Googling Retro-Forteana

Bing Image Creator (prompt = "black hole dinosaur Large Hadron Collider")

 What do the following have in common: "supermassive black holes", "Large Hadron Collider", "big bang theory"? If you said they're all fashionable science topics that large numbers of people might search for on Google, then that's the answer I wanted. If you type any of those phrases into Google, then among the top 5 or so results you'll see one from the Space.com website which (if you click on it) includes my name as one of the co-authors. I only spotted this recently, and while it hardly amounts to "fame" (since no one ever notices the author's name in situations like this, except the author themselves), it did start me thinking.

Google is where this blog gets most of its visitors from, after an initially flurry from my RSS and social media followers (all six of them). The result can be anything from under 50 views (as with a couple of my most recent posts) to over 5,000 (in the case of my luckiest half dozen posts). Years ago I set up Google Search Console to keep track of the blog's search performance, and then promptly forgot all about it. But I just had another look at it, and tried typing some of its suggested search terms into Google to see how they fare (just to clarify my methodology: I used a desktop rather than mobile browser, in incognito mode so it didn't know who I was, and I'm only counting hits from Google's main list, not the differently formatted items such as sponsored links, images, Reddit, Quora etc).

Suffice to say the blog doesn't score well on anything a normal person is likely to search for! Of course, it comes top for "retro-forteana", but only because it's a name I made up myself. Of the terms suggested by Google Search Console, it only makes the top 5 for "esoteric mathematics", "dinosaurs in the 16th century" and "spooky action at a distance in German" - all of somewhat specialized interest, to say the least.

At the opposite extreme, the three examples from Space.com I gave earlier really are the kind of thing the general public might search for. Those particular articles were joint productions with other writers, but there are a few other (admittedly less search-worthy) topics where the Space.com result is all my own work, such as "What is a parsec?" and "Blue stars".

"Blue stars", in fact, is the first search term I found where my article comes right at the top of Google's results. But if you want something more fortean, try "Beginner's Guide to Time Travel". As a search term it's a little contrived, but it has the benefit (from my point of view) that Google's first non-sponsored result is my article of that title on Space.com's sister site LiveScience.

As well as this blog, I've got a website andrew-may.com which I'm also monitoring on Google Search Console. The only remotely popular search terms it does well on are "Astounding Science Fiction" (a pulp magazine of the 1940s and 50s, for which my site places around third in a Google search) and "Heart Sutra in Japanese" (a chanted text used in Zen Buddhism, for which Google puts me just inside the top 10).

If you expand the second of those to "Heart Sutra in Japanese with English subtitles", then Google puts me right at the top - not with the website this time, but a video I uploaded to YouTube just a few months ago. Despite its good search performance, this hasn't had many views yet - but give it time! A much older video of mine, "Dirac on Einstein" (which also comes top in a Google search) is now up to 127k views - the one and only time I've seen a six-figure number in any of my online statistics!

One final thing, which I wouldn't have mentioned (honest!) if I hadn't just spotted it in the Google Search Console data. But another term my website scores highly on is "Andrew May astrophysicist". I'm not sure which is more surprising  - that my website comes out at number 1 ahead of LinkedIn, Space.com, LiveScience, Twitter, Amazon, Icon Books and BBC Science Focus - or that all those other sites are referring to me as well, not someone else of the same name!

Bing Image Creator (prompt = "science fiction Heart Sutra astrophysics")

Gravitomagnetism - book review

 

In looking for things I could post on this blog, I found quite a few book reviews I've done that might be of interest here. I'll start with this review of Gravitomagnetism - Gravity's Secret by Ronald A. Evans, which originally appeared in Fortean Times #426 a year ago:
 
Back in 2015 I reviewed Ron Evans’s first book, Greenglow & The Search for Gravity Control (see this blog post), about his involvement in the now-defunct BAE Systems project that dipped its toes into that distinctly fringe area of physics. This follow-up book covers similar ground, but from a different perspective and with a somewhat different aim. Rather than recounting the specific history of the Greenglow project, Evans presents the reader with a pretty comprehensive and methodical account of all the physics – generally standard textbook stuff, but occasionally more speculative – that might be relevant to the holy grail of gravity control (like most serious researchers in the field, Evans dislikes the term “antigravity”, but there’s no escaping that’s essentially what he’s talking about).

I suspect this is the book Evans really wanted to write all along. His real passion is to instil an enthusiasm for the subject in others, and inspire top-class scientists and engineers to get into it. He’s unusual, possibly even unique, among the “alternative gravity” community in not having strongly held pet theories of his own. So you won’t find any really way-out ideas here, or a blanket denunciation of mainstream physics as “wrong” – just an indication of where there may be gaps in the latter that might lead to some kind of breakthrough in the future.

Evans explains in the introduction how the book evolved out of a lecture written for the general public, and a trace of this remains in the PowerPoint-type slides around which each chapter is written. But don’t expect a book where everyone is going to understand every word. Evans doesn’t hide the fact that physics is a difficult subject, and he isn’t afraid to give technical details where they’re needed. But it’s all good science, not made-up technobabble, and it doesn’t just focus on trendy topics like black holes, gravitational waves and quantum theory. There are chapters on older branches of physics that rarely make it into the public consciousness, such as thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and electromagnetism. That’s because Evans thinks these topics may be relevant to extended gravity, not so much directly as through analogous mathematics.

The technical asides notwithstanding, Evans keeps the ideas flowing in a way that makes for a surprisingly easy read. His aim, from the first page to the last, is to be thought-provoking – and he certainly succeeds in that.

Pseudoscience and Science Fiction

It doesn’t seem that long ago (February and March this year) that I wrote a couple of posts featuring motley arrays of offbeat science fiction and pseudoscience books, which I described as research for a book I was writing. So I’m really pleased to be able to follow up those posts with the array of books pictured above – my author’s copies of Pseudoscience and Science Fiction, which has just been published by Springer. This is one of the world’s biggest academic publishers, based in Germany, and they really do have a very slick and streamlined system for getting books out quickly and to a very high professional standard.

I know what you’re thinking. Why should a prestigious academic publisher want to touch a book about such non-academic topics as pseudoscience and science fiction? Well, they do popular science books as well, and one of their ongoing lines is called Science and Fiction. Aimed at “science buffs, scientists and science fiction fans”, the series is a mixture of fiction (often written by professional scientists) and non-fiction. The latter primarily looks at the “real” science in science fiction, in a similar vein to some of Brian Clegg’s books (cf. From Science Fiction to Science Fact). But I felt there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled. What about the pseudoscience in science fiction? After all, pseudoscience is a lot more exciting – and much easier to understand – than real science, and hence much more fiction-friendly. On top of that, there are numerous examples of explicit interactions between science fiction and pseudoscience – much more than between either of those disciplines and academic science.

