75 YEARS OF ALTERNATE VIEWS
The 75 in the title does not refer to the number of years that Astounding/Analog has been publishing Alternate View columns. These came about shortly after Stanley Schmidt took over editorial duties from Ben Bova in 1979. In the "In Times To Come" from April of ’79, Stan said this about The Alternate View: "What we (Analog) haven’t had is a science news column, regularly reporting and commenting briefly on developments sometimes too new even for our articles. ‘The Alternate View’ will be such a column . . ." (The astute reader will no doubt note that this very column is not about new science.) With the very first appearance of The Alternate View in May of ’79, Stan said: "Herewith begins a new department, wherein G. Harry Stine and Jerry Pournelle take turns reporting on very late developments in science and technology. This month, a new angle in man-computer cooperation . . ."
Stine’s first column did deal with biocybernetics, but it was hardly a report on something "too new even for our articles." He’d found some interesting tidbits in an unclassified DARPA document under the heading of "accomplishments," including a paragraph about biocybernetics, and he ran with it. Pournelle’s first column the following month didn’t deal with late developments either. Instead, he wrote an editorial bitching (as only Jerry can do) about how the scientific community could get together to attack Velikovsky, and that it could switch its annual meeting from Illinois to Texas because Illinois hadn’t passed the Equal Rights Amendment, but that it couldn’t get together to protect SETI from being Proxmired, nor voice its insistence that the presidential science advisor on the subject of nuclear waste should be a non-idiot.
So right from the beginning, Alternate View authors have had an alternate view about just what it is The Alternate View is supposed to be about. It was only when current columnist John Cramer took over from Pournelle that one could reasonably expect that, half the time, The Alternate View would actually be about fairly late-breaking science news, or at least, physics and astronomy news. By the time I took over from Stine, he had established that an Alternate View column could be damn near anything the author wanted to write about provided it had some kind of connection, no matter how tenuous, to science, technology, or science fiction. And, oh yeah, Stan Schmidt has to approve.
In my case, since I was replacing Stine, I wanted to follow in his footsteps as closely as possible, which is one reason why my Alternate View columns are so different from Dr. Cramer’s. But Stine had very large feet, and took very long strides. Thanks to reader Steve R. Hastings, I have in my hands a copy of Stine’s On the Frontiers of Science.(1) Therein, Stine describes his experiments with dowsing, pyramid power, "wish machines," and other assorted weirdities. In short, old G. Harry was even more open-minded than I am. Most of the things in his book I would never look at twice, except that the monkey in me is curious, and since Stine says he got positive results, no doubt some day I’m going to have to try these things for myself.
The reason I said "75 years of alternate views" is because this column is appearing in the 75th anniversary issue of Astounding/Analog, and right from the start, the magazine was publishing alternate views on matters of interest to SF folk long before the actual column debuted. Granted, the earliest issues weren’t the hotbed of controversy that came about with the Campbell years, but even if only science fiction appeared in those pages–well, you can’t even write SF if you don’t have an alternate view from the mainstream of average Joes.
And once Campbell came along, the world changed. Campbell himself had an alternate view of what SF should be when he took over the magazine in the late 30s. By the 40s, his alternate view had become the mainstream one which, I believe, helped lead to the current suffusion of the SF mindset into today’s culture.
Apart from SF, Campbell liked to champion all kinds of interesting, weird, flaky, and far-out ideas. Most readers are at least somewhat familiar with some of these. Dianetics is probably the first one that comes to mind. Others will recall the Dean Drive or the Hieronymous Machine. The first of these took on a life of its own (just ask Tom Cruise). The other two also still have people supporting the claim. Personally, I don’t for one second believe the Dean Drive worked, though it may have been able to do some fairly counterintuitive things since it was a highly nonlinear system. As for the Hieronymous Machine–well, Stine has plans for the damn thing in his book, so I may give it a try.
During Ben Bova’s stint as editor, he put together the "Special Velikovsky Issue" of Analog (October, 1974). Along with a number of stories dealing with the theme of "what is truth and how does one determine it" were two essays, one speaking in favor of Velikovsky by Frederic B. Jueneman, and one speaking against by none other than Isaac Asimov–that is, a pair of alternate views. It’s amazing how much of what was said by both authors still resides in my soul though I first read the essays when I was but fourteen.
Jueneman took the scientific community to task for its unfair treatment of Velikovsky. One editorial comment he made in his essay bears repeating here since I, having gained an additional thirty years of experience in science since reading it, am convinced it is true. He said: "The purveyors of the conventional and accepted views of science state their cases very well. Their description of the scientific method is delineated in precise terms that grasp the essence of scientific inquiry very well, as indeed it should, for these spokesmen have had considerable practice in distilling and refining their rhetoric, and in so doing win approval of their colleagues and peers. And, of course, do a beautiful snow-job on uninitiated undergraduates and the nonacademic community. Well-rehearsed biases, when mixed with an array of facts, reflect a most plausible picture." (Pg. 30) Regardless of how one feels about Velikovsky, this is a useful bit of wisdom to keep in mind when evaluating other scientific accepted wisdom, especially when others with alternate views come along.
