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Dr. Petr Beckmann
This issue of Access to Energy memorializes Professor Petr Beckmann who died on August 3, 1993. He is remembered by his colleagues, readers, and friends in words that they have written since his death. Hundreds of such statements have been written and several meetings have been scheduled in his honor. We are publishing here only a few of these statements. Also included are some selected illustrations from the past 20 years of Access to Energy. These exemplify the messages that Petr Beckmann communicated to his readers. Those 240 monthly issues contain a remarkable education in the scientific and political issues of our generations. Dr. Beckmann greatly admired Sir Isaac Newton who, near the end of his own life, said: Even though most of that ocean of truth remains undiscovered today, the pebbles and shells of Isaac Newton, his colleagues, and his successors have given us an understanding of natural beauties that surpasses all previous human efforts. They have also made possible great increases in the quantity and quality of human life and great decreases in the amount of human suffering. Petr Beckmann's scientific work is in the best tradition of the world's finest scientists and engineers. I am certain that Isaac Newton would be pleased to have Petr Beckmann as a professional colleague. More than that, Isaac Newton would undoubtedly be grateful to Petr Beckmann for his work against the enemies of the human mind that today threaten all that has been built in the centuries since Isaac Newton led a revolution in the effectiveness of human thought and progress. Petr Beckmann was a man of unusual character and integrity. Those who knew him personally were fortunate indeed. Petr Beckmann was also an effective soldier in the successful battle to defeat Nazism and Communism, two of the more pernicious tyrannies of his time. Dr. Beckmann is remembered most widely, however, as one of the very few articulate and capable scientists who were willing to make the many personal and professional sacrifices necessary to effectively defend our civilization from the anti-science, antirational, anti-freedom, anti-human enemies who seek to destroy it. We have very few such people and still fewer with Petr Beckmann's ability. We cannot afford to lose even one. His death could allow significant progress by those who are enemies of science, technology, and human freedom. This could be the result, but, as Petr Beckmann would say, "Please don't let it happen." The memorials below begin with a text written and delivered at the August 1993 DDP meeting by Dr. Edward Teller. As Dixy Lee Ray and Lou Guzzo said in the dedication of their book, Environmental Overkill: "One of the most profound obligations of scientists is to provide factual information about basic science, technology, the environment, and human health in a manner that can be understood by policy makers and the public at large. We feel this obligation very deeply, as do many of our fellow scientists. But too few have the unique talent required for this very special kind of communication. Paramount among those who do are two great men—both physical scientists. "One is Petr Beckmann and the other is Edward Teller. "Although these two accomplished scientists have had strikingly different careers, each in his own specially, they share many attributes. Both are foreign-born; they chose America. Like so many adopted citizens, they display an unabashed patriotism that reminds us native-borns that, whatever her faults, America is a unique and wonderful country, one that continues to be receptive to good science. "Through their research and writing, Dr. Beckmann and Dr. Teller have demonstrated their passionate devotion to truth in science and their unshakable belief in its remarkable power to improve the lot of human beings. Above all, they have used their considerable skills to make complex science understandable to the common man. "For all these reasons—and with profound gratitude—we dedicate this work to Petr Beckmann and Edward Teller.""I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
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DR. EDWARD TELLER
I want to start by reading some of a very old friend's words, about himself and about some problems. Whatever the date of this is, I think it is January 1990. Quote from Access to Energy by Petr Beckmann: "When my bladder was removed five years ago, the prostate gland should have been removed with it. But the doctor, who has since died, left a piece of it in by oversight. It has now also turned cancerous and has to come out on the 21st of December. I plan to survive the operation, because I have a lot more trouble to make." Well, thank God he did, and we all wish it would have been ten times longer. But to come to the point, untreated prostate cancer ultimately spreads to the bones and until the advent of nuclear medicine, there was no easy way to find out whether it had spread to the bones, for they would simply appear opaque to x-rays regardless of whether they contained cancer cells. But, one can use a radioisotope, technetium, that is, an element that does not occur naturally, but only as a product of fission. Technetium injected into the blood will collect in the bones, especially where