This is a subject I felt eminently qualified to write about. My house is filled with books, and perhaps two-thirds of them are science, pseudoscience or science fiction. Not to mention my vast collection of Fortean Times magazines, going back more than twenty years. I just searched the final text of Pseudoscience and Science Fiction for “Fortean Times”, and it appears 55 times in 180 pages! So I had great fun writing the book, and I really hope it will appeal to the target audience of “science buffs, scientists and science fiction fans”.

Here is the publisher’s blurb (I had nothing to do with the last paragraph!):

Aliens, flying saucers, ESP, the Bermuda Triangle, antigravity … are we talking about science fiction or pseudoscience? Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference.

Both pseudoscience and science fiction (SF) are creative endeavours that have little in common with academic science, beyond the superficial trappings of jargon and subject matter. The most obvious difference between the two is that pseudoscience is presented as fact, not fiction. Yet like SF, and unlike real science, pseudoscience is driven by a desire to please an audience – in this case, people who “want to believe”. This has led to significant cross-fertilization between the two disciplines. SF authors often draw on “real” pseudoscientific theories to add verisimilitude to their stories, while on other occasions pseudoscience takes its cue from SF – the symbiotic relationship between ufology and Hollywood being a prime example of this.

This engagingly written, well researched and richly illustrated text explores a wide range of intriguing similarities and differences between pseudoscience and the fictional science found in SF.

For some reason the publishers put a 2017 date on the book, but don’t let that put you off – it’s out now. It’s available both as a paperback and an ebook, and there are lots of ways you can get hold of your copy. Here are a few links (the Amazon preview is particularly generous, if you want to get a flavour of the content and style of the book):

• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Amazon.com
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Amazon UK
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Waterstones
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from iTunes
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Google Play
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Springer’s own website

Test your ESP

Here’s a nostalgic curiosity I found in a second-hand shop a couple of weeks ago. It’s called Know Your Own Psi-Q, and it’s the only retro-fortean book I’ve come across that contains computer code. The book dates from 1983 (or 1986 in the case of this paperback version), so the programs were written with things like the Apple II and BBC Micro in mind. However, I managed to convert one of them to JavaScript and will try embedding it at the bottom of this post.

The computer programs only take up one chapter of the book – the rest consists of what you might call “manual” tests. In effect they’re all guessing games. Typically you’re asked to do a repetitive task, like guessing the colour of playing cards before they’re turned over, and record the number of “hits” or correct guesses. Then you have to look at the tables in the back of the book (or use a formula for more complicated examples) in order to calculate your “z” score and hence the probability of obtaining that result from pure chance. According to the authors, you have “some Psi” if this probability is 1 in 20, “good Psi” if it is 1 in 100, and “excellent Psi” if it is 1 in 1000.

There are several problems with this. Firstly, it assumes there is a black-and-white choice between pure chance and ESP, with no other possible explanations. Secondly, if you do a lot of short test runs one after the other (20 of them, say), then the likelihood that one of them will yield a 1-in-20 result is pretty high, by definition (thanks to Peter Harriman for reminding me of this last week, in a completely different context). Finally, if you have to resort to hunting for small deviations from chance, then “extra-sensory perception” is far inferior to regular “sensory perception” (which comes close to 100% reliability and repeatability).

If you want an intelligent discussion of such issues, you won’t find them in Know Your Own Psi-Q – even though the authors, Hans Eysenck and Carl Sargent, were both professional psychologists who ought to have been aware of them. Your money is much better spent on Brian Clegg’s Extra-Sensory, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Now for my attempt at reproducing one of their computer programs. I’ve simplified it a bit, making it a straight choice between heads or tails. Imagine that the computer has just flipped a coin – and click on “heads” or “tails” according to which of them you think it is. As soon as you do this, the computer will tell you whether you were right or wrong, and immediately flip another coin. So then you can guess again. Keep doing this as many times as you like – the computer will accumulate your z-statistics, but only start displaying them after you’ve had at least 36 guesses.

Don’t click the “Restart” button unless you want to clear the statistics and start again from scratch (which you might want to do – as mentioned earlier, a large number of short runs is more likely to produce a high z-score than a single long run). What you’re aiming for is a z-score of 1.96 or higher, corresponding to “some Psi ability” according to Eysenck and Sargent.

TEST YOUR ESP BY GUESSING HEADS OR TAILS
Heads
Tails

DISCLAIMER: This is a cut-down version of Eysenck and Sargent’s Program 2 (“Clairvoyance Test”), with an updated user interface. The main reason for putting it here is to illustrate the tedious and soul-destroying nature of such tests. Please don’t expect it to demonstrate anything other than the random nature of JavaScript’s math.random() function. If it doesn’t work on whatever device you’re viewing this on, you aren’t missing anything.

Popular Science with a difference

Yet again I’ve been working so hard on my book about Pseudoscience and Science Fiction that I haven’t left enough time (or energy) to do a proper blog post this week. So I thought I’d just give a quick plug to three books by Brian Clegg that I’ve found very useful as reference sources:

• Final Frontier – the pioneering science and technology of exploring the universe
• How to Build a Time Machine – the real science of time travel
• Extra Sensory – the science and pseudoscience of telepathy and other powers of the mind

Despite their subject matter, all three of these books are about real, reputable science – even if they take pseudoscience and/or science fiction as a starting point for the discussion. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to understand the facts behind the speculations!

(Another of Brian’s books in a similar vein, Ten Billion Tomorrows, was mentioned in an earlier blog post)

My Kirlian Aura

On a recent trawl through my Weird Science files (which are extensive) I found this Kirlian photograph of my hand that was taken about 16 years ago. According to my copy of The Aquarian Guide to the New Age (which is even older), this is supposed to show my mystical energy aura. Alternatively, the ever-skeptical Wikipedia says “the coronal discharges identified as Kirlian auras are the result of stochastic electric ionization processes”.

Whichever it is, my Kirlian aura and/or stochastic coronal discharge looks disappointingly unimpressive, so I couldn’t resist trying to improve on nature. The version below has the image inverted and false colour added – and it looks a lot livelier!

More Research

I usually aim to do a blog post every weekend, but earlier this year I said I might skip an occasional week if I ran short of ideas. Today is a case in point – but just so you know I’m still here, here’s a photo of some more research material for the book I’m writing. All these items were bought since my previous post on the subject three weeks ago!

As you can see, I managed to get hold of one of the two missing issues from the near-complete run of Skull the Slayer I acquired this time last year. I spotted the missing issue on a shopping trip to London last week, which also yielded four of the books shown in the photo. The other two books were bought online, while the DVDs came from my local HMV store.

In broad terms, the book is about the crossover of ideas between science fiction and Fortean-style speculation. I picked that subject partly because I already know a bit about it, but mainly because it’s the perfect excuse to indulge in lots of lowbrow “research material” of the kind pictured above!

From Science Fiction to Science Fact

Brian Clegg is a popular science writer who also runs the Popular Science book review site. When it comes to his own books he has to find someone else to review them, and I was lucky enough to be asked to do this in the case of his latest title, Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future. Brian sent me an advance copy to read some time ago, but the book has now been published and my review of it has duly appeared on his website.

