MARINOV: A NOTE FOR THE RECORD

© Harold Aspden, 1997

Research Note: 15/97: September 12, 1997

IN MEMORIAM

Having heard via Internet channels of the untimely decease of Stefan Marinov and later, in the September 1997 issue of New Energy News, read his 'SCIENTIFIC TESTAMENT', a declaration written before he committed suicide on July 15, 1997, I feel compelled to put on record a scientific commentary concerning one of the subjects in which he had a particular interest.

Marinov suffered from frustration brought about by the lack of interest by the scientific community in the field of endeavour to which he was committed, namely the regeneration of physics accompanied by the recovery of energy from the hidden world that the modern physicist cannot begin to envisage.

Marinov's final message, as published in New Energy News, reads:

After having walked so many years on the thorny way of truth, I became tired. My books and papers are my scientific testament.

I hope that soon the absolute (Newtonian) space-time concepts, which I restored by numerous experiments and by simple mathematical theory, will be accepted by the scientific community as those corresponding to physical reality.

I hope the perpetual motion machines, of which I constructed many prototypes without closing the energetic circuits, will successfully be built by other people.

And if my achievements in space-time physics, in electrodynamics and in the domain of the violation of the laws of conservation will be silenced also after my death, by leaving this world, I can only repeat the eternal words: feci quod potui.

Graz, Austria, 15 July 1997
Stefan Marinov

*****

We owe it to Stefan Marinov to pursue the issues raised by Erwin Schneeberger in his Letter of 12 August, 1997 published on p. 2 of the September, 1997 issue of New Energy News. Just before his death, Marinov asked Erwin Schneeberger, also of Graz, in Austria, to store his stock of books, an action which caused Schneeberger to remark: "But I could not realize his final intention." This was, indeed, a very sad situation.

The final paragraph of Schneeberger's letter reads:

There have been two disappointments for Stefan, his inertial-force driven vehicle is an artifact, and Ampere's formula seems to be correct, as he realized from some experiments he made with Dr. Pappas in Greece, about two weeks before his death. I have gotten to know Stefan on my experiments with PAGD-devices of the Correas, of Canada. As my efforts to replicate their system clearly show, that there is no generation of electrical energy, I would ask you if you have any knowledge of a successful verification.
Sincerely, Erwin Schneeberger

The above letter was presumably addressed to the Editor of New Energy News.

In the light of these comments, I call upon Dr. Pappas to disclose what he has discovered concerning Ampere's law. I have no doubt that we will hear more about the Correa technology in due course.

However, I wish here to add a few historical observations concerning Stefan Marinov and his research interests.

[1] I first heard of Marinov many years ago when he discovered my book 'Physics without Einstein'. He wanted to come to England to visit with 'my publisher' with a view to having his work published in the same way. Being the 'publisher' myself, ostensibly detached because I had a senior management position in IBM and deemed it prudent to operate that venture under my wife's maiden name as her business, I had to decline interest in the efforts of an enthusiastic Marinov. He had declared his intention to earn a Nobel Prize for his experimental discovery on speed of light anisotropy tests.

[2] It was Dr. Pappas who, at about that time, visited me to discuss what I had published in that book. Pappas was still a Research Student at London University, his thesis subject being Einstein's Theory. After our meeting Dr. Pappas took a strong interest in what I had to say about the law of electrodynamics. He became alienated towards Einstein's theory but did see his Ph.D. efforts to successful conclusion, thereafter mounting his own research interest in electrodynamic force law. Dr. Pappas made positive reference to my law of electrodynamics when he was called upon to write the text for a section on electrodynamics in the Greek (Larousse) version of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

[3] Later Peter Graneau became interested in this electrodynamic topic and we met on occasion when he visited the University of Southampton and thereafter when I visited his laboratory at M.I.T. and witnessed his exploding wire experiment. Peter Graneau has held tenaciously to his opinion that Ampere's law holds valid, agreeing with me that the Lorentz force law is inadequate but going expressly counter to my interpretation of the force law, mine being the version that leads directly to the form of the law of gravitation.

[4] I believe it was Dr. Pappas who may have stimulated Marinov's interest in the anomalies confronting the law of electrodynamics. I recall that Marinov announced a conference to be held in Bulgaria at a resort on the Black Sea (Varna). It was to be a major event establishing the case refuting Einstein's theory based on Marinov's experimental discovery. Ostensibly it looked as if this had academic backing and the official blessing of the Bulgarian state authorities. Such was my interest in the disproof of Einstein's theory that I decided to attend. Upon enquiry at the London agency concerned with travel to Bulgaria I found that they had no knowledge of such an international conference. That resulted in me changing my plans and it was just as well, because almost on the eve of that occasion it was officially cancelled. However, Dr. Pappas had not heard of that cancellation and he 'attended' and, as a result, which included a diversion to Sofia, got to know Stefan Marinov quite well.

