Boyd,

Just replying to you and not to the whole list, as I just don't have time to get into protracted exchanges.  My personal physical condition and that of my beloved wife will simply not permit it at this point, and I am essentially a man whose own race has already been run, and who is just passing on some things to the coming younger generation.

There is a way to not only get at the root cause of the Pioneer anomaly, but also to experimentally show the basis on the laboratory bench.

Gravity is much studied, but not very much at all has been done with antigravity, in spite of GR and other sciences.

The main key to antigravity is the use of negative energy, including negative mass-energy, rather than positive energy and positive mass-energy. The second key is in the accounting and use of the long-unaccounted but present stupendous Heaviside curled energy flow, when it is composed of negative energy. If that component can be pressed into used, then suddenly practical antigravity circuits and systems are possible.

In his electron theory, for one thing Dirac was attempting to dispose of negative energy, but could not do it because he came up with the negative mass-energy Dirac Sea holes which in the normal vacuum are filled with electrons, so that the normal Dirac vacuum has zero extra mass and zero extra charge. But Dirac did not like negative energy, and he directed the theorists and experimentalists away from it by taking the position that the Dirac Sea hole (with the electron lifted out of there) would be observed as a positron. That's ambiguous at best and false at worst. A hole is entirely different from a positron, and as a special source charge its EM fields and potentials are negative energy EM fields and potentials, rather than positive energy fields and potentials as exhibited by the positron.

In thermodynamics, one of the areas already known and recognized to violate the Second Law of thermodynamics is a sudden sharp gradient (in the energy density across a little region of spacetime). E.g., see Kondepudi and Prigogine, Modern Thermodynamics, p. 459 for a listing of some areas that do violate the second law and are widely known to do so.

For one thing, a sharp gradient in the energy density across a small region of spacetime lifts out some of the Dirac electrons from those holes in the Dirac Sea, leaving the empty holes existing and persisting at least momentarily.  And that situation does not appear to have been explored in physics, since the physicists are erroneously prone to immediately substitute a positron for the hole.

To see the difference, take a region of "normal" ambient vacuum, and draw a horizontal line across it to represent the "ambient energy density". If you have a positron, its mass-energy is positive, so all of its mass energy is above the horizontal line. The associated EM fields and potentials that it produces are also above the line in energy density, hence are positive energy fields and potentials.

Now take a normal electron. Again, its mass energy is positive and therefore all above the horizontal line. The associated EM fields and potentials that it produces are also above the "ambient" line in energy density, hence are positive energy EM fields and potentials.

The enormous but unaccounted Heaviside energy flow accompanying the Poynting energy flow from the charge is also comprised of positive energy for the electron and the positron. But it is comprised of negative energy fields for the Dirac hole. Since the Heaviside flow is so enormous (some 10 trillion times the associated and accounted Poynting flow), then this density of real negative energy flow directly involves one in the direction of circuits and systems exhibiting practical antigravity.

Now when you have a positron and an electron meet and the charge aspects annihilate each other, you are left with the summation of the positive energies above the horizontal line, and that energy must remain and be conserved, though it may change in form. So "pair annihilation" by a real positron and an electron does produce a burst of "positive energy" photon energy as the mass-energy converts. No surprise so far, and that is well-known physics. What is not known is the burst of positive energy Heaviside energy flow that is also produced.

But now examine the case where an electron and a hole meet and annihilate each other by annihilating their separation (i.e., by the electron falling into the hole to simply form a section of normal charge-free and mass-free Dirac sea vacuum). The net energy produced is made of two equal components, one of negative energy and the other of positive energy. So the NET energy produced is zero, with the two components being similar to vector components summing to zero. No burst of radiation, no nothing occurs for this kind of annihilation, which IS NOT pair annihilation. The hole simply eats the electron, and both dually remain while individually each "disappears".

I noticed all that while finishing my master's degree in nuclear engineering at Georgia Tech in 1971. I also noticed that, while a Dirac hole (negative mass-energy electron) exists and is persisting, the associated fields and potentials that it produces are below the horizontal line, hence they are negative energy EM fields and potentials.

