The Man Who Mastered Gravity Quotes

“Keep a fire for the human race Let your prayers go drifting into space You never know what will be coming down . . . And somewhere between the time you arrive And the time you go May lie a reason you were alive But you’ll never know ––Jackson Browne For A Dancer (1974)”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine,
It is stranger than we can imagine. – Arthur C. Clarke”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“If it can ever be perfected, controlled fusion offers the promise of a clean, safe, virtually unlimited source of industrial energy.  Science has been trying to harness that “star in a jar” for more than seventy years.  The kernel of knowledge that would solve the riddle remains elusively out of reach, tempting skeptics to insist that “fusion is the energy of the future and always will be.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Josephine succumbed to lung cancer in the spring of 1988. It was not until March of 1992 that Aviation Week broke the story that the B-2 Stealth Bomber uses an electrokinetic effect in its wings.  An adaptation of the flame jet generator produces a negatively charged cloud of ions in the exhaust, and applies a positive charge to the leading edge of its wings.  The result is a classic Biefeld-Brown Effect:  the B-2 surfs its own electrostatic wave, the negative cloud “chasing” the positive wing, reducing fuel consumption and helping to keep the bomber aloft at high altitudes where thin air reduces the wings’ conventional lift. The B-2 was built by the merged company Northrop Grumman.  Northrop was a company owned by Floyd Odlum.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. From The Sayings of Muad’Dib by the Princess Irulan (Frank Herbert - Dune)”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“barium titanate”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Barium titanate dielectric always exceeded air dielectric in total thrust.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Biefeld-Brown effect”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Russian Bank”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Townsend Brown’s “mortally wounded prairie chicken” routine: Prairie chickens have a trick to distract predators from their nest: they limp away from the nest as if injured; then, at a safe distance, they recover and fly away.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“It has been well documented that one of the physicists at Los Alamos – a German émigré turned British citizen named Klaus Fuchs100 – was quietly feeding the critical details of uranium and plutonium bomb engineering to researchers in Russia. That information accelerated Igor Kurchatov – the Soviet Union’s Oppenheimer – along the tricky path to vaporizing large tracts of the Kazakhstan desert – years before Western intelligence expected that to happen. Russian interest in Western secrets did not stop at acquiring the technology to build atomic bombs. In fact, the entire Western defense establishment in the 1940s and ‘50s was riddled with Soviet spies. Before joining the Manhattan Project, Klaus Fuchs’ work in Britain drew him into a circle of Communist sympathizers, many of whom came from the ranks of the British upper middle class – graduates of Oxford and Cambridge who were critical of the British class system even as they benefited from it. In 1947, Fuchs was one of the members of the CPC – the Combined Policy Committee – which coordinated efforts to share atomic secrets between the ‘ABC’ countries – America, Britain, and Canada.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Like a bureaucratic phoenix born out of the ashes of Donovan’s old OSS, the 1947 Act also consolidated all of the country’s military and civilian espionage operations into a new Central Intelligence Agency. In lieu of Donovan, Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter was named the first Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Truman’s attitude started changing as the Soviet Union asserted its dominion over the nations the Red Army had marched through on its way to Berlin. In Poland, liberation from the Nazis morphed into another kind of occupation – from fascist to communist. That pattern repeated itself in Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and elsewhere as the Stalinists spread their Dictatorship of the Proletariat.96 In 1947, Truman’s economic advisor, the financier Bernard Baruch, described the growing tension between the former allies as a ‘cold war.’ When that phrase was repeated in a series of essays by Walter Lippmann, it became a permanent fixture in the postwar lexicon and made a full convert of Harry Truman, who signed the National Security Act in July of 1947. The Act’s sweeping reforms included separating the Air Force out of the Army, creating a huge new Department of Defense,97 and established the National Security Council (NSC).”