took
place?
What is the physical mechanism that would allow the triggering to take
place? Could enough hafnium be produced feasibly in the next 20 years to
make it useful? Could a triggering mechanism be produced in the next 20
years?
The Jasons' conclusions, reached in July 1999, were damning on all four
fronts. In essence, the Jasons concluded that the whole thing didn't pass
the "snicker test," according to Zimmerman.
But there was a problem with the Jasons' study. Carl Collins, the man
whose
science was in question, never spoke to the group.
Even so, the study wasn't just about Collins's work. "Even if you trigger
it, you couldn't use it as a weapon," said Steve Koonin, the provost of
the
California Institute of Technology, who led the Jasons' study. Hafnium-178
emits radiation like crazy; the amount required to fuel a bomb would
require
so much shielding to protect whoever is around the material that it would
defeat the idea of having a small bomb. With the shielding, it wouldn't be
such a useful bomb anymore, Koonin said. Finally, even if you could
trigger
hafnium in a bomb, it would be impossible to "burn" all the hafnium
isomer.
The resulting explosion, he said, would simply disperse a large amount of
highly radioactive material. He paused for a second, and then said, "It
sure
would make a great dirty bomb."
A hafnium bomb, even if it didn't leave radioactive fallout, still
wouldn't
be like an ordinary bomb because, along with an explosive force, it would
emit intense, penetrating gamma rays. According to Hill Roberts, a
scientist
at SRS Technologies in Huntsville, Ala., a gamma-ray bomb is appealing to
some because gamma rays can pass through solid material and penetrate
living
tissue. Theoretically, an energetic gamma-ray burst could penetrate
bunkers,
killing whatever was inside -- be it humans or anthrax stockpiles. Putting
it more bluntly, he said, "Tissue turns to goo."
But none of that would matter if an isomer bomb was flat-out impossible.
Which was exactly what the Jasons concluded. Zimmerman thought he'd closed
the book on the matter, and so did the Jasons.
In fact, the isomer bomb was just getting started.
The Argonne Group
Even if hafnium wasn't going to be a weapon, Collins's claims challenged
conventional physics. Which raised a pressing question among government
physicists: Could the results of the dental X-ray experiment be
reproduced?
In fact, the Jasons themselves, while arguing that hafnium couldn't be a
weapon, suggested that another triggering experiment be done at a proper
X-ray facility.
"When the results of that first paper came out, it seemed strange, and
many
nuclear physicists said it just couldn't be right," said John Schiffer, a
senior scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory's Physics Division in
Illinois. "There were some comments published, criticizing the paper, but
most people just talked about it as something not to be taken seriously."
But in 2001, two years after Collins's results were published, John
Becker,
a physicist at the Livermore Lab, decided to do just that. He eventually
put
together a group of scientists that included Schiffer and 13 other
researchers from three of the nation's leading Department of Energy labs:
Argonne, Livermore and Los Alamos. The Becker group repeated the
experiment
using the powerful X-ray source at Argonne, which is the size of a
football
field and more than 100,000 times more intense than Collins's dental
X-ray.
According to the scientists who participated, if Collins's results were
correct, then their team should have seen a much bigger signal than
Collins
had reported. But when the Argonne scientists turned on the X-ray, they
saw
nothing.
Collins's response: The Argonne group had set its X-ray at the wrong
energy
level. In his first article, Collins didn't specify the exact energy level
that triggered the hafnium, he said, because his group learned what it was
only after repeating the experiment at an advanced X-ray source in Japan.
The scientists led by Becker did a second experiment a year later to
attempt
the level Collins described. Again, they found nothing.
This time Collins said the failure was the result of other differences in
the design of the Argonne experiment. One of the most significant
differences, he said, was that the radiation detectors were "blind" to
precisely the energy level of gamma-ray emissions present when the isomer
was triggered. In a recent interview, he described the members of the
Argonne group as "failures," who were unfamiliar with the literature on
triggering, inexperienced in the field and ill-equipped to repeat his
experiments.
Becker and his colleagues responded by saying that the experimental
differences were either irrelevant or untrue. Opinion in the scientific
journals favored the Argonne group. In fact, Collins suddenly was no
longer
able to get published in Physical Review journals. He eventually published
in Europhysics Letters, a lesser known journal. In April 2002, Don
Gemmell,
a physicist from Argonne, wrote to the editor of Europhysics Letters,
warning that the journal was in danger of promoting a new "cold fusion" --
the infamous 1980s claim by two University of Utah researchers that they
had
discovered how to produce almost limitless energy by running electric
current through a bottle of heavy water. After a series of e-mail
exchanges,
Europhysics Letters published the Argonne response and later declined to
publish any more of Collins's papers.
