... OR THE LACK OF IT

Only two years ago one could find articles explaining why atmospheric absorption would preclude particle beams. These forecasts (as near as we can tell from the open literature) have proved wrong; not because any physical laws have been broken, but for lack of experience with an energy threshold where other factors come into play.

There have been other such cases when just a little experimental physics, or the lack of it, considerably affected warfare.

The secret invention of radar was not only decisive in the Battle of Britain (the entire tiny RAF fighter force always intercepted the Luftwaffe squadrons wherever they chose to approach), but it also revealed to the British that very short waves will propagate well beyond the horizon, rudely overruling contemporary physics and engineering textbooks. Again, no physical laws were broken, but the texts had failed to take account of a tiny, but decisive (refractive) effect of the atmosphere. The British used this effect in 1941 to bomb Berlin at night, through clouds, for unknown to the Germans, Berlin (and Western Europe) was covered by a navigational net spun from signals emitted by radio beacons in Britain. They were received on board British aircraft by the grandfather of today's electronic navigation, the "G-Box," tuned to the then stunningly high frequency of about 50 MHz (the band of today's commercial TV channels).

The G-Boxes had a detonator to destroy their most secret ingredients on impact, but it failed to explode on one of the planes shot down, and the Germans appointed a commission of top experts to investigate the puzzle.

"We couldn't make head or tail of it," one of its members told this writer some years after the war. "But we unanimously concluded that it was something for training purposes only, because it was easy enough to determine the frequency to which the receiver was tuned, and we all 'knew' that such short waves could not possibly propagate beyond the transmitter's horizon.