Musings

As the fighting surges in Somalia, it is a little-known fact that U.S. Special Forces conduct operations there in support of the legitimate nascent government set up with the help of the United Nations. These highly trained warriors are excellent at sneaking up on perps (after all, we learned a lot by sneaking up on Native Americans—masters of the ambush), but once our troops open fire, they are subject to retaliation in kind. Battles become problematic in a hurry.

A better weapon system is needed by these elite forces.

It occurred to me that such a system might be found in using Saxitoxin derived from a poisonous crab family (Xanthidae, Order Decapoda). It is a chemical so potent that a single crab could kill thousands of adult humans, and the crabs are easy to procure and process. Heat stable and water soluble, Saxitoxin is the perfect poison. As Saxitoxin spreads through the body, it gradually paralyses the muscles. When the toxin reached the muscles that help us to breath, the victim slowly suffocates. It is extremely difficult to detect post mortem.

In fact, the CIA used this toxin for their suicide pills produced in the 1970’s.

Now, taking a lesson from the Matis and Yagua native Amazonian tribes, we equip our soldiers with very tiny darts disguised as a common biting insect found in the Somalia bush, and blowguns made of two-meter lengths of bamboo. Our agents simply infiltrate the bad guy’s jungle camp or hideout in the city, administer an annoying insect bite from as much as forty meters away, and sneak off to a safe location after the supply of ready-made darts is exhausted.

The beauty of this tactic is that the enemy doesn’t even know he has been attacked. Of course, after a few devastating attacks take place, our Psyops folks would begin spreading rumors about vengeful spirits and so forth among the local population.

I guarantee that this type of operation would be highly successful and discourage further recruitment by the insurgents. And, the best part is that the weapon system would cost a pittance. No need for expensive firearms and ammunition, except for full-tilt defensive fire-fights back at the base camp.

One of the first ‘modern’ novelists, Joseph Conrad, wrote a novel in 1902 titled ‘The Heart of Darkness’ which was the plagiarized basis for the Vietnam era movie ‘Apocalypse Now’. For Conrad, it existed deep in the jungles of the Congo, and within the mind of its Mr. Kurtz, who had set himself up as a God to the natives. Like the deranged colonel in the movie, Kurtz’ dying words were ‘The horror---The horror........'

For me, it occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My fellow Airmen and I sat in our B-52 bombers, lined up nose to tail on the taxiway, with engines running, full of nukes and ready to rumble, at Clinton Sherman Air Force Base in Oklahoma (now a civilian airport). To us, the end of the world seemed just hours away (it was, in fact):


We refueled the bombers with the engines running (a very dicey proposition) and rotated the aircrews at eight hour intervals. Of course, all communications with the outside world were pretty much shut down, but I managed a cryptic call to my parents in Utah to let them know that they had better head for the bomb shelter. My coded message was ‘please give my telescope to my brother.’

My parents knew that this 4” reflector was my prize possession, and that I was convinced that the end was near. It was the only situation imaginable in which I would have parted with it.

Astronomy has always been a bit of a passion for me, and was one of the things that drew me deep into the desert wilderness of Utah’s Colorado Plateau. There, you could see stars by the millions with the great swath of the Milky Way stretching from one horizon to another.

I never imagined it to be ‘The Heart of Darkness’, but today I discovered that it is indeed. A prominent feature, the Natural Bridges (carved from sandstone by wind and rain), is formally recognized as one of only two places in the world to be designated as Bortle 2 on the international darkness scale of astronomy. Bortle 1 locations can only be found in the middle of the ocean; again, one of the big draws for me to the islands of the South Pacific.

Today, I consider the ‘Heart of Darkness’ to be within the confines of Interstate 495 that encircles Washington D.C., but that is the subject for some future post. A new Bortle 2 designation is about to be conferred upon a location in the southwest of Scotland, and the inhabitants should be proud. I have always enjoyed traveling in Scotland, and this only reinforces my view that it is one of the most beautiful places in Europe.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Natural Bridges, Utah, I offer the photo below for your consideration:
The dry streambed is 2,000 meters above sea level

I made a blog post a few years ago that discussed the inability of physicists to discover of magnetic monopoles—the equivalent of particles with positive and negative charges that give rise to electrical currents. The motion of these particles produce an electromagnetic field, and theory suggests that similar particles of magnetism in the form of independent ‘North’ and ‘South’ poles as found in common magnets should exist.

