Zero Bias: February  2005

Outside the Box  

The Earth is flat... The Earth is at the center of the universe... You can't send messages over wires! … You can't send messages without wires! … Wireless signals travel by causing vibrations in the aether … A wave can't be a particle and a particle can't be a wave … and so on and so on.

Throughout human history, there have been certain "facts" that were "known" to be true until someone came along to stand conventional theory on its head, first by suggesting that some "established truth" might not be true, and then by proving it. Often, even that was not enough to keep the so-called "heretic" from being imprisoned or executed. This goes back at least as far as Socrates, probably further.

We've advanced beyond that today. Now, in most cases, instead of executing such rabble-rousers, we merely ridicule them. For example, last November, we published an article by Walter Bain, W4LTU, on the possibility of someday sending radio signals without transmitted power, just as today we send AM voice signals without a carrier (we call it single sideband). One reader wrote in, questioning not only Mr. Bain's premise, but also his education, his intelligence and possibly even his parentage. On the other hand, we also heard from Bill Lawson, AE6HP, a plasma physicist, who wrote that developments subsequent to Walt's sources made it unlikely, if not impossible, that the specific mechanism he proposed would ever be workable. (See "Update" on page 111.)

Walt's first reaction after receiving Bill's e-mail was that he should apologize to the readers, but both Bill and I disagreed. Bill wrote, "Giving up on cherished theories is the hardest demand science makes of us --but then that is kind of the point of science. I also do not feel an apology is in order any more than scientists are expected to apologize for theories that do not pan out. … I hope you won't stop looking into novel ideas. Most of them don't pan out, but there would be no progress if none of them panned out."

My response was similar: "Clearly, the way we transmit information now is reaching its limits in terms of ability to meet society's needs. Those needs will drive new discoveries and new ideas. Your article was intended to get people thinking, talking, sharing information -- and in that it has succeeded. The fact that the specifics of what you propose look like they won't pan out is secondary." 

Also in this issue, we have a further follow-up to W6BNB's article last fall on long-delayed echoes. Makoto "Mac" Obara, TZ6JA/ex-JA8SLU, has also been studying LDEs and coincidentally published a series of articles in the Japanese ham magazine 59 at the same time that Bob Shrader's article first appeared in CQ. Bob included some comments from Mac in his own follow-up article in October, and Mac has expanded on that in this month's issue (beginning on page 24), summarizing his three-part series in 59. Mac's theory is that there is some sort of interplanetary ionosphere in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and in the Kuiper Belt, outside the orbit of Neptune, in which some property of the multitude of small orbiting objects creates the ability to reflect radio waves back to Earth with very little signal loss. Now at first glance, this might seem impossible for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, no better explanation has yet been put forth and Mac makes a persuasive argument for his perspective. We have included with Mac's article a mini-debate among members of the CQ "family" who have read the article and come to very different conclusions.

Immense Parabolic Dishes?

CQ Publisher Dick Ross, K2MGA, added yet another perspective, too late to include with the article, but relevant enough for me to summarize here. In his article, Mac compares LDE signals with EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) and explains why he feels there is less loss on the LDE path than on an EME circuit. Dick points out that an EME signal originates from a point on the Earth and spreads out as it travels through space. Only part of that signal arrives at the surface of the moon, which absorbs more of it and -- as a convex object -- tends to reflect much of the remaining signal away from the Earth, so the portion of the signal actually returning to Earth is tiny. On the other hand, Earth's orbit is completely within the orbits of both the Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt. And if Obara is correct about mean motion resonance belts within those orbits, a substantial portion of the signal originating on Earth along the ecliptic, or plane of the planets, reaches one or the other of these belts, except for the energy lost to path loss along the way. The belts, however, are concave from our perspective, and could act as immense parabolic dishes. Rather than further scattering the received signal, they could capture virtually all of it and focus it back into a much stronger return signal (consider the action of a dish antenna).