[5] I have, in the light of those events, been interested in what Stefan Marinov was doing and have encountered him at various conferences, one memorable one being in Bologna, Italy, but in more recent times in connection with the Denver, Colorado, Symposia on New Energy.

[6] Always, Stefan was alive with ideas and, although I knew he had once threatened to kill himself if he did not command the attentions of the Editor of the journal Nature, John Maddox, and have something of his published in that journal, I could not have imagined he really would eventually sacrifice his life in such a way.

[7] We must, out of respect for what Marinov was striving to achieve, go further in our efforts to bring enlightenment and clarification into that Marinov's field of endeavour. There will be enough of us carrying forward in the efforts to probe the prospects for a New Energy Technology, but only a few of us who will strive to clear up the questions concerning the law of electrodynamics. Therefore, it is on this latter theme that I will remount my own efforts to expose the issues governing that controversial subject.

[8] To advance that research we should be wary about measuring force, per se, and look more to the energy shed by the aether in its inductive interaction with the flow of electric current. Force measurement can involve the aether indirectly as the seat of the inductive back-EMFs which can assert balancing forces and thereby deceive the experimenter into thinking that the force balance arises exclusively in the circuit interaction. Such is the fallacy of Ampere's law, just as the imbalance is the fallacy of the Lorentz force law. The real question which leads on to the New Energy theme is whether the aether, in getting into the act, can ever release energy over and above that we supply to excite the circuit reactions.

[9] To summarize some of my own conclusions:

(i) I do not understand how anyone can prove that Ampere's law of electrodynamics is correct by performing measurements on electron currents which flow around a closed circuit.

(ii) I am aware that current flow around a closed circuit, including an electron discharge across an air gap, can involve forces tending to expand the circuit. That arises from the energy of the self-inductance, which, acting in an energy adjustment sense opposite to that of electric potential, tends to increase, meaning that if the circuit or an arc discharge in that circuit can expand, it will, because that increases the self-inductance. Here I have in mind the ingenious tuning fork experiments reported by Thomas E. Phipps in the September/October issue of Galilean Electrodynamics, v. 6, pp. 92-97. On the face of it such experiments can, it seems, disprove the Lorentz force law and show that forces in line with current flow are present, but far more is needed before the Ampere law can be said to be proved. This applies not only to tests using a.c. in which an electrode has freedom of movement, but also to moderately rigid closed circuits subjected to a sudden d.c. high current impulse, where the tug-of-war between the inductive back EMF and the forward EMF can tear the wire conductor into small pieces. This is known as the exploding wire phenomenon but it is not the same scenario as that on which the derivation of the Ampere law of electrodynamics is based, namely steady-state current flow around a specific circuit path. Once change of self-inductance or mutual inductance gets into the act, then there is cause for setting up a force acting along the path of current flow and, even though there is no net magnetic flux change in linking a closed circuit, there can be such forces set up in different segments of that path, that is even though no net EMF is generated around the circuit as a whole. (See the experiment reported at p. 120 by reference to Fig. 9 in my book 'Modern Aether Science'). Concerning the exploding wire phenomenon, a subject championed by Peter Graneau, I draw attention to two papers of mine, abstracted in the Bibliographic section of these Web pages under references [1985c] and [1987c], namely Physics Letters, v. 107A, pp. 238-240 (1985) and v. 120A, pp. 80-82 (1987), where I explain how inductance effects set up the rupturing forces involved.

(iii) I am also aware of attempts to prove something about the action of an isolated current circuit element by replacing it notionally by a different physical form which is more amenable to treatment, whether by theory or experiment. These involve substitution by what amounts to something providing a closed current circuit, as by replacing a current circuit element by a small magnet, for example. Here, the internal currents that develop the north and south poles of the magnet are invariably closed electron loops or circuits and, inevitably, that means that no out-of-balance force action is possible for interactions involving circuit current elements represented in this way. However, the most notorious example here is that of Einstein, who, by transformations based on the Lorentz pattern attempted to say that a discrete charge in uniform motion could be replaced by what amounted to a current filament of infinite length, which is equivalent to path closure, thereby deriving the Lorentz version of the law of electrodynamics and eliminating from that law the relevant force term which gives action along the line of current flow.