I started reading science fiction in the 1970s, and many of the stories I read at that time were set in the period 1980 to 2015 – in other words, the future then but the past (or present) now. I still find such stories fascinating, because I have a clear memory of the time when they were written AND of the (usually less dramatically different) “future” as it actually unfolded. This is a subject I touched on in my recent Back to the Future post, and it came to mind again when reading Brian’s book.

One thing that can’t be said too often (Brian says it in his book and I say it in my review) is that SF writers almost never set out to “predict the future”. Writers make money by selling as many books as they can, and the way to do that is to write stories that readers are going to find exciting at the time the book comes out. “Exciting” technology in the 1960s and 70s meant things like space rockets, supersonic airliners and (in a scary way) nuclear bombs… so that’s what people wrote about, rather than “boring” technologies like computers (which were mainly used by accountants and mathematicians) and telephones (which had barely changed since the early 20th century). Today our lives are dominated by phones and computers, while people can go for months without ever thinking about nuclear war or space travel. But how many readers would have found this “future” credible or interesting 40 years ago?

Another thing that’s changed in the last 40 years is that SF used to be almost exclusively a geek subculture, with the emphasis on written works rather than movies or other media. Today the geeks are still there, but (thanks to a constant stream of blockbuster movies) the awareness of SF tropes among the general population is much higher than it was. By and large Brian’s book is aimed at this latter audience – quite rightly, since SF geeks are also likely to be science geeks, and hence know a lot of this stuff already.

Having said that, the book does get off to a rather geeky start, with a chapter about computer games and The Matrix, followed by one focusing on a comparatively obscure novel from the 1950s, The Space Merchants. After that, however, the book takes off on a whirlwind tour of themes that should be familiar to the most casual SF consumers – force fields, robots, clones, exoskeletons, ray guns, aliens, the end of the world, cheap energy, teleportation, trips to the moon, faster-than-light communications, cyborgs, cloaking devices and artificial intelligence.

In chapter after chapter, the same message comes across: Modern science can do that, but it can’t do it as impressively or effectively as it’s portrayed in science fiction. To take one example, “teleportation” – in the form of quantum teleportation – is possible under laboratory conditions, but it only works on a subatomic scale. That’s a far cry from science fictional teleportation (e.g. a Star Trek transporter), which is supposed to work on ten thousand trillion trillion atoms all at once. I discussed this in more detail last year in an article entitled Three Types of Teleportation (which points out that the word “teleportation” was coined by Charles Fort – a fact also mentioned by Brian in his book).

Generally when I’m name-dropping “famous people I used to work with” there are just two names on the list – Seth Shostak (I overlapped with him in the same department at Groningen University in 1982-83) and Nick Pope (I worked in the same office building in Whitehall between 1996 and 1998). But Ten Billion Tomorrows drew my attention to another minor celebrity I could add to the list – Kevin Warwick, who features in the chapter about cyborgs (“Since the late 1990s, Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University in England has been experimenting with a range of implants under his skin that have been described as specific attempts to turn himself into a cyborg”). I crossed paths with Kevin back in 1991-3, when he was consultant to a project on neural networks that I was working on (I had a paper on the subject published in the Aeronautical Journal – I just had a look for it online, but all I could find was this entry on a French bibliographic site).

The Number of the Beast

Over the years I’ve read a dozen or so books by Robert A. Heinlein, including novels and short story collections, but I wouldn’t count myself as a Heinlein fan. And The Number of the Beast – a huge, 556-page novel he wrote when he was over 70 – is really a book for die-hard fans only. It’s got a reputation as a dull and slow-moving novel, overloaded with Heinlein in-jokes and self-references. On the other hand, its basic premise is pretty fascinating – so I picked up a second-hand copy for a couple of pounds when I saw it in a bookshop earlier this year. I just got round to reading it – and while I can’t pretend it was an enjoyable experience, it was thought-provoking enough to be worth a blog post (plus I can’t think of anything else to write about this week).

The idea of “the number of the beast” – 6 6 6 – comes from the Book of Revelation. It’s one of the few things in the Bible that even non-Christians (and Satanists, for that matter) agree is quite cool. It’s normally rendered as “six hundred and sixty-six”, but in Heinlein’s novel it’s “six to the power of six to the power of six”. Written like that it’s mathematically ambiguous. 6⁶ is 46656, but there’s a big difference between 46656⁶ and 6⁴⁶⁶⁵⁶. Heinlein makes it clear that he means the first of these, which he multiplies out as 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056. That may look like a big number, but the second number is MUCH bigger. It starts with 223,872 followed by another 36,300 digits. I guess the reason Heinlein didn’t go for that one is because it would have taken at least 20 pages to write out in full!

In the novel, the significance of 6^6^6 comes from a six-dimensional theory of space-time developed by one of the four main protagonists. It’s supposedly the number of different universes “possibly accessible to us either by rotation or translation”. That’s pure technobabble, of course, but it’s an excellent starting premise for a science fiction novel. Unfortunately, however, Heinlein’s narrative doesn’t go the way most SF readers would expect it to.

That much was science – now for the philosophy. I like playing with words just as much as I like playing with numbers – especially if they’re really big words. There are three lovely big words on the back cover of the book – “Multiperson Pantheistic Solipsism” (that’s one of the reasons I had to buy it). Solipsism is the philosophical theory that the human mind creates its own reality. Pantheism, strictly speaking, is the theological belief that God is all-pervasive throughout the universe. But coupled with solipsism I guess you could substitute “the human mind” for “God”. The third big word, multiperson, is self-explanatory – the relevance here being that the book has four protagonists who are very much in tune with each other. Putting it all together, “Multiperson Pantheistic Solipsism” means that a whole universe can be created as a mental projection by a group of like-minded people.

This still sounds like a good idea – although closer to fantasy than science fiction – but again Heinlein doesn’t handle it the way most people would expect. I’d read in several places that the “universes” the characters create are based on pulp fiction, which immediately creates certain expectations in the reader’s mind. Even Wikipedia says “The novel lies somewhere between parody and homage in its deliberate use of the style of the 1930s pulp novels”. Having read the book I have to say that’s just plain wrong.

At its peak in the 1930s and 40s, pulp fiction encompassed a whole range of genres. The most popular of these were hardboiled crime (as typified by Black Mask magazine), supernatural fantasy (typified by Weird Tales), the “hero” pulps (e.g. The Shadow and Doc Savage) and the nascent genre of science fiction (pioneered by Amazing Stories, followed by various similarly titled magazines such as Astounding).

Near the start of The Number of the Beast, the protagonists do get into a brief discussion of pulp magazines – including Weird Tales, The Shadow, Black Mask and Astounding. But that’s pretty much it. When they start visiting “fictional” universes, only one of them has its roots in a pulp magazine. That’s a fairly brief episode involving E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman characters, who originally appeared in the pages of Astounding. As for tough-talking private eyes like Race Williams or Dan Turner, Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria, Doc Savage and his trusty aides... there’s no sign of any of them.

