Bill Ramsay
Bill Ramsay | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1926 |
| Residence | Clifton, CO, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Known for | Fixed-rate scanning; measurements of the Rodin coil; documenting Gregory Hodowanec's Rhysmonic Cosmology |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Independent experimenter |
Bill Ramsay (born 1926) is an American independent experimenter based in western Colorado. Across nine papers presented between 1990 and 2008, largely at the International Symposium on New Energy and to the Natural Philosophy Alliance, his work falls into three connected strands: bench measurements of the Rodin coil, a long-running observational technique he calls fixed-rate scanning, and the documentation and testing of Gregory Hodowanec's Rhysmonic Cosmology and its gravity-wave detectors.
He is unusual in this literature for being an instrument person rather than a theorist. His papers are largely accounts of what a particular piece of apparatus did, and they are consistently explicit about the limits of what was shown.
Rodin coil measurements
Ramsay's two 1995 papers are the most quantitative treatment of the Rodin coil this wiki holds. He obtained a copy of Marko Rodin's Aerodynamicsss, wound several coils to the design, and measured them against conventionally wound toroids.
"Rodin Coil Design" reports the construction and the first tests. Its framing is candid: Ramsay states plainly that none of his coils matched the proportions Rodin considers necessary for the most significant results, and that his tests, while showing "some interesting attributes and a few surprises", were non-definitive.
"Rodin Coil Test Result Explanations" presents the data — impedance against frequency from 1–10 MHz for several winding configurations, and B-field plots along and across the toroidal axis, each compared with a standard toroid. Two observations are of interest. He found that windings connected to cooperate and to oppose gave identical results at certain frequencies between 5 and 6 MHz, which he took to indicate behaviour absent from conventional coils. And he reported two distinct field orientations at ninety degrees to each other, without being able to establish whether there is a sharp boundary between them or a continuous rotation — the latter, he notes, would amount to the vortex action Rodin's scheme predicts. He proposed testing this with ionised gas to make the pattern visible.
Fixed-rate scanning
Ramsay's most original work began by accident in 1991. Testing a second-hand Rustrak strip-chart recorder he intended to use with Hodowanec's gravity-wave sensors, he drove it with a cheap, unstabilised function generator producing a slow triangular sweep at about 0.3 Hz. The recorder marks the chart at exact two-second intervals — 1800 dots per inch-per-hour of chart travel — and after several days of continuous running he noticed periodic intervals of frequency coherence in the drifting output.
He reported the technique at the International Symposium on New Energy in 1994, and returned to it in "Fixed Rate Scanning: Enigma or Research Tool?" (1997), timed to coincide with a period of unusual long-term planetary alignments that some researchers expected to correlate with earthquakes. He records apparent influences of sun and moon, and argues the method deserves refinement — computerisation, and a network of "scanning stations" around the globe. His own assessment of its maturity is characteristically modest: the situation, he writes, is "much like that of when there was only one seismograph".
He is explicit that the instrument's defect is what makes it work: an expensive stabilised generator would not drift, and "it was a good thing I didn't have one of these."
Hodowanec and Rhysmonic Cosmology
Much of Ramsay's remaining output documents the work of Gregory Hodowanec, a retired research physicist from New Jersey who built simple circuits he believed detected scalar or "monopole" gravity waves — identifying them with the 1/f flicker noise familiar to electronics engineers — and who developed a cosmology from Max Planck's natural units.
"'New Energy' and Hodowanec's Rhysmonic Cosmology" (1999) reproduces Hodowanec's last detailed "Cosmology Note", with Ramsay's tabulation of the natural units, the four basic postulates, and his own commentary. "Exploring the Aethers" (1994) recounts his own experiments with the detectors, and "Generic Gravity Wave Scalar Detector" (1999) describes building one. "The Superluminal Velocity of Gravity Waves" (1998) takes up the claim that these signals propagate effectively instantaneously — in Hodowanec's scheme, across the universe in one Planck time.
