M SCELLANY

A CURIOUS ATTRACTION

1. SPOOKY ACTION AT ADISTANCE

Even Sir Isaac Newtonrecognized that the idea ofgravity-that one objectcan instantaneously yankanother through totalnothingness and from ex-tremely far away-was socounterintuitive, "so greatan absurdity," that no intel-ligent person could be expect-ed to stand for it. It lacked theelegant horse sense of the oldideas, such as the rock falling to theearth because it is made of earth. New-ton was able to imagine this black mag-ic moving the apple because, as onebiographer admiringly writes, "he em-braced invisible forces." And he did somore promiscuously than we chooseto remember. The inventor of modemgravity was also a fanatical alchemist.It's just that, in the case of universalgravitation, the invisible force he em-braced turned out to be real.

"Most of the fundamental ideas ofscience are essentially simple, and may,as a rule, be expressed in a languagecomprehensible to everyone," AlbertEinstein once wrote. Yet in 1915, Ein-stein's theory of general relativitypulled gravity even further from the

Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer forThe New York Times Magazine. His lastarticle for Harper's Magazine, "The LastSupper," appeared in the July 2005 issue.

84 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2007

On the quest for antigravityBy Jon Mooallem

realm of common sense, entangling itin recondite mathematics and dream-like geometry.' Initially, it didn't seemto matter whether Einstein was right;

his masterpiece was attackedfor not being populist enough."A great and serious retro-grade step," one Princeton-ian called it. "All previousphysical theories havebeen thus intelligible ...[to] the whole race ofman." A flummoxed Co-lumbia professor an-nounced that general rela-tivity smacked of Bolshevism

and must be stopped.In 1919 astronomers made

the first significant observationto support general relativity when

they watched starlight bendingthrough space-time curved by the sun."It is not possible to put Einstein's the-ory into really intelligible words," theNew York Times noted in its coverageof the event. One scientist tried, but itwas as though he'd had a conversionexperience into a very small cult. Whatthis new observation showed, he toldthe Times, was that parallel lines couldeventually meet, that three angles of atriangle needn't add up to 180 degrees,and that "a circle is not really circular."The editors headlined the story, in part:"Stars Not Where They Seemed orWere Calculated to Be, but NobodyNeed Worry."

As in Newton's time, a seeminglyunbridgeable rift opened betweenthe everyman's visceral experienceof gravity and the specialist's expla-nation of it, and the laymen didn'talways accept this estrangement

1 The theory of general relativity conceived ofempty space as actually being a fabric of spaceand time, with gravity caused by the imprintsobjectsmake in it. Imagine the depressiona bas-ketball would make if placed in the center of ataut sheet; when a less massive object, like amarble, travels close to the ball, it will be de-railed off its course and begin circling in thecurved depression made by the ball. In thisway, the earth orbits the sun, and we are for-ever foundering in the deep space-time trencharound the earth. Einstein's gravity is not somuch a force as a circumstance: the very ma-terialof the cosmos has crumpled steeply aroundyou until, almost conspiratorially, all of yourpossible paths have been narrowed to one.

Space Travellers Will Have w Learn w Live in a Gravity-FreeEnvironment, 1933 © Mary Evans Picture Library

with the wry dispassion of theTimes. Somehow it just didn't seemright that this ubiquitous force af-fecting us all should be understoodby only a select few. A man namedGeorge Francis Gillette publishedOrthod Oxen of Science, claimingthat Einstein's "self created fairy-land of 4th dimensional space" was"the funniest mental bellyache in-flicted on science." It was also "uttertommyrot." Gillette offered a num-ber of ideas in place of Einstein'shooey. Among them was "The AllCosmos Doughnut.'?

Despite the initial resistance, how-ever, physics rapidly fell in love withgeneral relativity. More observationssupported it, and its predictionsseemed to operate on too astronomi-cal a scale to check directly with anytechnologically feasible experiments.Einstein's gravity came to stand as akind of untestable truth.

Nevertheless, as physics hasworked to refine its understanding ofgravity, a sanguine subculture of am-ateurs and outsiders has continuedto needle the accepted thinkingfor weaknesses, setting out not tobetter define this invisible forcebut to overcome it. Much of this re-creational research asks whether wemight finally be able to do somethingwith this power and not simply sufferfrom it. Today, the website Ameri-can Antigravity serves as a clearing-house for this quasi-scientific upris-ing, and the mere copiousness of itsholdings has a way of making the in-credible feel almost inevitable. Sure-ly a "cure" for gravity will arise fromsomething here: the "Angelina VI"ball-lightning generator, the Beifeld-Brown Effect, the internal plasmaexpansion/contraction engine, theImpulse Gravity Generator based ona charged Y Ba2Cu307 -v supercon-ductor with composite-crystal struc-ture, or the Quantum Vacuum Path-way Theory, which "describes a

