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.'
"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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Vol. 21, No. 2
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 21, No. 2 Date: October 01, 1993 04:47 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: Dr. Petr Beckmann
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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