Has Anyone Mentioned That Einstein Was Jewish? A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1955

 

If you are of a certain age and a nerd, you may have encountered the idea that the "spindizzy" reactionless drive of James Blish's City in Flight novels were actually a real thing that Norman Dean was demonstrating to various smart people in the science fiction world. It was probably someone about that age who wrote Spindizzy for MobyGames, which was a big release in 1986 and drives nostalgic interest in its theme music that blends into electronica more generally and dominates an internet search for "spindizzy." 

I did eventually sort out what Newsweek's nonsense about variations in the speed of light was about, and the link between this pseudoscience and the Dean Drive was made, although not until the early Sixties. Some of the people involved then went on to promote the Reagan Administration's SDI. Fun times!

Even some of the crackcpots hat John W. Campbell promoted
in Amazing were embarrassed to be associated with him,
but Norman Lorimer Dean was not noe of those guys.

 

But before it derailed, there was real science, and to make it even more fun, the real scientist who did the real work eventually derailed himself and became a big Einstein critic of the "relativity is like moral relativism," which used to be bad and opposed to Western Civilization, which is maybe not where we are right now, I can't keep track of the ongoing "start a new car wreck to distract people from the old car wreck" approach to politics they've got going on down there these days. 

Maybe in the interest of sanity I can expose some long-gone unsavouriness in the course of discussing some actual history of science and technology, after the jump. 

 The "politics and public culture" story, such as it is, is that Norman Lorimer Dean (1902--1972) began promoting a reactionless drive in the "1950s," and that in "the 1950s and 1960s" it received attention in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction, later Analog, and in some connection with this received further attention from Jerry Pournelle (1933--2017) According to long-time Byte backpage columnist, noted science fiction author, and space policy advocate Jerry Pournelle (1933--2017) and G. Harry Stine. According to Pournelle's account "Years ago I worked for an aerospace company and for a while was involved with efforts to buy a very odd device called the Dean drive." Already travelling to D.C. on his own business, secured permission to make Dean an offer, and a letter of credit to buy the Dean Drive "if countersigned by another company scientist." Pournelle then notes that he never actually saw the Drive, but that G. Harry Stine did, and that Pournelle was working from Stine's report, which was published in 1962, but must have been available to him earlier, as "[t]his was all in the Fifties," and 3M was interested at the same time, and, anyway, Dean wouldn't do a demonstration, and it all led nowhere. 

Pournelle is either being evasive here or just suffering from the vagaries of an aging memory. He completed a B.S. at the University of Washington in 1955, a master's in 1955, and a Ph.D., all at U.W., in 1964. Three years is a long time for a M.S., so I am fitting this in with the claim that he held a responsible position at Boeing at some point in this interval. After his doctorate, Pournelle worked at several aerospace companies in California, and this is the more likely period for the visit to Dean. Pournelle then exited the industry at some point, had a measure of success with his co-authored, oddly compelling space ghetto novel, The Mote in God's Eye, popped up in space policy during the heyday of the Strategic Defence Initiative and went on to edit a large number of volumes in the various anthology collections that Jim Baen published to keep the pipeline of junior science fiction writers primed after the collapse of the pulps. In one of these he printed Stine's magnum opus on the subject of reactionless drives and Einstein being wrong, which is where teenage me comes into the picture. Smart people are saying it in print! They must have a point! 

The upshot is that while I have no idea when Pournelle talked to Dean is not clear to me, but it seems more likely to have been after 1962 than in 1955.

Essen and Parry demonstrate their clock (NPL)

 What happened in 1955 was that Louis Essen (1908--1997) and Jack Parry of the NPL built the world's first caesium-133 atomic clock with the specific intent of measuring the speed of light. Essen had worked on the first cavity magnetrons during WWII, and focussed on their annoying propensity, which ought to be more publicised than it is, of finding their own unique wavelength in the 9.2cm range due to minute variations in the standing wave distributions due to equally minute variations in cavitron geometry. 

A more precise measurement of the speed of light was a great deal more important here than in boring old astronomy, and in 1950 he published a pretty good measurement of the speed of light, apparently a bit disappointed that his number was closer in line with theoretical predictions than his earlier work. His next project was his caesium-133 clock, and it is at this point that we touch base with the Newsweek article, as this more precise time measurement standard became available at a tie when the International Astronomical Union was becoming increasingly tired of being in charge of the "ephemeris second," taken from astronomical measurements, which was the basis for time measurement in the old SI metric system. Essen's caesium-clock measurement of the ephemeris second was accepted as the standard measurement of the second in 1967, and three years later, Essen was invited to take early retirement from NPL after publishing The Special Theory of Relativity: A Critical Analysis, which was apparently what you'd expect from the title. "Relativity: Joke or Swindle" seems adequately subtextual! I only wish that teenaged me had been acute enough to detect the subtle subtext of the "slavery is good, actually" conclusions of pretty much every science fiction novel or novella that Pournelle managed to produce over his surprisingly unprolific career.  
 

It's something close to the opposite of irony that the animus of all this motley crew of crackpots, wingers and anti-Semites is directed at bureaucratic standard bearers like the Bureau of Standards and the NPL. Accurately measuring time and distance intervals to precisely define the "meter," "second," and "kilogram" is at the heart of modern industrial science. We would not have microchips if these things were not nailed down, and we certainly would not have them if the speed of light did vary, even by the very small variations that Newsweek suggests.

Which brings me to "H. E. Canney of Bell Aircraft," a name evidently lost to history. Stine was fired from Martin Aircraft in 1957, according to his own account, for making indiscreet comments about the Eisenhower Administration's lack of a space policy. I have no idea how or when Pournelle separated from the industry, but I am pretty confident that he was not 

"head . . .[of] the Human Factors Laboratory at Boeing" for very long, and would guess that he enrolled in the PhD after his separation from Boeing. The same recession-era reduction in force might have caught up H. E. Canney, but Canney evidently didn't go on to a career in science fiction and advocacy. So unfortunately I can't tell you whether or not his "spaceships whizzing around at thousands of times the speed of light" remarks were motivated by the kind of systemic relativity bunking that G. Harry Stine eventually derived from his Dean Drive experiences. Were people thinking along those lines in the Mid-Fifties?  My vague impression that "reactionless drives are inherently FTL drives" (because sure, why not) was a big thing in the pioneering science fiction of E. E. Smith, but there was no big Triplanetary publication in '55 to motivate interest and there's a million forgotten pulp science fiction writers to get into H. E. Canney's brain. . 

So I guess the takeaways here are that the aerospace industry is seriously overexpanded in '55, and that the kind of weirdos who make a career out of doing exact measurements for the NPL, BS, British Standards Institute, National Research Council, and so on, are, well, weird. 

Oh, and when the American paleo-right told us what they thought, we maybe should have listened the first time.