The fact is, regardless of what Wikipedia says, The Number of the Beast isn’t even close to being a parody of 1930s pulp fiction. Instead, the dominant thread running through the fictional universes is children’s literature – classic books like The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Princess of Mars and Gulliver’s Travels.

They may not be pulp fiction, but these books are still essentially escapist adventures, with some very basic tropes in common. First and foremost is the idea of conflict. Typically this means protagonists versus villain – either the protagonists are desperately trying to stop the villain doing something bad, or the villain is trying to prevent them doing something good. Even if the story doesn’t have a human villain, it needs an impending natural disaster or other impersonal force to provide the same impetus and sense of urgency. The protagonists shouldn’t have time to catch their breath, let alone do any of the trivial little things you and I spend most of the day doing. If there’s a romantic subplot, then its course can’t be allowed to run smooth. That bit about living happily ever after comes at the end of the story, not the beginning.

Heinlein turns all of that on its head. If you think about it, in a universe governed by Multiperson Pantheistic Solipsism, he pretty much has to. I mean, if you created a universe out of pure thought, you’d give yourself an easy time too, wouldn’t you? Consequently the book is devoid of any sense of urgency. It’s the only novel I’ve read where the protagonists spend most of their time cleaning their teeth, taking a bath, deciding what to wear, eating breakfast, getting a good night’s sleep... and having long conversations in which everyone agrees with everyone else. They carefully plan what they’re going to do next, then do it in their own sweet time. On the rare occasions they come across anything resembling an obstacle or hindrance, they deal with it in half a page, then get back to eating, sleeping and agreeing with each other.

The result is a long and boring book, in which the protagonists thoroughly enjoy themselves but the reader doesn’t. That’s the exact opposite of a traditional escapist novel – it’s more like peeking in on someone else’s daydream. Maybe it is all a dream, in fact. The first two sections are called “The Mandarin’s Butterfly” and “The Butterfly’s Mandarin” – presumably a reference to a story told by the Chinese philosopher Chuang Chou:

Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither... conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Rocket to the Morgue

While I was writing last week’s post about L. Ron Hubbard I suddenly remembered a novel called Rocket to the Morgue, in which one of the characters is based on Hubbard. I bought the copy pictured above (second-hand, as you can tell from the condition) in 2008, and was impressed enough to write about it at the time. It should have featured in my post about Charles Fort in Fiction, since it belongs to the select group of novels that mention Fort by name, but I managed to miss it out. So I thought I’d rectify the omission now.

Rocket to the Morgue was written by a man named William White, and originally appeared in 1942 under the pen-name of H. H. Holmes. White is better known by another pseudonym, Anthony Boucher, which he used on a number of classic short stories including “The Compleat Werewolf” and “The Quest for Saint Aquin”, and as founding editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The paperback reprint of Rocket to the Morgue has the name Anthony Boucher on the cover.

The novel is essentially a murder mystery, although that’s secondary to the real interest of the book. The action takes place against the backdrop of science fiction fandom – and prodom – as it existed at the time the book was written. No real-world authors make an appearance, but even Wikipedia acknowledges that many of the characters are based on real people. Most of these will be pretty obscure to modern-day readers – the main exceptions are Robert A. Heinlein (who features as “Austin Carter”) and L. Ron Hubbard (“Vance Wimpole” – described by one of the other characters as “an eccentric, a madman if you will”). Somewhat confusingly, there is also a passing reference to another writer named “René Lafayette”, which as mentioned last week was a pseudonym used by Hubbard.

As an aside, it’s worth emphasizing just how different the world of 1942 was. L. Ron Hubbard was a pulp writer, pure and simple. Scientology and Dianetics still lay in the future, and Hubbard’s name would have meant nothing to the general public. Science fiction fandom would have been equally obscure. There were no blockbuster sci-fi movies in 1942, and the cutting edge of the genre still lay in the pulp magazines. Although the novel is full of characters who conform to the modern stereotype of the science fiction geek, that stereotype would have been unknown to most readers when the book first came out.

The most Fortean character in the book isn’t a science fiction author – he’s a rocket scientist. His name is Hugo Chantrelle, and it’s a mishap with one of his rocket tests that gives the book its title (and is illustrated, in stylised form, on the cover). But Chantrelle is more than just a scientist: “The time-dreams of Dunne, the extra-sensory perception of Rhine, the sea serpents of Gould, all these held his interests far more than any research conducted by the Institute. He was inevitably a member of the Fortean Society of America, and had his own file of unbelievable incidents eventually to be published as a supplement to the works of Charles Fort.”

Surprising as it may seem, Chantrelle too is based on a real person – Jack Parsons, who was one of the founders of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Like his fictional counterpart, Parsons was no ordinary scientist. He was on friendly terms with the real-life L. Ron Hubbard, and with the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. One of my all-time favourite Fortean Times covers (FT132, pictured below) described him as “Playboy, antichrist and missile messiah”. Here are a few selected passages from the article about Parsons in that issue:

• Before each test launch, he was in the habit of invoking Aleister Crowley’s Hymn to Pan, the wild horned god of fertility. Parsons was an active member of the California Agape Lodge of the sex magical group Ordo Templi Orientis, and in letters addressed the Great Beast as “Most Beloved Father”.
• He practised “sex magic” but was so lacking in occult disciplines that his early workings more resembled early free-love orgies than anything else. Outside of these “religious” activities, Parsons was an incorrigible womaniser, who also blithely styled himself the Antichrist.
• In August 1945, on leave from his less than spectacular naval career, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was introduced to Parsons. Jack was impressed by Ron’s exuberance and energy and wrote in a letter to Crowley: “I deduced that he is in direct touch with some higher intelligence... He is the most Thelemic person I have ever met and is in complete accord with our own principles”.
• In January 1946, the two commenced a long and complex magical ritual called the “Babalon Working”. This was intended to create nothing less than an elemental being. As far as Parsons was concerned, the invocation worked. The elemental turned up two weeks later in the form of the beautiful blue-eyed, red-haired Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron.
• In April 1946, Parsons, Cameron and Hubbard, acting as scribe, attempted the second part of the Babalon Working, which was intended to raise a “moonchild” in the manner described in Crowley’s novel of the same name, with Cameron the vessel for Parsons’ magical seed. The mundane world intruded, however, and the tricky Hubbard, despite his intense and apparently sincere involvement with the Babalon working, vanished with $10,000 of Parsons’ money.

Project Greenglow

 There’s another book review by myself in the latest issue of Fortean Times magazine (FT 328, pictured above). This time the subject is Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control by Ronald Evans. I also reviewed the same book, from the perspective of a different audience, for Brian Cleggs’s Popular Science website. I gave the book a rating of 8 out of 10 for Fortean Times and (after a bit of negotiation with Brian) three stars for Popular Science, which translates as “Good solid book, well worth reading if you are interested in the topic”.

