A Brief History of Science with Levity Read online

  Copyright © 2015 Mike Bennett

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador®

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  ISBN 978 1784629 168

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  In memory of my sister Alison, who died earlier this year.

  Also dedicated to my children Dan, Jonny and Tina. I hope that I have encouraged them to follow their dreams as they progress through life.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The information presented in this book is factual. In cases where the information is inferred or taken from third-party accounts this is stated. In some cases where the information presented comes from confidential sources or individuals who do not wish to be identified, their names have been changed.

  INTRODUCTION

  The author is an honours physics graduate, engineer and successful entrepreneur.

  He has decades of experience interacting with global industrial groups, and the intelligence-security services worldwide. In addition to presenting a history of science and technology, the book relates these experiences with a considerable amount of levity.

  As the book progresses it becomes ever more intriguing, starting to explore the interaction between the giant industrial-military corporations and the intelligence-security services. A great amount of information in these areas is disclosed which has hitherto been unpublished.

  The author has had long conversations with many people, ranging from leading politicians, diplomats, billionaire heads of industry and security agents from many countries, to beggars, thieves and leaders of rogue nations. With few exceptions, he finds that you can learn a lot from most people if you take the time to listen to them.

  For one of the first examples of the appropriation and manipulation of ground-breaking science and technology by the intelligence community, look no further than Wernher von Braun. When he was taken to the USA in 1945, the Americans also took Wehrmacht (Army) General Walter Dornberger, who they claimed was Wernher von Braun’s boss. This was pure window-dressing for American public consumption. US intelligence knew full well that Von Braun was a Major in the SS, although this was never disclosed at the time. He had used slave labour from concentration camps to build his V2 rockets. Von Braun actually reported directly to SS General Hans Kammler.

  Kammler held the third highest position in the SS, but the Americans knew that the truth would not go down well with the powerful Jewish lobby in Washington.

  Kammler’s achievements and the towering advances made by his group of scientists and engineers were truly ground-breaking, and the security system that he put in place to surround and protect these operations was never broken. This model was the start of black project operations, and has been copied by almost all nations ever since.

  I ask the readers to set aside any preconceptions they may have regarding science and technology, and to examine the facts presented in this book with an open mind.

  PROLOGUE

  It was a cold grey Saturday morning in the winter of 1965. I was sitting looking out of the window at the occasional flurries of snowflakes swirling around the building. I was wondering if my parents would let me go fishing with my friends tomorrow.

  Suddenly I felt a sharp blow to the side of my head. Our Latin teacher, Mr Bullock, had just thrown the blackboard eraser at me. Yes, I was still in the classroom and my thoughts of fishing would have to wait until later in the day. I was made to go to the board, and write down all of the grammatical cases for “boy” in Latin. There are nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative in both the singular and plural. Twelve different cases for the word “boy”. Does anyone really want to learn this language? To make it worse, nobody today even speaks Latin apart from the Catholic clergy and a few obscure scholars.

  I was nine years old at the time, but the influences I had during those early years probably shaped my life.

  I had an older sister. We got on fine together, although she normally got the better of me in family disputes, probably because she was older than me. I also have a younger brother who shared many of my interests. I nicknamed him Woolley as he was born in the autumn of 1962, and the UK had the biggest freeze in living memory the following winter.

  My mother did her best to care for us all. In those days there was not much money about. She worked very hard, getting up to light the coal stove an hour before she could start cooking breakfast for us all. I learned how to cook by helping her in the kitchen after school.

  My father was a government scientist. He did his best to bring us up well, and to give us a good education. Apart for the fee-charging schools, the best school in the area was Bristol grammar school. Provided that you passed the entrance exam, you had access to a good free education. I enrolled in their junior prep school at the age of seven. At the time, I was rather jealous of my friends at our local school, as I had to attend school on Saturday mornings while they enjoyed a two-day weekend.

  During the week, I took a bus to school, but on Saturdays my dad drove me to school and went shopping while he was waiting to collect me at lunchtime.