they contain cancer cells. This tracer, you probably all know this, emits gamma rays, and the position of the sources can be monitored. A computer program then integrates the measurement into an image in which radiation-emitting technetium shows up. Cancer cells are darker spots in the already dark bones. Now, Petr does something which I don't think anybody has done before, he published his bones, right in Access To Energy. Reading this reminded me of the spirit of our friend, of the way he tried, and practically always succeeded, to remain in touch with reality concerning his own disease as well as anything else. The other thing I want to read is connected with the main purpose of Access To Energy. (I'm quite sure it is also the main purpose why all of us are here today.) He's talking here about a stunning blow to the nuclear industry: a decision that individual states can forbid nuclear reactors for economic reasons, but not for health reasons, because that is reserved for the Federal Government. There is a debate whether that's good or bad. It is claimed that it is good for the industry because of the restriction that the states cannot forbid reactors for reasons of health. "Quite true," says Petr, "but only in the sense that corns are not at all bothersome if your feet have been amputated. And then a supreme court decision is expected." Petr has no great confidence in that because, and I quote, "The supreme court is supremely incompetent. In matters of common sense, it is supremely obtuse. Far from safeguarding our freedom of research, all branches of the government have lately joined in the witch hunt and repression of technology." That is what Access to Energy is about, what the great contribution of Beckmann is about, and which I see with pleasure, we are pursuing. In defense, in energy production, questions of insecticides, and health questions, we need the support of technology, and we need adherence to truth. And here I want to make a very special point about truth. It has been said, perhaps even in this meeting, and it is a quote which I wish were correct, but it isn't. "Truth does not need support because it will win in the end." I don't believe it. I want to make a confession. I do not know what truth is. I know only this much—that I am addicted to it. That it is my religion to seek truth without knowing whether it is there. After it is found, sometimes you can be very sure, particularly in mathematics and maybe in physics, that actually it is there. And now, for a few minutes, I want to talk about a difficult subject. I told you I don't know enough about truth except that I'm dedicated to it, and by that I have admitted that it is conceivable that I maybe wrong in some things. And, what is worse, it is even conceivable that Petr might have been wrong about some things. I'm sure, as sure as I can be, that questions of defending technology, talking about nuclear energy, talking about the exaggerations concerning pollution, he has not been wrong. For 20 years, certainly for longer than most of us, he has been supremely worried about the witch hunt directed against technology. That was even before the present situation. I am learning, to a great extent from Dixy Lee Ray's new book, that on Environmental Overkill, we may be spending a trillion dollars a year .....twice as much as our President is promising to save in five years by his tax policy to reduce our indebtedness. So, if there is a simple explanation of our economic woes, it might conceivably be precisely in the Environmental Overkill. In another respect, I am about as certain as I can be that Petr Beckmann has been in error when he opposed the theory of special relativity of Einstein. Now I want to qualify that statement, circumscribe it, define it, and make recommendations. Relativity appears to be a tremendous step away from common sense. The title of my latest book is Conversations On The Dark Secrets of Physics. The title is a fraud; the book is not about nuclear explosives, it is about relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the dark secrets because the dark secret is not that which you don't tell, but that which you don't understand. In the very beginning of the book, I talk about special relativity in which I happen firmly to believe. And I'll talk a little more about it. I struggled with it when I was 18 years old. I failed to understand it until I found a formulation that the time interval between two events appeared different to different people. Einstein knew that and explained it, but the new emphasis of Minkowski was to find a simple quantity which remains the same for all observers. It has been said, and it is true, that relativity is a misnomer. The important thing is not what is relative, but what is absolute. In our old concepts, time intervals have been absolute. In our new concept, a little more complicated, but not much more, a combination between time and space is absolute. And what that means, is that time and space are much more closely interlinked than was known in the past. That is really what is meant by four dimensional space. Not merely that an event is characterized by four numbers: how far to the right, how far forward, how far up, and at what time. The new thing which is really the center of Einstein's relativity, that makes the structure