Storm Glass

[mrsonde]

Jan 2, 2013 12:11:21 GMT 1 alancalverd said:

Long before the invention of automatic radio reports, our ancestors built henges and pyramids to signal surface weather conditions to aviators. Well ahead of their time, and much misunderstood by subsequent generations.

The last is certainly very true. Why do you think the builders of henges and pyramids went to such extraordinary trouble to construct their devices around the key functional units consisting of rocks containing as much quartz as they could find? Usually transporting those enormous rocks from hundreds of miles away? Not to signal weather conditions - to use in some well-understood predetermined manner, but in some yet to be understood way and for some long-forgotten purpose, the vibrations of the geomagnetic field.

Did you know, for example, that the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid was originally sprung? They built it to freely vibrate, with an air-gap between the heavily quartz-laden granite of its walls and the insulating limestone of its surroundings. And those granite walls were directly connected to the equally specially sourced quartz that originally encased the whole structure. This is no coincidence - the builders precisely and painstakingly tuned the Chamber to vibrate at a very precise frequency, as is evidenced by the careful chiselling of the series of granite resonators that make up its roof. The whole structure vibrated like a bell, audible today only within the Chamber (at about F#), but originally, with the outer white marble casing resonating with it, for miles across the Giza plateau.

Did you know that stone circles also vibrate with the geomagnetic field? They hum away constantly, in tune with dawns and midday and sunset, altering its tone through the seasons, reversing its change in pitch at the equinoces, and only ceasing momentarily at the precise moments of the solstices. You can't hear this hum of interplanetary space any more, without the aid of infrasound equipment - but their builders could, once, I'd lay my life on it. When they were built the noise would have been much, much stronger for one thing - the aurorae extended almost completely around the planet for many centuries, and produced a constant pyrotechnic display even during daytime - hence the worldwide occurrence of petraglyphs accurately recording patterns typically produced by plasma discharges (the configuration of Stonehenge itself can be almost precisely duplicated in a laboratory plasma chamber.) This beautiful paper's about 7 Mb, but it's well worth downloading:

www.eyeofsiloam.com/PlutoGetsWisdom/PlasmaPhysics/peratt_icops2003.pdf

[jonjel]

One of the reasons I like this board is because it often gives me information and facts of which I was totally unaware.

[principled]

MR S: A fascinating couple of posts.Thanks. I'd also like to concur with what Jonjel said. It's good to go to bed having learned something new, as I will today!
P

[mrsonde]

One observation I've had time to make is that crystal formation around the inside of the glass always begins and spreads out from due South. This occurs whether it's shielded from light or not, whether it's day or night, and whether I've lit the fire or not.

Scrub that. This morning it started its crystal growth on the North side!

Also, this evening I burned some teak that washed up on the beach before Xmas. I know - an almost sacriligeous waste. Before anyone gets on my case, I am of course keeping the best bits (most of a whole tree washed up!) for some more fruitful purpose. Anyway - incredible heat that stuff puts out. As a result, I suspect, this evening the Storm Glass, like me, has been shocked into complete lethargic inactivity, and it's yet to recover. There's clearly a crucial temperature range where its reactions can occur - most people I'd guess keep their homes too well heated for it to do much. Normally, I'm more frugal.

[mrsonde]

Thanks, j & p. I'm not sure what you're referring to in particular, but it makes a pleasant change not to have your head bitten off with the usual derision whenever something outside or contrary to normal mainstream "science" is mentioned on these messageboards.

Here's a few more provocative thoughts, then.

Re: stone circles. Given the demonstrated fact that the granite stones are (now at least) just sub-audibly (to most people at least) transmitting the vibrations of the geomagnetic field (presumably thanks to the piezo-electric properties of quartz), does it not seem plausible that originally they were strung? Taut ropes, their tension adjusted to the appropriate pitch, so that the sounds of the Sun (and Moon) would ring out across the plain?