2 Gillette envisioned the universe as beingcomposed of little masses that zippedaround and collided. "In all the Cosmosthere is naught but straight flying,bumping, caroming and again straightflying .... A mass unit's career is butlumping, jumping, bumping, rejumping,rebumping, and finally unlumping ....Gravitation," he concluded, "andbackscrewing are synonymous. "

plausible mechanism" for "spookyaction at a distance."3

Weare suspenders of disbelief, eas-ily enchanted by possibility, addicted towonder. So whatever measure of faithwe harbor in the fallibility of gravitymay, like our faith in so many things,be sustained not by facts or lack of factsas much as by the sheer strength of ourlonging for it to be so. After all, whatclearer vision of joyousness and freedomis there than a band of jumpsuited as-tronauts in zero gravity tumbling up-ward and over themselves like giddypinwheels? "Of all the natural forces,"wrote futurist Arthur C. Clarke, "grav-ity is the most mysterious and the mostimplacable." Yet Clarke also assumesthat the high Himalayan peaks willone day be as saturated with touristsas the beaches of Cannes, once per-sonal gravity control is perfected. "TheSherpas and Alpine guides will, ofcourse, be indignant," he writes. "Butprogress is inexorable."

After a century of science fictionon the subject, a life unfettered bygravity may feel strangely like an en-titlement. Indeed, there is mountingsuspicion even in the most respectablespheres of physics that the force wecall "law"-this fact evidenced byevery dropped paper clip and sunset,as frank as a falling anvil-may not ac-tually be settled at all.

2. GRAVITY RADIO

In 2002, at a Princeton physics sym-posium titled "Science and UltimateReality," Raymond Chiao announcedhis plans to tum gravity into both elec-tricity and light and electricity andlight into gravity. For more than twen-ty years, Chiao had been laboring overa revolutionary communications ap-paratus that would work by linkingthese disparate forces. He'd originallycalled the device a "gravitational ra-diation antenna," but his son-in-law

3 Stray too far into the site's labyrinth oflinks and you could end up, as Idid, listen-ing to an interview with "a man who sawsomebody dear to him suddenly transforminto a strange, reptilian creature." But withgravity most of us are ill equipped to distin-guish between the hokum and the shreds ofaustere physics on which it is imaginativelybased; "spooky action at a distance," for in-stance, is Einstein's phrase and describes agenuine conundrum of quantum physics.

eventually came up with a better name:gravity radio.

Chiao is sixty-six, an MIT alumnus,and a fellow of both the Optical Soci-ety of America and the AmericanPhysical Society. At the time of thePrinceton symposium, he was still acelebrated professor of physics at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. AsChiao spoke, he described his con-traption in the drab and equation-encumbered language of physics. Yetthe rattling wondrousness of gravityradio and the world into which it coulddeliver us was impossible to miss. Whatcould gravity radio do? Gravity radiocould beam unstoppable, information-rich gravity waves straight through thesoil, crust, and core of the earth to bereceived-unattenuated and un-scathed-by gravity radios on oppo-site ends of the planet. Relaying a flim-sy signal between satellites might be aserviceable way to dial China, but herewas a phone call of unwavering di-rectness. Point gravity radio up, andgravity radio could send emails toVenus, or farther, at the speed of light.Gravity radio could broadcast FreshAir to Alpha Centauri. Gravity radiocould pick up gravity waves still ema-nating from the big bang; which is tosay, gravity radio could be a baby mon-itor tuned to the infancy of time.

"It is hard to know whether the as-sembly was more astonished by theidea that this might be possible," oneobserver in attendance noted, "or byChiao's lack of concern for his ownreputation." No one has ever evenseen a gravity wave. Einstein predict-ed that these ripples in space-time aresent coursing through the cosmos anytime an object moves. Yet Einsteinhimself had trouble believing this atfirst; then, conveniently, he decidedthat if gravity waves did exist (we nowknow they almost certainly do), theywould be such slight disturbances thatwe'd never be able to detect them.For half a century, in fact, no onebothered to try.

As it happens, while Chiao deliveredhis paper, science's best hope of pin-ning down gravity waves was beingreadied to switch on after thirty yearsof development. The experiment iscalled LIGO, the Laser InterferometerGravitational-Wave Observatory, andinvolves multimillion-dollar arrays of

MISCELLANY 85

lasers streaking through sets of two-and-a- half-mile-long stainless-steeltubes in Washington State and theLouisiana woods. Still, even with thesemassive antennae, LIGO might barelybe able to detect the universe's mostrobust gravity waves, such as those emit-ted from violent supernovas. Gravityradio would practically fit on a tabletop.

"This is the teo-good-to-be-trueargument," a colleague of Chiao'stold me. "It threatens everyone else'sintuition." When a reporter for themagazine New Scientist visited Chiaoat Berkeley in 2003, he found gravityradio on the floor. It was a slab of su-perconducting ceramic, a couple ofempty paint cans for insulation, somepolystyrene cups, and bits of wood, alldisassembled and piled into a card-board box. It looked like trash. Chiaowas funding gravity radio himself, or-dering materials from high schoolsuppliers. A peer-reviewed journal, hesaid, had rejected one of his gravity-radio papers without explanation.