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“The Germans ignored Einstein and developed an approach to gravity based on quantum theory. Don’t forget that Einstein physics, relativity physics, with its big-picture view of the universe, represented Jewish science to the Nazis. Germany was where quantum mechanics was born. The Germans were looking at gravity from a different perspective than everyone else. Maybe that gave them answers to things the pro-relativity scientists hadn’t even thought of. In a message to O’Riley on Feb 18, 2005, I speculated that: Theoretical Physics split off in two directions in the 1930s. One fork in the road followed the path of relativity; the other followed the path of quantum mechanics. Because the Germans dismissed relativity as ‘Jewish physics,’ their scientists followed the quantum path, which gave them a head start on things that their British and American counterparts were not attuned to – except, perhaps, for Townsend Brown and a few of his colleagues in the ‘black’ realm. Does that sound about right? Within a few minutes O’Riley replied: Not just about right, dead on right. I feel like Henry Higgins: “By George, I think he’s got it!” Don’t know if you recognize that scene but the same amount of dancing around the den is occurring here. Thank you. I believe “You’ve got it!”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Space, Townsend Brown is telling us, is an infinite sea of energy – acting as a dielectric and subject to the same negative-to-positive thrust that he first observed in the Coolidge Tube. What we call ‘gravity’ is just one manifestation of that energy – and it can be modulated with what we call ‘electrical’ energy.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“And this story comes by its Alice association quite honestly. In Chapter 29 – The Caroline, Eldridge Johnson... ...was so enamored with the story of the young girl and her surreal world that he acquired several copies of the first printed edition. His obsession culminated with the purchase – at no small expense – of the original manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Underground, written in the hand of its author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who scribbled under the penname of Lewis Carroll. And during one visit to England, Johnson went to the trouble of having himself photographed with the elderly Alice Liddell Hargreaves, who, when she was a child, had been Carroll’s inspiration for Alice’s adventures.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then
to hang a question mark on the things
you have long taken for granted. -- Bertrand Russell”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“We will never be able to prove that Josephine herself was in league with Stephenson, but we do know what initially attracted Townsend to his future wife: She could keep secrets.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“(Notes from the Rabbit Hole #9) “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cheshire Cat: We’re all mad here. I’m mad, you’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“When the day becomes the night and the sky becomes the sea, when the clock strikes heavy and there’s no time for tea; and in our darkest hour, before my final rhyme, she will come home to Wonderland and turn back the hands of time. – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“equitation”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“In 1916’s General Theory of Relativity, Einstein defined gravity as a curvature in space, a distortion caused by the presence of a massive object like a planet or a star. Standing on the shoulders of all who had gone before him, Einstein synthesized everything from Newton to Planck, casting mankind adrift in a universe where space could be bent and time was elastic.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“In the 1860s, Faraday’s protege, the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell, compiled the equations that proved that electricity and magnetism are a single fundamental force, electromagnetism. Maxwell further observed that waves of electromagnetic energy could travel through space at the speed of light – a concept later verified by his own protégé, Heinrich Hertz, for whom radio frequencies are named. Maxwell also proposed that light itself was a form of this electromagnetic radiation – an idea that would ultimately challenge the very principals that had led him there in the first place. At the dawn of the 20th Century, the German physicist Max Planck postulated that matter absorbs heat energy and emits light energy discontinuously in ‘lumps.’ Planck’s lumps, which he called “quanta,” sparked the new scientific field of quantum mechanics.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Every discovery rests on those that preceded it. As Newton himself said, “If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Have you guessed the riddle yet? The Hatter said, turning to Alice again. “No, I give up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?” “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter. “Nor I,” said the March Hare. Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said,” than wasting it asking riddles that have no answers.” – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“Townsend explained that an electrically induced force field squeezed the air, “the way your fingers would squirt a watermelon seed.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“The mystery of Life isn’t a problem to be solved. It is a reality to experienced. - Frank Herbert, Dune”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between

“This story lives at the center or the Venn diagram where science, science fiction and pseudo-science, conspiracy and reality all intersect.”
― Paul Schatzkin, The Man Who Mastered Gravity: A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and The Mysteries In Between