When James Clerk Maxwell derived his famous equations of electromagnetism (based on empirical observations), they lacked these essential elements and thus were asymmetrical. This lack of symmetry disfigured these otherwise beautiful equations.

Well, as of September 3, 2009, this is no longer an issue. The mysterious monopole has finally been observed. You can find the article that discusses these observations at: Magnetic Monopoles Discovered

This partially validates my speculation that magnetism might be an inter-dimensional phenomenon, and also validates certain aspects of string theory.

With this new information in hand, we can now complete Maxwell’s equations and provide the symmetry that was sorely lacking for a century. The equations in their original form and the new form appear below (my thanks to the Dyslectic Mathematician for the discussion) Note that the equations are not in the conventional form:

These are slightly differently than the standard form to emphasize the fact that electric charges create electric and magnetic fields. So the information about the fields is on the left-hand side, and the information about the charges is on the right-hand side. What these fields tell us is the nature of the magnetic and electric fields produced by charges. At least in theory, the strength and direction of the fields at any given point in space can be determined from any arbitrary set of charges or charged objects.

Look at the first two of Maxwell’s equations. The E represents the electric field and the B represents the magnetic field. On the right-hand side of the first equation, the Greek letter rho represents the electric charge distribution, while the epsilon with the zero subscript is a constant number that always stays the same, like pi. The right-hand side of the first equation is written in a generalized way so that the equation applies to any distribution of charge. The information on that side of the equation represents a single point charge, such as a proton or electron. The triangle, called “del”, followed by a dot represents the way the electric field is spreading out from a charge. In the second equation, we have del dot B — so the spreading out of the magnetic field — and this is equal to zero. There is no magnetic charge from which a magnetic field radiates.

In the third equation, del followed by an X and an E, (spoken out loud as “del cross E”), represents the way the electric field is curling around the charge distribution. The d and dt coupled with the B represent how the magnetic field changes in strength and direction as time progresses. On the other side of the equation, we have zero, so there is no charge involved. A changing magnetic field actually induces an electric field. If you had just a static point charge — or even moving charges that are constant in their motion and quantity, and we shall see momentarily from the fourth equation — the magnetic field would not be changing. In fact, with a stationary charge distribution, as we saw from the second equation, no magnetic field at all would be produced. It follows that the electric field of a stationary charge (or unchanging electric current) does not curve. The electric field of a point charge only points straight outward or straight inward; it does not curl around.

In the final equation, del dot B represents the way the magnetic field is curling around. Then there’s the term involving Greek letters (ignore since they are constants), and another set of d’s, this time involving an E. Ignore the constants and what you have left is a term just like the one directly above it except with an E instead of a B. So this term represents the way the electric field is changing over time. On the right-hand side of the equation, we have another Greek letter (constant), and a J. The J represents a distribution of electric current. Electric current is just made up of moving point charges. If the electric field is not changing, then the second term on the left-hand side is zero, and we’re left with the statement that the way the magnetic field of a charge distribution curls is dependent on the way those charges are flowing in a current. If you have a current running through a straight wire, the magnetic field will curl around it in a circle.

This is what Maxwell’s equations will have to be updated to look like now that magnetic monopoles have been discovered:

Here, subscripts have been added to the rho’s and J’s to distinguish electric charges and currents from magnetic charges and currents A magnetic charge will do exactly what an electric charge does in Maxwell’s equations as we know them. A magnetic field would radiate straight out from a magnetic point charge, but no magnetic field would curl around it. An electric field would curl around a moving magnetic charge or current, but would not radiate outward from the magnetic charge.

If you ignore the constants and the plus and minus signs, which just represent direction, in the revised version of Maxwell’s equations, the first equation is exactly the same as the second equation, except with the E and B (and little e and b subscripts) interchanged. The same is true of the third and fourth equations: they are exactly the same as each other except the places of E and B, and e and b, are switched. This is the symmetry that the original equations lacked.