wry simple is this: out of these quantities, you can compose something that does not change, that is absolute. While Einstein was right in physics, he was systematically and thoroughly wrong in his politics. Except in the one important special point: he did not like Hitler. And that, of course, was mutual, and in that, we agree with him. I'm sorry, I think our friend Petr Beckmann did not see the point that Einstein was clearly right in his ideas of 1905 which he later called special relativity. Then Einstein went further. While he discovered special relativity in a few weeks, he worked out general relativity in a few years. And that is something incomparably more complicated. I'm afraid I'm a little sympathetic even to abstract truths. And Einstein's general relativity had a few remarkable successes. But I'm as sure of special relativity as I am of anything in physics. General relativity has been verified in every case where it can be applied, but the cases are few. In general relativity, the four dimensional space, God help us, is curved, whatever that means. Now you know, when a two dimensional surface is curved. That you can see on the surface of the Earth because you can see that the shortest path from the North Pole to the South Pole is to the south along any of the longitudes. This is quite different from a plain two dimensional surface where there is only one shortest path between two points. We can see two dimensional curvature because it's curved in the third dimension. But what does it mean if three dimensional space, and even more horribly, four dimensional time space is curved? That you won't understand very readily. Still general relativity agrees with observations in a remarkable fashion. Concerning special relativity, I would like to suggest that we be very careful because continuing Beckmann's work, we have a job. We have a job to stop the witch hunt, and if we are proven wrong, on a point as simple as special relativity, then I think our chance of being helpful in the really important business will be gone. Now, let me propose a way in which I am quite sure Petr himself would have been satisfied to submit his theory (that he prefers to Einstein's) to a test. The reason why Einstein proposed relativity was the well-known Michelson-Morley experiment. Light was supposed to be propagated through a substance, people called it ether. Now, there was an attempt by Michelson and others: if there is such a substance, one may measure the change of the ether wind due to the difference of the motion of the Earth in summer and winter. You did that by sending out a light beam and reflecting it, and measuring the total time taken for the return journey. If there was an ether wind, you went with it half the way and against it the other half. Therefore, the first order effects canceled out, but the second order effects remained because the impediment of going against the wind turns out to be a little more effective than the advantage of coming back with the wind. That resulted in a shift in time which Michelson tried to find. But the shift was not there. Einstein explained this by concluding that there is no such thing as an ether and that there is no such thing as an ether wind. This led to his novel ideas and to unexpected consequences which were confirmed in the following decades. Petr Beckmann, in his book, Einstein Plus Two, is making the pleasing assumption to replace ether by the local gravitational field. Light moves with a fixed velocity relative to the local gravitational field. Once you get outside the field of the Earth, light will no longer worry about the Earth, but near the Earth, it will move with the Earth's gravitational field. And that explains the Michelson experiment very nicely. It leads, however, to a different result if you consider the effect of the rotation of the Earth and limit yourself to paths which stay in the gravitational field of the Earth.
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Continued
Now, Petr Beckmann proposes to repeat the Michelson-Morley experiment in this new system within the Earth. But the velocities are 100 times smaller, and because there is a compensation of going forward and going backward, the measurement has to be made 10,000 times (100 2 times) more accurate. My point is that there has been developed in the United States, a system called GPS, Global Positioning System, which uses a number of satellites which send out signals at prearranged times. If I, sitting in an airplane, want to know precisely where I am, I will get these signals with a delay and then by triangulation I can find out where I am. If the signal moves always with light velocity, that would give results that agree with the present design. If the signal moves with a velocity that is a little different from light velocity, relative to the Earth's surface (as suggested by Petr's theory) that would give interesting corrections. So, depending on the detailed discussion of special relativity, at least, we should be prepared to accept or reject "Einstein Plus Two." My fellow physicists on the whole have been very wrong in political matters. In the particular field in which they are working, I a am pretty sure they are right, and they know what they are talking about. But don't believe me. Just be careful in that respect.
