TIME PIECE or Greed is Killing the Future

 

I am assured by fundamentalist Christians that six thousand years ago God created the world in six days. Of course, six thousand years ago a day was about the shortest period of time humans could measure accurately. And the mystical number six is also the number of sides to the electromagnetic spaces or cells which give cell phones their name. 

Within each 10 square mile cell surrounding every tower, 832 separate frequencies are used, two frequencies for every individual phone conversation. For the last half century the preferred method for defining these frequencies, the time between each electromagnetic wave crest, has been to hit a ball of 10 million pure cesium atoms (#55 on the periodic table) with a focused beam of  microwaves. 

The cesium then releases electrons, each with a new wave crest 9 billion, 192 million, 631 thousand 770 times every second. And the cesium  will maintain that exact frequency - and your cell phone conversations and web connections -  it is estimated -  for about 20 million years. And 20 million beats 6 thousand any day of the week.  It's a near perfect system.

The only problem is that cesium is a rare earth metal. The metal is so it eager to combine with oxygen that on contact it instantly steals water's two oxygen atoms, thereby generating enough heat to visibly explode the now free hydrogen atom like a mini-Hindenburg. Given a little time cesium will even dissolve glass to steal its oxygen. Cesium is only stable in nature in a rare rock called Pegmatite (above), and 82 % of all the cesium rich Pegmatite known to exist on earth has been found in one place, beneath a single narrow lake along the Bird River in Manitoba, Canada, a land unknown in 1656, to the Archbishop of Ireland.

In retrospect the Irish primate James Ussher (above) seems an unlikely source for 300 years of dogmatic intellectual stagnation. In life he was a purveyor of political compromises. Ussher's “Annales veteris testamenti” (Annals of the Old Testament), published in 1650, displayed his love of dusty manuscripts, esoteric minutiae and ancient languages. As an academic it was his judgment the world began after sunset on Sunday 23 October, 4004 B.C. He was using the best evidence available at the time, and disagreed about the date for creation with his friend, the Oxford mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, by just four years.

Bernic Lake is about 60 miles northeast of Winnipeg, just beyond the western edge of the Canadian Shield. But on this spot two and a half billion years ago, Precambrian rains fell upon sterile volcanic basalt of the shield, chemically altering and eroding the rock into the world wide ocean, laying down oxygen poor sediments called Greenstone belts. 

These belts (once rounded pillow lava, mashed flat and reheated) were buried and heated, compressed and folded at least three times, beginning two billion years ago with the advent of plate tectonics, until eventually batholiths of a new rock, granite, rose and intruded into the Green stones at depth. 

About 2.67 billion years ago, at a batholith about 15 miles due west of today's small community of Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba, cracks in the Greenstone were injected with chemically rich waters from the granite, concentrating a potpourri of rare earth metals, lithium, beryllium, tantalum and cesium.

Sir Isaac Newton's modern fame is as the discoverer of gravity, the inventor of calculus and optics and his three Laws of Motion. When praised by his contemporaries Newton explained he stood on the shoulders of geniuses. But the great economist John Maynard Keynes also called him “the last of the magicians.” 

Newton devoted most of his time and effort to alchemy, and his search for the Philosopher's Stone, which would magically turn lead into gold. Newton was no more a fool, than Bishop Ussher. But both were men were of their age, and they lacked the technology to more precisely measure the world they lived in. But they both wanted to do better.  Neither of them thought human knowledge should stop where they were, and neither thought God insisted upon ignorance.

The Bird River of Manitoba (above) flows through the largest remaining, seemingly eternal, boreal forest on earth. It is an awe inspiring terrain, but capable of supporting only two humans per square mile.

However, since 1929 some 60 families in Lac du Bonnet have depended upon the Cabot Corporation's Tanco mine (above) to earn a living.  Since the middle of the 1990's, each year's 30,000 kilograms of cesium extracted from the great rock rooms beneath Bernic Lake, have been destined to lubricate and cool oil drilling equipment world wide, in the form of caesium formate. 

The tiny fraction used in atomic clocks would never economically justify keeping the mine open. But there is enough profitable cesium under Bernic Lake to last another ten years. If the mine does not swallow the lake first.

At room temperature a single atom of cesium has 55 electrons in six orbits around its nucleus - two in the first level, eight in the second, eighteen in both the third and fourth, eight in the fifth and a lone single electron on the outside or valance level. 

