Bruce DePalma's experiments of the 1970's qualify him as America's 20th Century Galileo because he and Ed Delvers documented that a spinning object falls faster than a non-spinning object, and rotating and precessing gyro assemblies lose weight and their inertia in is changed, polarized along axes of rotation. This is one of the earlier newspaper articles about their work before the built the n-Machine electric generator to extract electricity from the energy field in space they discovered as the "rotational force field" in the early 1970's, where the n-Machine was first built and tested in Santa Barbara California under auspices of the Sunburst Community, why it was also known as the S-Machine. I met DePalma and Delvers in May 1979 and collaborated with them to get more press and university exposure of their work during the 1980's.
--------begin transcribed articles
[photo, not shown here, Bruce DePalma in his living room
in background with two "force machines" (precessable
counter-rotatable flywheel assemblies) hanging from the
ceiling by ropes to each of their four corners; captioned:]
Bruce DePalma with two of his machines, which he claims
prove the existence of the rotation force field
The Sunday Times Advertiser
Trenton, N.J.
GAZETTE
Sunday, January 11, 1976
Page E 1
Princeton doesn't believe in Bruce DePalma
But then, of course, Bruce doesn't believe in Einstein
By Eric Sauter
Staff Writer
Bruce DePalma, a 40-year-old student of life, knows
he is right. He gets confirmation of this fact almost
daily. It comes from everywhere -- Germany, England,
Arizona. It comes from ex-scientists, ex-academicians,
dissatisfied physicists and amateur inventors. It comes
in the form of privately printed books and articles,
Xerox copies of patents for antigravity devices, cryptic
letters with apocalyptic overtones and still more pages
filled with unsigned accusations against Them -- the
scientific and academic establishment. DePalma has
files and files of these confirmations in his 55-acre,
18th century farmhouse estate in Bedminster, Pa.,
just a few miles north of Doylestown.
They come, he says, from the Physics Underground, a
conglomeration so vast, so formless that he doesn't
even know how large it really is. Except, he says, it is
everywhere. Everywhere! In rooms and basements and
attics these faceless, sometimes nameless people are
working, tinkering, theorizing toward the one goal that
Bruce DePalma has taken upon his own shoulders.
Bruce DePalma wants to save the world from itself.
"This is," he says quietly, hands moving like tiny bird's
wings to shape the importance of his statement, "the
biggest story of the 20th century."
He is sitting in the dining room at the large wooden
table. His thinning hair is combed down over one side
of his forehead. He is wearing a blue and red Harvard
T-shirt, brown jeans and baby blue track shoes. He looks
like an aging undergraduate or perhaps one of those
resident advisors in an Ivy League dormitory, just passing
his prime. Above all, he is clean and neat.
"I thought I'd tell you a story," he says, "just like the ancient
mariner sits down to tell his tale." He pauses. He rubs his
hands. A smile moves across his boyish face like a creature
with a mind of its own.
"This discovery of mine refutes Einstein's theory. What I
mean is, this is a breakthrough in physics. Let me say first
that people have vibrations. You are not put off by my saying
that are you? You know people give off vibrations, you've felt
them. What we have done is to establish the physical validity
of these things. If scientists would only verify my experiments
it would change all the theories.
What DePalma's experiments have proven, at least to his
satisfaction, is that if you rotate an object, you radically
alter certain physical properties of that object: both its
mass and its inertia. Rotation, according to DePalma, also
produces a force field, specifically around the main axis
of the rotating object. He says he has measured this force
field.
What this means to DePalma is unlimited in its wonder and
universal in its scope. He says that the rotation phenomenon
and its force field can be used in a number of different ways
-- the vibrations from the force field can be a perfect cure
for cancer; the rotating effect can be harnessed for the creation
of an antigravity device and a 200-mile-per-gallon automobile.
He goes on and on. It could eventually produce a world free
from hunger, war and poverty. In other words, a perfect world.
All of this because Bruce DePalma says he has made certain
discoveries so simple that physicists for the last 50 years have
not even thought of them.
