Fixed Rate Scanning: Enigma or Research Tool?
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Fixed Rate Scanning: Enigma or Research Tool? |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Bill Ramsay |
| Keywords | fixed rate scanning, gravity waves, earthquake prediction, function generator, frequency coherency |
| Published | 1997 |
| No. of pages | 19 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
1997 IFNS Proceedings. In a 1994 paper presented at the International Symposium on NewEnergy, the author revealed a technique, discovered. serendipitously, which recorded. unusual periods of frequency coherencies in the output of an inexpensive commercial function-generator. Except for periodic influences of sun and moon, little was known at that time about the causes of these coherencies. Work has been sporadic since, but 1997 was to be a time of unusual long-term planetary alignments which some researchers thought might trigger increased earthquakes. So, the author decided to put forth concerted efforts to see what might be found out. Reported are the results of these efforts which suggest this crude technique may be worthy of refmements including computerizing and placements of other such "scanning stations" around the globe. The present situation seems much like that of when there was only one seismograph, in that something was being learned but far from the potential.
Overview
Presented in the 1997 IFNS Proceedings, this is an experimental report rather than a theoretical paper. Bill Ramsay describes a homemade instrument he calls Fixed Rate Scanning (FRS): an unstabilised, low-cost function generator running at a very low frequency, its output traced by a Rustrak strip-chart recorder that snaps a needle against pressure-sensitive paper at exactly two-second intervals. Ordinarily such a generator simply drifts. Ramsay's claim is that it does not drift randomly — that at certain times the frequency locks, or "coheres," within the recorder's two-second sampling window, and that when it does, intricate periodic patterns appear on the chart. The paper documents a year of nearly continuous scanning through 1997 and looks for correlation between those episodes of coherency and worldwide earthquake counts.
What makes the paper a dissident document is its interpretation. Ramsay does not treat the coherencies as instrument artefacts to be engineered away; he treats the instability of a cheap RC oscillator as a sensor for something the standard account has no place for — in his words "fundamental, profound, longitudinal gravity-wave (or very long wavelength EM) actions on a universe wide scale," mediated by the ringing of the Earth's core. He locates the work explicitly in the lineage of Gregory Hodowanec's Rhysmonic Cosmology and its capacitor-based gravity-wave detectors, and he is candid that the technique is "quite primitive" and that his own analysis is done by hand.
The technique and its findings
Discovery and apparatus
The instrument came out of repair testing in 1991. Ramsay had bought a surplus Rustrak Model 288 recorder — a design in continuous production since 1946 — intending to log the output of Hodowanec's gravity-wave sensors. He drove its one-milliampere movement with a roughly 0.3 Hz triangular waveform from a generic function generator, choosing a triangle wave because it swept the needle smoothly "similar to that of a pendulum," and a very low rate so as not to stress a meter movement never designed for the job. The recorder's 60 Hz synchronous motor advances the paper at exactly one inch per hour and snaps the needle at exact two-second intervals, giving precisely 1800 dots per inch of chart. After several days of running, Ramsay found "an intricate pattern, quite exquisite" formed overnight, which could only occur if the frequency had been stable, and within the sampling window, for about an hour.
The critical requirement is that the generator not be frequency-stabilised: "Those which use frequency stabilizing schemes will not work." He names the Elenco and Instek units he used and the B&K used by Alastair Couper, notes that a multi-turn or fine frequency control must usually be substituted, and specifies a 10 kΩ series resistor between generator and meter. The frequency is set once at the start and then left to wander. Of several scanning rates tried, he settled on 0.05 Hz — a 20-second period — because it is a sub-harmonic of other significant frequencies, lies within the sampling window, sits near the generator's lower limit, produces the greatest variety of patterns, and matches the archive of earlier records.
Ruling out local causes
Between the 1991 discovery and a 1994 paper at the International Symposium on New Energy, tests were run in upstate New York, North Carolina and California; Ramsay reports that all gave similar results, which he takes as evidence against purely local causes such as temperature drift or stray fields. He also reports reproducing the effect with a completely different oscillator — a hand-wired single-IC circuit with "radically different values of R and C" — which showed "a profound dip at about the same times two days apart," the two traces agreeing in trend if not point for point. The constant is that the frequency-determining element is an RC network.
Correlation with earthquakes
Continuous scans began 21 January 1997. To compare with seismicity Ramsay discarded the day-to-day baseline drift and plotted only the daily range from lowest to highest frequency, against the number of reported daily earthquakes worldwide — a double plot whose shape suggested an insect, giving it the name the "EQ-Bug." His statistical treatment is elementary and he states it plainly: for any day there are three possibilities (range and quake count both up, both down, or unchanged), so chance covariance is one in three, and for N successive days 3N. He identifies "several periods of four to six days with clear co-variances," giving odds against chance of one in 81 to one in 729. He is equally plain that this holds only on some days, and offers a conjecture rather than a result: that these are days when there is "a clear path between the core and the sensing location," a phasing between incoming influence and the core's ringing.