It is the valance electron that emits energy at a specific frequency when excited by microwaves, as was first predicted in 1945 by Professor Isidor Rabi (above) from Columbia University. With all due respect to Professor Rabi, he was not smarter than Newton, but as Newton might have put it, Rabbi was standing on his shoulders. Seven years later the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) built the first cesium atomic clock. They kept perfecting and miniaturizing the design until about 1968, when they established the highest standard of measurement ever achieved - until recently

Until 1989 cesium sold for less than $5 a gram (above). Then came the invention of cesium formate, a slurry that was liquid enough to lubricate drilling bits, and heavy enough improve drill efficiency and to carry rock back up the bore hole, while enduring the temperatures and pressures found thousands of feet underground at the point of a drill bit.  

By 1998 the price of 99% pure cesium was over $60 a gram. It was then that Cabot decided to maximize profits by extracting even the ore holding the up the roof of their mine. 

They shaved away the pillars supporting the ceiling, from 50 feet in diameter to just 25. In 2012 the price of cesium was $70.60 a gram. Then, in 2013, Cabot admitted that over the past three years at least a ton of rock had fallen into their mine because “The crown pillar...is unstable and requires immediate action”.  Corporate greed was destroying the goose that laid the golden egg, and digging at the Tanco mine had to stop.

The accuracy of cesium clocks is now the limiting factor in available cell phone channels, the accuracy of Global Positioning systems, higher precision and versatility in the electrical grid and better science in every field. 

So in the new generation of clocks, the NIST-F2, introduced on 3 April 2014, the chamber containing the cesium ball is chilled to minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit (-193 ºC). This does not change the frequency of the cesium, but it eliminates much of the “noise” of all the other atoms in the chamber, so the faint electromagnetic vibrations produced by that single valance election can be more clearly heard and more closely defined. 

Instead of losing a second every 20 million years, the NIST-F2 loses a second every 300 million years. With this more precise measurement of frequencies, the internet will get faster, cell phones will get more versatile and dependable and there will be more profit and better lives for every living human on earth.  Until the cesium runs out.

By 2015 it was figured that Bernic Lake (above) would drown Cabot's golden goose and the world's primary source of cesium within three years,  unless something was done. Cabot's solution was to bulldoze a new road through the virgin forest, build dikes across the lake, and “de-water” the now isolated section over their mine. 

In Cabot's opinion, this, as well as staples drilled into the ceiling (above)  provided “an optimal solution, in that it eliminates the immediate risk of flooding, minimizes the long-term footprint of the project, and upholds Cabot’s corporate commitment to being responsive, responsible and respected citizens...”.  It will also keep oil pouring into pipelines around the world, and profits pouring into the pockets of Cabot stockholders. It will also continue to pour $28 million a year into the Lac du Bonnet economy, and save 150 jobs in Manitoba.  

In 2018 Cabot "...resumed mining operations...", making certain they will provide cesium for new NIST-F2 clocks world wide. But to do so it may have to  kill the three mile long Bernic Lake, and poison the Winnipeg River and Lake Winnipeg which the Bird River pours into.

About six thousand years ago a Sumerian Michelangelo crafted an 8 foot long, 3 foot wide copper tribute to his God, the powerful lion headed eagle Imdugud (above). Copper was a new medium six thousand years ago. The metal has two electrons in its first orbit, eight in the second, eighteen in the third, and like cesium, a single electron in the valance level. But unlike cesium, when exposed to oxygen and moisture, copper slowly forms a layer of green verdigris, or copper carbonate, which then shields the underlying metal from further corrosion. 

The Imdugud frieze, found in the ancient city of al' Urbaid, has been dated using carbon 14 techniques, which uses the science developed by Newton and extended by Professor Isidor Rab. The science of chemistry and metallurgy tells us the ore for the frieze came from mines in present day Iran, mines whose tailings and waste rocks were scavenged by a third and fourth generation of miners for copper not long after Bishop Ussher's birth date for the universe. 

Perhaps the ore was carried to Ubaid in a ship powered by a sail, an invention which also made its first appearance about 6,000 years ago, as dated from the images painted on pottery, an unbroken line of which can be followed style change by style change, over the last eight thousand years - 2,000 years older than Bishop Usher ever imagined.

In the past the Catholic Church has denied that atoms decayed, that sunlight could be split into a spectrum, that the sun was at the center of the solar system, that anything existed before sunset Sunday, 23 October, 4004 B.C.  None of those contentions proved or disproved the existence of God. And eventually each, and a thousand other beliefs  were discarded, without destroying the faith of the faithful. 

Only,  insisting that ignorance is truth, that hypocrisy is devotion, are taking the Lord God's name in vain, by mistaking your will for God's will. The rare earth metals clawed from rocks by humans , does  not threaten faith. But ignorance does threaten your ability to receive a cell phone call from your kids to say they love you.

         - 30 -

THE EMPEROR'S OLD CLOTHES

 

I know where this version of the Emperor's New Clothes begins - in a two story white stucco building outside of Montgomery, Alabama. I know when it began - in the wake of the combined tragedies of World War One and the Great Depression. And I know who it's prophets were, men known as the “Bombing Mafia”. 