(iv) Ideally, to test a law of electrodynamics one needs to confine electron flow to an incomplete but well-defined and unchanging circuit path and avoid rate of change of current because that implies inductance effects which are not representative of the steady-state Amperian circuit current element.

(v) I am aware of only two experiments that satisfy such criteria. One is the famous Trouton-Noble experiment which dates from 1903. Its mis-interpretation by Lorentz in 1904 and by Einstein in 1905 put the evolution of physical science on the ruinous course that has given us our present problems. The other experiment is that of the circuit involving a cold-cathode discharge in which a segment of the circuit through the discharge tube involves current carried by heavy positive ions, rather than merely electrons. That is where the anomalous cathode reaction forces began to show in the early decades of the 20th century, but those anomalies were duly ignored by those more concerned with the mathematics of so-called four-space, thereby leaving open the scope for the debate I initiated on the subject in the 1960s.

(vi) I should also mention an important experiment performed by Pappas and Vaughan, Physics Essays, v. 3, 211 (1990), which involved an antenna in which the current oscillations should, by the Lorentz force law, have produced deflection about a suspension, whereas none was observed. This indicated that the electrodynamic forces between the arms of the antenna were balanced, a result inconsistent with the Lorentz force law but consistent with the Ampere law or the one which I have advocated for many years. It was not a steady-state current experiment and could not prove the Ampere law but it did disprove the Lorentz force law.

(vii) I should add here that when I approached the problem of the law of electrodynamics I had in mind two situations, the interaction between two charges in motion, given that the charges had the same mass, and the situation for which those charges had different mass. A system with two or more electrons following each other around a closed path typifies the first situation, whereas an electron circuit interrupted by a segment in which a positive ion captures an electron to move together across that segment in a neutral entity typifies the second situation, the heavy positive ion flow across that segment completing the current circuit. I could not 'invent' extra charges to cater for situations where electrodes vibrate, as applies if you do a.c. tests on such circuits keeping a.c. current amplitude constant. There the number of electrons traversing a section of the circuit in one second will be the same for a specified current, but if the circuit path has been allowed to extend then you must have added more such charge carriers to the system as a whole, as by ionization of an air gap. You do not have the scenario where you are dealing with forces between a specific set of charges constituting the system of the circuit under consideration. Ampere was dealing with a d.c. current flow in a closed circuit of definite form and, though he knew that there were forces acting on that circuit at right angles to current flow, he could only make assumptions concerning such forces as might exist along the current flow path. He assumed that action and reaction had to be equal as between any two circuit elements and thereby denied that the aether could assist in assuring that balance of action and reaction in force terms by providing an energy buffer which allowed a two-way transfer of energy between the circuit and the aether.

(viii) I hold that Ampere's law has to be wrong for the simple reason that my feet stay beneath me when I walk over the ground instead of treading air as I float off into space! You see, we 'know' that there just has to be an explanation of the force of gravity rooted in electrodynamics. Ampere's law offer no such roots. It does retain action and reaction balance and the central force that goes with such balance, but the force can vary in strength as between two charges separated by the same distance, given that there is no feature built into the law that can bring about order precluding such variation.

(ix) I hold the opinion that to get energy to transfer from electrons moving in their circuits in electrical machines and deploy into enveloping space, which is what we see with the process of induction, there has to be an out-of-balance force tolerated by a general form of electrodynamic law but one which can be eliminated from that law under certain circumstances, namely those pertaining to the gravity condition. The latter is a condition in which the Neumann potential, a component of the Lorentz force law or of my law of electrodynamics, but not featuring, as such, in the Ampere law, involves current elements flowing mutually parallel. I first wrote about this in 1959, but a convenient reference to a way of deriving my law, showing also how mass plays a role in that action, is Physics Letters, v. 111A, pp. 22-24 (1985).

(x) I know that if the Neumann potential were to be zero by virtue of current elements being set in a mutually orthogonal configuration, then there would be no electrodynamic force at all acting between those current elements. This is important when one comes to understanding the physical basis of the Exclusion Principle which governs the electronic structure of atoms. In short, since all this is offered by my law of electrodynamics, meaning that we can bridge the secrets of gravitation and the atom and have scope for New Energy technology, all linked by that electrodynamic base, I hold firm in asserting that, whatever merit there was in Stefan Marinov's efforts, the onward path is now clear. If, as Erwin Schneeberger implies, Marinov became depressed two weeks before his death by having realized that Ampere's formula was correct owing to experiments jointly performed with Dr. Pappas, then that is, indeed, a sad circumstance. I cannot believe that such an experiment to prove Ampere's law can have sound foundation and await disclosure of details of that experiment by Dr. Pappas.

Harold Aspden
September 12, 1997