When I called Chiao two years lat-er, he seemed understandably am-bivalent about explaining the promiseand controversies of gravity radio to anovice. He still hadn't performed anyexperiments; he was refining his the-ories. "Let me put it this way," he said."It's a long shot. But I think it's worthcontinued research."

Several weeks later, seeming moreconfident about gravity radio thanever, Chiao suddenly left his job atBerkeley to build it. I was welcome tovisit his new lab, he said, if I was will-ing to make the drive.

3. OUR ENEMY NUMBER ONE

I'd first learned about gravity radiowhile tracing the loose ends of a figurewhose life I was coming to see as botha cautionary tale and a catalyst for justthis kind of questioning. Roger Babsonwas an obdurate entrepreneur so gid-dy with the possibilities of the twen-tieth century that he saw even in grav-ity's downward tug an opportunitywaiting to be leveraged. Born in 1875in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Babsonrejected the values of the town's "cod-fish aristocracy," instead holding fastthe good Protestant value of self-reliance. He turned his small invest-ment newsletter into a trusted empire

86 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2007

called Babson's Reports; founded Bab-son College near Wellesley, Massa-chusetts; and became both wealthyand famous when, it is said, he pre-dicted the Great Crash of 1929 withhis signature "Babsonchart."

Babson went barking into thepost-World War II years with a beau-tiful idea: namely, that gravity, themost immutable law of the Enlight-enment, was unacceptable and shouldbe changed. "It seems as if there mustbe discovered some partial insulatorof Gravity which could be used to savemillions of lives and prevent acci-dents," he reasoned in his treatise"Gravity-Our Enemy Number One."His antipathy was steeped in grief. Inthe summer of 1893, Babson's three-year-old sister, Edith, drowned in theAnnisquam River near their house."Yes they say she was 'drowned,'" Bab-son wrote, but Edith was a fine swim-mer. He blamed "Gravity which cameup and seized her like a dragon andbrought her to the bottom." In 1947his teenage grandson also drowned, af-ter diving off a motorboat to rescue afriend. Less than eighteen months lat-er, Babson had formed the Gravity Re-search Foundation.

The foundation's underlying im-perative was to learn all it could aboutgravity and defeat it. It rose to meet thegravity problem with seemingly un-limited funds and a fervor that sug-gests a near-total unawareness of itsSisyphean nature. Frozen-food mag-nate Clarence Birdseye, a Gravity Re-search Foundation trustee, suspectedthat a gravity insulator might be dis-covered by accident, through unrelat-ed research. So twenty-five hundredlabs were contacted and asked to keeptheir eyes peeled. Three men were kepton permanent watch at the patent of-fice. Thomas Edison once wonderedaloud to Babson how it was that birdscould fly-maybe there was somethingthere. Thus, a lavish collection ofstuffed birds, from five thousand dif-ferent species, was amassed to be stud-ied, just in case.

George Rideout-foundation pres-ident and Babson's longtime right-hand man-devised an annual essaycontest with a thousand-dollar purse toinspire research on "the possibilitiesof discovering some partial insulator,reflector or absorber" of gravity. Bah-

son and Rideout purchased a twenty-five-year run of Time magazine to useas an almanac, searching for correla-tions between international incidentsand the phases of the moon. Theywondered if gravity's pull on the bodyaffected temperament, and mailed anexploratory survey to subscribers ofBabson's investment bulletin. And sostraitlaced industrialists were asked tofill in their weight and to agree or dis-agree with such statements as "I lovephysical comfort," "I am an unimpres-sive talker," and "Ladies like me."

"Gravity Aids for Weak Hearts," oneof many pamphlets the foundation pub-lished, recommends lessening gravity'sstrain on the body by moving into abungalow-style house or using a cane."Gravity and Posture" states, "It be-hooves us therefore to give the body allpossible aid in maintaining the propergravity pull by wearing the right corset."Digging through what's left of the foun-dation's early affairs in the Babson Col-lege archives, I found an entire folderof these instructional guides, with suchtitles as "Gravity and the Weather"and "Gravity and Your Feet." Theylinked gravity to the common cold,house fires, insomnia, poor crop con-ditions, tilted uteruses, the firing ofGeneral Douglas MacArthur, theshrinking of the elderly, tuberculosis,"worries," varicose veins, and hemor-rhoids-which, one article asserts, "aremerely varicose veins of the rectum."

"It was a time when amateurscould still hope and dream about be-ing contributors," David Kaiser, aprofessor of physics and the historyof science at MIT, told me. Kaiserhas been fascinated with the GravityResearch Foundation since he wrotepart of his doctoral thesis about it atHarvard. Babson's men were not ex-perts, Kaiser explained, but theirhearts were in the right place. "Bab-son thought, 'I'll just get all my bud-dies together and we'll fix it.'"