  My lifetime interest in both pure science and engineering was sparked at this time. After my dad picked me up from school, we would trawl through army surplus stores, which were common in those days, selling off supposedly obsolete military supplies left over after World War II. We would spend hours looking through shelves filled with parts of old communications equipment, safety equipment and anything else that was no longer considered useful by the armed forces. I was planning to build my first radio receiver, and had taken a book from the local library which contained various circuit diagrams. I think that I became interested in electronics when I wondered what was inside a TV. One day I dismantled our family TV for a look, and put it back together before anyone came home. It didn’t work after that, and suffice to say I was grounded (not in the electrical sense of the word).

  I needed three particular valves for my radio; two diodes and a triode. For the younger readers, valves, which the Americans call tubes, are hot cathode vacuum devices that were used for electronic switching and amplification prior to the introduction of semiconductors. How things have changed. When I was designing electronic control equipment thirty years later, I used IGBTs (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors). They were attached to the largest heat sinks I could find due to the amount of power that they were controlling. In 1965 I never dreamt that such a device could ever be built.

  I eventually found the valves I needed, and bought the whole chassis complete with many resistors and capacitors. The following weekend I found an old variable condenser and a small loudspeaker, and I was ready to start. I cut down and riveted the chassis, wired and soldered in all the parts that were needed, and mounted it all in a small wooden box.

  In the evenings afte
r my bedtime, I would run a copper wire up to the opposite corner of my bedroom for an antenna, and listen to Radio Luxembourg. It was very comforting to listen to their DJs while looking at the soft orange light coming from the valves in my radio.

  My next project was to build a solid-state radio using “modern” transistors. My dad showed me how to etch copper-backed board with ferric chloride, and using two Mullard OC71 transistors with some other parts I soon had my first portable radio.

  My dad did very well from the army surplus stores. He bought an old WWII aviator’s emergency battery with an orange head cap and light for three shillings and sixpence, which is 17.5 pence in modern money. These batteries were automatically switched on by seawater and were used to help Air Sea Rescue locate airmen ditched in the sea. Airmen were much more valuable than their aircraft, and the use of silver in the batteries was more than justified. At home he cut it up, and discovered that it was full of silver compound and magnesium plates. The MOD quartermasters obviously had no idea of the true value of these batteries.

  After that we purchased every battery that we could find. He then sold the silver chloride plates to Johnson Matthey for around £4,000. That was big money in those days, as our five-bedroom semidetached home cost £3,100.

  In the evenings he also had us going through bags of silver coins to look for ones that were minted before 1947. The melt value of the silver in these coins was much higher than the face value. The same applies to old American half-dollar coins and others, but I think that they will all have been taken by now.

  Although my father worked as a government scientist, I think that it was his entrepreneurial activities that encouraged me to start my own business after I gained enough experience in my working career.

  He grew up during WWII, and even after the war you would still not be allowed to enter Oxford or Cambridge universities without having studied Latin. He studied at Imperial College London, and was one of their youngest students ever to be awarded a doctorate. I think that I am lucky to be here today. One day when he was cycling to school a V2 rocket impacted a field about a mile away. On this occasion it only killed a few cows.

  Apart from my interest in how things work and general engineering, I have also been fascinated by physics. After completing the core courses required in high school, I chose to study physics, pure mathematics and applied mathematics for my advanced grades. For me, subjects such as languages, geography and others may be very interesting to some, but they are not rapidly evolving at the cutting edge of knowledge.

  I, along with the rest of the world, think that the pioneering work of Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein was pure genius. One person that I consider should be up there with them is Nikola Tesla. He was also a groundbreaking genius, but I will elaborate on his achievements in later chapters.

  One of my sons is now studying for a masters’ degree in physics at the University of Aberdeen. Physics is evolving so rapidly that when we speak, it is clear that many of the things that I was taught at university thirty-five years ago are now known to be incorrect. I was simply taught the best understanding that we had of physics at that time.

  I hope that as the reader progresses through this book, he or she will be as captivated by modern science and engineering as I am. I would like to ask the reader to keep an open mind about the issues discussed, and draw their own conclusions from the facts presented.

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Background

  About the Book

  Qualification to Write On This Subject

  CHAPTER 1

  Before going further, I am including a chapter covering some of the basic scientific fundamentals of both physics and chemistry. This is necessary as later in the book we will discuss both the design and application of many advances in detail.

  If the reader is an honours chemistry graduate or a recent honours physics graduate, you may wish to skip the next few pages as I am not trying to teach my grandmother how to suck eggs. However I hope that this chapter will be of interest to readers who do not come from a scientific background, and I hope that the brief synopsis in this chapter will help with the understanding of the concepts discussed.