Having reviewed the book twice, I’ll just refer you to those reviews rather than reviewing it again here. Instead, I thought I’d say a few words about my own peripheral involvement in Project Greenglow (which, if you’ve read one or both of my book reviews, you will know was a long-running “blue skies” research initiative led by Ron Evans when he worked for BAE Systems).

Until a month ago, I’d never seen my name mentioned in a book (apart from ones I wrote or contributed to myself). Now it’s happened twice in quick succession! The first was in the introductory note to David Clarke’s How UFOs Conquered the World, which I wrote about last week (I’m one of a long list of people that David thanks “for their input both past and present”). And then I’m mentioned twice in the Greenglow book – first in the introduction, where Ron says I provided “additional backing for the Greenglow venture” (which is true, albeit only in the form of encouragement from the sidelines, rather than active participation) and again in the acknowledgements at the end, where I’m listed as one of half a dozen people who read and commented on an earlier draft of the book.

In May 1996, around the time Project Greenglow got underway, I was seconded to the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall for three years as a scientific adviser (this was the high point of my career – it’s been downhill ever since then). This put me pretty close to the centre of things. If I crossed the corridor to my boss’s office and looked out of the window, I could see the gates of Downing Street (John Major was still Prime Minister when I arrived, replaced by Tony Blair a year later). For some even more impressive name-dropping, a couple of floors higher up the building, almost immediately over my own office, was none other than Nick Pope himself! As I said in a previous post, “by that time Nick had moved on from his stint on the UFO desk, but he had already become a major celebrity within UK ufology”.

As I also mentioned in that earlier post, my own job was concerned with advanced air vehicle research. Like Nick Pope, I was what they called a “desk officer” – which in my case meant monitoring a large number of other people’s research projects without actually (ahem) doing any real work myself. The most futuristic of the projects in my remit was a collaborative effort with BAE Systems (or British Aerospace, as it was called in those days), and that’s how I met Ron Evans. But as “futuristic” as this project was, it still used well-established textbook physics. That wasn’t the case with another of Ron’s interests, Project Greenglow, which deliberately set out to discover brand new physics in the realm of gravity control. Greenglow was purely a BAE initiative (I mean it was funded and directed by them, and carried out in various university departments around the UK), so I didn’t have any active involvement in it myself. However, I made no secret of my interest in the subject, and Ron was good enough to treat me as a kind of honorary member of the Greenglow team.

As I said in the Fortean Times review:

One of the biggest events in the field of “gravity control” during the Greenglow years was the announcement by the Russian scientist Evgeny Podkletnov of a possible gravity shielding effect caused by rotating superconductors. This made mainstream headlines when the news first broke in 1996, and an attempt to duplicate Podkletnov’s experiment was one of the main strands of Project Greenglow itself.

I was lucky enough to see the latter at first hand, when Ron invited a couple of colleagues and myself to visit the Greenglow experiment at Sheffield University in May 1998. This is certainly the closest thing to “weird science” I’ve ever seen in a university laboratory! Unfortunately the experiment failed to reproduced Podkletnov’s gravity-defying results – although it was done on a shoestring budget, so it wasn’t able to reproduce the original experiment exactly (for example the superconducting disc used in Sheffield was much smaller).

One of the things Ron was very good at was networking, and he put me in touch with a lot of fascinating characters, including several people involved in NASA’s “Breakthrough Propulsion Physics” program – which was similar in its objectives to Project Greenglow, if higher profile. At one point I got a call on my office phone from the American science fiction author – and science speculator – Robert L. Forward (who sadly died a few years later). Definitely the closest thing to a cold call from a celebrity I’ve ever received!

After I moved back to my old job following the temporary posting to MOD, Ron continued to keep me in touch with the Greenglow “network”. I talked about one of the weirder experiences to come out of this a few years ago in Stranger than Fiction. After Ron’s retirement in 2005, he sent me an early draft of his book to look through. It’s taken a long time, but I’m glad to see he finally got it published.

The book may be a little on the technical side for some people, but it ought to be essential reading for anyone who is seriously interested in the subject of “breakthrough physics”. To get your copy, just click on the appropriate link below!

Get Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control from Amazon.com (paperback)

Get Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control from Amazon.com (Kindle)

Get Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control from Amazon UK (paperback)

Get Greenglow and the Search for Gravity Control from Amazon UK (Kindle)

The Natural Law Party

There’s an interesting article in the current issue of Fortean Times called “Westminster Weirdos”, all about the nuttier fringes of British politics. The main focus is on the parties contesting next month’s General Election, but there’s a brief mention of a very nutty fringe party that fielded a number of candidates way back in the General Election of 1992: the Natural Law Party.

All the policies of the Natural Law Party centred around the practice of Transcendental Meditation (that’s a special kind of meditation devised by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, best known as the Beatles’ guru in the 1960s). When they first appeared on the British political scene in 1992, I happened to be particularly interested in wacky New Age beliefs, reading lots of books on the subject and attending lectures at the Theosophical Society and Buddhist Society and places like that. So I was fascinated by the Natural Law Party, and I’ve kept their campaign leaflet (pictured above) ever since. According to Wikipedia, William Stevens of the Natural Law Party got 92 votes in the 1992 General Election. I think one of those was mine, although at this distance in time I can’t be certain!

As you can see from the back cover of the manifesto, Transcendental Meditation would be good for the economy (by making people more creative), good for education (by increasing intelligence), good for defence (by creating an “invincible national consciousness”) and good for law & order (by eliminating the cause of crime, i.e. “the inability of the population to think and act spontaneously in accord with natural law”). You may say that’s all a load of unworkable idealistic nonsense, which of course it is – but no more unworkable than the idealistic nonsense purveyed by the mainstream political parties! There’s a difference, too – the mainstream parties have an annoying habit of talking down to the electorate, as if we’re all a bunch of ignorant yokels. That certainly wasn’t the case with the Natural Law party, as you can see from this interior page from the leaflet:

“Time to Bring the Light of Science into Politics”. That sentiment appealed to me, since I was working as a scientist at the time. But for most people it would have had the opposite effect – an instant turn-off! Especially as the science in question was fundamental physics, which is one of the most abstract, mathematically complex disciplines of all. Just zoom in on the left-hand side of the page and look at all those symbols and equations! Admittedly they’ve been annotated with user-friendly words like “FREEDOM”, “SIMPLICITY” and “OMNIPOTENCE”, but they’re still pretty daunting for the non-mathematician.

The thing that is depicted, as it says at the bottom, is “the Lagrangian of the superstring”. Now, how many people know what to do with a Lagrangian? I used to know, but I’ve forgotten – and I expect that most people who studied physics at degree level will say the same thing. To everyone else, it’s just so much mumbo-jumbo... which I guess is why only 92 Battersea residents voted for them!