In 2008 he returned with "A Few Simple Tests to Evaluate 'Rhysmonic Cosmology' Concepts, as Proposed by Gregory Hodowanec in 1985", proposing direct tests of the framework rather than further exposition — a notable move after two decades of advocacy.
His 1990 paper "Human Consciousness, Human form and the Void: Observed Alternating States of Being in 1990" stands apart from the instrumentation work.
Assessment
Ramsay's virtue is that he reports what the instrument did and says what he has not shown. The Rodin coil papers are the clearest case: at a time when the coil was attracting extravagant claims, he wound one, put it on a bench against a control, published impedance curves and field plots, and stated that his coils did not meet the specified geometry and that his results settled nothing. That is the right way to proceed, and it is why his data are the most useful material on the coil catalogued here.
Two limitations should be recorded.
The interpretation of the coil data is aesthetic rather than quantitative. Ramsay describes the Rodin coil's field plot as "coherently superior", "smooth and cohesive" and its conventional counterpart as "jagged and discombobulated" — but smoothness of a plotted curve is not a figure of merit, and no criterion is offered by which the comparison could fail. The measured differences are real and unsurprising: a winding whose turns cross rather than lie parallel will differ from a conventional toroid in inductance, self-capacitance and resonance, and the identical cooperate/oppose results near 5–6 MHz are the kind of thing a resonance analysis would be expected to explain. What is missing is the step from "different" to "anomalous".
Fixed-rate scanning has an obvious confound that the papers do not eliminate: temperature. The whole method depends on the frequency drift of an unstabilised generator, and the dominant cause of drift in such an instrument is ambient temperature. A diurnal temperature cycle would produce exactly the daily periodicity attributed to the sun, and a strip chart running for days in an unregulated room is a thermometer as much as anything else. Establishing that the correlations are not thermal would require a temperature log alongside the chart, a second instrument in a controlled enclosure, or both — none of which is reported. There is a second difficulty of method: with 1800 marks an hour and no pre-registered criterion for what counts as a "coherency", the search has a great many opportunities to find structure in drift, and planetary alignments are frequent enough that a post-hoc match is easy to obtain. Ramsay's own analogy to the single seismograph is apt in a way he may not have intended — a lone unreplicated instrument cannot distinguish a signal from its own environment.
On Hodowanec's gravity waves, the central claim is testable and has not been established. Identifying 1/f flicker noise with a cosmic gravitational signal runs against a well-understood body of electronics: 1/f noise is ubiquitous in semiconductor devices, varies with device construction and bias, and is normally attributed to charge trapping. Distinguishing an external signal from it would require, at minimum, showing that two detectors of different construction in different locations record the same fluctuations at the same time. Genuine gravitational waves were detected in 2015 by LIGO, at strains of order 10⁻²¹ requiring kilometre-scale interferometers — which does not by itself refute a different class of signal, but does set the scale of the instrumentation problem. See Gravitational Waves.
Papers
- 2008 - "A Few Simple Tests to Evaluate 'Rhysmonic Cosmology' Concepts, as Proposed by Gregory Hodowanec in 1985"
- 1999 - "'New Energy' and Hodowanec's Rhysmonic Cosmology" (Read in full)
- 1999 - "Generic Gravity Wave Scalar Detector"
- 1998 - "The Superluminal Velocity of Gravity Waves"
- 1997 - "Fixed Rate Scanning: Enigma or Research Tool?" (Read in full)
- 1995 - "Rodin Coil Design" (Read in full)
- 1995 - "Rodin Coil Test Result Explanations" (Read in full)
- 1994 - "Exploring the Aethers: Adventures Inspired by Hodowanec Discoveries"
- 1990 - "Human Consciousness, Human form and the Void: Observed Alternating States of Being in 1990" (Read in full)
See also
- Gregory Hodowanec — whose cosmology and detectors Ramsay documented
- Rodin Coil, Marko Rodin
- Jamie Buturff, Randy Powell, Jean-Louis Naudin — other replicators
- Gravitational Waves
- Category:New Energy, Category:Antigravity