The What? My friend Anastasia asked me the other evening
what I knew about the Philadelphia Experiment. Nothing at all. One of Ben Franklin’s
more ludicrous antics? No, something more recent. My eyes bulged and my jaw
dropped as Anastasia explained. She showed me a Greek text about it, and by now
my eyes were chapel hat pegs and my jaw had hit the table with a clang. ‘I
think I’d better investigate this in English; I’ll report back tomorrow’ I told
her.
48 hours later I find that the application of reason and the
exercise of critical faculties have reduced the need for ophthalmic and
osteopathic help. I can’t give you the ‘facts’ about the Philadelphia
Experiment; there don’t seem to be any.
But the story, such as it is, goes
something like this:
During WWII the Americans[1]
decided that invisibility might have its military uses. Their version of Harry
Potter’s cloak took the form of an electromagnetic shield: an electromagnetic
field large and powerful enough to surround an entire battleship.
The experiment (so the story continues) was only too
successful: the ship, complete with crew, disappeared, only to reappear briefly
somewhere in Virginia before becoming fully visible again back in Philadelphia.
It had also, we are told, ‘gone back ten seconds in time’, (I wish someone
would explain what on earth, or indeed anywhere else, that phrase could
possibly mean), and various ghastly physical and mental things had happened to
the crew.
Well. It wouldn’t have been the first and has certainly not
been the last time that an infantile fear of Reds (Muslims, Jews, Blacks,
Bicycle-riders) under the beds, an improper grasp of scientific concepts, and a
total lack of humour have together made America do something lunatic, with
horrific, surreal, or at least Pythonesque consequences.
Perhaps the Americans really were, misled by an incomplete
understanding of the Grand Unified Field theory (with its appropriate acronym
GUF) and Einstein’s Special and General theories, trying for invisibility. It’s
perfectly true that light waves are deflected, bent, by passing near or through
huge gravitational fields, such as that of the sun. That this should happen is
one of the implications of Einstein’s theories, so that when, soon after he
published them, a planet (I think it was Venus) conveniently passed behind the
sun, careful observations were made and it was found that, just as Venus
disappeared behind the sun and then later reappeared, it seemed to be slightly off
where it ‘ought’ to have been: light from Venus had been bent by passing near the
sun. This didn’t ‘confirm’ Einstein’s theories — that’s not how scientific
method works — but if it hadn’t happened then it would have shown that Einstein
had been wrong.
But Venus (if that’s the one it was) seemed only the
teensiest bit to one side of its ‘proper’ place, and the gravitational field of
the sun completely dwarfs anything even all the electricity in America could
produce. (Gravitational and Electromagnetic fields are for these purposes the
same thing.)
What seems more likely is that the American Navy was doing
something called ‘Degaussing’ the ship: using powerful electromagnetic fields
to reduce its residual magnetism, thus rendering it less vulnerable to magnetic
mines. Degaussing, on a smaller scale, is a simple enough operation familiar to
anyone who has worked above an amateur level with tape-recorders. Perhaps people
of the New-Agey type got hold of the wrong end of the stick and spread wild
stories, which, being more entertaining than the possible truth, gained
currency and belief.
Don’t misunderstand me: America does do strange, wild,
sinister things, for which it then provides boring spurious ‘explanations’ when
people find out. I have some sympathy for believers in UFOs, Crop Circles and
suchlike. For instance, something strange and nasty certainly happened at
Roswell in the ’fifties or whenever it was, and ‘official explanations’ about
weather balloons really won’t do. As for crop circles, mischievous students
working at night with planks and bits of string simply couldn’t produce
patterns of such complexity and elegance. The trouble is, people who are so
open-minded their brains have dropped out hear of these things and start
talking rubbish, thus making the stories less rather than more credible. They
are unwittingly the debunkers’ best allies.
If people would take the trouble to study scientific method
and above all logic, just a little bit, they would on the one hand be less
likely to fall for idiotic new-agey stuff of the Erich von Däniken sort, and on
the other less ready to have the wool pulled over their eyes by authorities
who, with their relentless efforts to provide dull, debunking and implausible ‘explanations’,
show that they probably have something to hide. They might, in short, become
able to say ‘Here is something strange and interesting: let us calmly and
reasonably find out more.’
[1]
‘America’ and its cognates should be taken here to mean the U.S. government,
armed forces, secret services etc. and not the ‘ordinary’ people of America,
many of whom are quite sane and decent, if rather brashly over-self-confident.
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