Hey! Excess positive energy density of space produces one direction of spacetime curvature and positive gravity (attraction). Therefore negative energy density of space produces the opposite direction of spacetime curvature and negative gravity (antigravity, or repulsion). It seemed at the time to me that one ought to be able to experiment with this in terms of detectable antigravity, in actual circuits. But I went immediately to Vietnam, and had no time to pursue the idea.

Then after military retirement at the end of 1975, in the 1980s and on into the early 90s  I worked for some years with Floyd Sweet, the inventor of the vacuum triode amplifier (VTA) (which I personally named). Strangely, that unit had a COP of 1,500,000 and so manipulated a very large energy gradient across its local spacetime! So it meant that it had to be lifting out some Dirac electrons, leaving behind some temporarily persisting holes. From the moment of their inception, these holes produce negative energy EM fields and potentials, spreading at light speed. So very tiny temporal persistence of holes can fill the circuit with flowing negative energy. And that means that one can have antigravity present and manipulate it. Because of the sharp gradient, if one increases the COP to, say, double, then one should materially increase the negative energy and antigravity effect, and one should therefore experimentally detect it.

Further, since the Sweet device used magnetic fields etc., and magnetic field is curled magnetic vector potential, then one is using swirling energy which may indeed interact with the swirling (curled) huge Heaviside energy flow component.

So for the first time there was a chance to actually do an antigravity experiment with the Sweet device, to go after real, practical antigravity.

I convinced Sweet to so the experiment by doubling the output (by doubling the output impedance in series steps, that is easy to do because with negative energy flow every impedance in series along the flow freely converges additional EM negative energy flow from the vacuum into the line of flow propagation, without work. It's a sort of "negative impedance" effect but only for negative energy flow, series impedances, and in line propagation.

Because of my aerospace work conditions, it was impossible for me to be physically there in California for the actual Sweet antigravity experiment, but Sweet performed the experiment in California with me on the phone here in Huntsville, writing down the instrument readings as he did the experiments and announced the readings. He had doubled the available output section from 500 watts to 1,000 watts in 100 watt steps, and that series of additional impedances thus increased the negative energy output and fraction. I had previously back-of-the-envelope estimated that at 1500 watts the unit should levitate. But we dared not go past 1,000 watts, because in a CURVED spacetime one has net magnetic monopoles involved and the deposit of such net magnetic monopoles in curved spacetime inside the magnets can and will cause explosion of the magnets like hand grenades, possibly killing the unwary inventor. Sweet on several occasions did explode his barium ferrite magnets.

At the 1,000 watt limit, the unit had smoothly lost (in steps) 90% of its weight on the bench, by accurate measurement. I plotted the best little weight loss curve one could ever hope for, and there it was. Later I wrote up a crude little paper, placing Sweet's name first since he was the actual inventor (I just designed the experiment; I had nothing to do with inventing the device itself). But the experiment was spectacularly successful.

Shortly thereafter, Sweet was fired at by an assassin with a silenced rifle, at about 200 yards distance. Being old and feeble, Sweet was coming up the steps to his apartment, when he tripped and fell down sprawling. By sheer fate, just as his head moved forward and down in the fall, that bullet snapped right by his ear where his head had just been. That's all that saved his life. We reported it to the FBI, of course, but the would-be assassin was never found. However, it frightened the daylights out of Sweet, since from then on he was called repeatedly during the night, threatened with death and assassination, followed around in the supermarket by powerful and swarthy Arab thugs, etc. With his invalid wife and his own age and feebleness, he was terribly vulnerable. So in abject fear for his life he would never again do anything with the antigravity capability, as he strongly believed he would be immediately killed if he tried.  And I believe he was correct, although I did try to get him to let us bring in two or three Nobelists and their own measurement teams, give them the demo, let them repeat it themselves and examine and measure everything, etc. But that was not to be. Sweet was much to fearful for anything like that. Having since then survived several assassination attempts myself, I fully appreciate his concern.