Re: water and the Great Pyramid. Given the fact that quartz transmits infrared light, and in doing so polarises it into one plane, is it a coincidence that the angles of the pyramid are within half a degree of the angles of the O-H bonds of the water molecule? Why did they build it flattened to that peculiar angle?

Here are some suggestive facts:

- The walls of the Queen's Chamber and lower cavaties of the pyramid are encrysted with inches thick deposits of salt.
- The lower chamber shows unmistakeable turbulence patterns of water erosion, showing that large quantities of water were forced into the pyramid from below over very long periods of time. John Cadman has reproduced the layout of the underground chambers and tunnels beneath the pyramid that once ran to the Nile in reinforced concrete and, by merely running water through his model, shown that it works as a highly efficient, and precisely tunable, hydraulic ram pump, able to pump water, with no other power source than gravity, at a tremendous rate to heights far in excess of the pyramid's apex.
- The two pipes running from that chamber terminate with "doors" through which pass metal (probably copper) bars.
- When the King's Chamber was first entered (in modern times) a large sheet of inch-thick iron was found (and nothing else, incidentally - no treasure, no mummy: no mummy has ever been found in any pyramid. There is not a scrap of evidence whatsoever that the pyrmaids were ever intended to be or used as tombs.)
- At some point in history the pyramid has undergone an enormous trauma. The walls and roof of the King's Chamber, built of 70-ton blocks of granite, have been cracked and forced outwards, necessitating rather hamfisted repairwork. There is no indication in any other part of the pyramid's structure of this what must have been explosive event - it was contained to that room.
- There is a tunnel, or more accurately a large pipe, running from the lower chambers of the pyramid to the Sphinx, which is now known to contain considerable unexplored chambers of its own. The walls of this pipe are thickly carbonised, unequivocally indicating that tremendous heat must at some point have occurred along its length.
- The inexplicably large quanities of gold used by the Egyptians, even in artefacts dated to the Old Kingdom, is of such a high degree of purity that it's only recently that physical chemists have been able to emulate it. To do so demands very elaborate and prohibitively expensive electrolysis techniques; or heat in excess of 6,000 degree centigrade. The same is true of the melted "glass" found scattered across a large area of the Egyptian desert.
- The only means of generating such high temperatures, in a controlled manner amenable to craft working, that could possibly have been available to ancient Egyptians, is if they knew how to produce Brown's Gas - the focussed burning of (pure) hydrogen.


That's enough to be going on with!

[alancalverd]

A true word spoken in jest, perhaps, when I facetiously suggested shoving the storm glass up the arse of a sphinx.

Less certain about the impossibility of Egyptian industry. Glass was well known in ancient Greece and among the Celts. It's quite easy to manufacture with a decent charcoal furnace, soda (from animal dung) and sand. One assumes that the ancient Egyptians had at least as much camel shit and sand available as their descendants.

Likewise iron ore, the smelting of which was certainly contemporary in India, and gold, which being virtually chemically inert, can be extracted by simple ore smelting and dissolving everything else (silver being the most persistent contaminant) in hydrochloric acid.

All you need for this sort of refining is a decent charcoal furnace. How about a chamber with a long sloping pipe? Pour the ore in the top of the pipe and extract the liquid metals at the bottom....

If only modern refineries were so pretty!

[mrsonde]

Jan 5, 2013 11:31:16 GMT 1 alancalverd said:

Less certain about the impossibility of Egyptian industry.

No, there's no impossibility - the evidence of it is abundant, in their building technology, and their artefacts in the Cairo Museum. The point is in order to have fabricated these things the technology they must have developed far exceeds the knowledge and abilities than is normally ascribed to them. I highly recommend Christopher Dunn's The Giza Power Plant - Technologies of Ancient Egypt to anyone interested in this fascinating subject. Here's an master craftsman and engineer analysing the technology required to make common ancient Egyptian objects and concluding, with emphatic agreement from the most advanced engineering experts working in a variety of fields today, that it simply couldn't be done in the manner standard Egyptologists suppose. Two examples, proven beyond any dispute: one, narrow-necked granite pots in the Cairo Museum show under analysis that they were drilled out achieving cutting depths obtainable today only using the most sophisticated and powerful ultrasound technology; and saw depths through granite blocks prove the same inescapable conclusion. Secondly, it's been proven by laboratory analysis that most of the limestone blocks that make up the bulk of the Great Pyramid are not natural stone at all, but moulded composites. Forget the thousands of slaves pulling on ropes up ramps etcetera - they were poured in situ. We know how to do this today - but the expertise required is a post-war development.