Unable to publish in mainstream journals, Collins had to resort to Laser
Physics, a Russian journal of lesser stature. Traditional physics seemed
to
have won the public battle. Becker's group had produced what it considered
to be a textbook experiment that debunked hafnium triggering. The critics
thought that, with Argonne's results in print, the 1998 Collins experiment
was destined for the scientific dustbin.
Wrong again.
How To Build A Better Bomb
Even as Collins's work was being kicked around by the mainstream
scientific
community, it was being embraced by the CIA, according to several sources.
Mort Weiss, a retired nuclear physicist who once led Livermore
Laboratory's
isomer research, recently recalled that a CIA official named Fred Ambrose
approached him in the 1980s to discuss CIA concerns about foreign
countries
developing isomer weapons. Then, after Collins's 1998 experiment, Weiss
said, Ambrose became convinced that hafnium could be weaponized and that
other countries, primarily Russia, were working actively on such a
project.
Weiss said he tried to explain that the physics wouldn't work, but Ambrose
was convinced it would. "Fred is a true believer," Weiss said.
Ambrose did not respond to a request for an interview, and the CIA
declined
to comment.
The fears about hafnium technology falling into the wrong hands, and the
Pentagon's desire for a weapon that could radiate through hardened bunkers
and wipe out biological weapons, could only have multiplied after
September
11, 2001. It had been three years since the Jasons' report, and George
Ullrich, a senior Pentagon official in charge of weapons research, decided
it was an opportune time to reassess the isomer debate. This go-round, the
task was assigned to the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally
funded
research arm of the Pentagon. Unlike the Jasons, whose 1999 review of the
subject lasted just one day, IDA exhaustively researched hundreds of
papers
on the subject, including those by Collins.
While the IDA report concluded that research on isomers should go forward,
it was critical of the focus on weapons. "Don't force it into trying to be
practical before the relevant background work is done and it becomes ready
for 'prime time,'" the authors wrote. In a personal blow to Collins, the
authors also concluded his Physical Review Letters paper was "flawed and
should not have passed peer review."
Ullrich's office accepted the judgment and decided that isomers were best
left to universities engaged in basic physics research. But soon the
nuclear
hand grenade would once again explode back from the brink of oblivion.
Martin Stickley arrived at DARPA as a program manager in 2002. Stickley,
who
had managed research programs for the Air Force in London, had supported
research by some of Collins's Eastern bloc colleagues. According to two of
the participants in Collins's dental X-ray experiment, Stickley was a
believer. The European work, according to McDaniel, "really sparked
Martin's
interest" in starting a triggering program at DARPA.
Stickley did not respond to requests for comment, and requests to DARPA to
interview him were declined.
For Stickley, a promoter of isomer research, the timing was fortunate. The
Jasons, who had panned isomer triggering three years earlier, had since
been
relocated out of DARPA, and it didn't hurt that the 2002 Nuclear Posture
Review, unveiled by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, emphasized that
the United States needed new nuclear as well as non-nuclear bombs to
destroy
difficult targets, such as buried bunkers that could hide terrorists or
weapons of mass destruction.
Last May, Stickley gave a PowerPoint briefing to a review panel in which
he
promoted the hafnium program as the next revolution in warfare. Hafnium
bombs could be loaded in artillery shells, according to a copy of the
briefing slides, or they could be used in the Pentagon's missile defense
systems to knock incoming ballistic missiles out of the air. He
encapsulated
his vision of the program in a startling PowerPoint slide: a small hafnium
hand grenade with a pullout ring and a caption that read, "Miniature bomb.
Explosive yield, 2 KT [kilotons]. Size, 5-inch diameter." That would be an
explosion about one-seventh the power of the bomb that obliterated
Hiroshima
in 1945.
In other words, hafnium, if it worked, would be just what the secretary
had
ordered.
Under the direction of Stickley, DARPA began to hand out a number of
contracts, totaling about $7 million, to national labs and research
institutes, most of them associated with participants in the 1998
experiment. According to the Air Force, which administers the contracts,
and
a DARPA document, McDaniel, Collins and a former student of Collins's,
James
Carroll, were funded to conduct triggering experiments. The agency planned
to spend $10 million in 2004, and then $20 million in 2005, according to a
description of the hafnium program that DARPA gave to the State
Department.