And I know when the denouement of this tale was reached, between noon and three on the Thursday afternoon of 14 October, 1943, in a frozen bloodbath. It was the day some of the best brains in the United States military had a “come to Jesus moment” and were forced to face the results of their own hubris.

It was just after four in the morning when the lights were switched on in the metal Quonset huts at 14 airfields across southern England, awakening any of the 2,900 young crewmen who had been able to sleep. They had half an hour to wash up and dress before breakfast, and another hour to eat and then report for their briefings. It was in those chilly rooms they learned their assignment for this day, mission number 115, was to again attack the ball bearing plants in the southern German town of Schweinfurt.

In August of 1931 Austin Hall (above) on Maxwell Air Field, outside of Montgomery, Alabama, was dedicated as home for the United States Army Air Corps Tactical School. Tasked with training the next generation of pilots and planners, and facing dwindling depression era budgets, the ACTS saw the salvation of their new service in technology. 

General Oscar Westover decreed, “Bombardment aviation has (the) defense fire power...(to) effectively accomplish...its assigned mission without support.” Thus was born the Air Force's “holy trinity"; bombers will always get through to the target, a well trained crew can “drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet”, and pinpoint shock and awe bombing of the enemies' “industrial web” would, by itself, destroy an enemy's ability and will to resist. The temple where this faith was practiced was the Boeing B-17 bomber.

In the cold and damp the ten mechanics assigned to each bomber had been struggling through the night to prepare for the mission. 

All four 1,200 horse power Wright “Cyclone” turbo charged radial engines were serviced. The manual control services (there were no hydraulic assists) on each 74 foot long bomber were tested. The tanks in the 103 foot wings were filled with 100 octane aviation fuel. 

The armament team loaded and armed 3,880 pounds of bombs in the bomb bay, and loaded and checked the eleven .50 caliber machine guns that gave each “Flying Fortress” its nickname. Close to 55,000 pounds of weight now depressed the two rubber tires on the concrete. At about 7:30 that morning the flight crews arrived to bring the aluminum behemoth to life.

First introduced in 1936, the Boeing B-17 was the embodiment of General Westover's creed. The commander/pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit were backed up by the flight engineer, sitting directly behind them. He monitored the performance of all four engines, which drove the aircraft 160 miles an hour at 25,000 feet for a thousand miles to the target.  He also manned the twin .50 caliber machine guns in the electrically powered top turret. Below and behind him was the bomb bay which could carry 3 tons of bombs. 

Forward and below the cockpit, crouched in the nose of the aircraft, worked the navigator and bombardier, who also manned a single .50 caliber machine gun each. Behind the bomb bay sat the radio operator, who also manned a single fifty caliber gun. 

Rear of the radio compartment was the new (in the “F” model) belly electrical ball turret, which was lowered after take off. With his knees level with with his head, this gunner fired twin .50 caliber guns, as well as reporting on the bomb strikes. Behind him were two waist gunners (above), each manning a single .50 caliber machine gun. 

And crouched on his knees, beneath the 19 foot high tail, was the rear gunner, firing twin 50. caliber machine guns.

The concept preached in the ACTS was that the a porcupine-like cone of fire around the bomber would destroy any attackers foolish enough to approach. 

But survival above 10,000 feet in the un-pressurized plane required a heavy electrically heated clothing plugged into the plane's electrical system, thick insulated boots and gloves, an oxygen mask and hose tied to a heavy tank, a bulletproof vest, a steel combat helmet and goggles to keep the crewman's eyes from freezing in the ten degrees below zero air . 

All guns not in powered turrets had to be manhandled against a 150 mile wind howling across the aircraft. It was quickly apparent that no one, burdened in such bulky gear, could track a heavy machine gun in three dimensional space, fast enough to accurately shoot at a single engine fighters closing with the bombers at up to 500 miles an hour. German fighter pilots were terrified by the heavy tracer rounds reaching out for their planes, and sometimes they were killed. But they attacked anyway, and they were horribly effective.

In the three missions just prior to this  Black Thursday, the U.S. Eighth Air Force had lost 90 B-17's to enemy action and accidents - 900 highly trained crew killed or captured in just three missions.   American production and population could quickly make good the losses. But survivors were already doubtful of living through the 25 combat missions of their official tour of duty. 

And at 8:15, as the engines were started, there were few who did not dread what was coming. Four days earlier, the medical officer for one of the 17 groups taking part in mission 115 noted “moral is the lowest that has yet been observed.”

At 8:30 the 12 to 16 bombers in each squadron rolled forward, and followed the leader down their taxi ways. By nine each of the big bombers had powered its way into the sky, climbing to 7,000 feet.