What this all means is that engineers and scientists can perhaps start solving the problems associated with ‘Zero-Point’ energy devices, ‘Warp’ drives, and the inter-dimensional aspects of gravity & electromotive forces.

This fall, my brother’s third-youngest daughter will start on her Master’s degree at Oxford University in London. Of his five children, the oldest is pursuing her Doctorate at Stanford, his son and next two oldest daughters obtained (and are obtaining) graduate degrees from the London School of Economics, and his youngest, a teenage daughter, is a math genius who is being groomed to possibly become another Planck or Einstein.

I have mentioned in prior posts here that our family was impoverished in my childhood, because our father chose to follow the noble path of his father as a conservationist and game warden. This path however, was not pursued by my brother and me, although we carry on the tradition in other ways. He became a scientist, while I became a sometime businessman and electrical engineer.

I came across an old and grainy photo of my first year primary school class in 1946. I was six years old when it was taken. Here it is for your amusement:

Even as a youngster, I had an attitude: I am the brat in the second row (second from left) with my hand on my hip, a chip on my shoulder, and a defiant expression on my face.

Well, the military changed all that for me and I was challenged to excel. I accepted the challenge and applied myself with a vengeance. I have been a millionaire twice in my life, and my younger brother became a millionaire many times over (most of which he has given to charity and environmental causes over the years).

Had I not been challenged, and guided by wise mentors who saw my potential, I probably would have become a drifter or worse. As it is, I am proud of the fact that I developed this in 1972. It is one of the first of its kind:


The reason that I am revealing all of this for the first time in this blog is that there are many children out there who are gifted and impoverished, and who may drift away into the future unless they get the motivation and guidance to achieve their potential. It is especially important in these troubled times.

This is not just the task of educators. It is the task of all of us. Our immediate future on Planet Earth depends on applying the best of humanity to solving our pressing problems. If you know of such a child, it is your duty as a human being to offer a helping hand. And, if you are such a youngster yourself, please take my advice:
You can accomplish anything your set your mind to do. It (not-so-simply) requires commitment to your dream and the self-discipline to get there. Set aside all of the distractions and wastes of time in modern life and apply yourself diligently to your goal. The good news is that it gets easier once this behavior becomes a habit.

One of my dear and nearly life-long friends called me to explain that he might be dying. The painful, invasive biopsy of his lungs confirmed the worst: widespread lung cancer. As he has suffered a collapsed lung twice in the last few decades, the prognosis is grim. And, his smoking like a furnace has turned his chest into a war zone over the years.

His life has been replete with hardship and grief: both of his children were struck down with medical traumas, and only his son survives. His marriage has been torn asunder, and financially, for most of his life the wolf has been at the door.

In spite of these hardships, he has always tried to maintain good cheer, laughed at my feeble jokes, hiked with me in the wilderness, skied the Black Diamond runs together, shared the last of our food and water in secret desert places, and always respected our friendship as something precious and true. As is typical of him, he had a hard time telling me of his condition, of his fear and grief.

So this, Al, is for you. As your computer is history, I know you are unlikely to read this directly on-line. Perhaps I can work up the courage to print it out and hand it to you in person sometime soon.

A wise old Hopi Indian once said, “Take a kernel of corn, plant it in Our Mother Earth with the sweat of your body, with what you know of the times and seasons, with your proper prayers. And with your strength and manhood Our Father Sun multiplies and gives it back into your flesh. What then is this kernel of corn? It is not a simple thing.

Nothing is simple and alone. We are not separate and alone. The breathing mountains, the living stones, each blade of grass, the clouds, the rain, each star, the beasts, the birds and the invisible spirits of the air---we are all one, indivisible. Nothing that any of us does occurs in a vacuum, but affects us all. I would have you consider how you fit into the pattern of the whole; how far your influence may spread. What it may grow into……

We know that we are all one life on the same Mother Earth, beneath the same plains of the sky. But we all know that one life must give way to another so that the one great life of all may continue unbroken.”

Should the outcome of your trial by great pain and suffering be death, know that you will live on in the memories of those who knew and loved you. Like the ripples in a pond from a pebble thrown into the water, your influence and essence spreads to infinity—through your son, and his children, and his children’s children into the fog of time. It is the web of life, and it is good.
Oil on canvas by Fredrick Remington