Evidence of the Greatest Crime Ever Against Humanity?
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Evidence of the Greatest Crime Ever Against Humanity? |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Robert F Beck |
| Keywords | Climate change, Cold fusion, Antigravity, Suppression |
| Published | 2006 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the NPA |
| Volume | 3 |
| Number | 19 |
| No. of pages | 38 |
| Pages | 9-13 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Technology that could have prevented climate change has been potentially available for half a century, but has deliberately been suppressed for reasons that are no longer valid and represent self-interest that globally is criminally negligent. Such action, if continued in the light of these now apparent consequences, would amount to the greatest ever crime against humanity, and of course, arguably, maybe the greatest ever sin. This report sets out the evidence that I have recently become aware of and my own particular reasons for considering the possibility of its validity.
Overview
The document — headed in the original PDF as Possible Evidence of the Greatest Ever Crime Against Humanity? and dated October/November 2006 — is not a physics paper but a public appeal, written by a retired English town planner and addressed simultaneously to the physics community, the UK government, the press, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope. Roughly two-fifths of the 38 pages are the argument proper; the remainder consists of four appendices reproducing Beck's correspondence with fellow NPA members about the April 2006 Tulsa conference, with the Revd. Dr. John Polkinghorne, with Lambeth Palace, and with the Prime Minister's office and the Department of Trade and Industry.
Its thesis has three linked parts. First, that anthropogenic climate change is a real and near-term catastrophe — Beck opens with the Stern Review's £3.68 trillion and 200-million-refugee figures, the reported 30% weakening of the Gulf Stream current, and the risk of runaway methane release from thawing boreal peat. Second, that no realistic programme of emissions reduction can avert it, and that only "radical new technologies" — specifically genuine antigravity propulsion and new energy sources — could. Third, that such technology was demonstrated in the United States in the late 1950s and deliberately suppressed, so that those who knew of the suppression and let it stand are "collectively guilty of the greatest ever crime against humanity". Where mainstream climate policy treats mitigation as an engineering-and-economics problem within known physics, Beck treats the physics itself as the bottleneck, and treats the refusal of the establishment to reopen it as a moral rather than a scientific failure.
The argument
Beck's own position and how he came to it
Beck states his provenance frankly and without hedging: in October 2003, after a period of ill health and a renewed Christian commitment, he had experiences over about two weeks which convinced him he "was being given an understanding of relativity clearly beyond my own ability to reach", and he completed a 10,000-word paper one month after the first such episode. This became the self-published book The Special Theory of Reality (2004 e-book, 2005 paperback), and a paper delivered at the Natural Philosophy Alliance conference in Tulsa in April 2006.
The physical content he claims for that revelation is stated compactly rather than derived: that inertial mass depends on spin; that the electron is composed of rings; that photons are composed of many smaller particles; that gravity is produced by the action of neutrinos moving in spirals; that c is not a cosmic speed limit; and that "time does not exist". He notes with satisfaction that other dissidents reached similar positions independently — that a reader of all 82 Tulsa papers told him he was "on the right track" in linking mass and spin, that Professor Kanarev denies the existence of electron orbits, and that Alex Tsybin also attributes gravity to neutrinos. He records the late Sir Hermann Bondi as the one establishment figure who replied, agreeing that c should not be regarded as a cosmic speed limit. Against that he sets 1,000 emails sent in two weeks to staff and graduate students at several top colleges, yielding a single reply.
The Ralph Ring interview
The core of "The Evidence" is Beck's reading of a 52-minute Project Camelot video interview with Ralph Ring, a Korean War veteran who worked in the 1950s as a laboratory technician at a Southern California facility called Advanced Kinetics. Beck reports four episodes from it and attempts to assess each against his own theory.
- A cathode-ray-tube experiment in which slow electrons deviate more than fast ones. Beck argues this is hard to explain conventionally but follows naturally on his account, where both the magnetic field and the moving electron are spirals and rings of anti-neutrinos: a slow electron "may progress not in a straight line but a spiral (helix) by virtue of the inertial effects of its spins", threading between the field's own spirals with less interaction than a fast one can avoid.
- The levitation of a ping-pong ball above a 15-inch woofer driven at 28,000 cycles. Beck concedes acoustic radiation pressure could in principle balance gravity, but presses one specific objection: why only at 28,000 cycles, rather than as a progressive effect? He takes the sharpness of the resonance as evidence for his prior conclusion that levitation depends "upon something very specific rather than high levels of power", probably a particular sub-atomic vibration frequency.
- The "jellification" of an aluminium plate, into which Ring could push his hand. Beck rejects Ring's own guess of sound in favour of a high-voltage effect that removes structural electrons, citing the Hutchison effect as documented by Tim Ventura.
- The alleged ten-mile flight in a levitating disc built by Otis T. Carr — a former associate of Nikola Tesla — accompanied by strange effects on time perception and memory, followed two weeks later by a federal raid that shut the operation down on the stated grounds of "attempting to overthrow the monetary system".
Beck's argument for taking the account seriously is circumstantial rather than physical: that Ring's supervisor Weinheart shredded his paper and that three "men in black" visited, which would be inexplicable if the ping-pong result were merely conventional acoustics; and that Weinheart is quoted as saying "we get paid handsomely for looking for answers – not finding them." He treats the reported General Motors response to levitating craft — "put 'em up and we'll shoot 'em down" — as the motive: a technology not dependent on gasoline would destabilise the capitalist economy.