Years later, Sweet also brought up that antigravity experiment subject again, and we had an interesting discussion. He stated that, when he did that weight loss experiment, he was so completely astounded that he could not let it go at that. Finally, after much moping and agonizing, he decided to throw caution to the wind and just try more load (more impedance, therefore more negative energy and more COP gain, and more Heaviside negative energy curled component). So he added more impedance, ran the experiment again with the unit tied to the bedpost, and the darn thing levitated, according to him, and lifted until restrained by reaching the end of the cord. He then attached another cord to the front of the unit so he could tilt the unit, and with tilting could develop a lateral component of thrust. According to Sweet, he played with the thing for most of the rest of the night, flying it around the bedpost, stopping it in flight, reversing the thrust for propulsion in the other direction, etc. He was extremely important in that his highly stressed magnets held and did not explode, which would have killed him.

Sweet later died without ever having fully revealed the exact full conditioning procedure used to get his barium nuclei in his barium ferrite magnets into self-oscillation. But he could do it, and once activated, the magnetic field of the magnet simply waved to and fro continuously and freely. I once locked up a Sweet activated magnet with a shim stock piece freely set on it, with the shim stock freely waving to and fro and doing continual work against the air drag and the fanning. Twenty four hours later when I opened the safe again, the magnet was still sitting there and the shim stock was still fanning to and fro, having freely done work against the air for 24 hours. It turns out that a very few of the old early magnetics experimenters (and the great Gabriel Kron, who was also Sweet's mentor) did know of such "kinetic magnets" and how to make them by a special activation method. Self oscillation in magnetic materials (thin films) is of course well known today, but such sustained self-oscillation of the barium nuclei in barium ferrite magnets is still a black art. I've worked at a distance with one group in France that got activation lasting for up to five weeks as it slowly decayed, but no longer. That group was interested in the energy applications, not the antigravity applications, so I never discussed it with them.

The little paper we got published is Floyd Sweet and T. E. Bearden, "Utilizing Scalar Electromagnetics to Tap Vacuum Energy," Proceedings of the 26th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference (IECEC '91), Boston, Massachusetts, 1991, p. 370-375. Sweet's basic 500 watt unit produced 500 watts for a 330 microwatt input, or for a COP = 1,500,000 approximately. By doubling the COP in 100 watt stages, the successful 90% weight reduction was experimentally demonstrated.

I believe it is possible to still resurrect the Sweet vacuum triode amplifier approach (self-oscillation induced in barium nuclei in barium ferrite magnets). The man who built the actual activation control unit used by Sweet is Walter Rosenthal, and he is still alive (also a very nice fellow).

Anyway, since then, over the years I've continued some work as I could in negative energy, and Bedini and I a few months ago filed a most formidable provisional patent application on the use of negative EM energy in electrical circuits, and included some small but real working circuits used and discovered by Bedini. We hope to add another PPA in that field in the future. Eventually, once the technology is developed, negative energy circuits will power the world cheaply and easily, since longitudinal flow of EM negative energy along a series of ordinary impedances will result in very great convergence of extra negative energy (from the vacuum environment) into that energy flow. Hence simple and easy direct amplification of EM negative energy flow is practical. Further, to change it into positive energy, just charge a capacitor with it, with the capacitor leads reversed from normal, and then switch away the capacitor into a normal circuit in the normal connection manner, and the capacitor will now discharge positive, normal EM energy into that circuit to power its loads.

