Harry Stine
Harry Stine | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | March 28, 1928 |
| Died | November 2, 1997 (aged 69) |
| Residence | Phoenix, AZ, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Known for | Model rocketry, inertial propulsion, the Dean Drive |
George Harry Stine (1928–1997) was an American aerospace engineer, science and technology writer, and science fiction author who wrote fiction under the pen name Lee Correy. He is best known as one of the founding figures of model rocketry, as the founder of the National Association of Rocketry and the author of its safety code. On this wiki he is remembered chiefly for his willingness to take seriously experimental claims that mainstream physics had dismissed — above all Norman Dean's alleged reactionless "Dean Drive", which he investigated with the physicist William O Davis — and for his 1985 book On the Frontiers of Science: Strange Machines You Can Build.
Biography
Stine grew up in Colorado Springs and attended the University of Colorado in Boulder. Upon his graduation he went to work at White Sands Proving Grounds, first as a civilian scientist and then, from 1955–1957, at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Missile Test Facility as head of the Range Operations Division.
After White Sands, Stine was employed at several other aerospace companies, finally ending up at the Martin Company working on the Titan project. He was dismissed by Martin on 5 October 1957 after telling United Press that the Soviet Union had used an intercontinental ballistic missile as the launch vehicle for Sputnik 1 — a statement that proved correct but that his employer regarded as an unauthorised disclosure.
In later life Stine settled in Phoenix, Arizona. He served as a technical consultant to CBS News during the Apollo programme, wrote extensively on space technology and space commerce for the popular and technical press, and chaired the National Fire Protection Association's Technical Committee on Pyrotechnics from 1974 to 1994. He died in Phoenix on 2 November 1997.
Model rocketry
While at White Sands, Stine had handled inquiries from young people concerning rockets, and early in 1957 he wrote an article for Mechanix Illustrated about rocket safety. Shortly thereafter he received a letter from Orville Carlisle, who had begun making small models and, more importantly, replaceable solid-fuel engines to power them. Stine was impressed with the samples that Carlisle had sent him, and wrote a cover article for the October issue about them.
After leaving Martin he contacted Carlisle, and the two of them formed Model Missiles Inc., the first manufacturer of model rockets and their engines. Stine also founded the National Association of Rocketry (initially called the Model Missile Association) and wrote the safety code which became its centrepiece; he served as its president until the late 1960s. His Handbook of Model Rocketry, first published in 1965, ran through numerous editions and became the standard reference work in the field.
Inertial propulsion and the Dean Drive
Stine took a serious and sustained interest in claims of inertial or reactionless propulsion — devices said to produce a net unidirectional thrust without expelling propellant, and therefore to violate the conventional reading of Newton's third law. The best known such claim was the machine built by the Washington inventor Norman L. Dean, publicised from the late 1950s in Astounding/Analog by its editor John W. Campbell and known as the "Dean Drive".
Stine and William O Davis, then Director of Research of the Huyck Corporation, witnessed a demonstration of Dean's apparatus and concluded that what they had seen was a genuine anomaly rather than a deliberate fraud. Their considered position, however, was not that Dean had abolished the conservation of momentum. Davis instead proposed an extension of Newtonian mechanics: real physical systems, he argued, cannot transfer energy or respond to an applied force in zero time, but possess a finite "critical action time" during which the reaction has not yet fully developed. From this he derived what he called a fourth law of motion — that the energy of a given system can only be changed in some finite length of time, and never instantaneously — with the consequence that under rapid oscillation action and reaction fall measurably out of phase with each other. On this account a machine such as Dean's would not be reactionless at all; the missing momentum would be carried away, in Davis's phrase, as gravitational-inertial radiation.
Stine's own contribution was to press for measurement rather than advocacy. He and Davis proposed pendulum tests that would have settled whether the device produced true thrust or merely exploited asymmetrical friction against its support; Dean declined to submit his original apparatus to them, and Stine's later published account of the affair — "Detesters, Phasers and Dean Drives", Analog, June 1976 — is notably unsentimental about the inventor while remaining convinced that the underlying transient-mechanics question deserved an experimental answer. That combination of open-mindedness about the phenomenon and insistence on replicable measurement is the characteristic Stine position, and it is the explicit programme of his 1985 book On the Frontiers of Science: Strange Machines You Can Build.
Science fiction as Lee Correy
Stine published science fiction from the early 1950s under the pen name Lee Correy, beginning with the Astounding story "...And a Star to Steer Her By" (1953). His first novel, the juvenile Starship Through Space (1954), was a sequel to it, and was followed by Rocket Man (1955) and Contraband Rocket (1956). After a long gap he returned to fiction in the 1980s with Star Driver (1980), Shuttle Down (1981), Space Doctor (1981), the Star Trek novel The Abode of Life (1982), Manna (1984) and A Matter of Metalaw (1986). Under his own name he wrote the near-future Warbots series (from 1988) and the Starsea Invaders novels (1993–1995). The Correy books are unusually concerned with the engineering and economics of spaceflight, and several were serialised in Analog alongside his science-fact writing.
Papers
- 1962 - "Some Aspects of Certain Transient Mechanical Systems" — presented to the American Physical Society, 23 April 1962, New York University; co-authored with William O Davis, E. L. Victory and S. A. Korff.
This paper is Stine's substantive contribution to the dissident-science literature. It set out the transient-mechanics case sketched above: that the classical laws of motion assume an exact simultaneity of action and reaction which real bodies of finite size and finite signal speed cannot satisfy, and that in systems driven hard enough for those transients to matter the measured behaviour should depart from the Newtonian prediction. The claim was framed as an extension of classical mechanics rather than a refutation of it, and it was offered as the theoretical setting in which anomalies of the Dean Drive type might be understood and tested. The paper was not accepted for publication by the American Physical Society, and the work circulated thereafter mainly through Analog and the independent research literature. The companion statement of the argument is Davis's "The Fourth Law of Motion" of the same year.
Books
- 1985 - "On the Frontiers of Science: Strange Machines You Can Build" (Read in full)
- 1965 - Handbook of Model Rocketry (numerous later editions)