Now, let me turn to something that is much more constructive. It is in the line of what I believe should be done. We could make a big contribution in the sense in which Access To Energy is written and in the sense in which you and I would like to see technology develop.
There is a problem with energy, a real problem. Carbon dioxide is the wrong scare. But in the middle of the next century, there are apt to be shortages in fossil fuels. Perhaps a lot more natural gas will be found on the continental slope. But we have available to us nuclear energy which is inexhaustible. Now don't tell me that nothing is inexhaustible, because I know it. By inexhaustible, I mean that if you use the energy from thorium, a very abundant material, particularly in China, in the United States, in Brazil, in India, it will last for a million years, and that is a period in which many other things can change. A million years is a good approximation to "forever," because it's longer than the time during which Homo Sapiens have existed.
But there are two big objections: one I think quite unreal, the other sort of real. Nuclear reactors are unsafe, and nuclear reactors can add to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Well, the lack of safety I don't deny, but I say that nuclear reactors are at any rate safer than coal plants or hydroelectric plants. Where there have been accidents, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, they have been due to human error. Eliminate the human, eliminate the fool, and there indeed you have something that is foolproof. But as long as the fool is there, the proof can never be complete.
The second point, in a way, is more important. How can we prevent misuse of nuclear reactors and proliferation of weapons? We could separate the reactors and human beings. We could load the reactor, and run it without reloading for 30 years. Put the whole thing underground. When the reactor has served long enough so that its components no longer can be considered quite reliable, we will let it melt down into a lump, that will never again be approached by humans. The whole thing may be 300 feet underground. At such depth, we have performed in Nevada many nuclear explosions, and we have found out that even at these much higher activities, radioactivity is contained.
How do I do all of this? Let us put the reactor underground, have a coolant that communicates to surface, and that has to be safeguarded so that no radioactivity can come to the surface. How do I regulate it? The reactor should work more effectively at lower temperatures and less effectively at higher temperatures. Include nuclei which absorb neutrons and tend to interrupt the chain reaction, but absorb neutrons only of very definite energies. Those few neutrons which happen to have that energy win be completely absorbed but neutrons at other energies will not be absorbed. If you raise the temperature, the nuclei will move more rapidly. They will absorb neutrons of other energies as well. So they will be more effective in stopping the chain reaction. That is a well-known technique. There are reactors of that kind, the TRIGA reactor, some modifications of the High Temperature Gas Cooled (HTGC) reactor are examples. Higher temperatures can stop them.
One may then demand more energy by extracting more heat from the coolant. The reactor will run cooler and give more energy. You demand less energy, the reactor will run cooler and will produce less energy. You make it run hot enough, and it will produce no energy. Actually, it will continue to produce some energy because a lot of material has become radioactive, and that produces some heat. When the chain reaction stops, this amounts to a few percent of the full effectiveness of the reactor. Later, it will slowly become less. Once the reactor has been going, it remains a heat source for a long time. So, for the 30 years you have to have your coolant going at a lower rate or at a higher rate. But this is all you are doing: extracting the maximum or the minimum energy which will differ maybe by a factor of 20.
After the reactor has been run long enough so you no longer trust it, you no longer extract heat, close the exits, let the reactor melt down. Try to involve in the melt-down some material like tungsten—that is hard to melt. It melts at very high temperatures, then trickles down into the loose Earth surrounding the reactor. This will make a lump that might be extremely resistant to human efforts at getting close to it. One may be able to show that it will also resist an earthquake. The radioactivity cannot be ejected by anything, except possibly a volcanic eruption at that precise spot or a meteorite which hits just at that point. I'm not saying it's absolutely safe, but I think it's obviously safe as a method of waste-disposal.