"You know," he says calmly, "we have tried to publish papers
on this discovery since 1971." Four years we've tried. After
getting turned down by all these magazines we learned that
the physics department at Princeton was blocking their
publication."
He gets angry. "Those dimwits over at Princeton are such fools.
They think they can use their authority like Nixon, but we know
what plays in the Oval Office may not play in Peoria or in Trenton."
He looks thoughtfully across the table, secure in his status as
another victim.
DePalma turns to Ed Delvers, his 25-year-old assistant, who has
been with DePalma since his days at MIT five years ago. "Ed," he
says, "would you cook something for me, just put something on
a plate." Ed begins to go into the kitchen but DePalma changes
his mind. It is too early to eat. Ed returns quietly to the table.
Bruce DePalma is currently locked in his life and death struggle
with the physics department of Princeton, specifically with
Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, author of a widely used text on
gravitation and relativity and considered by many to be one
of the leading experts in the field.
"Wheeler even said that all his thoughts on gravity will be
shattered if my experiment is correct, and there he sits
with his dead hand on the wheel. In our meeting they
even said that my simple inertia experiment was worth
a Nobel Prize. Yes, they said that."
The meeting DePalma is talking about took place on Dec. 5
at Jadwin Hall on the Princeton campus. Present were
Bruce DePalma, Ed Delvers, John A. Wheeler, and Dr. Frank
Shoemaker, another Princeton physics professor.
"You see," DePalma said, "I'm a pretty innocent guy. But
the CIA and FBI and Watergate finally convinced me that
intelligent men could commit sin. It also occurred to me
that my discovery would discredit their (Princeton's) position
in Washington and their $215 million grant."
That $215 million grant is for the construction of a prototype
fusion reactor to be built at Princeton. DePalma claims that
it won't work simply because they have not taken his discovery
of the effect of rotation into account.
The meeting finally took place after DePalma wrote a letter
to William Bowen, the university president, delineating his
problems with certain members of the physics department
who were reluctant to give him the time of day. He got a
limited response, a short note from the president's secretary
pleading Bowen's ignorance of physics and washing his hands
of the whole problem.
DePalma then wrote a second letter telling Bowen he was
about to squelch their prospect for the $215 million. Did
he actually threaten them?
"Of course," he said, "The whole reason I did this is because
I'm worried, I'm concerned. I really care. Look, we have all
these problems and they're not doing anything about them.
After the second letter Wheeler called me and asked, 'What
do you want?' So I told him. I said I wanted to solve the energy
crisis."
Bruce DePalma's awareness of his unique position in the universe
came about in the spring of 1971. He was fed up with academia,
fed up with everything. "When I was at MIT I tried harder than
the president to make MIT work but the faculty resented my
attempts to build up school spirit." So he headed west to California
with five of his students, followers he had collected from his
lecturing days in Cambridge. Ed Delvers was one of them.
DePalma has had a startling background. His father,
Dr. Anthony F. DePalma, now retired and living in
Florida, was the head of the department of Orthopedic
Surgery at the New Jersey Medical School in Newark. One
of his brothers, Barton, is a West Coast painter of some
merit and head of the art department at Foothill College,
Los Altos. His other brother, Brian, is a well known film
director whose latest film, interestingly enough, is called
"Obsession."
Even more interesting is the fact that all this information
appears on the front page of Bruce DePalma's resume.
DePalma graduated in 1953 from the Friend's Central
School, a private school for above average students in
Philadelphia. He won the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Gold Medal for excellence in math and physics and entered
MIT in 1953.
He had a stellar career at MIT. His freshman year he won
a regional award for a student paper he wrote on low
distortion amplifiers which was eventually published in
"Audio Engineering". During his junior year he left MIT
to work as a consultant for the Dyna Company of Philadelphia,
working again with audio amplifiers. He also attended the
graduate school of Temple University on a part-time basis,
taking courses in physics and thermodynamics.
He received a B.S. from MIT in 1958 in Electronic Engineering
and began working for various electronics corporations,
moving from one to another during the boom years of the
electronics industry.
