ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

90 The Hunt for Zero Point
understood about nuclear physics, that by the outbreak of the Second
World War all experiments resulting in nuclear reactions had required
more energy than had been released.
As more and more physicists escaped the Nazis, however, and debate
in America was stimulated further, the conjecture spilled into the U.S.
press and writers began to speculate about what they had heard. A
number of sensational articles appeared about the weapons implications
of a nuclear reaction that could be compressed into the blink of an eye.
The word was, it would result in a massive bomb.
By 1940, when it was understood that uranium bombarded with
neutrons fissioned and produced more neutrons and that a multiplying
chain reaction really might occur with huge explosive force, something
remarkable happened. The nuclear physics community voluntarily
stopped the publication of further articles on fission and related subjects
and this, in turn, dampened the media's interest.
By the time America entered the war in December 1941, you couldn't
find a mention of fission. It was as if no one had ever been discussing it.
The parallel with what I had read in the U.S. media in the mid-1950s,
culminating in all those statements in 1956 that antigravity was doable
with a Manhattan-style effort behind it, and then the crushing silence,
was extraordinary.
By 1960, you talked about antigravity and people looked at you like you
were mad.
I stared out the window, trying to find Watson-Watt's once-secret
radar mast, but it was lost behind the trees. I knew Marckus lived
somewhere nearby. I wondered where, exactly; what his house was like,
whether he was married, if he had kids.
"What's in this for you?" I asked him.
"You have freedom of movement, I don't," he said. "You can go visit
these people and ask questions, I can't."
I still couldn't quite see where all this was headed.
Marckus took a moment before adding: "I think it's 1939 all over
again. I think we're poised on the brink of something. The physics is
mind-boggling—Christ, I don't pretend to understand half of it
myself—but what we're talking is huge."
"Spell it out for me."
"Bye-bye nuclear power. Bye-bye rocket motors. Bye-bye jet engines.
If we can manipulate gravity, nothing will ever be the same. But expecting
British Aerospace to develop this stuff is like asking someone
who'd spent the first half of the 17th century building horse-drawn carts
to come up with the outline for Stephenson's bloody Rocket. People