Now, where do you get all the material that should go into these reactors? There's a big problem what to do with the fissionable materials from nuclear explosives that are now being dismantled. The answer is: put them into the reactors. I don't want them to serve just for a few years. I want each of them to work without refueling for 30 years. You add a readily available material, thorium which is quite abundant. Thorium will absorb neutrons and turn itself into a very effective supporter of a chain reaction uranium 233.
That material is associated with a strong gamma ray emitter. For this reason, people did not like it because it was hard to handle. Now we don't want to handle it, we want to leave it underground. Anything that makes things harder to handle for possible further use as an explosive, is welcome.
We have an energy problem, particularly if you consider all of the Third World that needs energy, whose people to an increasing extent, are congregating into big cities: Mexico City--24 million, Tehran--14 million. There are more than a dozen in the Third World with populations over five million.
Reactors producing electricity in those places do not even need a substantial distribution system. I think such reactors would be most useful because they do not need special handling knowledge, are not approachable, and are not capable of being misused as a source of nuclear weapons (except if you have the very high technology of remote mining).
Now I want to conclude by objecting to everything I have said about reactors. Petr Beckmann told us that the radioactive materials are very useful to find out what's wrong with us. Do we throw away all this material? I say right now we want to throw it away. In fact, I'm glad to pay this price if that is the only way that I can get reactors at all. But, assume we have done all that. In 500 or a thousand years, most of the radioactivity would decay, very little of it would remain. We need not wait for centuries. In 100 years, we may have found out a lot more about the use of the isotopes. In 100 years, we may find out a great deal how to mine these old reactors and how to use the radioactivity.
Let us think about development far in the future. How much more we shall know at that time about biology, about the uses of these substances. We don't throw these substances away, we leave them in places where for the time being we make them inaccessible. Their roles, their uses, their accessibility will change with time. We can assure everybody that people will not be able to get at these radioactivities unless they are much more clever than we are now. And then let us go out on a limb and try to imagine a world where more knowledge will also be connected with better behavior. If we believe that much, then we can fight the battle for more technology with confidence.
I believe that we should be honest, that truth is an elusive thing, that safety is never complete, but that people are educable in every sense of the word. If that is valid, then our fight to defend technology will succeed.
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S. FRED SINGER
How do I remember Petr—after reading him for two decades and knowing him for the past decade? As a giant—a man of unshakable principle and wide intellectual interests—from science to art—from relativity to music. And not just superficial knowledge, but always a search for deeper understanding—and the ability to share his knowledge. He had the enemies of human progress figured out years ago; rereading his 1973 book Eco-Hysterics and the Technophobes I marvel at his foresight. For delightful scholarship I have appreciated his A History of Pi, in its fourth edition! (There are three Japanese printings, I am informed.) For sheer enjoyment there is his computer program Hum-it, which covers a good part of my classical repertoire. And there is his widely quoted classic The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear. A product of Central Europe, his character forged by the events leading up to World War II, Petr was quintessentially American in advocating the principles of economic and personal liberty. Surely a mark of his greatness must be that he made so many important enemies. But he made even more fiercely loyal friends. Petr knew exactly where he was going: His motto, emblazoned on the masthead of Access to Energy, tells his direction: "Pro-Science, Pro-Technology, Pro-Free Enterprise," which translates into "Pro-Energy, Pro-Capitalism, and Pro-Prosperity with Liberty." It may be that, some day, the world will regard his pioneering critique of the Einstein theory as his greatest contribution. But whether dealing with relativity, nuclear energy, or environmental issues, Petr was forever uncompromising in his passionate pursuit of truth. And that's how I will always remember him.
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GENE K. BRUCE
Dr. Beckmann's capacity to find just the right analogy always served well to dispatch latter day Luddites and quack environmentalists. I have applauded through the years his profound respect for truth, his enthusiasm for detail, and his cheerful willingness to admit the occasional mistake. He taught me that you don't have to be in the majority—only on the side of truth and you'll eventually win.