In some ways, undoing gravityseemed to be just another entrepre-neurial project Babson felt compelledto get off the ground. (It was not, in-cidentally, his oddest venture: healso envisaged chocolate-covered fish,to bailout Gloucester's economy;asbestos-lined pants pockets, to pre-vent men from igniting their crotcheswhen putting away their pipes; and,

to right America's moral compass, thecreation of a federal "Department ofCharacter Training," to be headed bythe "Secretary of Character.") As adedicated businessman, he couldn'tallow gravity to go on wasting itself,pulling things in the same old direc-tion for its own purposes and not ours.Electricity, light, magnetism-if allthese things could be insulated andcontrolled, he argued, surely gravitycould. It seemed only reasonable."World peace will come only as the

Spirit of Jesus grows in the hearts ofman and as the principles of birth con-trol are taught to overcrowded nationsand the latent power of gravity is usedas freely as air, water and sunlight,"Babson wrote in his autobiography,Actions and Reactions. He didn't knowwhat caused gravity, and he didn't care.All he knew was that the damn stuffwas everywhere, and only a sap wouldgo on accepting its reprimand.

4. INFLATION"How did you get onto it?" Rainer

Weiss, professor emeritus at MIT, want-ed to know when I brought up theGravity Research Foundation. "You gotonto Mr. Chiao, so that's a bad sign," hejoked. "And now you got onto this-which is an even worse sign!"Weiss, a short, charismatic man of

seventy-three, had returned fromLouisiana late the previous night aftervisiting LIGO-the grand experimenthe'd dreamed up thirty years earlier."Observatory" is the key concept ofthe Laser Interferometer Gravitation-al-Wave Observatory. Ultimately,LIGO aims to diagram the universeby charting gravity waves emitted bymoving bodies, just as we now seethings by the light they emit. Map-ping the "gravity sky" will open anew field of astronomy, Weiss said-one theoretically capable of assem-bling a picture of the big bang.I'd hoped to find out more about

LIGO in order to gauge just how far-fetched Chiao's gravity-radio schemeactually is. Weiss resented my evencomparing the two endeavors. He wasa colleague of Chiao's at MIT for atime and still periodically writes Chiaoto point out what he considers gravityradio's many unsolvable problems. "Hesays, 'Yeah, yeah. I'll get to it.''' Weiss

MISCELLANY 87

said of Chiao. "I like him. He's a fineman. But he's not a doer. He likes tothink about things."On the phone, Weiss had urged me

to stop writing about gravity waves al-together and cover "the real revolu-tion" in physics-something called "In-flation," which, he said, "is probablythe most shocking discovery in my life-time." Now that I'd flown across thecountry to meet Weiss, my first questionwas about Roger Babson. He squintedat me from behind his desk. "I'm wor-ried about you," he said. Babson was abusinessman, Weiss went on, who wentloopy over gravity because his relativegot killed in an airplane. I correctedhim, relaying the fates of Babson'sgrandson and poor Edith. "And so grav-ity did the job on her too, eh?" Weisssaid. He sounded sympathetic. Thenhis voice rose. "Well, there wouldn'thave been any water there for her toswim around in if there was no gravity!"I pointed to his office door in my

defense. Weiss had taped up a flyer an-nouncing the Gravity Research Foun-dation's 2006 Awards for Essays onGravitation, the fifty-seventh annual

Foresight is 20/20.

competition. The foundation has en-dured, its mission having matured fromconquering gravity to understandingit. The essay contest, David Kaiser toldme, is where graduate students now"look to see the coolest, hottest stuff."In his doctoral thesis, Kaiser arguesthat the contest helped return physi-cists to the study of gravity. Genera-tions of graduate students had beentold that there was no more work to doin the field after Einstein; one couldmerely plug numbers into his equa-tions and futz around in the abstract.Rainer Weiss said that when he at-tended MIT in the Fifties, general rel-ativity was taught only in the mathdepartment. Gravity, in short, had lostits place in the physical world.At that time, when a physics pro-

fessor might earn only five thousanddollars a year, Babson's foundation wasoffering one thousand dollars for a brieftheoretical essay on gravity. In 1953 abrilliant but down-on-his-luck post-doc named Bryce DeWitt submitted apaper and won. (DeWitt, with thebacking of a southern financier Babsonhad introduced him to, went on to

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found an esteemed gravity-research in-stitute at the University of North Car-olina, Chapel Hill.) Two Princetoni-ans took home the prize in 1954, andin 1957 it was a team from Cornelland Harvard. As the contest rules soft-ened over time-it now solicits papers"on the subject of gravitation"-iconslike Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawk-ing won, too. In 1981 a young Berke-ley professor named Raymond Chiaotook second place for an essay on"Gravitational Radiation Antenna."It was among Chiao's first staggeringsteps toward gravity radio-an idea,Chiao later told me, that initiallyleaped out at him from one of BryceDeWitt's equations."Despite himself," Kaiser says, "Bab-

son and his foundation-this band ofmisfits and amateurs-actually playeda role in bringing great minds back togravity. Fifty years ago no one was do-ing this work. Now it's what gets gov-ernment funding. There are fancy con-ferences and big expensive equipment.