Glass was well known in ancient Greece and among the Celts. It's quite easy to manufacture with a decent charcoal furnace, soda (from animal dung) and sand. One assumes that the ancient Egyptians had at least as much camel shit and sand available as their descendants.

What I was referring to were the thousands of tektites known as Dakhla Glass. This is not like ordinary glass - its very low water content proves it must have been made with temperatures far in excess of any charcoal furnace: normally, either by nuclear explosion, lightning strikes, or meteorite atmospheric combustion. The latter is the standard explanation for the source of Dakhla Glass - because there simply is no other explanation that fits in with any current scientific paradigm. But there are problems with it. One obvious one is that some of these tektites have been worked into decorative objects and then melted. Under any normal definition of a scientific theory, that would be a conclusive refutation - as it is, there's no other alternative theory deemed acceptably feasible, so it's simply ignored.

Likewise iron ore, the smelting of which was certainly contemporary in India

"Certainly" according to who? The earliest evidence for iron smelting is normally dated to about 1500 BC at the very earliest. The normal dating of the Great Pyramid, ascribing it to Cheops, is over a thousand years earlier. And there are very good reasons arguing that this ascription is mistaken, and that it's very likely to be seven or eight or even more thousand years older, making it contemporary with the Sphinx (which most scientists now acknowledge shows clear evidence of millenia of water erosion, making it up to ten thousand years older than Egyptologists have supposed.)

, and gold, which being virtually chemically inert, can be extracted by simple ore smelting and dissolving everything else (silver being the most persistent contaminant) in hydrochloric acid.

As I said, it's virtually impossible to "dissolve everything else". Certainly not by that method. To produce the 99%+ unalloyed gold of the Egyptians demands a completely different method, at present unknown - other than the resmelting by Brown's Gas, which has been shown to produce gold of a comparable purity. The only other plausible alternative is that they'd dicovered how to efficiently extract it from the sea, where most of the planet's gold is found - something that we haven't yet learned how to do.

[alancalverd]

Brown's gas is useful stuff but no hotter than many other flames. 99% gold is common "24k" bullion quality and has been for aeons. "Four nines" (99.99%) is a common product but of little use outside the laboratory.

I'm baffled by your statement of the water content of glass. Since glass is manufactured and worked at a minimum of 600 deg C I can't imagine how any water gets into the mass. However it is easily wetted when cold, and usually has a multitude of minute surface cracks so the true surface area of a glass object can be many times greater than its macroscopic outline and can carry a considerable quantity of moisture. Now glass that has been rolling around in hot fine sand for a few centuries is likely to have its surface cracks polished away or opened up, and thus have rather less superficial moisture than your average British car windscreen. Anyway it seems that Dakhla glass is a natural product of volcanic origin. No big deal, then: it's very difficult to produce diamonds in the laboratory but nature does a fair job of producing heat and pressure (and chemical purity) when required to do so.

[mrsonde]

Jan 7, 2013 21:07:15 GMT 1 alancalverd said:

Brown's gas is useful stuff but no hotter than many other flames.

It's not like any other flame at all. The contact temp of Brown's Gas is over 6,000C - as hot as the surface of the Sun. At the same time, one can safely run the flame across one's skin without any burning at all. The "heat" is not standard infrared radiation, or molecular excitement - it's something very different, where bonds are being broken by a mechanism other than infrared absorption.

99% gold is common "24k" bullion quality and has been for aeons. "Four nines" (99.99%) is a common product but of little use outside the laboratory.