It’s not mumbo-jumbo, though – it’s real science (the equation, I mean – not the bits about omnipotence and freedom). The image below shows, on the left, a zoomed-in view of the bottom line from the Natural Law manifesto. On the right is a closely similar equation from the book Why Does E = mc²? by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. They describe it as “one of the most wonderful equations in physics”, and go on to say: “It really is possible to get a flavour of what is going on just by talking about the symbols without knowing any mathematics at all.” Sadly, however, they don’t say anything about “IMMORTALITY” or “INVINCIBILITY”.

The Museum of the Future

The Museum of the Future is a new collection of 20 short stories, published by Jon Downes at CFZ Press under the “Fortean Fiction” imprint. I included the blurb in my Books, plural post last month, but here it is again:

Twenty tales of High Strangeness featuring conspiracy theorists, mad scientists, hippies, geeks and miscellaneous weirdos: A group of Cambridge academics investigate a crashed UFO... An outcast scientist discovers the secret of anti-gravity... A paranormal author finds himself prime suspect in the Case of the Purloined Poe... A student has a bewildering vision of the future... Four New Agers are regressed back to their past lives... An engineer invents a new way to spy on the competition... A viewer gets too deeply involved in a TV cop show... A young woman battles the spies, aliens and perverts that only she can see... and a dozen more stories!

Most of the stories were written because I was looking for an entertaining way of getting a particular idea across. As a result there’s quite a mix of styles and genres. There’s some science fiction, some adventure, some mystery and some horror. At least half the stories have a humorous element to them, and several are parodies of a specific style. I guess if I had to stick a label on the collection it would be “Fortean satire”.

There’s an account of the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery in the style of an M. R. James ghost story, and of the Rendlesham UFO incident in the style of a pulp adventure. There’s Roswell-style paranoia, transplanted backward in time from the Cold War to the period just before the First World War. There’s H. P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” retold in the style of Philip K. Dick. And there’s a murder mystery featuring homeopathy, Tesla coils and other internet-age wackiness.

The title story, “Museum of the Future”, is very short – but it’s retold five times. It’s a vision of the British Museum in the year 2012, as envisaged in 1912, 1932, 1952, 1972 and 1992. The basic plot is pretty much the same, but the background details are different every time. Not surprisingly, these reflect the political preoccupations of the time the story was written!

The Museum of the Future is published as a paperback (ISBN 978-1-909488-23-6), which I believe can be ordered from “all good bookshops” or via any of the Amazon sites. It’s also available as an ebook, but only in Kindle format (so my apologies to regular reader Colin and anyone else who may buy their ebooks elsewhere). Here are a few links:

• Amazon US – paperback
• Amazon UK – paperback
• Amazon US – Kindle
• Amazon UK – Kindle

Mad Scientists, Zombies and the Loch Ness Monster

Earlier this year Nick Redfern wrote a piece for Mysterious Universe entitled The Convenient Monster, about an intriguing-sounding episode of the 1960s TV series, The Saint, based around the legend of the Loch Ness Monster. I discovered later that “The Convenient Monster” started life as a short story by the Saint’s creator, Leslie Charteris, so I started to look round for a printed version of it. I eventually managed to get hold of the book pictured here – The Fantastic Saint, containing “The Convenient Monster” along with five other Saint stories having a horror and/or science fiction element to them.

Leslie Charteris wrote his first Saint story in 1928, when he was just 21 – while the Saint, alias Simon Templar, was portrayed as being not much older. His last Saint stories were written early in the 1960s, by which time the TV series starring Roger Moore was already underway, and Charteris (and presumably the Saint too) was the wrong side of 50. Charteris had retired from writing by the time The Fantastic Saint was published in 1982, although he did produce an afterword for it.

The six stories in the collection span virtually the entire career of the Saint, from the early 1930s to the early sixties. In his afterword, Charteris says he wanted “to avoid the perpetual repetition of a recognizable formula”. That’s just the sort of thing you’d expect the creator of a long-running series character to say... but in Charteris’s case it’s absolutely true. The six stories are all completely different from each other – and at least a few of them are really outstanding.

The earliest story in the book, “The Gold Standard” from 1932, is also the longest of them – and probably the weakest, too. It’s essentially a Mad Scientist story, about a modern-day alchemist – but it can’t really be called science fiction, because Charteris makes no attempt at a technical (or even pseudo-technical) explanation for the gold-making process. That’s only a minor quibble, but it’s worth mentioning because the other five stories are all particularly strong on technical background. In this story, however, the “technical details” border on tongue-in-cheek metafiction – the scientist’s lair is likened to “one of those nightmare laboratories of the future which appear in every magazine of pseudo-scientific fiction”!

I’m glad I read the stories in chronological order, because “The Gold Standard” is the only one that goes into much detail about the background of the characters. At this point in his career the Saint was a kind of English version of the pulp hero the Spider, who made his debut the following year – an independently wealthy, upper-class playboy who fights against evil while being viewed as a dangerously anti-social psychopath by the blunderingly ineffective police force. As the stories progress, the Saint slowly inches his way toward acceptance by the establishment.

The villain of the second story – “The Newdick Helicopter”, from 1933 – is not so much a Mad Scientist as an inventor-turned-conman. It’s a highly amusing tale, but I was puzzled at first as to just what the “fantastic” element was supposed to be. Then I realized that the first true helicopter, capable of vertical take-off and landing, didn’t come on the market until several years after the story was written!

The third piece, called “The Man Who Liked Ants” and dating from 1937, is about as archetypal a Mad Scientist story as they come. As far as the plot goes, it would have been right at home in a B-movie theatre or pulp science fiction magazine of the time. However it’s lifted up somewhat by the fact that, as Charteris says in his afterword: “Before writing ‘The Man Who Liked Ants’, I read three or four serious books about them. Which doesn’t make me an entomologist, but at least gives the story some scientific support.”

Keeping to chronological order (which is not quite the order the stories are printed in the book), the next one is “The Darker Drink” from 1949. Just as “The Man Who Liked Ants” was typical of the naively simplistic science fiction of the 1930s, this one is closer to the sophisticated mind-benders the masters of the genre was turning out just a decade later. “The Darker Drink” reminded me particularly of Fredric Brown, whose novel What Mad Universe?, also from 1949, has a similar tone – as do several of his short stories. But hardly anyone has heard of Frederic Brown today – so a less obscure (if slightly less accurate) comparison would be with the early work of Philip K. Dick a few years later.

I can’t think how to describe “The Darker Drink” without spoiling it, so I’ll just quote the introduction by Martin H. Greenberg: “Simon Templar’s hideout in the High Sierras is invaded by a man called Big Bill Holbrook who claims to be the dream-world creation of a sleeping bank clerk in Glendale, California. It is perhaps the Saint’s strangest adventure, beginning as a screwball send-up of The Maltese Falcon and ending as a nightmare.”