It's what you make NOVArJ" specials about."

~he day before my meeting withRainer Weiss, I tracked down a mon-ument on the campus 'of Tufts Uni-versity. I found the four-foot block ofgranite beside a chapel overlookingthe Boston skyline.

THIS MONUMENT HAS BEENERECTED BY THE

GRAVITY RESEARCH FOUNDATIONROGER W. BABSON FOUNDER

IT IS TO REMIND STUDENTS OFTHE BLESSINGS FORTHCOMINGWHEN A SEMI-INSULATOR IS

DISCOVERED IN ORDER TO HARNESSGRAVITY AS A FREE POWER

AND REDUCE AIRPLANE ACCIDENTS

Babson issued at least thirteen suchmonuments to various colleges, ac-companying them in most cases withsizable gifts of stock. The endowmentswere to be held for a certain number ofyears and then dedicated to research inthe fight against gravity. By the timethe Tufts stock was freed up in 1989,it had appreciated to roughly half amillion dollars. Absolved by the foun-dation's lawyers from its original anti-gravitational obligations, Tufts usedthis windfall to found its Institute of

88 HARPER'SMAGAZINE / OCTOBER2007

Cosmology, which is now a prestigioustraining ground for theoretical physi-cists. The institute's director, AlexVilenkin, told me that new graduatesare led to the monument and orderedto kneel so that an apple may be cer-emoniously dropped on their heads.I was beginning to see Babson's mis-

directed burst of energy as havingloosed a ripple effect not unlike a grav-ity wave itself-nearly imperceptiblebut warping the fabric of legitimatephysics ever so slightly wherever itreached. Still, I was unprepared for theepilogue to Vilenkin's story. "The fun-ny thing is," he said, "we actually dowork on antigravity."He was referring to the theory of

inflationary cosmology, the theoretical-physics revolution Weiss had urgedme toward. The theory seeks to ex-plain why the universe's expansion,once thought to be powered by mo-mentum from the big bang, is, in fact,speeding up. Its answer is "dark ener-gy," a power aggressively pushingeverything in the cosmos away fromeverything else. It is, by definition,antigravity. Cosmologists now suspectthat dark energy accounts for as muchas 75 percent of the energy in exis-renee, that is, our universe is mostlythis thing we only just discovered. AsWeiss put it, "It turns out there is novacuum. The vacuum is full of stuff!"Perhaps not since general relativi-

ty has a theory produced such mad-deningly counterintuitive corollaries,calling into question fundamentalpresumptions of physics, even rela-tivity itself. "A dark mystery is bur-bling up," Weiss told me, "and itsays: We don't have a workingknowledge of the universe."Inflation happens to be David

Kaiser's field. He was surprised butpleased that a scientist of Vilenkin'sstature would refer to dark energy as"antigravity." "Repulsive gravity," in-stead, has emerged as the term of art.Nothing about dark energy suggests itcan be harnessed, generated, or, say,spread on the bottom of your shoe tofacilitate expeditious slam-dunking.But physicists may worry that borrow-ing a shibboleth like "antigravity"would open them up to discussionswith the wrong crowd.I asked Kaiser how he'd respond to

some earnest, pseudo-scientific hob-

byist pointing to the relatively late dis-covery of dark energy to argue that themore fantastical antigravitational as-pirations of laymen-of us all-shouldnever be deemed impossible."I would grant that," he said.

Though, he added, he wouldn't feelthis same equanimity if he hadn't be-come so enamored of "our wacky friendBabson." When Kaiser does get maillike this, he chooses to be heartened byit. "Usually my reaction is, 'Isn't itgreat that people are interested in whatwe do all day?'" Besides, he told me,"crazy ideas are sometimes right."

