Gregory Hodowanec
Gregory Hodowanec | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 23, 1921 Madeira, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Died | January 1, 2021 (aged 99) |
| Residence | Newark, NJ, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Alma mater | University of Scranton (Physics) |
| Known for | Rhysmonic Cosmology; the capacitor gravimeter; scalar or "monopole" gravity waves |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Research and development engineer; cosmology |
| Institutions | National Union; RCA; Edo Air |
Gregory Hodowanec (23 September 1921 – 2021) was an American research and development engineer who, after a career in the electronics industry, spent his retirement developing Rhysmonic Cosmology — an aether theory built on Max Planck's natural units — and building simple circuits he believed detected a class of scalar or "monopole" gravity waves. He is best known for proposing the use of an ordinary capacitor as a gravimeter, and for the claim that the 1/f "flicker" noise familiar to every electronics engineer is a cosmic gravitational signal rather than a property of the device.
His work reached a wide amateur audience through the hobbyist electronics press, and it is chiefly through the replications of Bill Ramsay that it is documented on this wiki.
Biography
Hodowanec was born in Madeira, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Scranton. During the Second World War he served as a sergeant in the 42nd "Rainbow" Division and was awarded the Bronze Star. He afterwards took a degree in Physics at the University of Scranton.
His professional career was in electronics research and development, at National Union, RCA and Edo Air. He held several United States patents, among them "Dark trace cathode-ray tubes and screens therefor" (granted 27 May 1958) and "Microwave Circuit With Coaxial Package Semiconductor Device" (granted 23 June 1970). He lived in New Jersey, latterly in West Orange, and died in 2021 at the age of 100.
He turned to cosmology after retiring, publishing from 1985 onwards — first the Rhysmonic Cosmology treatise (1985), then "All About Gravitational Waves" in Radio-Electronics (April 1986) and "Gravitational Impulses" in the Electronics Experimenters Handbook (January 1989), followed by a long series of privately circulated "Cosmology Notes" sent to a small group of correspondents. A two-volume compilation of his work was distributed through Hal Fox's New Energy News.
Rhysmonic Cosmology
Hodowanec's starting point was an aside in a reprint of Max Planck's Theory of Heat Radiation, suggesting that the universal constants could serve as natural units. He took this seriously as a physical rather than merely dimensional proposal, and built a cosmology in which the Planck scale is the actual granularity of the world.
The fundamental entity is the rhysmon — a Planck-scale unit whose collective structure, the rhysmoid, constitutes the fabric of space and plays the role of an aether. The universe in this scheme is finite, spherical and closed. Hodowanec deliberately declined to frame the problem as one of unifying separate forces, arguing that the forces are separate only because the fragmented sciences that discovered them were.
The claim with practical consequences concerns gravity waves. Hodowanec held that besides the tensor waves of general relativity there exists a monopole or scalar gravitational signal — described by magnitude alone — which is far stronger and far easier to detect, and which propagates across the whole universe in one Planck time (~5.4×10⁻⁴⁴ s), making its effects effectively instantaneous everywhere. He identified this signal with the ubiquitous 1/f noise seen in electronic components, and designed simple op-amp and capacitor circuits to register it, reporting coherent daily-repeating structure that he associated with particular directions on the sky — from his latitude, the regions of Perseus and Auriga at zenith. He suggested such signals might even carry information instantaneously, with implications for SETI.
Reception on this wiki
Bill Ramsay is the principal documenter and replicator of this work. His "'New Energy' and Hodowanec's Rhysmonic Cosmology" (1999) reproduces Hodowanec's last detailed Cosmology Note with a tabulation of the natural units and the four basic postulates; "Exploring the Aethers" (1994) and "Generic Gravity Wave Scalar Detector" (1999) describe building and running the detectors; and "The Superluminal Velocity of Gravity Waves" (1998) takes up the propagation claim. Ramsay's "Fixed Rate Scanning: Enigma or Research Tool?" grew directly out of an attempt to log the output of a Hodowanec sensor.
In 2008 Ramsay proposed moving from exposition to test, in "A Few Simple Tests to Evaluate 'Rhysmonic Cosmology' Concepts, as Proposed by Gregory Hodowanec in 1985".
Assessment
Hodowanec was a competent professional engineer — a physics graduate with patents in cathode-ray tube and microwave semiconductor design — and the instinct behind his work is a good one: that a well-understood laboratory nuisance might be worth a second look, and that useful measurements need not require expensive apparatus. Publishing in Radio-Electronics rather than a journal put a testable procedure into the hands of thousands of readers who could try it, which is more than most theoretical proposals achieve.
The central claim is nonetheless the weakest link, and it is testable.
1/f noise is device-dependent in ways an external signal should not be. Flicker noise is ubiquitous in semiconductors and is conventionally attributed to charge trapping and release at defect sites. Its magnitude scales with the device's construction — junction area, material, fabrication process — and with the bias current through it, and it varies with temperature. A signal arriving from outside the apparatus should not care how large the transistor is or how much current is flowing through it. Establishing that some component of the noise is external requires showing that two detectors of different construction, in different places, record the same fluctuations at the same time. That coincidence test is the decisive experiment, it is straightforward in principle, and no such result is reported in the material catalogued here.
The capacitor gravimeter faces the same difficulty in a more acute form. A high-gain circuit built around an electrolytic capacitor is a sensitive detector of ambient temperature, humidity, mechanical vibration and local electromagnetic interference — all of which have strong diurnal cycles. Daily-repeating structure in such an instrument's output is expected on entirely mundane grounds, so it cannot by itself support a sidereal or astronomical interpretation. Distinguishing the two requires the signal to track sidereal rather than solar time, which is a sharp and achievable test, and it requires environmental logging alongside the data.
On propagation speed, part of the scheme now conflicts with direct measurement. Hodowanec's monopole signal is claimed to traverse the universe in one Planck time. The 2017 neutron-star merger GW170817 produced gravitational waves and a gamma-ray burst that arrived within about 1.7 seconds of each other after travelling some 130 million light years, constraining the speed of gravitational waves to that of light to roughly one part in 10¹⁵. This does not formally refute a distinct scalar signal, since Hodowanec's is proposed as a different class of wave — but any theory offering an instantaneous gravitational channel now has to explain why the channel that was measured is not instantaneous.
The scale of the real detection problem is also worth stating: the waves LIGO observed in 2015 produced strains of order 10⁻²¹ and required kilometre-scale interferometers with mirrors isolated from seismic and thermal noise. That does not prove a stronger signal of another kind cannot exist, but it does mean that a claim to detect gravitational effects with a capacitor and an op-amp carries a correspondingly heavy burden of controls. See Gravitational Waves.
Papers
- 1989 - "Gravitational Impulses" (Electronics Experimenters Handbook, January 1989, p. 114)
- 1986 - "All About Gravitational Waves" (Radio-Electronics, April 1986)
- 1985 - "Rhysmonic Cosmology " (Read in full — archived copy)
See also
- Rhysmonic Cosmology — the 1985 treatise
- Bill Ramsay — his principal replicator and documenter
- Gravitational Waves, Aether
- Hal Fox — distributor of the two-volume compilation
- Category:Gravity, Category:Aether, Category:New Energy