Personally I’d rate “The Darker Drink” as the second best story in the book, after the one that comes next in chronological order: “The Questing Tycoon” from 1954. This is a zombie story – but it’s not THAT kind of zombie story. It’s as thoughtful and well-researched a zombie story as I’ve ever come across, with a discussion of Voodoo in terms of comparative religion which must have seemed quite radical in the 1950s. Again quoting from Leslie Charteris’s afterword: “‘The Questing Tycoon’ was inspired by a visit to Haiti, where I was fortunate enough to be able to witness a couple of genuine voodoo ceremonies – not the kind that are laid on for the tourists. I was also lucky enough to meet a local resident, a lifelong student of the cult and the author of important monographs on the subject: thanks to him, I can vouch that the details and the actual incantation and the song quoted are literally exact.”

This brings us to “The Convenient Monster”, the last of the stories to be published – in 1962, only four years before the TV adaptation described in Nick Redfern’s article. I hardly need to say anything about this one, because Nick’s (spoiler-free) account of the small-screen adaptation is pretty close to the printed version. The order of events at the start of the story is slightly different, and a few scenes and at least one character seem to have been added to the TV version, but otherwise it sounds like a pretty faithful adaptation. I’ll have to look out for it in the schedules now!

Although I’ve known the name Leslie Charteris since childhood – my grandfather had a couple of Saint paperbacks on his bookshelf in the sixties – The Fantastic Saint is the first book I’ve ever read by him. I’ll certainly be looking out for more now – and I’ll have to catch some Saint reruns on TV, too. I used to watch it regularly as a child, and I really liked the Simon Templar character as portrayed by Roger Moore. Probably for that reason, I’m the only person I know (and possibly the only person in the world) who thinks that Roger Moore was far and away the best actor ever to play James Bond!

The Science of Bigfoot

In an earlier post this year, Patterson-Gimlin Film: Fake or Fact?, I reviewed one of the ebooks in the Cryptid Casebook series from Bretwalda Books. Most of the titles in this series are written by Larry Jaffer, and – as the name suggests – consist of specific case studies. A couple of months ago, however, Bretwalda editor Rupert Matthews asked me if I would like to write something on “aspects of Bigfoot other than sightings”. I thought this was a great idea, and The Science of Bigfoot was the result.

Here is the book’s blurb:

For many Bigfoot enthusiasts, science has becomes synonymous with knee-jerk debunking. But to ignore science altogether is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If Bigfoot is a real flesh-and-blood creature, and not some kind of paranormal apparition, there is ultimately no alternative to approaching the subject in a scientific way. The aim of this ebook is to explain what that means in simple everyday terms. From anatomy and adaptation, through ecology and evolution, to DNA analysis and the laws of physics – here in one small package is everything you need to know about the science of Bigfoot!

I’m a scientist, and I would really like Bigfoot to exist. I have to admit it’s not very likely, based on the lack of hard, unambiguous evidence. But I get annoyed when skeptics say things like “Bigfoot is a scientific impossibility” – I simply don’t believe that’s true. I don’t think there are any ecological, evolutionary or physiological reasons why a large, bipedal hominid couldn’t exist in the world today.

At the other extreme, it’s not really true to say, as many Bigfoot believers do, that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. The more you look for something and fail to find it, the less likely it is that it’s there to be found. But ultimately you can never prove a negative – absence of evidence is not PROOF of absence.

The screaming headline “DNA Study Proves Bigfoot Never Existed” in Time Magazine a few months ago was simply wrong – an ignorant misunderstanding of the scientific method. Proving that a selection of hair samples came from known species merely proves that those specific samples didn’t come from Bigfoot. That’s a far cry from disproving the existence of Bigfoot.

If Bigfoot does exist, why is physical evidence so hard to come by? One possible explanation is that the species has evolved a kind of “prime directive” to stay out of sight of homo sapiens. As a member of the hominid family, Bigfoot is likely to be of comparable intelligence and resourcefulness to humans – possibly even superior in some ways – so who knows what they might be capable of?

As I said earlier, I would like Bigfoot to exist, although I don’t think it’s likely. It’s a subject everyone will have their own views on. But whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, you’re bound to find food for thought in The Science of Bigfoot. It’s available in Kindle format for just $2.99 from Amazon.com, or for corresponding prices from other national branches of Amazon (currently £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk, for example).

Tales from the White Hart

Pictured above is my copy of Tales from the White Hart by Arthur C. Clarke. I bought this just over 42 years ago, on Saturday October 7th, 1972 (you’ll see later why I can be so precise about the date). It was brought back to mind last week when a picture of exactly the same paperback edition appeared in Fortean Times – in the latest instalment of Bob Rickard’s ongoing series about “The First Forteans”.

During the 1940s and 50s, there seems to have been considerable overlap – in Britain at least – between Fortean subculture, science fiction fandom and amateur space enthusiasts. Arthur C. Clarke was just one of many individuals who spanned all three spheres of activity, although he’s by far the best remembered today. Meetings were held in various public houses around London – for several years in a place called The White Horse, before moving to the better known Globe.

In his introduction to Tales from the White Hart, Clarke freely admits that the venue was modelled on the White Horse – and the last story in the book sees the characters migrating to “The Sphere”, obviously a thinly veiled allusion to the Globe.

The stories in the book all follow the familiar (and perennially popular) format of the bar-room tall-tale, coupled in this case with a strong hint of P. G. Wodehouse in the narrative style. Most of the tales deal with wacky inventions of one form or another, and while a few of them are inclined to silliness, several of the ideas are really very clever (I mean clever as science fiction, not as proper science!).

Tales from the White Hart isn’t a particularly Fortean book. Without the broader context provided by Bob Rickard’s article, you probably wouldn’t even notice the Fortean connection. The cover image does look rather Fortean (or Lovecraftian, perhaps), but it’s purely symbolic. The giant squid comes from one of the stories told in the White Hart – one of the cleverest of them, actually. At the time the book was written, the giant squid had never been photographed alive. The story, called “Big Game Hunt”, deals with a novel method of enticing one to the surface for just that purpose – explained with the customary more-than-half-convincing Clarkian technobabble.

The most explicitly Fortean of the stories is “What Goes Up”, which starts with “one of the leading exponents of the Flying Saucer religion” gatecrashing the White Hart. The man is thoroughly ignorant and obnoxious (unlike present-day ufologists), so the regulars decide to burst his bubble with a comically far-fetched anecdote about antigravity. But it turns out the visitor is immune to irony – the story appears in the next month’s issue of Flying Saucer Revelations, printed as straight fact!

The paperback edition pictured above (and in Fortean Times) was published in 1972, and I bought my copy that same year. I know, because that’s the only year I ever kept a diary, and it’s there in the entry for October 7th – “Heard Venezuela. Got Galaxy 3, Tales from White Hart”.

“Galaxy 3” refers to the September 1972 issue of Galaxy magazine, which was marketed in Britain as issue #3. This contained the second half of Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg, which I mentioned in Literary Name-Dropping (if you look at the cover shown in that post, it has “No. 2” in the upper right corner).

“Heard Venezuela” refers to a hobby called DXing, which was popular with teenage geeks in pre-internet days – listening to short-wave radio transmissions from distant countries. It may have been a commercial radio station or an amateur operator – I used to listen to both. I just had a trawl through my collection of QSL cards, but I couldn’t find anything from Venezuela, although there were several from other countries in South America.

