Radiant Energy: For Beyond the Light Rays Lies the Secret of the Universe: The Evolution and Transmutation of the Atom
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Radiant Energy: For Beyond the Light Rays Lies the Secret of the Universe: The Evolution and Transmutation of the Atom |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Thomas Henry Moray |
| Keywords | Radiant Energy, Light, atom |
| Published | 1946 |
| No. of pages | 15 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The reader should bear in mind that most of the ideas as set forth in the following pages, as also later date, were first given to the world by Dr. Moray from 1911 to 1931, and therefore should be read with that thought in mind.
In the past we permitted ourselves to be put on the defensive in our attempts to prove our stand. This was a mistake, as TRUTH should never be put on the defensive. The system of instruction of the Far East rather than that of the Western World should be used in advancing new discoveries of truth. In the Far East the teacher does not stop to prove each theory or fact. The message is delivered whether his hearers agree with him or not. He does not care whether they all agree with him or not, for he feels sure those who are ready for the truth he teaches will recognize it, and for the others, if they are not prepared to receive the truth; no amount of argument will help matters. The Eastern teacher knows that much of his teaching is but the planting of seed which will grow and be recognized only after the lapse of time.
Overview
This is not a research paper but a compilation — a booklet copyrighted 1945 by the T. Henry Moray Research Institute of Salt Lake City, assembled "for the layman from excerpts of the writings of Dr. T. Henry Moray" and drawing on material he had written between 1911 and 1931, including his 1931 pamphlet Beyond the Light Rays. It is composed of a general statement on the Moray Radiant Energy device compiled in Los Angeles in January 1939, letters written in 1942 and 1943, quotations from contemporary textbooks, testimonial correspondence, and a closing 1946 treatise on alpha, beta and gamma ray therapy. Moray himself warns that "this account may lack continuity."
Two claims run through it. The first is that space everywhere is filled with an oscillating medium — Moray uses the word ether, adding "or if you do not like that name, call it what you will" — whose surgings originate in the continuous disintegration of matter throughout the universe, and that a properly tuned receiver can draw usable power from it. The second is that matter and energy are continuously interconverting, so that transmutation of the elements is a matter of tuning rather than of brute-force bombardment. Both are framed against the mainstream physics of the day, and specifically against the cyclotron programme, which Moray regarded as an enormous waste: "Why should man waste his time and efforts in trying to split the atom when nature is doing it all the time for us out in space?"
The argument
Radiant energy and the oscillating universe
Moray's starting premise is that heat and light "are not things in themselves, but sensations or effects produced by this 'Radiant Energy' directly or indirectly from matter", and that all substances are combinations of one primordial substance which he identifies with electricity — "electricity is specifically modified ether". Electrons in motion constitute a current; so, he says, do ether waves in motion. He extends the mechanical analogy to define an electrical inertia as "the ratio of electric motive force to the acceleration of electric displacement", by analogy with inertia as the ratio of force to acceleration.
The energy of space is said to have "a definite elastic rigidity and density, which is subject to displacement and strains." Strain it and release it and the medium springs back past equilibrium and oscillates, as a struck elastic body does. If internal impedance is too great the return is a dead beat with no oscillation; reduce the resistance and synchronise the apparatus with "the actions of the universe" and recovery quickens until inertia carries the recoil past the natural oscillation and harmonics set in — at which point, Moray claims, the oscillations continue indefinitely, sustained by the oscillations of the universe itself. He is careful to distinguish this from perpetual motion: "My device oscillates because of the oscillations of the Universe caused by the disintegration of matter," and no more counts as perpetual motion than does the motion of the Earth.
The supporting physics is taken from Tesla, quoted from Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency: "Ere many generations pass our machinery will be driven by power obtainable at any point in the universe — Is this energy Static or Kinetic? If Static, our hopes are in vain; if Kinetic, and this we know it is for certain, then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheel work of nature." Moray adds a key observational argument of his own: the electrical conductivity of the air, which was his starting point for the discovery of the rays in question, "is just as strong by night as by day, so that radiations emitted by the sun can scarcely be the cause of this energy." From this he draws a striking inference — that the sun "in and of itself, has no energy, but is merely a rebroadcaster of the great generator — the sonic of the universe itself."
The device
The Moray device is presented as a tuned receiver rather than a generator. "An electrical generator is in the true sense not a generator, as it creates nothing. Electricity is not made by the generator, it is merely pumped." His device is by contrast "a high-speed oscillating atom turbine": special oscillators pick up the incoming surgings by what he calls neutron bombardment, the frequency is stepped down for commercial use, and a proprietary "valve" prevents return of the energy to the outer circuit and forces it through the load.
The claimed performance is described but never explained; Moray states plainly that for patent reasons "no attempt has been made to give, nor will such information be given, as to why or how the results are obtained." The demonstrations reported include: an endurance run of 157 hours and 55 minutes under railroad seals with no flicker or dimming; operation more than 50 miles from any power line and 26 miles from the nearest farm telephone, at sites chosen by the witnesses and reached in their own car; and operation in a moving automobile. All parts are said to run cool and silent, with no moving parts, and the load to draw current adaptively from one 50-watt lamp up to fifty or more.
The single most-cited observation is attributed to an unnamed physicist who witnessed a 1931 demonstration: that with the oscillators in circuit "the condensers fill slowly, and the longer the current is applied to charge them, the greater the charge they take… much as in filling a bucket by pouring the water into it," rather than charging essentially instantaneously; that the lamps ran hot at one spot from incandescence of the gas while the rest of the globe stayed cool; and that the transformer wire carried a current that ordinary current would have burned it out. A 1940 letter from The Sun Photo Service of Salt Lake City reports that negatives including Moray's lamps required about ten times the normal exposure and special masking, the light burning into the film in a way ordinary lamps do not.
