The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios Read Free Book Online

features a scene from the “Bipos” yarn. Two robbers who have broken into the home laboratory of a Dr. Sanborn, who was experimenting on methods to send living beings to another world (whether in this universe or an alternate one is never made clear), have been trapped in a large glass device. This cylinder, large enough to hold two grown men, is described in the story as a “cathode ray tube”—though its appearance is quite different from the cathode-ray tubes one finds in older-model television sets. Sanborn is shown moments before throwing a switch that will convert the two thieves into electricity. They will then travel at the speed of light to the land of the Bipos, where they will be reassembled into their human form. Bipos, apparently, are a race of intelligent three-foot-tall penguins. The means of transportation appears to be an early ancestor of Star Trek ’s famed transporter. That Sanborn was able to construct such a fantastic scientific marvel, with no outside assistance and using his own financial resources, is perhaps not so surprising once we discover that in his day job Dr. Sanborn is . . . a druggist!
    Science Wonder Stories was not devoted solely to fantastic scienctifiction but also featured descriptions and discussions of real-world current scientific advances. This particular issue contained a “Symposium,” in which an essay on the question “Can Man Free Himself from Gravity?” was followed by letters from knowledgeable experts. The short essay by Th. Wolff of Berlin was translated for the pulp from the original German. Wolff tantalized readers with a report of an American physicist, Charles Brush, who claimed to have discovered a material made up of silicates (the exact composition known only to Brush) that exhibited an acceleration due to gravity of only 9.2 meters per second per second, rather than the larger value of 9.8 meters per second per second that all normal matter experiences. “If true, this would be a fine achievement,” allowed Wolff, for “by increasing the valuable property of these mysterious substances one might perhaps attain approximate or even complete freedom from gravity. Let us wait for it!”

    Figure 5: Dr. Sanborn about to test his homemade transporter device (that looks like an overgrown vacuum tube), which will send two intruders to the Land of the Bipos in 1930’s Science Wonder Stories.
    But Wolff did not think we should hold our breaths while waiting, for he went on to correctly point out that such a material would represent an “irreconcilable contradiction” to the Newtonian law of gravity, which indicates that the acceleration of a falling object is the same for all matter, regardless of composition. Brush’s report, Wolff informed readers, “must with absolute assurance be relegated to the realm of fiction. If there were exceptions and deviations from the general law of gravity, these would certainly have appeared before now in manifold and various ways, and it would not need the discovery of mysterious substances to bring them to our knowledge.” So much for flying cars—even back in 1930! But then Wolff goes too far—and dismisses space travel when he incorrectly calculates that the chemical fuels of the time would limit any rocket ship to heights no greater than 400 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, a mere fraction of the 384,000 kilometers from the Earth to the moon.
    This last point was challenged in letters from members of the Science Wonder Stories Board of Associate Editors, notably Robert H. Goddard of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Goddard pointed out that in 1919 he had authored a scientific publication in the Miscellaneous Collections of the Institute (namely, the Smithsonian Institute, which was funding his rocket research), stating that a multistage rocket, essentially of the design employed by NASA fifty years later, would indeed be able to exceed this 400-kilometer limit. Thus, while hopes of flying cars and