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JULIAN L. SIMON
Petr's effect upon me was four-dimensional—not in space and time, but in mind and heart. The first dimension—for which he will be remembered longest, perhaps forever—is pure science. His book on error-correction in language excited me greatly. Petr's second dimension for me was scientific instruction in Access to Energy. I depended on him to teach me the crucial science of many vital matters, and he never failed to get it right. Petr's third dimension was as scourge of the environmentalists. Someone named A. A. Hodge said that it is easier to find 20 scientists who will discover the truth than one who will stand up and proclaim that truth when it is unpopular to do so. Petr's will and courage to proclaim the truth were the absolute highest possible. Pete's fourth dimension was as a friend. I came to love him for his willingness to discuss anything and everything, and for his being able to change his mind. He was a great man. As Irene Beckmann says, many will miss him.
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SAM KAZMAN
When I was young I watched Mr. Wizard; when I grew older I read Petr Beckmann. Both men knew how to explain mysterious phenomena. As we grow up, of course, the things that puzzle us change, from why a pencil in a glass of water appears slightly bent, to why truth in the world of politics becomes grossly distorted. One thing that doesn't change, however, is the sheer joy of getting the answer. Dr. Beckmann was a solitary master at explaining both the bending of pencils and the distorting of truth. The joy of reading him is what I will miss most with his passing.
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GEORGE C. ROCHE III
Everyone at Hillsdale College was saddened to hear of Petr Beckmann's passing. He was a great defender of liberty and especially of free inquiry in the field of energy research which he did so much to advance.
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TOM JUKES
More than anyone I have known, Petr Beckmann was a fierce and uncompromising fighter for scientific truth as he perceived it. He was tremendously erudite and articulate. He was a born teacher, he loved explaining the intricacies of physics to his students, the subscribers to Access to Energy. He knew what it was like to live under repressions, and he rejoiced in freedom. His struggle against cancer was monumental and heroic; he refused to give in, and kept going until the very last. We still hear his voice, and we salute his memory. Bureaucrats breed shortages Once, kiddingly, I told Petr that the success of Access to Energy was due to the genius of every member of the staff, editor, researcher, re-write man, promotion manager, office manager, secretary, publisher. I guess you know that Petr worked single handedly! On his own he cleared the minds of thousands of his subscribers and the people within their orbit; by proving what one dedicated man can do, he raised the spirits of all of us. Petr was winning the battle in Nuclear Medicine. Most Health Physicists have almost reversed their position. Luckey's radiation hormesis is beginning to be noticed. France's successful power can no longer be passed over. Petr did not win his battle with the greenies, but at least a few of us know they are liars. A lot more than last year. It took 20 years to achieve full blown radiation hysteria, and we must allow at least 40 to get rid of it. When this occurs in about 2016 AD some engineer-historian is going to say "Thank you Petr" as he starts up another nuclear reactor. Petr Beckmann died on August 3, 1993, at Boulder Community Hospital. He was 68 years old. He was born in Prague in 1924, three years after his parents had helped found the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Beckmann said a couple of years ago that his father, Rudolf was a "mistaken idealist and a very ethical man," and that his mother, Katerina, was a "religious Communist." Neither lived to see the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, an event that (he said) would have mortified his father and pleased his mother. At the outbreak of World War II, Petr's father, who was Jewish and a politically active lawyer, was in danger. The family qualified as refugees and were moved to England in 1939. Despite the German bombing, Petr looked back on his high school years near Birmingham with great affection. He said later that he did not want to return to England, for fear of discovering that hardship had been suffered and victory won only that Punk Rock might triumph. In 1943, he enlisted in a Czech squadron of the Royal Air Force and helped service the then embryonic and secret radar. After the war, Petr returned to Czechoslovakia and enrolled in Prague Technical University where he studied physics and electrical engineering. He also became a member of the