I found something else hidden among the QSL cards – my long-lost U.N.C.L.E. ID card! I mentioned how I’d mislaid it in one of the comments on my blog post about The Man from U.N.C.L.E. earlier this year. I’d already looked for it among the QSL cards, but when I got them out again today I noticed there was something jammed in the bottom of the envelope – and that was it!

U.N.C.L.E. ID cards were incredibly popular in the 1960s – probably millions of people around the world had them, and you can find examples quite cheaply on eBay today. But it’s not the same as having one with your own name on it! I see I was assigned to Section 8, which (having just looked it up on Wikipedia) is “Camouflage and Deception, known more colloquially as the Lab.” Best place for me, I’m sure.

Postscript: In response to overwhelming popular demand (see comments thread), here is the back of the card (this photograph was taken at night with a flash, rather than in natural light, hence the apparent difference in colour):

Iron Man, the Illuminati and the Holy Grail

For about 18 months now I’ve had work trickling in writing short educational articles for various websites. Essentially the site supplies a title, around which I have to write an article. You can find all the titles I’ve done listed on my website, under the broad headings of Science and History. Most of the topics are pretty mainstream, but a few are distinctly Fortean. Earlier this year, for example, I did an article for Synonym Classroom entitled “What Are the Flaws in the Ancient Astronaut Theory?” (As I said, the titles are supplied by the website – I wouldn’t have worded it so negatively).

More recently, a number of assignments have come in from eHow, rewriting articles which have been on that site for some time but need to be brought up to date. There’s a lot of competition for this sort of thing, resulting in a feeding frenzy every time a new batch of titles appears. Among the half-dozen I’ve managed to grab so far were three I was particularly pleased with – on Iron Man, the Illuminati and the Holy Grail (you see – it wasn’t just a contrived headline to grab your attention!).

I did What Is the Holy Grail? in July, and The History of the Illuminati in August. They’re both archetypally Fortean subjects, although the writing guidelines for eHow are pretty strict so I had to stick to facts rather than speculation in both articles.

Perhaps the most surprising title of all was one I did last week: How to Make Energy Like Iron Man. This was listed in the Science category, not Entertainment, and I’ve always wanted to have a go at one of these “science behind science fiction” articles. To make things even more interesting, the science in this case is Cold Fusion – a Fortean topic in its own right, since it’s a classic example of “damned science”. Nevertheless, all the evidence (from the movies, at any rate) suggests that the Arc Reactor in Tony Stark’s chest plate is some kind of Cold Fusion generator.

I really enjoyed researching the article, but there was one thing I kept coming across that drives me mad. That’s the widespread belief that the character of Iron Man, and/or Tony Stark, was created for the 2008 movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. As I pointed out in The Marvel Age of Comics last year, that’s simply not true. While RDJ’s interpretation of Tony Stark is definitely appealing, it’s nonsense to say things like “he created the role and no-one else could possibly play it” when the character has been around since 1963.

But perhaps I shouldn’t press the point so hard. I recently dug out the T-shirt pictured below, which used to fit me perfectly when it was new (the larger one fits me now). OK, then – if the character of Iron Man was created in 2008, this T-shirt must be newer than that, right? I reckon that makes me about 16 years old (which, by coincidence, is a pretty accurate estimate of my mental age).

Actually the T-shirt dates from 1968 (the iron-on transfer was a free gift in Terrific #1, dated 15 April 1967, but I bought it as a back issue the following year). In those days, of course, no-one had heard of Cold Fusion. The highest level of technology mentioned in the early Iron Man stories was “transistors”. I wrote an article on that subject earlier this year, too: What Is a Transistor and What Effect Did Its Invention Have on Computers?

Quantum Weirdness

I finally got my name in a real book! I mean a proper hardback book, that is going to be read by more than a few dozen people! It’s called 30-Second Quantum Theory, and it’s the latest in a popular series of “30-Second” titles from Icon Books. It’s a really great-looking package, printed on top-quality glossy paper with stunning illustrations and an appealing visual design.

The content is first class, too. Contrary to what you might think from the title, this isn’t a journalistic dumbing-down of quantum physics for the lazy reader – it’s as serious a popularization of the subject as you’re going to find anywhere. The book is edited by Brian Clegg, and includes contributions from seven other authors in addition to Brian himself. And right down at the bottom of the list of contributing authors is – Andrew May! I’m not sure if they put me last because I’m the least well-known, or because I’ve got the smallest number of contributions (both are true).

The book is organized in double-page spreads, of which I’m responsible for five. The most Fortean-sounding of these is “Zero-Point Energy”, because of the way the phrase has been appropriated by New Age mystics and free-energy conspiracy theorists. But I barely touch on the wackier aspects of the subject (although Brian mentions that it’s “beloved of fringe science” in his introduction). Zero-Point Energy is weird enough even if you stick to the well-established facts!

Another of my contributions is on the Quantum Zeno Effect, which I also wrote about in Fortean Times last year (FT309, Christmas 2013). There’s also one on the quantum double-slit experiment, which is such a basic aspect of quantum physics that it’s in danger of sounding mundane. But Wheeler’s delayed choice version of the experiment – which I mention in a sidebar – is every bit as weird as the quantum Zeno effect or zero-point energy.

I also contributed a two-page biography of Erwin Schrödinger. In fact this can be seen online – it’s the second item in the slideshow on this page (if you click on the image, a bigger version pops up). It’s a shame that Schrödinger is only known to most people for his silly “cat” paradox, which he never meant people to take seriously (he was attempting to refute a ludicrously arrogant interpretation of quantum mechanics that was current at the time). In fact he was one of the most innovative physicists of his generation – for reasons that have nothing to do with cats.

In his spare time, Schrödinger is said to have dabbled in Eastern philosophy and mysticism. That’s also true of the other person I wrote a two-page biography of: Brian Josephson. The work that made him famous – and earned him a Nobel Prize – was done at a very early age, in his twenties. By the time he was in his thirties, however, he was drifting away from mainstream science, feeling that it ignored large areas of human experience – things like mysticism and the paranormal – that it ought to be trying to explain. This led Josephson to set up his Mind-Matter Unification Project at Cambridge University... and to become one of the most outspoken heretics of modern science.

Needless to say, 30-Second Quantum Theory is packed with other good stuff besides the handful of contributions I wrote myself. There’s quantum gravity, quantum biology, quantum chromodynamics and quantum tunnelling. You can read about superluminal experiments, about waves that travel backwards in time, and about the many-worlds hypothesis. There’s a whole section on the ramifications of quantum entanglement (“Spooky Action at a Distance”) – including the dubiously named “quantum teleportation” effect, which I wrote about last week at Mysterious Universe. (It’s worth reading Brian Clegg’s comment at the bottom of that article, as well, since Brian explains the details of the effect better than I do).