But Stickley needed to solve a fundamental problem. To make hafnium into a
weapon, he would need to produce enough hafnium-178 to conduct a bomb
experiment. The micrograms that had been used by Collins and others to
test
the physics of triggering were nowhere near the amount needed for a bomb.
In
early 2003, DARPA assembled a 12-member Hafnium Isomer Production Panel
(HIPP) to make recommendations on the best way to produce the elusive
isomer. Paul Robinson, the head of Sandia, co-chaired the panel along with
Ehsan Khan, a Department of Energy official assigned to DARPA's isomer
project.
Initial estimates were not encouraging. The Pentagon at first pegged
production costs at more than $1 billion a gram, according to Robinson.
While McDaniel claims that the production cost estimates have come down by
"three orders of magnitude" to about $1 million a gram, the capital costs,
according to some members of HIPP, would include $30 billion to $50
billion
to build the specialized facilities needed to produce hafnium.
But as it turned out, production was only one of HIPP's concerns.
Among the experts appointed to the panel was Bill Herrmannsfeldt, who had
worked for 40 years at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Herrmannsfeldt, by his account, began his research by typing the word
"hafnium" into the Google search engine. One of the hits concerned the
Argonne experiment, which led him to the Jasons' study, and then the IDA
study, all questioning the original Collins experiment. He saw the ominous
shadow of cold fusion creeping in through the crack of a Pentagon door. It
was all there for him: the incredible claims, the immediate doubt and,
most
important, the inability of independent researchers to successfully repeat
the original experiment.
His doubts became stronger when HIPP members met to discuss the production
issues. Collins made a presentation to the panel, criticizing the Argonne
experiment, and yet no members of that experiment had been invited to the
meeting. Herrmannsfeldt said he tried to discuss his doubts about the
science with Stickley and Khan, but to little avail. "I begged Khan to
invite the critics, maybe I even threatened him, because this was really
dangerous, even worse than I thought it would be," he said.
Frustrated by the lack of response from DARPA, Herr-mannsfeldt spearheaded
a
campaign to undermine the very project he was supposed to help move
forward.
His anger peaked with an August 13, 2003, letter written directly to
Stickley at DARPA and Khan at the Department of Energy. Signed by five
members of the HIPP panel and 10 experts in the field, Herrmannsfeldt's
letter urged another review of hafnium triggering.
In Washington this January for another HIPP meeting, Herrmannsfeldt spoke
calmly and softly about his concerns. He jotted down equations to show how
DARPA would never get any useful energy out of hafnium. He talked about
the
reviews and competing experiments. He acknowledged his political concerns
about the program -- he calls hafnium "the mother of all dirty bombs" that
would entice other countries to build nuclear weapons -- but he based his
argument on science. "I complained about the lack of respect for
scientific
advice, major reviews such as the Jasons and IDA," he said after the
latest
meeting. "Martin [Stickley] then came back and not very politely told me
DARPA was above such things, and 'could ignore any publicity' around the
program."
The end result of the panel's meeting, according to Herrmannsfeldt, was
that
Khan and Stickley were enthusiastic that production costs could be brought
down. The program would go on.
'High Risk, High Payoff'
In the early spring of 2002, DARPA's annual tech expo was held in Anaheim,
Calif., at Disneyland. In his keynote speech, DARPA Director Anthony
Tether
explained, "I thought there was nothing more appropriate than having
DARPATech at Disneyland. Disneyland is a land of dreams and fantasy
becoming
reality, and that is what DARPA does and does well."
In its 46-year history, DARPA has had some incredible successes -- such as
ARPANET, now better known as the Internet. It also has had plenty of
failures.
But, Tether reminded his audience, "there is no sin in failing at DARPA.
"Why?" he asked. "Because no one remembers the failure."
"High risk, high payoff" is Tether's motto, and it is DARPA's job to fund
far-out ideas. Put in that perspective, the $7 million DARPA spent on
isomer
research last year is barely a drop in an annual defense budget of more
than
$400 billion. So why worry?
"I think the critics recognize that by Department of Defense standards,
it's
not a lot of money," said Ivan Oelrich, a former IDA scientist now at the
Federation of American Scientists. "Even if they think it's a total waste,
why lose sleep over it? The Defense Department spends about $16,000 a
second, so by DOD standards, it's not much to worry about. That might be
part of the explanation."