5. UNWANTED DEGREES OF FREEDOM

A low charcoal-colored storm read-ied to break as I drove toward Yosemiteto meet Raymond Chiao. In 2005,Chiao abandoned the flagship schoolof the University of California sys-tem-Berkeley-for its fledgling start-up, the University of California,Merced. The college was exactly threemonths old. It had eight hundred stu-dents. For the low-profile venture threehours' drive southeast of San Francis-co, Chiao's appointment was "a majorrecruiting triumph." Merced's press re-lease touted his research in gravita-tional radiation and listed his prizefrom the Gravity Research Founda-tion first among his many honors.Chiao's laboratory is several miles

from the unfinished campus, set backfrom Highway 99-past several cowyards, some sheep, and acres of blos-soming almond orchards. The univer-sity had erected a lone building there,on the decommissioned Castle AirForce Base. Nearby, mid-century dog-fighters and transporters were set out tomake an air museum. They crowdedtogether on the flat, featureless land, areliquary of ancient propeller planesin khaki and chrome.Chiao had just finished lunch when

I arrived. I asked after the gravity-radio prototype I'd read about-thepaint cans, the wood. It was boxed upin a closet and forgotten, he said, flut-tering his hands in front of him asthough to exonerate himself. He hadnow arrived at a "much clearer andmuch simpler" concept. "I have reacheda point of conclusion that is, I think, in-controvertible," he announced. "UnlessI've made a mistake."

Gravity radio is essentially a trans-ducer, Chiao explained. He wouldbeam waves of electromagnetism-like those broadcast by a radio sta-tion-into two drops of helium, andthey would bounce off the helium asgravity waves. The gravity waves wouldthen be sent, however far and throughwhatever obstacles, to a second grav-ity radio, a receiver. There they wouldhit other drops of helium and be con-verted back to usable radio waves.Chiao's calculations led him to be-lieve that nothing would be lost inthese conversions. He could, in physicsparlance, "freeze out" all the helium's"unwanted degrees of freedom." Thatis, if he cooled the helium, it would re-flect one form of incoming energy byradiating it back as the other, and notin a disorganized array of other forms,such as sound or heat.

Chiao was trying to pick up ex-ceedingly weak gravity waves throughthe disturbances they made in two ex-ceedingly small drops of helium-asopposed to picking up very powerfulwaves, like those from exploding stars,through the disturbances they madein LIGO's two-and-a-half-mile lasers.This, Chiao explained, looks impossi-ble, given much of the field's thinkingsince Einstein. But to compensate forhis antenna's infinitesimal size, Chiaowas banking on triggering an elusivephenomenon of quantum mechanics.The helium, he believed, would act asa "superfluid": every atom would shud-der under the gravity wave as one co-herent object, amplifying the effect.t

"I don't care what people say," Chiaotold me. "I really don't care. I thinkmost people like Rai Weiss will say I'ma crackpot. But I know that I'm not-especially after writing this paper."Chiao had recently delivered a new pa-per on gravity radio to a colloquium inSnowbird, Utah, where he was award-ed the prestigious Lamb Medal for un-

4 For nearly a century, physics has livedwith a kind of acute schizophrenia: generalrelativity and quantum mechanics, both use-ful predictors of the way things work in andof themselves, can't be made to fit togetherinto a single "Theory of Everything."Quantum mechanics is used to understandphenomena on the atomic level and smaller,and relativity applies to those on much largerscales. The real significance of gravity radio,if it works, is that Chiao will have teased outan interface between the two.

MISCELlANY 89

related work in optics. To celebrate,some former students had organized a se-ries of laudatory panels called Chiaofest.

He was eager to walk me throughthe paper and printed off an even morerecent version than the one he'd pre-viously emailed. In this latest refine-ment, he'd linked his hypothesis to anironclad constant in physics calledPlanck's mass. Although this maneuverdid little to convince two other physi-cists I spoke to, it clearly put gravity ra-dio on inviolable ground as far as Chiaowas concerned. He underlined the para-graph in red, read it aloud slowly, thenflipped the paper across his desk to meas if it were an unbeatable poker hand.

At Merced I'd expected to find abitter man in exile. But Chiao seemeddisarmingly content-relieved, even-to be there. He'd already put his start-up funds toward the sophisticated low-temperature lab that gravity radiowould require, having ordered twoEuropean-built dilution refrigeratorsat a cost of half a million dollars. Hewas building from the ground up andwould be ready to perform his experi-ment in five years. Maybe it wouldn't

Most occur you

accidents when

work. But the most important thingwas to build his device and, throughgravity radio, let the universe speak foritself. "In the end," Chiao said, "thetruth will prevail. Especially in physics."

I'd heard, from more than one physi-cist, the real-life allegory of joseph We-ber, another accomplished Gravity Re-search Foundation honoree. In the lateSixties, Weber announced he'd madethe world's first successful detection ofa gravity wave using a stubby pair of alu-minum bars in his University of Mary-land lab. "It was a very unfortunateevent for him," Rainer Weiss had ex-plained, "because up to that time he'dbeen perfectly dispassionate about this."Physicists around the country, spurredto think seriously about gravity-waveexperiments for the first time, eagerlybuilt their own "Weber bars," tryingto confirm his work and push it fur-ther. No one saw anything. But Weberclung to his story, stubbornly, for years.He traveled the country, announcinghis findings at conferences. Anotherphysicist shadowed and heckled himto safeguard the integrity of the field.The two men had to be separated on-

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stage at MIT after raising their fists.Demoralized but still adamant, Weberkept bars running until he died in 2000.