The accounting and use of the long-neglected but gigantic Heaviside curled EM energy flow, in addition to the very tiny Poynting energy flow component, and the use of NEGATIVE ENERGY Heaviside energy flow components is where the secret of practical electrogravity lies. The unaccounted Heaviside nondivergent  component is some trillion to 10 trillion times the magnitude of the accounted divergent Poynting flow component, so as you can see a single flashlight battery can indeed power New York City, if sufficient fractions of the already available Heaviside component could be diverged and utilized. When the static matter assumption in standard force fields is violated, one can indeed get some of that normally nondiverged energy diverged for practical use as additional Poynting energy flow. In the area of negative resonance absorption of the medium, e.g., COP = 18 is routinely achieved in the IR and UV. However, to prevent being called perpetual motion nuts and attacked and suppressed, those scientists in that field almost never speak of COP or of the actual thermodynamics of the negative resonance absorption phenomenon. Instead, they speak only of "increase of the reaction cross section". But it has been around and experimentally proven since 1967. And bluntly, you put in so much Poynting energy, and you get back out 18 times as much energy as you think you put in. Actually, you input lots more in a giant unaccounted Heaviside component, and the self-oscillation is the key to usage of part of that normally nonusable Heaviside component and transformation of some of it to Poynting energy flow.

E.g., see V. S. Letokhov,"Stimulated emission of an ensemble of scattering particles with negative absorption," ZhETF Plasma, 5(8), Apr. 15, 1967, p. 262-265. See also Craig F. Bohren, "How can a particle absorb more than the light incident on it?" American Journal of Physics, 51(4), Apr. 1983, p. 323-327. Under nonlinear conditions, a particle can absorb more energy than is in the (accounted Poynting component of the) light incident on it. Metallic particles at ultraviolet frequencies are one class of such particles and insulating particles at infrared frequencies are another. See also H. Paul and R. Fischer, {Comment on "How can a particle absorb more than the light incident on it?'}," Am. J. Phys., 51(4), Apr. 1983, p. 327. The Bohren experiment is repeatable and produces COP = 18.

Notice the key element of self-resonance in the particulate medium. By going to very very tiny self-resonant media (the barium nuclei in barium ferrite magnets), and the fact that the binding energy of the nucleus is NEGATIVE energy, Sweet was able to increase the "Bohren-Letohkov" effect to 1,500,000 and higher.

The real saving grace is this: By using sharp pulses for sharp energy gradients across very small space intervals, temporarily persisting Dirac Sea holes can be produced. They flow backwards in circuits, and produce (from their moment of formation) negative energy EM fields and potentials.

NOW account for the horrendous but normally unaccounted Heaviside energy flow negative energy flow as well, and suddenly you can have circuits that do indeed produce real, practical antigravity. And you can do it on the bench, as Sweet did.

The only barrier is how to get very long persisting self-oscillations produced and trapped in the barium nuclei of the barium ferrite magnets. Once that is obtained, then with sufficient COP at the beginning and by further "pushing" the COP, one gets real, practical antigravity capable of smoothly and controllably lifting real devices.

Anyway, with the new phenomenology from negative energy including the Heaviside component, one can now very probably explain the dark energy phenomena that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, the external antigravity forces (not internal positive gravity forces) from outside a spiral galaxy that is reconverging and holding together the mass of the galactic arms so they do not fly apart, and one can get at the distant antigravity repulsion that is producing the "drag" on the Pioneer spacecraft. All of those have been "outlined" at least, so the answer really is there, once we get some sufficiently powerful theorists and experimentalists on it.