But Oelrich, who is familiar with isomer research from his days at IDA,
argued that money alone should not be the standard for judging the
program.
Though DARPA reasonably wants to err on the side of pushing things too
hard,
rather than being too conservative, he explained, "there have to be some
standards." Triggering hafnium, in his opinion, just didn't meet any
intelligent standard.
Even one of the beneficiaries of DARPA's spending on isomer research,
James
Carroll, Collins's former student, has some concerns about the agency's
approach. From his office in Youngstown, Ohio, Carroll argued that isomer
triggering is not analogous to cold fusion, but he also described his
unease
with the focus on weapons. DARPA's involvement in isomer research is
similar
to an "impedance mismatch," he said, a scientific term describing the
result
of joining two systems that have different conceptual bases. DARPA wants a
fast track, Carroll explained, but isomer research is still at the very
basic stage. "It's a mismatch between expectations and reality. That
perhaps
is the difficult part here."
Isomer research is extremely good basic science, he said. "Maybe you can
never make anything practical out of it . . . Maybe none of it will pan
out.
But in the meantime, we will learn a lot about how the nucleus responds to
people banging on it."
In declining to answer specific questions about DARPA's work on hafnium,
Tether responded with a general written statement offering a compelling
argument for pursuing the hafnium bomb. The countries of the former Soviet
Union are interested in isomer weapons, he said, and "an enemy with this
capability could create havoc on a scale that has never been seen before."
He raised the specter of isomer car bombs and "a suicide bomber with a few
pounds of isomer."
While such weapons could be devastating in the hands of an adversary, it
would be useful for the United States to have it as a deterrent, Tether
wrote. An isomer bomb "would give the U.S. a capability that would truly
be
revolutionary given our ability to deliver small munitions with incredible
precision."
Isomers Hit Prime Time
The Capital Beltway is a world away from Collins's lab. Unlike the sparse
landscape of the University of Texas at Dallas campus in suburban
Richardson, Tex., Northern Virginia is dotted with hotels where defense
contractors, scientists, researchers and "Beltway bandits" come to visit
with their Washington sponsors. Common perception holds that the Pentagon
itself houses the Defense Department, but in reality its offices extend
along the Metro's Blue Line, from Rosslyn, where acquisition managers line
Wilson Boulevard, to Crystal City, where satellite offices handle
everything
from foreign military sales to the management of a $200 billion fighter
aircraft program.
Visiting defense contractors meet in conferences, on panels and at
seminars
in the Sheratons, Hiltons and Marriotts that populate Northern Virginia.
While rarely five-star accommodations, they are all a convenient 10-minute
drive to the Pentagon. The Hilton Towers in Ballston is definitely not for
the high-end bandit. Sandwiched between a Metro station and an office
building, the lobby of the hotel is the size of a typical family dining
room, and the industrial carpet shows the wear of daily visitors rushing
to
early-morning appointments.
Sitting in the lobby one day last fall, an Army captain read the sports
page, with a PowerPoint briefing at his side marked "Transformation,
Now!" -- the Pentagon buzzword of the day. Rising from the opposite couch,
a
woman enthusiastically greeted a Russian doctor. They were off to a
biological and chemical defense meeting. And here, too, was Carl Collins,
all smiles and dressed as you might imagine any professor, with a golf
shirt
and sports jacket. Collins was in the area to brief DARPA's higher-ups on
the progress in hafnium triggering, yet he seemed somehow out of place.
Defense contractors call the Pentagon "the customer," and speak about
program "milestones," mixing military metaphors with business euphemisms
and
indecipherable acronyms. Collins does not walk the walk or talk the talk
of
a defense contractor. He speaks about the scientific method. He says he
has
never had a security clearance, and doesn't want one. He prefers doing
research out in the open and wants to continue working with colleagues
from
behind the former Iron Curtain, he says. Although not particularly
bothered
by the military applications that have caught the eye of DARPA, he seems
genuinely uninterested in its focus on weapons. He says that he really
wasn't aware of how or why the agency became involved in his research. He
had a contract in place with the Air Force, and at some point he simply
noticed that part of the money was coming from DARPA.