Transmutation
Moray insists that the atom is not and cannot be split by man — "It is merely a question of a change in form, no less matter and no less energy" — and that were the chain genuinely broken, atom would ignite atom throughout the universe like drops of gasoline. What is possible is "addition, multiplication, division and subtraction of the combinations of the atoms", the evolution of matter into energy and back again.
The practical method is resonance. In a September 1943 letter on the reduction of colloids from a non-crystalline to a crystalline state, he argues that the frequency of the current and the wavelength of the rays used must "harmonize so as to blend or synchronize with the natural frequency or wave length of the substance treated", producing what he coins a "super-ultra sonic reaction". Reported results include treated lead that could be heated white-hot before melting, and assays from Salt Lake City samples: one ounce of treated lead assayed at 35 cents in gold at the Boaz Mine in Montana in May 1940; treated soil assayed at $122.50 per ton in gold against a blank for untreated soil; and about 50 cc of treated artesian water assayed by the Union Assay Office in July 1940 at $10.50 per ton in gold and $2.63 in silver, with a further 1941 sample at 70 cents gold and 43 cents silver. He contrasts these with the Harvard cyclotron transmutation of mercury to gold reported by Sherr and Bainbridge, where the product was detectable only indirectly and decayed with a half-life he gives as 48 minutes — whereas his own metals, he says, "still exist and can be examined by anyone."
Scattered through the same passages are claims that ammunition stores could be destroyed at a distance by transmitting the proper oscillation, and that "gravity is akin to, if not an electrical oscillation so well balanced that we might, for the lack of a better name, almost call it a 'Wattless current'", from which he infers that gravity can be controlled and air navigation transformed.
Ray therapy
The closing 1946 treatise, on the Moray Cosray applicators invented by John Eugene and Richard R. Moray, argues that alpha, beta and gamma radiation can transform or disintegrate diseased cells so that nature rebuilds with healthy tissue, and that the applicators achieve this without the destruction of healthy tissue that limits radium and X-ray therapy. The rays are said to penetrate the human body, as proven by Geiger–Müller counter tests, and half an inch of lead, while requiring no shielding and no expert supervision, thanks to "internal phantom characteristics built into these applicators as a patented feature". Their half-life is given as about 1600 years.
Assessment
What is genuinely interesting in the booklet is the framework rather than the hardware. Moray's insistence that a generator does not generate — that electricity is pumped, not made, and sinks back "as water over the wheel — no less water, only the lowering of potential" — is a clear statement of the view that energy is a bookkeeping relation rather than a substance that is used up, and it is stated more sharply here than in most textbooks of the period. His long passage on the field as "the storehouse of the energy", following Maxwell, is orthodox and correctly rendered: he is right that induction across empty space forced physics to locate energy in the medium rather than on the conductor. The conductivity observation — that atmospheric ionisation does not follow the sun — is a real and important one; it is precisely what led Hess to cosmic rays, and Moray's reading of it as evidence of an extra-solar radiation was sound in 1913, when he says he first drew it.
The claims about the device, however, are not assessable as stated, and the booklet says so itself. Moray explicitly declines to explain how the device works, so the reader is left with reported effects and no mechanism. None of the reported demonstrations includes an input–output measurement: no figure is given anywhere for power delivered to the load, and no accounting is offered for the energy stored in the "special valve" or the tubes. Without that, the 157-hour endurance run establishes only that something in the apparatus lasted 157 hours. The witnesses are anonymous throughout — "a nationally known physicist", "men of science… names will be furnished upon request" — and the argument from their silence ("not one of them has been able to disprove my claims") inverts the burden of proof in exactly the way the booklet's own preface says it intends to. The claim that a tuned circuit synchronised with the universe will oscillate "forever" once harmonics set in is not distinguishable, on the evidence given, from the perpetual motion Moray denies it is; a real resonant circuit continues to oscillate only while energy flows in, and the source term is never quantified.
The transmutation claims carry a specific internal difficulty. Assay values of a few tens of cents per ounce and a hundred dollars a ton in gold are exactly the range in which assay technique itself is the dominant uncertainty — fire assays of treated samples are notoriously subject to contamination from crucible, flux and lead collector — and the booklet reports no blanks run alongside the treated samples in the same laboratory session, no replication, and no independent laboratory. The comparison with the Harvard mercury-to-gold experiment cuts the other way from the way Moray takes it: the Harvard product was detectable only indirectly and decayed rapidly precisely because the transmuted isotopes were radioactive, which is what a real nuclear transformation of mercury produces. A process yielding stable, weighable gold from lead by chemical-scale resonance would violate the energy scale separating chemical bonds (a few electron-volts) from nuclear binding (millions of electron-volts), and the booklet offers no energy budget at all. The assertion that man "has not and cannot split the atom", published in 1945, sits awkwardly with the events of that year.
The therapy section is the weakest and the most troubling. A source with a 1600-year half-life emitting radiation that penetrates half an inch of lead is, on any account of radiation physics, dangerous; the claim that such applicators can be used without shielding or expert supervision because of unspecified "phantom characteristics" is asserted, not argued, and contradicts the same booklet's earlier warning that one "will be risking his life in this work without a proper absorber". Gamma dose does not discriminate between malignant and healthy tissue by virtue of the emitter's packaging.
Read as a historical document the booklet is valuable: it preserves Moray's own words, his sources, and the rhetorical stance — "TRUTH should never be put on the defensive" — that shaped how his work was received. Read as a scientific case it does not make one, and the reason is structural rather than accidental. Moray withheld the mechanism deliberately, and what remains is testimony.