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Variant, v. 1, issue 3, September 1947
Page 36
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remove the antigravity, and let the body fall under its weight, thus generating energy out of nothing, which is not allowed. Campbell, however, failed to note two highly important points which came to my attention while I was thinking this matter over prior to writing this paper, and which are, as far as I know, original ideas of my own--original contributions,let us say, to the literature of pseudo-science. Firstly, when you start to figure out how much energy is required to lift a body to infinity, you run into this train of thought: to remove one pound of matter from the earth's gravitational field requires about 260 kilowatt hours of energy. That's a log, but not too impossible. Then you think--but the antigravity machine can't tell the difference between the earth's field and the sun's field. Let's calculate how much energy it takes to remove the body from the sun( starting at the present distance of 93,000,000 miles.) And you find that that amounts to 10,000 kilowatt hours per pound of matter. And we are not yet finished--there is the gravitational field of all the fixed stars in the universe. It is possible to calculate what that is from general relativity, and it is apparent that this is going to run into a hell of a lot of energy. True, most of this energy will simply be money in the bank--that is, you'll get it all back when you turn off the antigravity machine. But getting the energy in the first place is likely to be a task. The second point is one that was hinted at, but not developed completely, by Edward E. Smith, inSkylark Three. You will recall that at the beginning of the story, the hero surrounded himself by a field of force which cut him off from the influence of all gravity. Instantly he began shooting off at an angle into the air at a velocity of over a hundred miles per hour. The reason for this, of course, was the fact that upon being released from gravity, he continues in a straight line with the velocity that he already had due to the rotation of the earth, and so his path diverged rapidly from the path taken by objects fixed to the earth. (See figure 4) This much Smith recognized, and he also noticed that since the earth is moving around the sun, the weightless object must assume a path which is tangent to the earth's orbit. However, in the story he failed to carry this through to the ultimate conclusion--that the sun is also moving in a circle around some distant center of gravity, so that the weightless body would have to move in a path tangent to that--and so forth. In other words, the object under consideration would take a path which is absolutely straight in space--which sounds like what we said before--that the antigravity machine would have to straighten out the space around it, and like I said, I don't know if that means anything. Furthermore, will this antigravity have an effect upon the forces within the molecules and atoms of the body? Might not the body under the influence of the antigravity fly apart because of the cancellation of the forces which hold it together? I must emphasize that all of this is the most rank type of speculation--indeed so rank that time and again I come up with sentences which perhaps have no meaning at all in strictly scientific logic. When we speak of antigravity we are in a topic that is so far ahead of contemporary science that we don't even know enough to say whether or not it is possible. You may claim that a thing is possible unless it is proved impossible. That is a point of view not easy to dispute. You may, if you wish, say that it is possible there are elephants on Mars, since there is no evidence to the contrary. Personally[[?]] (36)
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remove the antigravity, and let the body fall under its weight, thus generating energy out of nothing, which is not allowed. Campbell, however, failed to note two highly important points which came to my attention while I was thinking this matter over prior to writing this paper, and which are, as far as I know, original ideas of my own--original contributions,let us say, to the literature of pseudo-science. Firstly, when you start to figure out how much energy is required to lift a body to infinity, you run into this train of thought: to remove one pound of matter from the earth's gravitational field requires about 260 kilowatt hours of energy. That's a log, but not too impossible. Then you think--but the antigravity machine can't tell the difference between the earth's field and the sun's field. Let's calculate how much energy it takes to remove the body from the sun( starting at the present distance of 93,000,000 miles.) And you find that that amounts to 10,000 kilowatt hours per pound of matter. And we are not yet finished--there is the gravitational field of all the fixed stars in the universe. It is possible to calculate what that is from general relativity, and it is apparent that this is going to run into a hell of a lot of energy. True, most of this energy will simply be money in the bank--that is, you'll get it all back when you turn off the antigravity machine. But getting the energy in the first place is likely to be a task. The second point is one that was hinted at, but not developed completely, by Edward E. Smith, inSkylark Three. You will recall that at the beginning of the story, the hero surrounded himself by a field of force which cut him off from the influence of all gravity. Instantly he began shooting off at an angle into the air at a velocity of over a hundred miles per hour. The reason for this, of course, was the fact that upon being released from gravity, he continues in a straight line with the velocity that he already had due to the rotation of the earth, and so his path diverged rapidly from the path taken by objects fixed to the earth. (See figure 4) This much Smith recognized, and he also noticed that since the earth is moving around the sun, the weightless object must assume a path which is tangent to the earth's orbit. However, in the story he failed to carry this through to the ultimate conclusion--that the sun is also moving in a circle around some distant center of gravity, so that the weightless body would have to move in a path tangent to that--and so forth. In other words, the object under consideration would take a path which is absolutely straight in space--which sounds like what we said before--that the antigravity machine would have to straighten out the space around it, and like I said, I don't know if that means anything. Furthermore, will this antigravity have an effect upon the forces within the molecules and atoms of the body? Might not the body under the influence of the antigravity fly apart because of the cancellation of the forces which hold it together? I must emphasize that all of this is the most rank type of speculation--indeed so rank that time and again I come up with sentences which perhaps have no meaning at all in strictly scientific logic. When we speak of antigravity we are in a topic that is so far ahead of contemporary science that we don't even know enough to say whether or not it is possible. You may claim that a thing is possible unless it is proved impossible. That is a point of view not easy to dispute. You may, if you wish, say that it is possible there are elephants on Mars, since there is no evidence to the contrary. Personally[[?]] (36)
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