Two further observations are offered. First, diurnal variation — Ramsay accepts the standard requirement that any such claim must show predictable daily variance, plots twelve days of hour-by-hour coherency end to end (6–17 May), and reports clear smoothed maxima and minima. He attributes this to the Earth's rotation carrying the sensing site through directions of greater and lesser cosmic matter-energy influence, drawing an analogy to the microwave background dipole (see Cosmic Microwave Background). He notes that the same diurnal signature is reported from Hodowanec's capacitor sensors, from T. T. Brown's millivolt outputs of rocks, and from Dan Davidson's sensors. Second, timing — he reports that the majority of catalogued quakes occurred while coherencies were in progress at his location, not after the Earth had rotated away: a minor Alabama tremor about 13 "earth-rotation-minutes" away, and three Californian events about 228 rotation-minutes away, all during local coherency.
Recommendations
The paper closes as an appeal for collaboration. One instrument, Ramsay argues, is in the position of a single seismograph — enough to know something is there, useless for locating it. He wants the technique computerised (the generator's TTL square-wave output triggering counters on its edges), multiple scanning stations distributed globally, and Nick Fiorenza's "spherical astrogeometry" alignment analysis — done entirely by hand at the time — reduced to software. He raises the distributed-computing model of SETI as a precedent, and suggests that FRS may explain why some Free Energy devices behave "finicky."
Assessment
The paper's real merits are its transparency and its instinct for control experiments. Ramsay states his apparatus, cost, part numbers and settings precisely enough for anyone to replicate the setup for a few hundred dollars, which is more than many claims of this kind offer. He anticipates the obvious objections and tests them: geographic relocation against local environmental causes, an independently built RC oscillator against generator-specific artefacts, and the diurnal-variation criterion which he correctly identifies as the standard demand made of any claimed cosmic influence. He states his statistics rather than hiding them, and he does not overclaim the earthquake correlation — he explicitly asks "But why just some days?" rather than papering over the failures. The framing of the work as a research tool needing many stations, not a finished discovery, is honest.
The difficulties are nonetheless severe. The statistical argument does not survive inspection: selecting "several periods of four to six days with clear co-variances" out of a year of continuous data and then computing 3N odds for those selected runs is the multiple-comparisons error in its purest form. In a 340-day record, runs of four to six matching days are expected by chance in large numbers; the calculation is only valid for a stretch specified in advance. Nor is the three-way partition (up, down, same) equiprobable — daily worldwide earthquake counts are strongly autocorrelated and "same" is rare — so the one-in-three baseline is wrong to begin with. No control series is analysed, no null distribution is generated by shuffling, and the earthquake data is acknowledged to be "incomplete since not all was readily available to me."
More fundamentally, the chain from observation to conclusion has several unbridged steps asserted rather than shown. That an unstabilised RC oscillator's drift correlates with anything is the entire empirical content; the identification of the cohering agent as longitudinal gravity waves rests on intuition, which Ramsay says outright — "my intuition is that the long-duration cohering influences … are those of gravity." The Earth's-core-as-bell mechanism is offered as a "good" explanation without an estimate of the core's resonant periods, an amplitude, or a coupling mechanism to an RC network. The "clear path" and "phasing" hypotheses are introduced precisely where the data fails, which makes them unfalsifiable as stated. The diurnal maximum attributed to the Earth's off-centre position in the universe conflicts with the isotropy of the microwave background beyond its measured 10−3 dipole, which is fully accounted for by the Solar System's peculiar motion; and a sidereal-versus-solar-day test — the standard discriminator between a cosmic and a terrestrial or thermal source — is not performed, though the twelve-day dataset would allow it. Given that the entire method depends on an oscillator chosen for its thermal and supply sensitivity, ordinary 24-hour environmental cycling remains the obvious competing explanation and is not excluded.
The paper is at its weakest where it is most expansive: the digressions into heart and brainwave frequencies, "sending love to the planet," beam weapons on Atlantis and unconventionally powered craft add nothing to the measurement and considerably lower the odds that a reader will evaluate the measurement on its merits. Taken narrowly for what it is — a request that other people build the same cheap rig and see whether the patterns appear at the same times in different places — the proposal is testable, and the multi-station test Ramsay asks for is the right one. It does not appear to have been carried out.