Suppression, Tesla, and the alleged Church–science pact
Beck is careful on Tesla. He accepts that Tesla's wireless power transmission was found unworkable after his death in 1943, adds his own doubt that a constant nationwide supply could be made safe, and declines to claim the finding was rigged — while noting that millions were subsequently spent on military "death ray" applications of the same principles, possibly including parts of Reagan's SDI, with no success. His point is that Tesla should not be discredited by this, and that the knowledge Tesla passed to Carr "could be the key that can save humanity".
He then presents, with explicit reluctance ("the idea repulses me and I hope it is not true"), a claim quoted from Roger Anderton: that scientific academia and the "Religious Priesthood" long ago agreed a mutual censorship over unified field theory, because it touches on the paranormal and on extraterrestrials. Beck offers this as a candidate explanation for what he says he has met — not ostracism, which he "would have preferred and could have responded to", but universal avoidance of any comment at all. He announces he will write to the Archbishop and the Pope asking whether such a pact existed. His own moral conclusion is stated independently of it: "No science and no religion should ever insist that they cannot be wrong."
Recommendations
The report closes with five numbered recommendations: that Canada reconsider its ban on John Hutchison's experiments given adequate safe premises; that all governments be asked via the United Nations to share antigravity research openly; that the UN require participating nations to prioritise antigravity and new-energy funding, including analysis of non-peer-reviewed sources; that questions be put in the House of Commons about whether Lord Sainsbury should confine his contact with scientists to his own areas of expertise; and that the churches, the scientific community and the press ask "What if Beck is right in his claim of Divine revelation? How do we discern this matter?" To the second question Beck gives a concrete answer: repeat the spinning-ball trajectory and spinning-ball collision experiments associated with Bruce DePalma, under conditions that clearly exclude air resistance and friction, to test his claim that "anything that spins, naturally follows a curved path in the absence of all other forces."
Assessment
Two things in the report are genuinely to its credit. The first is that Beck states his epistemic basis openly rather than disguising it: he says the ideas came to him as revelation, does not pretend to a derivation he did not make, and repeatedly proposes an empirical test that could go against him — "If I am wrong, how much is lost? If I am right, how much stands to be gained?" That is an honest posture, and rarer in this literature than it should be. The second is the specific and testable core of the DePalma proposal. Whether a spinning body follows a curved path in free flight, and whether spinning and non-spinning balls behave differently in collision, are questions a well-instrumented laboratory can answer cheaply, and Beck is right that DePalma's own control of air resistance and friction is not clearly documented. His demand for a clean replication is reasonable on its own terms.
The difficulties are severe, and they are mostly structural rather than matters of detail. The report's evidential chain is almost entirely testimonial: a single video interview, recalled fifty years after the fact, assessed for credibility by the impression the interviewee makes, plus a website compilation, plus a third-hand report of a secret pact. Beck acknowledges he "cannot guarantee the validity of all this evidence", but the conclusions do not then retreat to match. The inference from "Weinheart shredded the paper" to "the ping-pong result was not conventional acoustics" is the weakest link and carries most of the load; the sharp 28 kHz threshold he finds so suggestive is exactly what one expects from a driver's own resonance and from the standing-wave condition in an acoustic levitator, where a stable trap exists only near the frequency at which the cavity supports a node — acoustic levitation of small objects at ultrasonic frequencies has been standard laboratory practice since the 1930s and is not in dispute.
The theoretical claims are asserted, never derived. That inertial mass "depends on spin" is offered without a functional form, without a coefficient, and without confronting the measurement that most directly bears on it: the Eötvös-type torsion-balance and lunar-laser-ranging tests of the equivalence principle, which constrain composition-dependent differences in the ratio of inertial to gravitational mass to parts in 1013, and the fact that nuclear binding energy and internal angular momentum vary between the test bodies in those experiments. Likewise the neutrino-spiral account of gravity gives no cross-section, and neutrino interaction cross-sections are measured — they are of order 10−44 cm2 at MeV energies, which is why solar neutrinos pass through the Earth essentially unimpeded, and any push-gravity mechanism built from them must explain how a flux that weak produces a force that strong without depositing the corresponding heat. Beck does not address this, and the paper contains no equations at all.
There is also an internal tension the report does not resolve. Beck argues both that the technology exists and was demonstrated in the 1950s, and that his own theory — arrived at independently in 2003 — is what is needed to develop it. If Carr's craft flew, the theory is not the bottleneck; if the theory is the bottleneck, the flight account is doing no work. The two strands are presented as mutually confirming, but they compete. Finally, the appeal to divine revelation is offered simultaneously as a private warrant ("God has given me a new understanding") and as something the Church could adjudicate, which places the physics claim outside the reach of the very testing Beck asks for.
As a document the report is best read as what it announces itself to be: a moral petition rather than a scientific argument. Its central plea — that a cheap experiment with a large potential payoff should be run regardless of the prior odds — is not unreasonable. Its evidential case for the suppression narrative does not meet the standard its own conclusion demands.