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Peter Graneau

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Peter Graneau
Peter Graneau
Born(1921-03-13)March 13, 1921
DiedFebruary 25, 2014(2014-02-25)
ResidenceConcord, MA, United States
NationalityEnglish
Known forNew Energy, Newtonian Physics, IAAD, Mach's Principle, Water Arcing
Scientific career
FieldsResearch Scientist, Electrodynamics, New Energy

Peter Graneau (March 13, 1921 – February 25, 2014) was a British-born American research scientist best known for his experimental revival of Ampère's original force law and for his work on water-arc explosions in the field of New Energy. A physicist and power-engineering specialist who spent much of his career at M.I.T. and Northeastern University, he argued — with his son and collaborator Neal — that a Newtonian, instantaneous "action-at-a-distance" electrodynamics explains a range of phenomena treated as anomalies by mainstream Maxwell–Lorentz–Einstein theory.

Early Life and Education

Graneau was born on March 13, 1921 in Silesia, then part of Germany (now Poland), where his father was a landowner and businessman. After the Second World War that region was annexed by Poland and his family relocated further west. His studies at the University of Berlin having been interrupted by the war, he moved to England, became a British subject, and attended the University of Nottingham, where he was awarded a B.Sc. (First Class Honours) and a PhD. He was later appointed a Fellow of the British Institute of Physics.

Career in Power Engineering

After university, Graneau joined the industrial laboratory of British Insulated Callender's Cables as assistant research manager, where he worked to foster collaboration between industry and academia — then an uncommon practice — initiating joint projects in standard electrical cables, novel forms of electrical energy transmission, and the electrification of Britain's railway network.

In the early 1960s he was invited to serve on a U.S. committee under the "Highway Beautification Act" championed by Lady Bird Johnson, tasked with placing unsightly overhead power corridors underground. He assembled a consortium of Simplex Wire & Cable, Arthur D. Little and MIT and, in 1967, moved with his wife and son to Concord, Massachusetts to lead the project. When the Vietnam War drew away its funding, he founded a consulting company, Underground Power Corporation, and established an electrodynamics and power-transmission laboratory at MIT supported by the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. There he developed novel prototypes — cryogenically cooled and sodium power cables and high-voltage switchgear — and filed many patents, work that culminated in his first book, Underground Power Transmission (Wiley, 1979).

Amperian Electrodynamics

In his MIT laboratory in the late 1970s, Graneau returned to lines of thought first raised in his PhD work. His research into the history, derivation, and experimental confirmation of the original law of electrodynamics proposed by André-Marie Ampère led him to argue that a return to the Newtonian concept of "instantaneous action at a distance" could resolve inconsistencies in conventionally taught physics. His experiments with railguns pointed to longitudinal forces acting along the direction of current flow — forces predicted by Ampère's force law but not by the modern Lorentz formulation. Working closely with his son Neal, who handled the computational modelling, he set out his case in Ampère-Neumann Electrodynamics of Metals (Hadronic Press, 1984) and, with Neal, in Newton vs. Einstein: How Matter Interacts with Matter (Carlton Press, 1993) and Newtonian Electrodynamics (World Scientific, 1996).

Water Arc Experiments and New Energy

As a visiting professor at Northeastern University during the 1980s and 1990s, Graneau formed an international research team studying the high-current pulsed-arc liberation of energy stored in the hydrogen bonds of water — the "water arc explosion." He published more than a dozen papers arguing that this process points to a new source of clean, renewable energy, a line of research still pursued in the UK and the Netherlands. His experiments in this area are collected in Unlimited Renewable Solar Energy from Water (2006).

Inertia and Mach's Principle

Graneau's final book, co-authored with his son, In the Grip of the Distant Universe: The Science of Inertia (World Scientific, 2006), extended his electromagnetic work to the problem of inertia. Its central claim is that the inertia resisting the acceleration of every object arises from instantaneous force interactions between every atom and every other atom in the universe — a "preconventional" view that, he argued, contradicts much of modern physics yet remains consistent with experiment while offering a simpler framework (see also Mach's Principle).

Awards and Recognition

In 2006 Graneau became an editor of the U.S. journal Infinite Energy, through which he promoted unconventional and renewable energy research. In 2009 he received the Sagnac Award from the Natural Philosophy Alliance "in recognition of a lifetime commitment to excellence in scientific pursuit, for experiments in water plasma explosions and railgun recoils, and for theoretical presentations of Amperian longitudinal forces, instantaneous Machian interactions, and the unique role of water in renewable energy." His body of work comprises five books and around 150 refereed publications.