I beg to differ, but I'll have to research it before being emphatic. As far as I've read it's virtually impossible to eradicate from gold trace copper and other contaminants.

I'm baffled by your statement of the water content of glass. Since glass is manufactured and worked at a minimum of 600 deg C I can't imagine how any water gets into the mass.

Water vapour is everywhere. Tektites have hardly any water content, which is the primary determinant of their identification - they must have been formed at temperatures only found in atomic explosions or naturally in lightning, striking sand, or in the impact heat generated by a meteorite strike. The other determinant is the presence of melted strands of SiO2, totally unknown in any other form of glass.

Anyway it seems that Dakhla glass is a natural product of volcanic origin.

No - there is no volcanic activity in the Dakhla desert. Or the Libyan desert. If there was millions of years ago, why are the tektites the only sign left? This is the currently accepted theory of origin:

news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2006/12/061221-egypt-glass.html

The big problem with this theory, other than they all occur on the surface, and there's no evidence at all of any impact crater, or any other signs of the usual meteorite material, is that some Dakhla tektites have been drilled, for example, with the molten surface then forming over the hole: the vitrification has occurred after they've been worked. It's not easy to come up with an explanation of why Egyptians would work a tektite, then remelt it, and then place it back where they found it.

[mrsonde]

So far I've learned that any gold object including bullion is easily identifiable as to its origin by standard chemical analysis - South African gold has a specific different range and proportion of contaminants to Klondike or Welsh gold, etcetera. I've found where I read the purported fact about ancient Egyptian gold, a normally reliable source, but annoyingly he gives no reference. I'll see if Dunn discusses it at all.

[alancalverd]

Alas

When ignited, the [Brown's] gas mixture releases energy and converts to water vapor, which sustains the reaction: 241.8 kJ of energy (LHV) for every mole of H2 burned. The amount of heat energy released is independent of the mode of combustion, but the temperature of the flame varies.[6] The maximum temperature of about 2800 °C is achieved with a pure stoichiometric mixture, about 700 degrees hotter than a hydrogen flame in air.[7][8][9] When either of the gases are mixed in excess of this ratio, or when mixed with an inert gas like nitrogen, the heat must spread throughout a greater quantity of matter and the temperature will be lower.

Bloody facts get in the way of a good theory as always.

[mrsonde]

Jan 8, 2013 18:28:48 GMT 1 alancalverd said:

Bloody facts get in the way of a good theory as always.

;D Alas indeed. The problem with this as ever is what facts, and what theory? What is "Brown's Gas", exactly? As I admittedly too vaguely used the term, it specifically referred to the technological device making use of the recombination of hydrogen and oxygen into water in a precisely contingent manner. Since that invention the number of devices and uses of this basic discovery have proliferated, and which forms of hydrogen used has too. The inventor and testers of the original technology measured (equivalent) temperatures of 6,000C, and I see no reason to suppose they would fabricate such results - do you? I'm still in the chaos of sorting out books and papers after a move, but I'll try and dig out the specifics on this. Until then, I'd say this much: this technology is employing physical principles that are not yet understood. The standard calculi used in classical thermodynamics are inadequate - as they are, for example, in explaining the as yet unaccountable heat of the sun's corona. It is not simple combustion, and thermal radiation: as even your quote rather surreptiosuly acknowledges. One needs to take into account resonant frequencies and field conditions - not simple sums of total energy and mass, but coherent energy, vibrating in unison at specific frequencies. In this case various normally overlooked phenomena such as photosonolysis and nanobubble formation are very probably involved, and probably physical potentialities that are even more exotic - DelGiudice has shown that under conditions of coherent vibration and structural homogeneity water can act as a free electric dipole laser, for example. Something like that is going on here, concentrating the energy released as the water bonds form in a pinpoint coordinated manner. The energy released by the bond formation is being focussed (which is why I originally qualified my reference in this way) by means of necessarily precise spacing and vibration number - almost certainly dependent on the properties of an accompanying magnetic field of a correctly resonant frequency. We're familiar with this as a necessary condition for life already: they're the conditions required to raise the temperature of the sun from 6,000 or so centigrade on its surface to millions of degrees as it's radiated.