Very best wishes,

Tom Bearden

 It was in 1980 that John Anderson first wondered if something funny was  going on with gravity.    The Jet Propulsion Laboratory physicist was looking over data from two  Pioneer spacecraft that had been speeding through the solar system for  nearly a decade.    Only something was off base. The craft weren't where they were supposed to  be.    In fact, rather than traveling at a constant velocity of more than 25,000  mph toward the edge of the solar system, Pioneer 10 and 11 inexplicably were  slowing down. Even factoring in the gravitational pull of the sun and the  other planets couldn't explain what he was seeing.    How could that be?    At first, Anderson figured there must be a simple explanation. Maybe there  was a malfunction on board the spacecraft. Maybe his calculations were  wrong.    "I assumed something was going on that I didn't understand," said Anderson,  70. "So I just kept at it."    Gaining support      Two decades later, Anderson's work on what is now called the Pioneer Anomaly  may be paying off.    In October, a European Space Agency panel recommended a space mission to  determine whether Anderson had found something that could rewrite physics  textbooks. Some cosmologists even speculate the Pioneer Anomaly might help  unravel some of the thorniest problems in theoretical physics, such as the  existence of dark matter or mysterious extra-dimensional forces predicted by  string theory.    Whether Anderson will be remembered as the man who changed history or the  guy who spent decades of his life chasing an illusion, all that's clear at  this point is that he will be remembered.    For the record, gravity is one of the most closely studied forces in the  universe.    Sir Isaac Newton first measured it in the 17th century. Every object in the  universe attracts every other object, Newton determined, with a force  proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to  the square of the distance between them. That means the bigger things are,  and the closer they are, the greater their gravitational pull.    Einstein's theory      In 1915, a former Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein refined the  theory, arguing that gravity occurs when planets or stars warp the fabric of  space around them, just as a bowling ball on a trampoline warps the surface  of the trampoline. Instead of a sucking force, Einstein's general theory of  relativity said, small objects fall toward larger ones like a marble rolling  down the slope of the trampoline to the bowling ball.    Einstein's theory has been successfully tested again and again. Without it,  complex space missions such as Pioneer 10 and 11 would have ended in  disaster, either by missing their targets - in this case, flybys of Jupiter  - or by crashing.    Anderson already was an experienced space hand when the Pioneers were  launched in 1972 and 1973. Having worked on Mariner missions in the 1960s,  he was chosen to be principal investigator for gravity research on both  Pioneer missions.    It would prove to be a surprisingly long ride. The TRW-built Pioneers  performed so well that after the initial two-year mission ended, the  National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided to send them on a new  mission to explore the solar system's outer planets.    They were the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, which  some scientists at the time thought could be as dangerous as a field of  icebergs. Pioneer 10 was first to pass the orbit of Pluto. For many years,  until overtaken by the speedier Voyager 1, the Pioneers were the  farthest-venturing human-made objects in space.    By 1980, the vehicles were still zipping through space in fine shape - when  Anderson stumbled upon the unexpected.    "I started plotting this anomalous acceleration toward the sun," Anderson  said. In space-science-speak, that meant the spacecraft were improbably  slowing down.    To be sure, the anomaly was small. It amounted to about 8,000 miles a year,  a fraction of the 219 million miles the spacecraft covered annually. The  anomaly is about 10 billion times weaker than Earth's gravity.    But inches and meters add up. After nearly 30 years, the difference is about  248,000 miles, the distance from Earth to the moon.    Anderson, ever the cautious scientist, didn't tell anyone what he was seeing  for a decade. Early on, the probes still were so close to the sun that he  reasoned radiation and solar wind could be affecting them.    The other possibility was a spacecraft "systematic": an onboard mechanical  problem. Prime suspects were gas leaks, along with releases of energy by the  plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generators that provided  electric power to the instruments.    None of these candidates seemed capable of producing errors as large as  Anderson was charting.    Going public      There was one piece of evidence that seemed to support the idea that the  anomaly could be real: It was almost exactly the same on both spacecraft. On  the other hand, both Pioneers were built by the same company to identical  specifications, so why shouldn't the same problem show up on both?    As years passed, and the Pioneer probes moved away from the sun's influence,  the anomaly didn't disappear - or change.    Anderson was stumped. He began burrowing deeper into the numbers.    He still was scratching his head when physicist Michael Martin Nieto at the  Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico called one day in 1994 looking  for material for an upcoming speech about new developments in physics.    "Well, I've got this thing with Pioneer," Anderson said.    "I almost fell off my chair," Nieto said.    That's when, for good or ill, the Pioneer Anomaly went public. As word  spread in the scientific world, critics appeared. This can't be right, they  said. You have a software error. You're not interpreting the data correctly.  And there were the usual off-center enthusiasts who were convinced the  researchers had found proof of aliens, God or both.    A key ally      Anderson's work attracted another group, led by former Soviet scientist  Slava Turyshev, the first Soviet scientist to leave his country for a job  with the JPL.    Although never funded by NASA to work on the anomaly, Turyshev plunged into  the project as a volunteer, eventually becoming the Pioneer Anomaly's  door-to-door salesman. He traveled Europe seeking support for a space  mission that could solve the riddle.    "This is a form of space archaeology," he said.    The first sign that the world's space bureaucracy was taking notice occurred  in 1995, when NASA gave the research team a $247,000 grant to pay for an  independent analysis of the Pioneer data. The Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo,  Calif., was chosen.    "They came back and said, 'Guys, you have something here,' " Turyshev said.