Communist Party. By the 1950s, however, he had become strongly antiCommunist. Graduate studies in history tempted him—he had done well at it in England. In the end he stuck to science. He made the right choice, he later said, because under Communism physics could be studied without ideological interference. History could not. His temperament was such that it would have been impossible for him to remain silent as a disbelieving communist historian. As a scientist, it was not so difficult. "You got used to the bad economics," he said of life under Communism. "It takes weeks for you to get your shirt back from the laundry and then it is somebody else's shirt and you don't care much because all the shirts are bad. The telephones don't work and nothing works, and that type of thing you can get used to. The thing I could not live with was the hypocrisy—being told that only we have truly free elections and that in the West it is a sham democracy. We were not allowed to read certain books, and we were periodically called, in a meeting of the whole Institute, to condemn the American imperialists for this, that or the other." Having obtained his Ph.D., Petr joined the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, in Prague, and soon he became head of the Wave Propagation Department. In 1963, as a result of his work on the scattering of electromagnetic waves from rough surfaces, he was invited to become a visiting professor at the University of Colorado. He planned He was appointed a full professor by the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado, and in 1965 he married Irene Muller. Soon they bought their house in the foothills of the Rockies, and anyone who has ever driven up from Boulder to Kelly Road East—a vertical climb of over 1100 feet—will marvel that Petr who would bicycle into Boulder every day to pick up the mail, was still bicycling back up that steep hill as recently as 1991. By then he had undergone cancer operations, and his shinbone was held together by 16 screws as a result of a 1986 bicycling accident on the same road. It was in 1973 that Petr started his newsletter, Access to Energy. In an interview with Karen Reedstrom for Full Context, he gave the following explanation for having done so: "In the early 1970s, I was made more and more nervous by the anti-technology attitude that the Left was developing—that technology is war and so forth. At the time it was phosphates and population control. One day I read an article showing that there was no population explosion. Like everyone else, I had assumed that there was one in the United States. I had read some of Paul Ehrlich's writings and others. Like everybody else, I said, 'Well, it's not my field and he probably knows what he is talking about.' Yet this anti-population business was part of the whole anti-technology anti-science, anti-progress, no-growth complex. So when I found out that the whole thing was a lie, that the fertility rate since 1958 had been dropping as never before, I said, 'If Mr. Ehrlich can walk all over subjects that he doesn't understand, then so can I.'
Energy feeds FREEDOM Bumpbersticker—AtE June 1979
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"So I published a book called Eco-Hysterics and Technophobes, which sold out in six or seven months. When I was ready to put together the second edition I realized that things were changing too fast, phosphates were out of date and something else was coming up instead. So I decided to put out a newsletter and I never republished the book. I looked at what part of science was going to be most important, and yet something that I did understand, and I decided it would be energy. I didn't exactly see
the oil embargo coming, but I did print bumper stickers saying, 'Make America an Arab Sheikdom, Join the Sierra Club.' In fact, I printed those in the summer of 1973, and the embargo came in October. So that's how I started out."The last work that Petr did, in a heroic effort after leaving hospital in early July, was to put out his August 1993 issue of Access to Energy, thereby completing 20 years of publication. Few who received the newsletter (on ideologically inappropriate pink paper), realized that he did not just write it and typeset it, but also printed it on an A.B. Dick 360 press in his basement; folded it, enveloped it and mailed it. He had no employees, and liked to say that an employee is a "paid enemy." (In recent years, an Englishman working on a contract basis did help him with the folding, stuffing and mailing.) Petr also published books and pamphlets, some of which were highly successful and translated into several foreign languages. "I sold 50,000 copies of The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear out of my own basement," he said, and he also published A History of Pi, and a book on language, a subject to which he returned in his final newsletter.