In December of 1963, DePalma settled down, taking a position
in the Physical Chemistry Group of the Polaroid Corporation,
Edwin Land's gigantic research company in Cambridge, Mass.
He also went back to MIT, not as a student but as an appointed
lecturer in photographic science, on the recommendation of
Dr. Harold Edgerton, a professor who was working with
photography, specifically strobe light pictures. They shared
a common passion for photography and had become friends.
Edgerton remembers DePalma as a "very imaginative young
man" who was fascinated with photography. "He was always
jumping around looking for new ideas," Edgerton said.
By the time he left Polaroid and MIT, DePalma was making
$40,000 and was able to afford a new Ferrari, a prized
possession that still sits, clean and in good condition, in
his front yard in Bedminster. He gives it a spin once every
two weeks or so to keep it in working order.
DePalma has been able to maintain the car and his extremely
comfortable lifestyle by donations. Since 1971, after he'd
come back from California broke, these donations have totaled
about $100,000. These gifts have come from various supporters
and students who believe in what he's doing.
He says he intends to pay it all back. "When my discovery pays
off, there's going to be a lot of money. I intend to pay back
$100 for every $1 I've been given."
Over the last 20 years DePalma has moved back and forth through
experiments on sound, underwater communication, the effects
of underwater nuclear blasts, laser beams, X-ray photography
and three dimensional motion picture film, a process he perfected
at Polaroid only to have it turned down by Land, who was engrossed
in the development of the SX-70 camera.
Perhaps put off by Land's rejection of his project, in 1970 he left
and went to California. By the time he got there, the battles of
the 1960's were already dead and gone. No matter. Bruce DePalma
was thinking about the problems of peace.
The meeting at Princeton on December 5 was a disaster. It was so
incredible Bruce DePalma couldn't believe it. There he was, with
his most important experiment, an experiment so simple even a
child could comprehend it. His students, who had followed him
to California and back, who had supported him, they had seen it.
They believed it. But the Princeton physics department was not
impressed.
"They think they're such experts over there. We did the spinning
ball experiment and they said, 'Our eyes aren't that good.' They
didn't think they could see it."
"After we did it," DePalma said.
"They fell silent," Ed said.
"They went into catatonic paralysis," DePalma said. "So I told
Wheeler. The next time I see you, Doctor, it will be in front
of the camera and the lights. I don't want anything to do with
them any more. I even wrote a letter to Dicke (another Princeton
professor who refuses to talk to DePalma) telling him to resign
before a very unpleasant situation develops."
The experiment is quite simple. DePalma takes two steel ball
bearings, spins one while the other remains stable and throws
them in the air. The spinning ball goes higher than the stable
one. DePalma claims this refutes Einstein's theory of relativity.
DePalma became enraged at the physicists' attitude towards
him, particularly at Wheeler, who he has singled out for his
most vicious criticism. "They treated me like I had no brains
at all," he said. He became emotional at the meeting and
started to yell at them.
Frank Shoemaker asked him to leave.
"I know I have no power myself," DePalma said, "I only have
the power other people confer on me. I will get invited to
Washington only after I generate a lot of publicity. To get
this against the ineptitude and stupidity I am facing I have
to be really clever."
"Ed," he said, "would you get me another glass of Sprite?"
Ed rises quickly and gets him another glass of Sprite.
"I'm not an outcast. I think of myself as a folk hero of
science. I have my students out here. I ride a motorcycle,
play the guitar, write poetry. I'm an interesting fellow.
I'm not an ordinary man. Extraordinary people do. You
have to accentuate your extraordinariness to make things
happen."
"Ed," he said, "could you bring me something to eat now?
Would you like something? No. All right. Ed?" But Ed was
already in the kitchen, dishing up the food.
"Our work," he said, "is being carried on by a number of
people all around the world. So what am I going to do
next? I'm going to start a clinic for the treatment of
cancer using vibrations like those of the spinning balls.
I'm going to raise money and heal people with these
radiations."
"You see," he said as Ed brought the plates into the
dining room, "I have no secrets. I'm naked in front of you."