In fact, that fall day in Ballston, Collins said he was unsure that
hafnium
would be useful for a bomb, though he claimed not to have given it much
thought. If he had given any thought to applications, he said, it was to
the
concept of using tiny amounts of hafnium "seeds" for cancer therapy. The
isomer seed, Collins said, could be "triggered" to give out precisely the
right amount of gamma rays needed to destroy a tumor. There was already
some
interest in this from the Mayo Clinic, he said.
Collins laughed at the mention of the infamous dental X-ray machine.
"That's
not the worst of it," he said. "Sometimes we used car parts." But the
truth
is, he said, there is nothing wrong with using a dental X-ray machine to
save money. And more importantly, he said, in 2001 he and his team,
working
with Japanese colleagues, went on to validate his original results at the
world's most advanced X-ray source, the Spring-8 facility near Osaka,
Japan.
Collins chose Spring-8 precisely because he needed an advanced
synchrotron,
which can be tuned to precise energy levels. In his mind, this was the
scientific method at work, the reproduction of earlier results proving out
his theory of isomer triggering.
Collins is not beyond a bit of drama: He sees himself and his challenge to
traditional nuclear physics as the modern-day equivalent of the trials of
Giordano Bruno, the Dominican monk who was burned to death in 1600 for
claiming Earth revolved around the sun. The "expert panels" represented by
the Jasons and other critics are trying the same scare tactics, according
to
Collins. "You start talking about expert panels, that's exactly what they
did to Bruno," Collins said. "This is the same thing."
But despite Collins's view that his initial triggering results were
validated at Spring-8, there has been a lot of bad news since the big
flash
of attention in 1998. First, James Carroll, his former student, broke with
Collins's group shortly after the first experiment and went on to set up
his
own gamma-ray research team at Youngstown State University, taking with
him
prominent Russian scientist Sarkis Karamian. Worse for Collins, Carroll
began to challenge Collins's contention that the 1998 experiment -- and
later experiments -- was clear proof of triggering. The data were not
conclusive that triggering took place, Carroll maintained, saying that the
results were "intriguing" but very preliminary. Carroll and Collins both
declined to speak about the break, other than to acknowledge that it has
personal as well as professional dimensions.
Collins asserts that his critics don't accept his results only because
they
didn't come out of a large science center. The mainstream journals are
dominated by a "daisy chain" of famous scientists unwilling to accept
groundbreaking work from outside their clique, he contends. Yet, at the
same
time, he denies that mainstream physicists reject his work, and points to
allies like McDaniel.
McDaniel, who now works at Sandia, is a crucial part of the isomer debate
because, while a Collins collaborator, he is also the only person who
claims
to have independently reproduced Collins's results. Using DARPA's
sponsorship, McDaniel and his colleagues conducted a series of separate
experiments, including three at a high-tech X-ray source at Louisiana
State
University over the past year. According to McDaniel, one experiment
"seemed
to corroborate Carl's results very well" and with fewer errors than
previous
Collins work. Another experiment proved difficult to measure, he said. A
third experiment has been conducted, but he hasn't yet had time to assess
the data.
McDaniel, however, has never published any of those results, giving rise
to
criticism that his alleged confirmation is meaningless. "All the data's
noisy, so we were reluctant to publish," McDaniel said of his most recent
experiments. Besides, he added, "publish or perish is not a problem for
government employees."
The "noisy data" that concerned McDaniel involves statistical uncertainty
and, possibly, background radiation that makes it difficult to be sure the
instruments are measuring emissions from the hafnium, and not from
something
else. Another problem is the chronic inconsistency in experimental
results.
Some of McDaniel's tests produced data that exceeded the 1998 results, but
others failed to show anything. It is hard to explain these differences,
McDaniel acknowledges, but he argues the inconsistencies are reason enough
to continue the experiments.
McDaniel contends that much of the criticism of hafnium is based on
political concerns over a weapon. If hafnium proves out its potential,
then
the government will face a political decision. "If it does work, it's the
same question about the super," McDaniel said, referring to the 1950s
debate
over developing the hydrogen bomb. The critics are trying to fight the
science in the press because they don't like the politics, he said. "The
issue is, in a free society, we need to know what's possible."
McDaniel, for one, believes that hafnium triggering is possible, and at
Sandia last year, Paul Robinson, the head of the laboratory, was beginning
to believe it, too. As a graduate student back in the '60s, Robinson
himself
had been interested in building a gamma-ray laser, and as an experimental
physicist, he liked the romantic notion of proving the theoreticians
wrong.
More importantly, he trusted the work of Pat McDaniel. So, why is
definitive, bowl-over-the-critics proof in such short supply? This is
often
the way new science discoveries start out, Robinson suggested.
