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"History is just
people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 358......October 2025 Published
since 1985 for clients and contacts of ABQ Communications Corporation, the
fuzzy focus of The ABQ Correspondent is "the impact of
new technology on society." If you'd like to receive
email notification when each monthly issue is posted, please let us
know. correspo at swcp dot com
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JUST IDLE OBSERVATIONS An article in Quanta Magazine reports very entertainingly on a gathering of physicists to recognize the hundredth anniversary of 22-year-old Werner Heisenberg’s initiation of the field of Quantum Physics. He’d gone to the windswept island of Helgoland in hope that the sea breezes would reduce the effects of his allergies, and this downtime gave him the chance to pull together thoughts on odd observations physicists were reporting. The paper he wrote has stirred interest and controversy ever since. In 2025, some 300 physicists…most of the big names in quantum physics…gathered to celebrate the birth of their field, and debate what it’s all about. These folks mostly know one another, as Heisenberg knew the likes of Einstein, Bohr, and Schrödinger. It’s a small community of sometimes very cranky people who have the interest and intellectual tools necessary to figure out what the others are talking about…and this brings us to another surprising player involved with Heisenberg. As the years rolled by, Heisenberg became the lead physicist in the Nazi effort to create an atomic bomb…and at one point in 1944 (late in WWII), the American OSS assigned an agent to attend a lecture by Heisenberg, with instructions to kill him if he said anything that sounded like real progress on A-bomb development. That agent, Moe Berg, a former professional baseball catcher with 14 years in the big leagues, was an improbable choice for the task, and one may wonder how the heck he managed to attend a lecture by Heisenberg during the war. Well, the lecture was in neutral Switzerland, attended by the old gang of physicists who all knew each other. Berg was a very intelligent, educated, if not very well focused guy whose primary feature was gregariousness (in several languages). He knew and was liked by most everybody he encountered, and he went out of his way to make friends. Of course he was welcome at a lecture on physics in Zurich. He loved baseball. (In 1934, he went with an all-star team including Babe Ruth and Lou Gerhig on a goodwill tour of increasingly belligerent, baseball-crazy Japan. While there he took tourist photos of military installations.) No, he didn’t shoot Heisenberg, but the story is intriguing. How about the limited number of folks in narrow disciplines like physics today…how personal are the relationships, how tight the connections, how casual the contacts? Surely people haven’t changed fundamentally in the last hundred years. Who’s lined up to shoot whom? …AND MAYBE A LITTLE LESS IDLE An associate
passed along this unsettling demo of a robot
with the question, “If this is for real, what is next?” The critter is
a small (compared to the pioneering Boston Dynamics version) robot
dog. It’s fast, multitalented, strong, tough,
and long-running (I think they refer in one place to walking twenty miles
on a charge and in another to operating for 3+ hours). This
particular demonstration doesn’t make an issue of AI, but one can believe
that developers are working feverishly to make the thing smart. The
tasks an intelligent system such as this might perform are hard to imagine
beyond a few, but in the bottom-up tradition, just fooling around to see what
happens, we’ll surely be discovering and implementing applications that
will curl your hair. This activity cannot (never could) be “regulated,”
so we may prepare for unpleasant as well as welcome and helpful surprises.
Some years ago, an aeronautical friend retiring from his situation decided
he’d like to get into the “drones” field, and was looking for a point of
entry. Some of us suggested that he concentrate on counter-drone
technology. He didn’t, but is happily working on flying machines in
another way. Maybe it would be generally helpful if some talented folks
wanting to get into robotics found a way to apply those talents in
developing counter-smart-robot technology.. Item: For no particular reason, it recently seemed like a good idea to find out where the word “tabloid” came from. We’ve used the term for years, referring the small format newspaper. The word seemed be related to “tablet.” Are we talking about a pill…a small slate…what? It turns out that “Tabloid” was originally a trademark, dating from 1891 that did indeed relate to compressed pills. The association of the term with stories of crime, violence, and scandal seems just to be coincidental. The publishers of the early small-sized newspapers competed with their large-format rivals by sensationalizing most everything they reported on. They didn’t originate yellow journalism, but they have pretty much specialized in it, hence “the tabloid press.” Item: The term “solar
power” in this era automatically brings to mind shiny panels (probably too
dusty) that convert energy from the sun into useful electricity…but people
have been using mirrors and lenses to focus the sun’s energy where it’s
wanted to heat things up…indeed, sometimes vaporize materials with that heat.