   In 2002, Anderson, Turyshev, Nieto and other team members published the most  detailed analysis of the Pioneer Anomaly. The dense, 54-page paper, which  appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review, considered every  conceivable space event: effects of solar radiation and solar wind, the  force of radio beams used to communicate with Earth, gas leaks, helium leaks  and gravity from the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune that contains  Pluto and a number of small, planetlike objects.    They even looked at whether ocean tides might affect NASA's Goldstone Deep  Space Network facility, where Pioneer's radio transmissions were received.  Although Goldstone was many miles from the shore in the Mojave Desert, it  rested on California's geologic Pacific plate. So, the team factored in the  remote possibility that waves hitting the beaches were ever-so-slightly  jiggling instruments at Goldstone.    Nothing came close to explaining the anomaly.    What are implications?      "There are two possible explanations," Turyshev said. "The most plausible is  systematics."    The second possibility is new physics.    "If it's new physics, the implications are truly tremendous," he said.    One possibility is that dark matter is holding the spacecraft back. Some  cosmologists believe dark matter exists because only 10 percent of the  expected mass of the universe has been found. If 90 percent of the  universe's mass and energy is invisible, maybe it could exert gravitational  pull on spacecraft.    Another possibility, even more fanciful, is that invisible dimensions are  tugging at the Pioneers. This idea has its origin in string theory, a  two-decade-old school of thought that suggests we are surrounded by more  than the three dimensions we know about. Some versions of string theory  suggest there could be as many as 11 dimensions, most of which are curled up  and hidden from us.    A third possibility is that gravity has been hiding secrets that three  centuries of research have failed to uncover.    Anderson and his colleagues have known for some time that the only way to  prove the anomaly is to duplicate the Pioneer Anomaly with another  spacecraft.    First, they considered other NASA missions that penetrated the outer solar  system, finally settling on the 1989 Galileo and 1990 Ulysses.    Although some data appeared to show the anomaly had affected them, results  were not conclusive enough for Turyshev and Anderson.    A natural candidate was the twin Voyager missions, launched in 1977. The  Voyagers' meanderings offered plenty of space far out of reach of the sun  for the anomaly to show up, but their orienting technology was so different  that the data were useless.    The only solution was a new space mission. But NASA wasn't interested.    High-flown theoretical physics involving relativity had a more ready  reception in Europe. So Turyshev hit the road.    Down the road ...      In October, the team was excited to learn that the Fundamental Physics  Advisory Group had recommended a European Space Agency mission to study the  Pioneer Anomaly. That was the good news. The not-so-good news was that the  launch wouldn't happen before 2015, and the answer to the anomaly might not  come back for decades.    It's unclear how many of the Pioneer team will be around to greet the new  data. But if the anomaly turns out to be real, the story will be as much, if  not more, about grinding persistence as the flash of insight that is  supposed to be the badge of genius.    "Some have told us the most impressive thing was that we wouldn't be  stopped," Nieto said. "We just keep going."    Anderson never has permitted himself to hope he might have found something  that could change the way people think about the cosmos.    "I used to think the probability of making a fundamental discovery was  pretty remote," Anderson said. "Now, I kind of wonder about it."    Whatever the solution to the Pioneer Anomaly, it will be reached without any  more help from the Pioneers. NASA lost contact with Pioneer 11 in 1995.  Pioneer 10's last message came in January 2003.    Copyright C 2004 The Seattle Times Company