As with most studies into water - and material science generally, I would say (it's just that with water it's still a very young and little understood subject, and extremely difficult, technologically, to study) - these field and vibration conditions are absolutely vital, but are nearly always overlooked. The absorption bands of water, for example, vary enormouslyly according to its structural condition - something that until very recently scientists weren't even aware of - and the specific magnetic fields that it's exposed to. A field weaker than the geomagnetic pulsed at 16 Hz, for example, will orientate water molecules, allowing coordinated proton precession and therefore coherent mass field oscillation across large distances, whereas a 15 Hz or 17 Hz field will have no apparent effect at all. (This is how neurones probably control the opening and closing of calcium gates, permitting impulse transmission, so these are not insignificant changes.)

Of course, I'm not for a moment suggesting that the pre-Egyptian culture that built the Great Pyramids - or their pre-Mayan associates - understood the physics of all this, in the meaning of our specific cultural meaning of "science". But what I am saying is that the evidence is overwhelming that they knew a great deal about how to manipulate the vibrational sensitivities of materials like this, and they knew they were dependent on the goemagnetic field too. They used this principle in the machine tools they used, as Dunn has shown beyond question. And they used it for some as yet unclear purpose in the Great Pyramid. The hypothesis I'm putting forward here is that purpose may well have been the splitting of water using sunlight, discovered over centuries in a pragmatic, experimental manner. The power and benefits of such a discovery would of course have been immense.

If this wasn't the purpose, it's a very strange coincidence indeed that the pyramid builders - in Egypt, South America, and even here, as in the case of Silbury Hill - accidentally constructed buildings that as functioning machines came so very close to creating the conditions necessary to achieve it.

[alancalverd]

There's a lot to answer here, but Brown's gas is quite simply a mixture of 2 parts hydrogen to 1 of oxygen. The easiest way to make it is to electrolyse water with an alternating current, so you get stochiometric H and O released at both electrodes. It's fairly handy stuff for rough welding and cutting because it only needs one feed pipe, the mixture is always optimised, and it works under water, but the flame temperature is lower than many other industrial gases - particularly acetlylene/oxygen - and it tends to oxidise the cut in air (you can use excess acetylene or propane to prevent metals burning at the edge of the cut).

I think Brown's gas has a significant future as the only economical way of harvesting solar and wind power: we already have national storage, distribution and metering facilities for gas. A flammable mixture that is nonpoisonous, nonsuffocating, and whose only combustion product is pure water, is surely the ideal domestic and industrial source of high-grade heat. The UK, at least, isn't short of water, so why not run all those fatuous windfarms at full power and fill the gas tanks?

The problem with BG is the pseudoscience and scam baggage it carries with it. Claims to defeat the laws of thermodynamics by generating BG and feeding it into car engines abound. Pity, because it is a potentially useful material.

As for Silbury Hill, you need to see it in context. Stonehenge is actually the foundations of a cyclotron which fed into a linear accelerator (founded on the "avenue" of stones) leading to the treatment bunker - a chambered tumulus containing the bodies of some patients who did not survive. There is an earlier, simpler* long linac at Carnac, but you can get a much higher particle flux by using a cyclotron injector. With all that radiation flying around, the simplest operator shield is an earth mound - Silbury. We use the same technology today. Skeptics ask what happened to the flight tubes, magnets and electronics, but again we should look to contemporary technology: when the machine was decommissioned, the metals, glassware, etc were either recycled or dumped as radioactive scrap.

*though it may have been a coaxial reflex accelerator - still regarded as revolutionary and a great source of protons.

[marchesarosa]

How much does a storm glass cost,Mr Sonde and where was it purchased? What are the dimensions? Sorry to be so prosaic. I want one!

[mercury]

Jan 10, 2013 12:30:35 GMT 1 marchesarosa said:

I want one!

just what i thought. it's an object of desire.