When I asked Chiao how he knewhe wasn't turning into another JosephWeber, he characterized Weber's workas wishful thinking. "Allowing wishfulthinking to dominate your assessmentof reality is a sin," he said.

6. A BASEMENT IN WELLESLEY HILLS

The Gravity Research Foundationis currently headquartered a milefrom Babson College, in the suburb ofWellesley Hills. George Rideout Jr.,the son of Babson's right-hand man,inherited the Gravity Research Foun-dation in 1988, six years before his fa-ther's death, and now administers itssole remaining activity-the essaycontest-from a cluttered back roomof his basement. Rideout, a subduedman with a long patrician chin, ex-plained that the job is largely admin-istrative. He xeroxes contest submis-sions and mails them to ananonymous panel of judges everywinter. Rideout minored in physics incollege, he said, but cannot read theessays with any great understanding.

In preparation for our meeting,Rideout had set up a card table in thecenter of the basement headquarters,with glasses of water on coasters rest-ing in front of each of our seats. Hissetting also included a yellow legalpad, on top of which was written myname, followed by the date and a listof points he intended to cover. Abattery of filing cabinets holding thecomplete archive of essay submis-sions lined one wall; nearby, hungamong some crayon-drawn birthdaycards, was a handwritten note fromAbraham Lincoln to his surgeon gen-eral. Something Mr. Babson had col-lected, Rideout told me when I hap-pened to notice it.

I had spent the previous day riflingthrough the Gravity Research Foun-dation's scant archives at Babson Col-lege, watching in those pages a mantoil earnestly toward his own ham-fisted theory of every thing-a manimagining a universe in which gravitywas the greatest asset and the mostpervasive menace. But I also detectedin those papers the foundation's ris-ing prestige as the years wore on. Then,

90 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I OCTOBER 2007

following the minutes from GravityDay 1958, the paper trail ran out.

Babson had sponsored Gravity Dayevery summer as part of a conferenceon "Investments and Gravity" at thefoundation's headquarters in NewHampshire. Attendees were largelyfrom the business world. Thus, a pre-sentation on "Eliminating Weight"might dovetail with a talk like "WhoShould Buy Mutual Funds?" Conven-tioneers were invited to see Isaac New-ton's bed, view the stuffed-bird col-lection, or sit in special Japanese-made"Gravity Chairs"-undulating wood-en recliners that alleviated gravity'sstrain on the legs. "Remember," ex-claimed the brochures, "that gravityis Enemy Number One for middle agedand older people."

Eventually some airline executivesbegan attending, as did Igor Sikorsky,the inventor of the first successful he-licopter. By 1958, the minutes depicta serious-minded crowd of 278 dis-cussing general relativity and jokingabout various quack entrants in thatyear's essay contest. According to oneattendee, many of the essayists had de-vised their arguments simply by rein-venting gravity "from scratch, with amind uncluttered by knowledge."None of the conventioneers pointedout that they were gathered there be-cause, ten years earlier, Roger Babsonhad done precisely that.

Babson, then an eighty-three-year-old man, was relegated to a brief para-graph at the end of the minutes. "Be-fore the close of the session," the recordconcludes, "Mr. Babson reported onthe question of the physical reality ofthe examples of levitation mentionedin the Bible." He'd polled ChristianScientists, Roman Catholics, andProtestant clergy and asked that thefoundation convene every Easter todiscuss the matter further.

George Rideout Jr. wasn't sure hehad ever attended a Gravity Day.Much of what Rideout knew aboutBabson, he admitted, came from hisfather and the autobiography, Actionsand Reactions. But he had enjoyedromping around the New Hampshirecompound as a child. He liked theJapanese Gravity Chairs; they werecomfortable. "It's too bad," Rideoutsaid from across the card table. "Theysold that place, and I don't think they

kept any of the chairs." He then point-ed to what remained of the founda-tion's stuffed-bird collection. A long-necked specimen sat upright on thefiling cabinets to my left, and anothersquatter bird perched by the oppositewall. "It's some kind of duck up here,"Rideout said, noting the webbed feet.

When I relayed what I'd learned atthe Cosmology Institute at Tufts, Ride-out reached behind him for a photo ofthe gravity monument. But his armswept into his still-full glass of water.The glass-having no choice-toppledover. Ice cubes skirted across the cardtable. There was suddenly a puddle."Let me go get a towel," Rideout said.

A photocopy of "Black Holes Aren'tBlack," an essay by Stephen Hawking,had gotten the worst of the spill. I mustnot have noticed Rideout sliding itinto position on the table as we spoke.He'd been bringing out various rele-vant artifacts as he steered our conver-sation down the talking points on hispad. Much of his presentation dwelledon the stature of the foundation today.I assumed he was saving the Hawkingpaper as a robust finale. It includedhand-drawn diagrams, and I took itsbrusquely paradigm-shattering title as asign of its significance in the history ofphysics. The Gravity Research Foun-dation awarded it third place in 1974.