More often, the heat is moderated to cook food. Here’s a
nifty, practical system to cook with solar energy. Item: When a friend commented recently about asking Management for a second desk in a workspace, without much hope of getting it, I pointed out that a practical desk can be assembled in jigtime from four orange crates and a door. Well, no, I guess not these days, though much of our just-married furniture employed orange crates. (Dimestores like Woolworth’s and Kresge’s even sold fabric covers for orange crates that converted them into not-quite-so-crude-looking cabinets that seemed acceptable as a dressing table.) Orange crates aren’t made of wood now, but sturdy cardboard. In olden times, an orange crate was made of eight pieces of pine board, each a couple of feet long, 4.5 inches wide and a quarter-inch thick, which made the sides, bottom, and top of the crate. The ends were 12” x 12” pine board about 5/8” thick, and a third such panel was centered in the crate. that’s a bunch of good DIY construction material. If you disassembled a crate carefully you could save even the 1” nails, straightening them when necessary, for re-use. Orange crates were not just protective carriers of fruit; they were an important technical resource… like wire clothes hangers…for those who couldn’t afford to visit lumber yards. Grocery stores were happy to let you carry them away at no expense to them. A minor note: 12-inch vinyl records are reportedly coming back into favor, but be aware that those records in their covers don’t stand upright inside an orange crate, they’re a smidge too big. My distant friend can’t currently find wooden orange crates to make a desk, though I have maybe twenty of them in the garage, hoping to turn them into cash one of these years. …and by the way For the last few years, the online operations (many and varied) the small technical company I’ve been working with have been supported by Clear Guidance Partners, headquartered in Austin TX. I have been the happy beneficiary of their first-rate services; when I have a computer mystery that one of my grandkids can’t solve, I give GCP a holler. They hop on, and fix whatever it is quickly, efficiently, and cheerfully (some of their folks even start laughing when they realize it’s I calling with a DBOS problem (Dumb-Bunny-On-System). Just coincidentally, when someone asked them to recommend an ISP in Albuquerque, they suggested Southwest Cyberport…our ever so patient ISP since about 1995. The good guys seem to find each other. _____________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE
PAST This piece
from 1996 is brought to mind by current speculation
(and claims) that “anti-gravity”, if that’s a good name
for it, has been achieved, and is in practical use. WHAT GOES UP An intriguing article by Hans Christian
von Baeyer in the March 96 DISCOVER discusses
the difficulty of measuring absolute gravity, G (not g, which has more to do with inertia). Gravity is not only a
rather weak force, difficult to separate from other forces operating
simultaneously, but we have no theoretical value for gravity against which to
compare the results of empirical measurements. When measurements by different teams disagree (and they do,
significantly) we’ve no comforting way to guess who is most nearly right. In
that, gravity is different from other forces with which physicists
commonly deal. Interesting. Brings to mind an observation of Iben’s. “If somebody asks for a useful new
invention” (people did ask Dr. Browning for useful inventions, and he was
often able to oblige), “I ask if he
has a problem that he hopes to solve with an invention. People usually
have a hard time thinking of such problems. ‘Well, for example, if you let go of your coffee cup in
midair, does it drop to the floor and break?’ Yes, it does, but people don’t think of that as a problem
to solve, just a situation to avoid. If they thought about it
differently, they might conceivably do something about it.” He didn’t have a
suggestion for solving that particular problem; indeed, he commented once
that if anti-gravity were possible,
some living things would probably have evolved to take advantage of it,
and he wasn’t aware of anything that had done it. Larry Bellinger once gave
me a plausible argument that gravity
is a push, not a pull. I wish I could remember the argument, but I take solace in the idea that other
people have trouble with gravity, too.
Much of the
speculation has to do with the propulsion of
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), if there are
such things.* Speaking from
my firm base of technical ignorance and lack of
information from “insiders” all I can do is pass along
gossip. One major subject of gossip is a chap named Townsend Brown, who did a lot of work for
interesting organizations, and who may have cracked
the problem of manipulating gravity in useful
ways. A few years ago, after people had speculated
that some Boeing aircraft made use of modulated
gravity technology. Boing finally denied it, and one
television news commentator said with satisfaction,
“at last the Scientific Silly Season is over.”
Somehow, neither the denial nor the comment was
reassuring. Beats me…and my uncertainty is tinged by
another observation of Iben’s: “The point is not to go
from here to there, but to stop being here, and start
being there.” He did not elaborate. *Yeah, well...I’ve had two potential UFO
sightings, neither very impressive. The better one was a big
vehicle headed straight up as we drove northwest in the San
Fernando valley maybe sixty years ago. It was a rocket being
launched from Vandenberg AFB, exciting, but not a legit UFO.
The other sighting was in early October 1957. Russia’s
Sputnik satellite had been orbited on the fourth of that month,
and we were told that it would be visible in the San
Francisco Bay Area, crossing the sky in the southeast just at dusk.
Some hundreds of thousands of people were outside early
evening to see that worrisome demonstration of Russian technology. From
our front yard in San Mateo. I could see lots of
neighbors in their yards. Before Sputnik came along, a handful of
lights …maybe 7 or 8..., just points like stars, silently
moved overhead from northeast to southwest. They all went the same
direction at the same pace, not holding a formation, but
weaving as they traveled steadily in a loose cluster. I could
hear neighbors complaining that it wasn’t very nice of somebody
to be sending up a bunch of lanterns to distract people hoping
to look at history. The lights moved out of sight. Sure enough, Sputnik was soon clearly visible as
a bright dot, moving steadily and scarily. Just after it
passed, a cluster of seven or eight lights (same ones?) moved across
the sky from southwest to northeast, this time in rigid
formation. They moved steadily until they were out of sight. The newspapers (remember newspapers?) next
morning were full of discussion of those lights. The
authorities calmed concerns by pointing out that people aren’t often all
outside at dusk, looking up, and we didn’t realize that we were
seeing a flock of birds, lighted from below by streetlights. Oh.
Must have been pretty big birds to be visible simultaneously in
San Mateo and Berkeley. I believe that. Sure I do. Nothing since, and that’s just fine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917 See on Amazon __________________________________________________
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