Dr. Frank Shoemaker sits in his large office overlooking
a wide-open courtyard that is dominated by the big black
Calder sculpture in the middle. He is a medium-sized man
with short grey hair. It has a slight wave to it, reaching up
to the top of his head. He is wearing a red plaid shirt and
glasses. He laughs a lot.
"There's nothing like the theory of relativity to bring the
nuts out of the woodwork," he said. He is speaking about
Bruce DePalma.
"DePalma's approach is completely unprofessional," he said.
"A scientist doesn't set out to prove an idea right. He looks
for ways to prove it right or wrong, if you know what I mean."
But DePalma, Shoemaker went on, always finds something
in his experiments to prove his theory right.
At that Dec. 5 meeting, Shoemaker tried to explain away
DePalma's effects by saying they were simply "ordinary
effects" that DePalma had misinterpreted.
DePalma didn't want to hear it. "He flew off the handle,
started calling us names. I told him I was going to throw
him out of the building if he didn't control himself. He just
didn't want to hear that ordinary things were causing his
effects.
"DePalma's case is not that surprising. Many people construct
their lives around one thing. They develop this singlemindedness
of purpose. In that letter he wrote me, he sounded like a man
rebelling against authority."
The letter DePalma wrote to Shoemaker sounds as if it should
be read at the volume of a scream.
"I lost my interest," DePalma wrote, "in the viability of the
institution of the so-called 'science' you uphold when it became
clear you and the rest of you are incompetent and incapable of
receiving new information.
"I think it is clear that the energy crisis and other economic
and political woes of this country and the world at this time
is due to the activities of Professors like you and Dr. Dicke,
Dr. Wheeler and your ilk."
Dr. John Archibald Wheeler is more reluctant than Shoemaker
to speak his mind.
"I really hat to talk about it," Wheeler said, "I would be upset
if DePalma tried a scientific problem in the daily press. It
wouldn't be right to deal with the situation like this."
He doesn't know anything about DePalma's charges that he
and his colleagues tried to block the publication of DePalma's
articles. In fact, the question seems to confuse him. But what
bothers him is that DePalma hasn't done enough tests and the
ones he has done are simply not accurate enough.
"I don't see any substitution for tests," Wheeler said.
DePalma also showed his experiments to John Taylor, who
teaches physics at Bucks County Community College.
"I'm not sure if he has something or not," Taylor said, "I know
he didn't put sufficient effort into measuring it. He's got a
very fancy apparatus but something's out of line. Why doesn't
he have some experimental data? He tells me he doesn't
believe in statistics and that turns me off right there."
Another physicist who is familiar with DePalma's experiments
is Dr. Edward L. Purcell, a professor at Harvard.
"They told me about the experiments," Purcell said, "but they
weren't very good. They didn't show me anything. Similar
experiments have been done like this with far more accuracy."
But what about the spinning balls? "If there were any effect
like he says, we would have had gross problems with our
satellites. After all, they're spinning objects. Of course,
he says they're not spinning at the same rate as his, but
naturally he says that.
"A baseball spins," Purcell said. "If you throw a spinning object
in the air, of course there will be an effect. This isn't even
very interesting."
This grates on DePalma's nerves. Not very interesting? How
can they say that? He plays the guitar, he listens to rock
music. Wheeler and Purcell don't listen to rock music, do
they? Of course not. They are the dull ones.
"I want to tell people that they're sending their kids to these
people to be brainwashed," DePalma cried. "Until we get rid
of the theory of relativity no progress will be made and that
includes Wheeler and their ilk."
Shoemaker invited DePalma back to Princeton to test his
experiments on their equipment. DePalma declined. If they
were really interested, he said, they could do his experiments
all by themselves. They don't need him. He certainly does not
need them.
"I know what you wanted to do," DePalma said to the reporter,
"you wanted to destroy me. You had me in your pidgeonholes
and you wanted to get rid of me once and for all.
"But see," he goes on, "you're not going to do that now. I'm
going to be with you from now on. You think you can just go
back and forget this but every story you do from now on I'll
be in, because what I have will influence everything."
DePalma gets up from the table and walks into another room.