  In addition, if the reader is a high school student who happened to miss school when these basics were being taught, I hope that this chapter will help you. Once you have a firm grasp of the essential basics in most subjects, the rest tends to fall into place more easily.

  Many centuries ago, philosophers believed that the world around us was formed from four things. They were water, earth, air and fire. As the centuries progressed and science was born, people discovered new materials that were unknown to their ancestors. For example, the end of the Stone Age was marked by the point at which humans discovered bronze. This was a material that they had never before encountered, and they used it to produce new tools and weapons. Although bronze is not an element but an alloy formed mostly from the elements copper and tin, its discovery made people start to question the ideas of the ancient philosophers.

  Similarly, the Bronze Age was succeeded by the Iron Age when people discovered that certain rocks, which we now know as ores, could produce other materials when heated. It was obvious to them that the new material, iron, was different from bronze due to its different colour and physical properties.

  In more recent times, the early scientists that we now refer to as alchemists started to define the first elements in what we now know as the periodic table of elements. As time progressed, more and more elements were discovered and these elements are today the basis of all chemistry.

  An element is defined by the number of protons in the atomic nucleus. For example, if an atom has only one proton in the nucleus it is hydrogen. If it has two protons in its nucleus it is helium, and with three it is lithium and so on. Apart from the most common form of hydrogen, all atoms also have particles called neutrons in their atomic nuclei.

  Although hydrogen normally contains a nucleus consisting of just a single proton, hydrogen isotopes also occur that can possess either one or two neutrons within their nuclei. These isotopes are known as deuterium and tritium respectively. Although they are chemically still hydrogen, their nuclear make-up gives them slightly different properties. It is not possible for hydrogen to exist with three neutrons in the nucleus. Tritium is already radioactive and a hydrogen nucleus of this atomic weight cannot accept any further neutrons.

  Neutrons are very similar to protons, except that they have no overall electrical charge. A proton has a charge of +1. Neutrons and protons are both made up from subatomic particles known as quarks. Six types of quarks are currently known to science. Physicists normally group them into three pairs, known as the up/down pair, the charm/strange pair, and the top/bottom pair. Associated with each of these quarks, there is also a corresponding antiquark. Quarks also carry another type of charge known as a colour charge, however the discussion of this is beyond the requirements of basic scientific fundamentals.

  Quarks are unusual in that they carry a fractional electrical charge. Electrical charge in physics and chemistry is measured against the electrical charge of a proton which is +1. All quarks currently discovered have an electrical charge of either +2/3, or -1/3. Neutrons and protons are each made
up of three quarks. Quantum physics dictates that three quarks with the same charge cannot exist together. So for example, if two up quarks (which each have a charge of +2/3) combine with one down quark (which has a charge of -1/3), the resulting particle will be a proton as the overall charge will be +1. Conversely, should one up quark combine with two down quarks, the resulting particle will have an overall charge of zero, and will therefore form a neutron.

  As we move away from hydrogen and towards the heavier elements with higher atomic numbers, we find that they contain a varying number of neutrons within their nuclei. These are called isotopes. Isotopes are variants of the same element, but with different atomic weights due to the different number of neutrons within their nuclei. Many of these isotopes are unstable, and throw out particles and electromagnetic pulses from their nuclei, changing them into different isotopes or elements. This is known as radioactivity, and this also needs to be discussed in order to understand how some science has developed when we look at this in detail later in the book.

  Radioactivity, or more correctly radioactive decay, is broadly grouped into three categories. These are known as Alpha, Beta and Gamma decay. All three decay modes produce ionising radiation which is damaging to plant and animal life.

  Alpha particles are helium nuclei. This means that an alpha particle consists of two protons and two neutrons, but with no surrounding electron shells. They have a relatively short range in air and can easily be blocked by something as simple as a sheet of Perspex.

  However, they are hazardous to humans, as they are known as bone seekers. This means that if one inhales air containing alpha particles, they will be absorbed into the body through the lungs and make their way predominantly into the bone marrow. As the bone marrow controls blood cell production, the ionising radiation from the alpha particles will damage the bone marrow and hence the blood cells that it helps to produce. This usually ends with the person contracting leukaemia or some other type of cancer.