Sagnac Awards

Today, a new page was written in the annuals of scientific history. After a catered luncheon, the NPA officially presented its first annual Sagnac Award to three deserving octogenerarians. David de Hilster opened up the ceremony with a heart-felt speech about the occasion. He remarked that the word 'dissident' is only a passing term, and that the greatest minds in science were being represented today. The first recipient, Alex Scarborough, received praise from de Hilster for his work in expanding earth theory and abiotic fuel production. Scarborogh’s daughter Kay shared a few highlights from the life of a great scientist and father. Scarborough accepted the award and barely started to talk when he was overcome by emotion.

Greg Volk spoke next about the award’s name sake Georges Sagnac, who, in spite of contributing such an important experiment, has yet to receive recognition from the scientific community. The underappreciated Sagnac typifies today's unsung heroes receiving his namesake award. The son of perhaps the greatest father-son team of scientists since the Braggs, Neal Graneau shared a few words about working with his father, Peter Graneau. Their experimental work in longitudinal forces and the breaking of hydrogen bonds in water may yet revolutionize the energy economy. Graneau graciously received his award from Volk.

Finally life-long friend Cynthia Whitney and former student and current collaborate Terri Mascado both told charming anecdotes about the final recipient, Domina Spencer. No surprise to anyone, Domina herself was not at a loss for words, reflecting on her student years at MIT.

Returning to the more prosaic world of physics, Neil Munch renewed his sermon on assumption control, showing how science today is quietly abandoning special relativity just as the Kuhnian world predicts. Tuomo Suntola, one of our two special guests from Finland and one of the many scientists struggling to summarize a lifetime of work into 30 minutes, introduced his unique concept of zero energy balance in a closed universe. Dr. Suntola was kind enough to offer copies of his new book to interested colleagues. Satisfyingly the first afternoon session closed with Aleksander Tsybin, assisted by Peter Marquardt. They showed that by expanding Einstein’s gamma factor into a series, the higher order terms could account for neutrinos from X-rays or electron-positrons from gamma rays.

The second afternoon session was filled with close calls. After a three hour flight delay, Francisco Muller finally arrived as Bob French presented his wave-particle unity ideas. A former student of Abner Shimony, French has maintained a long-term interest in EPR, Bell’s inequality and non-locality, explaining much by way of emission theory. Dr. Muller described his attempts to detect the motion of the earth and the one-way Sagnac Effect with interferometry. With pictures form his own living room, Muller showed exactly how his experiments were done. While waiting for Franco Selleri, Glen Borchardt challenged everyone with questions about reality. Are force, energy, mass, and temperature real things or only ideas that describe real things? With 15 minutes to spare, Dr. Selleri closed the regular Wednesday session with a critique of the Reichenbach-Jammer parameter for the one way velocity of light. Disproving the need for this parameter, Selleri introduced his new theory and book on Weak Relativity.

Any normal day this would be enough, but now Wednesday. With more pizza than anyone could begin to contemplate and less liquid than anyone desired, we enjoyed an hour of discussion and comrodary. This year’s John Chappell lectures followed with a tribute to the late Bob Heaston. Using Heaston’s own words, Roger Rydin sampled through the myriad of Heaston ideas and philosophies. Following this, Peter Marquardt told the story of the Heaston-Marquardt attempt in 2008 to publish their gravitational paper in Annalen der Physik.

Those devotees who remained to the bitter end hit their collective pillows simultaneously, conclusively demonstrating that reality of absolute time.