Soon Rideout returned with a yellowhand towel that he spread carefullyacross a dry section of the floor. Hebrought over the first few pages of theHawking paper and arranged them onthe towel. Then, with a kind of aloofbut patient dignity, he knelt to patthem dry.

7. THE MYSTERY SPOT

Afrer returning home from New Eng-land, my wife and I took a drive to theCalifornia redwood forest one Sundayafrernoon. Our destination was the Mys-tery Spot, a small plot of land where"the laws of physics do not apply.""Within the Mystery Spot," a bright-yellow brochure claims, "it appears asthough every law of gravitation hasgone haywire, turned topsy-turvy andjust doesn't make sense." Grainy pho-tos show a ball rolling uphill, someoneleaning so far back he seems to hover,and an old man standing on a wall. Ac-cording to the promotional materials, a

number of theories have been workedup to try to explain this aberration: anexcess of carbon dioxide or radiation, a"magma vortex," underground metalcones implanted by aliens.

A guide in a ranger-style uniform leda group of us up a hillside into a cabinhe described as "the grandfather of allAmerican funhouses." The woodenfloor sloped in one direction and thewalls skewed off in others. The guide an-nounced that we were in an epicenterof mystery, where unknowable forcesabound and the power of gravity frays.Then he began, slowly, to bend back-ward from the waist. He kept on bend-ing-more, further, Matrix-like-untilhis hands touched down on the floor be-hind him. Emboldened, a boy therewith his mother and older brother doveinto a kind of handstand, corkscrew-ing his pubescent torso like a marlinsnagged on an invisible line. It was stun-ning. I'd read about a psychology pro-fessor at UC Santa Cruz who brings hisclasses here to demonstrate how opticalillusions operate. But I found myself ig-noring any rational explanations of theMystery Spot's mysteriousness, insteadlosing myself in a kind of simple glee.Even my wife, who had threatened towait in the car, now seemed delightedby the strange push and mild nauseaneither of us could deny feeling.

In 1940 a certain Mr. Prather firstclaimed to have discovered "puzzlingvariations in gravity" on this land andpromptly opened the Mystery Spot asa kitschy "mind-boggling" amusement.It was an era of amusements and, notunconnectedlv, of war. Science wasmoving in its one perfunctory direc-tion: forward. Physics would build thebomb that gravity lowered on Japanwith quiet and characteristic indiffer-ence, thirty-two feet per second, persecond. Who then could fault RogerBabson for believing, with a faint andtender measure of desperation, thatother trajectories were possible? "Theharnessing of Gravity today is at thestage where the harnessing of elec-tricity was when Ben Franklin flew hiskite during a thunderstorm," Babsonwrote in 1950. Free power from grav-ity "is the next thing on the scientists'agenda. It has been delayed by theArmy's atomic craze to kill people; butit is coming," he insisted. "Be patient."

When I called Rainer Weiss a few

MISCELlANY 91

weeks later to tell him about Chiao'smove to Merced, he became sudden-ly optimistic. "I bet you somethinggood will come of it," he said. Al-though he had no hope for gravity ra-dio, he felt that a physicist of Chiao'scaliber, given this new opportunity todo well-funded experiments, wouldend up making some important con-tribution to the field. Ideas are nice,Weiss explained, but they need to bechecked and honed through actual ex-periments. In science, progress meansindustriously refining one's vision ofthe world until it reflects reality. Thisis to say that in science, progress meansthe exact opposite of what it meantfor Roger Babson.

Babson assumed he could will theuniverse's most elemental mechanisminto a more agreeable shape, that hecould keep hammering away at it un-til it gave. In the closing chapter ofActions and Reactions, he wrote, "Per-haps the foremost lesson I havelearned is that emotions rule theworld, rather than statistics, informa-tion, or anything else." This may behis stoic confession, a recognition of

the blinding force of his own imprac-ticable idealism. He concedes thatthe longing for what should be possi-ble does not easily give way in theimplacable face of what actually is.

In the redwoods that afternoon, asgravity suddenly seemed to slacken itsgrip, I realized we'd been lured to theMystery Spot by the promise of findinglonging and reality finally, if only fleet-ingly, aligned. It felt like a celebration,a homecoming into our own imagina-tions. We were chattering, pointing,laughing. Suddenly a woman climbedonto a table, leaned startlingly far overthe edge, and balanced there for afriend's camera. "This should be in acommercial," someone else yelled, over-taken by wonder.

I watched a little girl dressed en-tirely in pink-with pink sandals, pinkfur trim on her coat, and pink-sequinedfringe on her skirt-stretch out herarms and start to twirl on a curious ax-is. Then the tour guide cupped a handto his mouth and hollered, "If anyonewants to walk up the walls, come withme!" And we followed him into the ad-joining room, drifting uphill. •

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