Dick also comments that LDEs may be more common than we think and may not return only to the point of origin -- since we all tend to hear just one side of a QSO or a CQ that is returned to someone we can't hear. There is no way of knowing whether that station calling CQ who doesn't come back to us has just sent out his signals or if we're hearing echoes a day or more later from the far reaches of our solar system.

Who's Right?

Is Mac's theory correct? Or full of hot helium gas from the sun? It doesn't matter. That's right. It doesn't matter. Does it matter that Walt's theory isn't quite right? No. Thomas Edison tried 10,000 different possibilities for light-bulb filaments before finding one that worked. What if he'd given up after number 9,999? Just one or two short of success? What matters is trying … trying to solve a problem, trying to come up with the right answer. Coming up with the wrong one along the way is simply part of the process. As Edison famously said, "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward."

Edison also said, "Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless." Edison himself believed the primary use for his phonograph would be as a dictation device for business. He had no idea it would revolutionize popular music.

In the 1960s, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, two radio astronomers at Bell Labs, were trying to use a huge dish antenna to research radio signals from space but were bothered by noise that just wouldn't go away. It didn't matter where they pointed the antenna or what time of year it was. The noise was always there, always at the same level. It made no sense to them. Then they shared their frustration with fellow astronomer Robert Dicke at Princeton, unaware that he had been working on a theory that the "big bang" at the birth of the universe should have left behind uniform low-level microwave radiation. As the three of them compared notes, they realized that what was frustrating Wilson and Penzias was actually the proof of Dicke's theory. It won Wilson and Penzias the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 and is now known as the "standard model" of the universe.

THINK!

The key is thinking -- thinking differently -- outside the box as we like to say today, trying out new ideas and sharing them with others. After all, one person's "failure" may be the key to another's major step forward.

Here at CQ, we have always encouraged this sort of thinking. It was here in CQ in the 1940s that hams were first recruited to take part in research on radio wave propagation, and contributed greatly to the base of knowledge on which today's understanding of propagation is built. It was in these pages in 1957 that the late Don Stoner, W6TNS, writing about the 100+ mile range of a microwatt transistor 2-meter transmitter, asked, "Does anybody have a spare rocket for orbiting purposes?" and unwittingly gave birth to the amateur satellite program. Forty years later, the January 1997 issue of our sister magazine, CQ VHF, featured a ham at MIT with a computer, ham rig and amateur television transmitter woven into his clothing. Boy, did we hear it about that one. "He has too much time on his hands," wrote one reader. Another suggested that he "must look like 4th of July fireworks after dark." Yet today, "wearable computing" is one of the hottest frontiers in the high-tech world.

Even our humor articles are ahead of their times -- famous CQ April authors Dr. Jerzy Ostermond-Tor and Dr. Emil Heisseluft have accurately predicted the development of cell phones, stealth aircraft and yes, this one's real, too -- an ionosphere on Mars (so why can't there be one in the Asteroid Belt?) Another Edison quote: "We don't know a millionth of one per cent about anything."

It is part of our 60-year tradition here at CQ to encourage thinking "outside the box" by publishing well-reasoned, well-written articles that push the limits of current knowledge and understanding, that seek to break new ground despite the risk to their authors of being called crackpots and worse. It is our hope to encourage others to think, and maybe use the information and ideas in one of these articles to spur their own ideas. So let's all try thinking outside the box. For that matter, why limit ourselves to a box? Today, let's think outside the egg as well. And let's not be too quick to dismiss the ideas of those who do, even if they're still at filament number 100 out of what turns out to be 10,000. To quote Thomas Edison one more time (with thanks to quotationspage.com), "Hell, there are no rules here -- we're trying to accomplish something."

Looking at things in a way no one else has looked at them before -- or looking farther than others have looked before -- is the root of all progress. It is our privilege, and our responsibility as a magazine devoted to an activity based in science and technology, to promote progress by encouraging those who look at things in a different way. I'll close with one more quote, this one from Robert F. Kennedy: "Some people see things as they are and ask why; I dream things that never were and ask why not." -- 73, W2VU

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