"I suspect you'll keep looking at the triggering until you get it firmly
established that you can do it," he said last year.
Of course, by that point, he noted, hafnium research "would probably be
made
classified, and you wouldn't read about it."
Robinson's remarks proved prescient. Last November, DARPA's talk of a new
weapon made its way to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation,
which wanted to know why everyone was discussing plans for a new
super-bomb
out in the open. The bureau sent a batch of e-mails to government
scientists
expressing concern that without more secrecy, isomer technology could fall
into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.
Scientists who had been involved in the work at Argonne were apoplectic.
The
idea that the government would make a nonexistent weapon a classified
secret
struck them as silly, and also as dangerous if it meant that the
scientific
debate became shrouded in secrecy. As Don Gemmell, the Argonne physicist,
responded in frustration, "Classifying the work at this stage would serve
to
protect this waste from public scrutiny. I would sooner see us look for
ways
to trigger a chain reaction in sugar. The material is readily available,
is
not radioactive, has an energy density greater than TNT, and is about as
likely to work as 178Hf!"
At least some of the scientists' doubts may have reached DARPA. According
to
Herrmannsfeldt, the critic on the production panel, in late February two
leading weapons scientists, both critical of the isomer program, jointly
called Tether. After the conversation, DARPA's director took one step
back.
Rather than putting money into hafnium production immediately, according
to
DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker, the agency will focus on experiments to
"scientifically prove, to the satisfaction of the majority of the nuclear
physics community," that isomer triggering is real. For now, rather than
the
$30 million originally planned for 2004 and 2005, DARPA will spend just $7
million, according to updated budget submissions.
Zimmerman, the former arms control agency chief scientist, is skeptical
that
even the more cautious approach will make much difference in the end. "I
think that a program like this, once started, will have an enormous amount
of inertia," he said. It won't be a matter of someone deciding that this
is
just a waste of money, it will stick around for years, and likely grow in
scope, he added. Zimmerman's concerns also go well beyond the science.
"Are
we going to advertise that we are going to build a new nuclear-type weapon
based on new physical principles?" he asked.
The isomer bomb is foolish, Zimmerman said, but it's foolish in a
dangerous
sort of way if it pushes other countries to build real nuclear weapons in
the hope of deterring the United States from using a fanciful hafnium
bomb.
Back at Carl Collins's office in Texas, a clutter of paper shrouds his
desk.
A portrait of a beautiful young woman -- an old photo of Collins's wife,
Doina -- stands out amid the chaos. Nearby is a copy of a novel by Dallas
author Payne Harrison, who has written a number of techno- thrillers. The
plot of one of them, Thunder of Erebus, has it all: a fictional isomer
called rubidium-86, gamma-ray lasers for Star Wars, and then DARPA's
development of a new, super-conventional weapon based on isomer triggering
after Star Wars is canceled. In the book, Russia decides that it must
control the world's supply of rubidium-86 (which, in the novel, is in
Antarctica) for fear of DARPA's secret isomer program. Ironically, the
Pentagon fears the Russians will build their own isomer weapon and then
invade a country in the Persian Gulf.
Some years ago, Harrison hung around the gamma-ray lab for a few months
"to
absorb the culture," according to Collins. The author, a former tax
accountant, shadowed Collins's team, eventually drifting out of the lab as
quietly as he came in.
The odd thing is, Thunder of Erebus was published in 1991 -- a full decade
before DARPA says it ever funded work on an isomer bomb.
Last May, Collins appeared at a DARPA meeting and showed a slide of a man
hitting a golf ball across a field, a mushroom cloud rising at the end of
the ball's arc. The caption read: "A golf ball filled with the isomer
would
have the energy of 10 tons of explosive." Collins was visibly
uncomfortable
when asked about the diagram, which was displayed at a closed meeting, and
said apologetically that the "sponsors," DARPA, had asked him to make an
illustration to show hafnium's potential. Collins is an avid golfer.
Asked how he felt about conducting an experiment whose results, if true,
could lead to the next super-bomb, Collins began to talk about the need
for
science in a free society, about the medical applications, and then
paused.
"I guess I don't feel anything. At some point, I'll retire and go play
golf," he said with a smile.
Sharon Weinberger covers Congress and the military for Defense Daily, a
trade publication. She will be fielding questions and comments about this
article Monday at 1 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
