[meteorite-list] Nut finds fake meteorite with fake technology!

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 14:32:15 -0500
Message-ID: <012601c7d9f3$a5099f20$ac2ee146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, Francis, and List

    You might have missed my post on dowsing
machines. The URL's in this paragraph are to sites
where you can buy an Hieronymous Machine (don't
do it!), or build an Hieronymous Machine, and to
the story about how a circuit diagram works just
as well as the physical machine!

> Dowsing is the ancestor of the many failed
> "psychometric" machines, like the famous Hieronymus
> Machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_machine
> Yokum's device is identical to the Hieronymus machine,
> which you can buy for only $600 here:
> http://www.lifetechnology.org/hieronymus.htm
> or build your own from these excellent and detailed plans:
> http://www.wdjensen123.com/hieronymus/Plans.htm
> And, it has been claimed that the Heironymus Machine
> will work perfectly well from a carefully hand-made
> ink-drawing of the plans, as a symbolic device alone:
> http://www.cheniere.org/books/excalibur/another%20kind.htm

    If you Google "Thomas Galen Hieronymous,"
the inventor of the machine (named after him, of
course), you will find interviews with him and
much more. (Or just Galen Hieronymous, or T. G.
Hieronymous... It's not the most common name.)

    John W. Campbell is not only editorially
responsible for modern Science Fiction, but
for a lot of silliness, even dangerous silliness.
He had a strange attraction to the idea that various
psychic forces were real and could be detected
and manipulated by physical machines. In an odd
way, it IS scientific: if you believe certain phenomena
to be real (telepathy, psychokinesis, and such), then
they "must be" mediated by physically real forces,
however unknown for the moment.

    The first half of the 20th century is the hayday
of "scientific" mysticism: Rhine at Duke University
analyzed telepathy statistically; Dunne studied clairvoyance,
spiritualism was studied and physically tested by the
famous physicist Crooke and the author, Conan Doyle.

    But John W. Campbell is responsible for various
disasters: he used his magazine to promote L. Ron
Hubbard's medical and phychological theories under
the name Dianetics, which then turned into Scientology,
and we know how well THAT turned out. He pushed
the Hieronymous Machine very hard for about six months,
but only after long corespondence with and questioning
of T. G. Hieronymous. He was also intense for a time
in promulgating a inertial reaction motor ("The Key To
The Stars"!) called the Dean Drive, before it too didn't
pan out.

    Campbell was also insistent that "his" authors provide
support for his interest in these ideas. Campbell was also
intelligent (physics, MIT) and honest enough to jump
off these ideas when they did not prove to work (although
that was harder for him).

    If you found articles by G. Harry Stine supporting
the Hieronymous Machine, my guess is that they were
written at the time to insure continued publication in
Campbell's magazine!

    It's a hard line to define: if you're too close-minded,
nothing gets in; if you're too open-minded, your brain
falls out!


Sterling K. Webb
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Francis Graham" <francisgraham at rocketmail.com>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2007 8:46 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Nut finds fake meteorite with fake technology!



 The story reminds me of a strange pseudomachine to
detect minerals in rocks featured in G. Harry Stine's
book "Frontiers of Science: Strange Machines You Can
Build" called a Heironymous Machine. It supposedly
examined a mineral with an electric field of some sort
and placed some kind of charge on a tactile plate, so
the user could "feel" what was in the rock. It was
covered by US Patent 2482772.
  I never tried to build it, because the vacuum tubes
used no longer exist, so I won't go so far as to stick
my neck out and assert absolutely it won't work, but I
don't understand how it could, physical laws being
what they are. But I will be charitable and allow,
unless the patent examiner was wacked, he or she must
have seen some merit in it I suppose.
  But why bother when for the same expense, I can
build a little electric arc and prism spectroscope and
see the spectral lines and will use my sense of sight
(not touch) to learn what trace elements might be in
the rock, if I had to do it from scratch. And of
course a thin section and a petrographic microscope
are proven technology for these sorts of
investigations for the gross minerals in rocks
themselves. This technology is taught in every
geology program in every college or University. It's
worth a thousand bucks at State U. to take this
particular lab course, dear meteorite colleagues.
(plug,plug).
   But then G. Harry Stine then makes the
(conservatively) outrageous claim that a Heironymous
Machine made of paper symbols for the electrical
components also works. This, if true, would be so
jarring to my sense of reality I am not sure I want to
try it! Actually, he gives credit to John Campbell,
who said the same in "Astounding Science Fiction" in
the 1950s. Stine wrote for Campbell. Some of this is
rehashed on many websites.
   But if anyone has experimented with the actual
Heironymous Machine G. Harry Stine outlined, or even
with meteorites, please educate me on how it could
work. I just don't see how with physical laws it can.
Unless MAYBE (and I am being charitable again) two
rocks greatly different in composition might be
distinguished by the amplified differences in field
they make on the plate, like meteoric iron and quartz.

Perhaps this type of device (diagrams get around) is
what the gentleman used to try to find "meteorites".
If he started to find real meteorites, then, well,
that's the clincher.

Francis Graham
Received on Wed 08 Aug 2007 03:32:15 PM PDT