Personal Life and Death

Graneau married Brigitte, an advisor in fine art, at Buckfast Abbey, England, in 1955; their son Neal was born in London in 1963. After the family's move to the United States in 1967 they made their home in Concord, Massachusetts, where he enjoyed writing, tennis, sailing, and life in the woods, and took particular pleasure in visiting his son's pulsed-power laboratory at the University of Oxford. Peter Graneau died on February 25, 2014 at the Rivercrest Nursing Home in Concord and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. (Dee Funeral Home obituary.)

Selected Journal Articles

  • "Steady-State Electrodynamics of a Cylindrical Body in Axial Motion," Journal of Electronics and Control, V14, p. 459 (1963).
  • "Application of Ampere's Force Law to Railgun Accelerators," Journal of Applied Physics, V53, N?, pp. 6642 (1982).
  • "Electromagnetic Jet-propulsion in the Direction of Current Flow," Nature, V295, pp. 311-312 (Jan 1982).
  • "Compatibility of the Ampere and Lorentz Force Laws with the Virtual Work Concept," Il Nuovo Cimento B, V78, N2, pp. 213 (1983).
  • "First Indication of Ampere Tension in Solid Electrical Conductors," Physics Letters A, V97, pp. 253-255 (1983).
  • "Ampere and Lorentz Forces," Physics Letters A, V107, N5, pp. 235 (1985).
  • "Comments on 'Equivalence of the Lorentz and Ampere Force Laws in Magnetostatics," Journal of Applied Physics, V58, N9, pp. 3638 (1985).
  • "Electrodynamic Explosions in Liquids," Applied Physics Letters, V46, N5, pp. 468-470 (1985). (with P. Neal Graneau)
  • "Powerful Water-Plasma Explosions," Physics Letters A, V117, N2, pp. 101-105 (1986). (with R. Azevedo, C. Millet & N. Graneau)
  • "The Electromagnetic Impulse Pendulum and Momentum Conservation," Il Nuovo Cimento D, V7, p. 31 (1986). (with P. Neal Graneau)
  • "Railgun Recoil and Relativity," Journal of Physics D, Applied Physics, V20, N3, pp. 391-393 (1987).
  • "Amperian Recoil and the Efficiency of Railguns," Journal of Applied Physics, V62, N?, pp. 3006-3009 (1987).
  • "Wire Explosions," Physics Letters A, V120, p. 77 (1987).
  • "Energy and Its Electrodynamic Mass," Physics Bulletin, V39, p. 136 (1988).
  • "Electrodynamic Water Arc Gun" (Presented at the 4th Symposium on Electromagnetic Launch Technology, April 1988).
  • "Electromagnetic Momentum Measurements," Applied Physics, V21, N5, pp. 1826 (1988).
  • "The Cause of Thunder," Journal of Physics D, Applied Physics, V22, pp. 1083 (1989).
  • "Longitudinal Forces in Ampere's Wire-Arc Experiment", Physics letters A, V137, N3, pp. 87 (May 1989).
  • "The Motionally-Induced Back-EMF in Railguns," Physics Letters A, V145, p. 396 (1990). (with S. L. Morrill & D. S. Thompson)
  • "The Finite Size of the Metallic Current Element," Physics Letters A, V147, N2/3, pp. 92 (1990).
  • "Nonlocal Action in the Induction Motor", Foundations of Physics Letters, V4, N5, p. 499 (Oct 1991).
  • "Comment on "The Motionally Induced Back-EMF in Railguns", Physics Letters A, V160, N5, p. 490 (Dec 1991).
  • "The Role of Ampere forces in Nuclear Fusion", Physics Letters A, V165, N1, p. 1 (May 1992).
  • "Ampere Force Calculation for Filament Fusion Experiments", Physics Letters A, V174, N5/6,  p. 421 (Mar 1993).
  • "Solar-Energy Liberation from Water by Electric Arcs" (J. Plasma Physics, 60, 4, 1998).
  • "Arc-Liberated Chemical Energy Exceeds Electrical Input Energy (J. Plasma Physics, 63, 2, 2000).
  • "Evidence of Thunder Being a Chemical Explosion of Air" (J. Plasma Physics, 69, 3, 2003).

Abstracts

Books

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