While forming up the squadrons began flying six or seven loops, each 15 miles long by 5 miles wide, until a group of four squadrons (48 to 60 bombers in total ) would be staggered vertically and horizontally into a three dimensional combat box, 3,000 feet from top to bottom, over a mile deep and half a mile wide and moving at 140 to 160 miles an hour. 

Each group then flew to an assembly point over southwest England, where the seven groups laboriously were formed into two wings. Then, on the flight to the Belgium coast,  the formation the 350 bombers started the 25 minute climb to their operational altitude of 22,000 feet.  By then it was just about 11:15 in the morning.  And for most of this time the Americans had been clearly visible on radar screens in German occupied France.

The “experts” at ACTS had reduced the problem to numbers. At best a 600 pound bomb dug a crater 2 feet deep and nine feet wide, and was lethal out to 90 feet. And in prewar training each individual bomb, dropped from 23,000 feet at 160 miles an hour, had only about a 1% chance of landing within 100 feet of the aiming point. And that was without anybody shooting at the bombers. 

In essence, the United States Air Corp, using the most complex weapons system yet designed, using what the Americans considered was the super accurate super secret Norden Bombsight (above),  was still reduced to Napoleon's 300 year old strategy of maneuvering mass, men to put the maximum metal in the general target area, and rely on the rule of averages to destroy the target. The prewar devotes at ACTS figured it would take at least 220 bombers to destroy any individual industrial target. 

Joining the bomber formation over southern England were the “Little Friends”, British Spitfires, and American massive P-47 Thunderbolts (above) and the twin engine twin tailed P-38 fighters. Technological advances now allowed the fighters to match the bombers for altitude, and more than double their speed. But these escorts could only reach as far as the German border at Aachen, before they had to turn back. By then 26 bombers had already aborted the mission because of mechanical problems.  The remaining 250 B-17 bombers were now alone in the sky, soon surrounded by a swarm of 700 German fighters. It was about two in the afternoon.

Almost immediately, closing at 500 miles an hour, six waves of ME-109 (above) and FW 190 fighters swept toward the American bombers, firing rockets, and with their machine guns and 20 millimeter cannons blazing. After the last fighter wave hurtled through the lead formations, 37 Flying Forts had been shot down or so damaged they were forced to turn back for England. There are now fewer than 225 bombers to complete the mission.

The coordinated fighter attacks continued for half an hour, coming at the bombers from all angles. Some multi-engine German aircraft even flew above the bomber stream, bombing the bombers. As the B-17's approached the target, the fighters pulled away and the ground based anti-aircraft guns around Schweinfurt began firing. Every black, blue and red puff and white star burst marked the center of thousands of shards of metal that sliced apart aluminum, ripping control and fuel lines and flesh. 

Between 2:40 and 2:57pm all the bombers dropped their loads. As they pulled away, the fighters, which had landed, refueled and rearmed, returned.

It was now a vicious melee in the cold sky, as the German pilots, desperately defending their homes and families, formed up with any available formations to press their attacks. One surviving navigator recalled, “The fighters were unrelenting; it was simply murder.” 

The desperate situation for the bombers was made worse because fog in England had prevented the Little Friends from launching to protect the B-17's on their homeward leg. The mauling did not end until the bombers staggered over the English channel.

All five ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt had been damaged, and production was cut by 40%. Two hundred seventy-six workers and civilians had been killed. In addition just under forty German fighters had been destroyed and another 20 damaged. 

However, even though the factories were destroyed, the heavy equipment inside was largely left undamaged, and the industry soon returned to full production. Worse, for the Americans, it was soon,  dispersed across Germany to make them a less tempting target. And the cost to America had been staggering.

Only 33 bombers landed without damage. 77 B-17's were lost. Sixty had been shot down, one had ditched in the channel and five had crash landed back in England.

One hundred thirty-three planes were damaged, 12 so badly they had to be cannibalized to keep the others flying. Out of 290 crew members who had flown the mission, 59 had been killed and 65 survived to be taken prisoner. In addition a single P-47 fighter escort had been shot down.

The British Bomber Command called the Schwienfurt Raid “America’s Waterloo.” And General “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Eighth Air Force was forced to admit that his bombers had no clothes. For the rest of the war his  “war winning” bombers were reduced to acting as bait to draw German fighters into the air to defend their homeland, where they could be destroyed by the long delayed long range P-51 Mustang fighters, which Arnold finally began shipping to England two months after Black Thursday.

Like the pre-World War One theory that French spirit could over come German machine guns, the pre-World War Two theory that bombers could win a war by themselves, was just another fantasy.   As Canadian thinker Marshal McLuhan put it, war is "the little red schoolhouse".

- 30 -