The Asimov piece is not, unfortunately, Asimov at his best. He called his essay "CP,"(the initials being a neutral term for "crackpot"). He then went on (with exactly the sort of smug, know-it-all tone that makes ordinary people want scientists to be wrong) to disparage so-called crackpots in general, but sometimes landing a blow or two on Velikovsky. It is amazing now to read this and note that the Solar System as we know it today, with its host of battered moons and planets, is much more like the "worlds in collision" view pictured by Velikovsky, than the clockwork mechanism Asimov learned about in school.
Ironically, near the end of his essay, Asimov says, "Over the follies that are leading mankind to destruction through over-breeding and through the continuing rape of our lovely planet, I can do nothing but weep." So in an essay in which he decries people believing in bullshit science, he himself apparently believed in the trendy, 70s era, overblown doom-and-gloom claims supported by what we now call junk science.
Some of the alternative views on things put forth in Analog science columns were highly influential on the course my life would eventually take. One of these is "The Curious Case of the Humanoid Face . . . On Mars" by Richard C. Hoagland in the November, 1986 issue. This controversy remains alive today. Now, I’m not going to say I think the Face is a humanoid face, although I have tried to keep my mind open about it. But that particular article so captured my imagination that I decided to look more deeply into the matter. Along the way, I discovered that a whole bunch of "facts" either aren’t facts or are only facts under certain circumstances or given certain assumptions.
Having learned that, I began to get my own hands dirty in wacky-ass science. You’ve seen some of it in these pages. Hoagland led me to Tom Van Flandern, some of whose work on gravity I discussed in my own fact piece "Paradigm Shifty Things" (Analog, June 1997). This led to a debate between Van Flandern and General Relativist Steve Carlip via my e-mail address, and I discussed it at length in my double Alternate View "The Great Gravity Debate" (September and November 2001).
That same fact article also dealt with some work done by Dr. Peter Graneau. His friend Dr. Tom Phipps sent me a letter about that, which resulted in a long period of friendship and correspondence, and ultimately, in my working on something called the Marinov Motor. And that, too, I discussed in a two-part Alternate View called "The Marinov Motor and Me" spread over the February and April issues of 1999.
The papers that Dr. Phipps and I wrote about our researches on the Marinov Motor came to be published in Infinite Energy Magazine. Those articles, my scientific background, and my writing experience led editor Gene Mallove to hire me to be associate editor of Infinite Energy, and to run his New Energy Research Lab. At the time, Infinite Energy was mostly a cold fusion magazine. Cold fusion was Mallove’s passion, and he wrote about it in perhaps the most extensively referenced fact article to ever appear in Analog, it being "Cold Fusion: The ‘Miracle’ is No Mistake" in the July/August 1997 issue.
Sadly, I must report that a few months before writing this column, Gene Mallove was murdered at his boyhood home (he was using it as rental property), apparently as the result of a robbery. Ironically, the murder happened only shortly after the Department of Energy decided to reopen the books on cold fusion in light of the research that has been done (and ignored by the bulk of the mainstream scientific community) since 1989, and often reported on in Infinite Energy.(2) Some think there may have been more than coincidence involved in the timing of Gene’s murder (Richard C. Hoagland has suggested this as a possibility, though I don’t know if he thinks it is likely), but I highly doubt it. It was just the darkness of life snuffing out a candle to make the world a little darker.
In researching this piece I went through many back issues of the magazine. I’m astonished at how relevant and downright prescient so many of the "alternate views" presented are. The very first Analog I ever bought, the September ’73 issue, had a fact article dealing with using hydrogen as a fuel for cars, an idea finally coming into its own. The same issue that held Hoagland’s Face piece also had Cramer’s Alternate View dealing with his own Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, an idea that has steadily gained favor ever since.
And in my case. . . .
Echoes of my Marinov Motor work show up in my story "Nova Terra," which is in this very issue. At the end of part 2 of my Marinov Motor article, I made it clear that I did not understand how it worked, particularly the variant I called "The Warlock’s Wheel" which flagrantly violated Newton’s Third Law. During my time at Infinite Energy I started to figure it out, and now understand how it works quite well. I just haven’t told anyone.
Perhaps it’s time I did.
1. On the Frontiers of Science by G. Harry Stine. Atheneum, New York, 1985. ISBN 0-689-11562-8
2. Wilson, Jim, "Dangerous Science," Popular Mechanics, August 2004, pp. 74-79.