He comes back carrying a photograph. It is a black and white
picture of a young man sitting in a semi-lotus position. He has
a thin face and bright intelligent eyes.
It is one of DePalma's students who not long ago at a capsule
of cyanide and died.
He lays it in the middle of the table.
"He couldn't get rid of a lot of things," DePalma said pointing
to the picture. "He wanted a brother, he wanted the notion
of a brother so bad. But he just couldn't shed these attachments.
We were hurt by his death."
"I'm already starting. I'm getting rid of everything. I'm on the
road to attainment. Attainment is becoming, you see. It is a
continual process. I can see that your journey is almost at
an end. You fight it with everything you have but they always
to that just before the end. You're almost there, I can tell."
"You see," Ed Delvers said, "you won't be able to stop the
change. It will just happen to you."
"Right," Bruce DePalma said, "there's no way you can go about
looking for it. My discovery is the way we can make it possible
for everyone. I want my discovery to help people. I want it now.
You have to believe this. Don't you want this, too? Don't you
want peace and harmony, don't you want to drive 200 miles
on a gallon of gas. Why don't you just give in to this?"
---end article number one, same page starts second article:
(companion article about the spinning ball experiment)
[photo of trajectories of spinning vs non-spinning ball bearings,
black background, higher trajectory approximately 6-8 ball
diameters higher than lower trajectory, balls illuminated
against black background; photo not shown here, captioned:]
You have to watch the spinning balls
There are two experiments which DePalma claims prove his discoveries.
The main one, proving that rotating radically alters the physical
properties of an object, involves two spinning ball bearings.
A strobe flash of that experiment appears above.
DePalma writes: "We have discovered that the spinning or rotation
of objects changes their inertia. When a spinning object is dropped,
it falls faster than a non-spinning object because its inertia has been
reduced by the effect of rotation. Therefore, an object of given
weight will fall faster when it is spinning than when it is not spinning."
The device used to spin the ball bearing is a simple lathe machine
socket activated by a small, hand-held motor. The other ball
bearing, resting in a stable socket, sits next to it. After a
reasonable amount of spin is attained on the one ball, DePalma
throws them both in the air. The spinning ball goes about 5 per
cent higher than the stationary one, he says. He has strobe
photographs of this effect.
This effect, if it is what he says it is, goes against Newton's idea
of inertia, and Einstein's theories of gravitation, which says,
basically, that all objects, no matter what their mass, fall at
the same rate because their inertia (the tendency to remain
at rest when at rest and the tendency to remain in motion
when in motion) is constant.
The other experiment which, DePalma claims, proves the
existence of a rotation force field, is not quite so simple.
He places an Accutron watch above the axis of a 29-1/2-pound
flywheel spinning at 7,600 revolutions per minute. The Accutron
watch has a small tuning fork which sets the timekeeping rate
of the watch. The manufacturer claims that this tuning fork
will keep accurate time to within one minute a month.
The watch is separated from the flywheel by a magnetic shield
to eliminate any effects from motors driving the flywheel itself.
An electric clock is synchronized with the Accutron to compare
accuracy after exposure to the rotation force field of the flywheel.
According to the results of the test, with the flywheel spinning
at 7,600 rpm, and running steadily for 1,000 seconds (16-2/3 minutes),
the Accutron loses .9 seconds relative to the electronic clock, which,
DePalma claims, is not affected by the rotation force field. If this
actually happens, then the effect of the rotation force field has
greatly altered the Accutron's tuning fork. Compared to the
manufacturer's claim of loss for the watch, it means that the
watch would lose somewhere around a half an hour a month
if exposed to the force field that DePalma claims exists.
Rotation then, according to DePalma, affects the physical
properties of matter, changes the very things that physicists
have based their theories on for the last few decades.
"These theories," DePalma says, "are just a bunch of science
fiction." He says that they have neglected to take into
consideration his discovery of rotation and its effects on
the real physical properties of objects. DePalma claims
their theories don't work because his theory goes to the
very heart of the nature of things -- atoms -- which,
DePalma says, are also rotating objects.
--- Eric Sauter
-------end articles