One of his themes was that great historical changes are brought about not by education but by technology. "I think what will happen is the computer will mark one of the great break points in human history, like fire, the agricultural revolution, the printing press, the industrial revolution," he said. "We haven't seen anything yet. I think the computer will eventually abolish hiring and buying of labor by time and will replace it by a system of entrepreneurs who have no employees." Although Beckmann was an admirer of Ayn Rand's ideas, he later criticized her leading disciple, Leonard Peikoff, for saying that if he could gain control of a major philosophy department, he could change the country. Beckmann said that this was comparable to believing that if he could gain control of a major English department, he could change the English language. Technology, not education, was the driving force for change.
His more somber warning was that this change is not inevitable. "We have become so used to progress for the last four or five hundred years that we have forgotten what happened to antiquity and a thousand years of darkness afterward," he said. "You're not guaranteed progress. You may have another
thousand years of darkness if these Greens succeed in killing technology, and they are succeeding. They are driving up the price of everything with fairy stories about the ozone layer. Everybody thinks the ozone layer is disintegrating and we're all going to fry and nuclear power makes women bear two-headed kids. It's nowhere written that progress will have to happen in America, but it can't be stopped in the long run."
He also couldn't help noticing the decline in the quality of the students between 1964 and his early retirement in 1981. "They changed during the Vietnam War, when the leftist professors, trying to shield them from the draft, gave them easy problems and easy grades," he said. Relativism crept in—"everything has two sides and everything is a matter of opinion"—and by the mid 1970s high school graduates knew about relevance and sensitivity, but when they enrolled in engineering "they didn't know what a sine or a cosine was."
As to the future of the US: "I can't forget something that Solzhenitsyn said in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge: maybe the whole thing will be like an eclipse, that Russia will be free and the shadow will move on to the West. Not that Communism will come here—Communism is finished as an ideology. But what is coming here and what is already infecting great masses and certainly the opinion makers is the Green Church."
Petr was conscious of having stood on the shoulders of giants. "I feel like I have taken a lot of stuff for free from people who went before me and I feel an obligation to pass it on," he told Karen Reedstrom. "The two subjects that were given to me were physics and music, personified by Newton and Beethoven." His little book, Musical Musings, expressed gratitude for the joy he experienced all his life from music. As for physics, Beckmann had felt there must be something wrong with Einstein's theory of relativity from the time when he first studied it. Over the years he kept returning to it—"Einsteinitis," he would say to Irene—and after his retirement he set to work in earnest. Einstein Plus Two (1987) took him four years to write, and he felt it was the best he could do "to express my gratitude to Newton."
In response to a famous problem which puzzled the world of physics in the 19th Century, Einstein in 1905 proposed a solution which discarded the absolute character of space and time—what Beckmann called the "alpha and omega of classical physics." This Einstein did in order to preserve the velocity of light as an absolute quantity. Since velocity is merely space divided by time, it occurred to Beckmann that so drastic a step should not be taken if a simpler alternative could be found.
The 19th century problem in physics had been to detect the medium in which electromagnetic waves travel. It was called "ether," but careful measurement had failed to detect it. Einstein posited that it did not exist. In Beckmann's theory, the problem is resolved by assuming that the medium is the local gravitational field. This field varies in density according to its proximity to celestial objects. On the surface of the earth, the local field is that of the earth itself, it is entrained by the earth's translation, but not by its rotation. This leads to the prediction that the "fringe-shift" unsuccessfully sought by Michelson-Morley should in fact exist, but is one ten-thousandth of what they expected to find.
In pursuit of his ambitious goal of restoring physics to its classical foundations, Beckmann in 1989 began publishing a bimonthly journal, Galilean Electrodynamics, once again using his own printing press and his awesome energy. In 1985 he said that he "was beginning to worry that they will fail to crucify me," and his efforts to revise relativity theory have continued to be ignored by the academic world. It is too early to say whether Beckmann's endeavors in this field will be borne out or refuted. Possibly, however, this is where his greatest triumph will lie.
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