Chapter 8 Notes: On Bouncing Waves, Kaiser Frederick III, The Venona Project, and the Radium Girls

Since Chapter 8 is not available online, these will be spoiler-free notes, providing some links and additional information HiddenTruthFeatureabout topics in Chapter 8 for those who have purchased The Hidden Truth.

Here’s the scan of pages 302-303 of Lodge’s Modern Views from the eBay seller. As I mentioned in a previous post, Amazon charges authors a data fee based on the sized of their Kindle book, so including lots of figures would have cut into royalties. In addition, my early readers thought that the descriptions in the text were clear enough without the figures. Thus, I omitted all but one critical figure from the book. By a remarkable coincidence, the supposed paper by Heaviside on wave interactions sounds suspiciously like some of my own work. See my paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1800 for details, or this news item.

Original Lodge Modern Theory

Kaiser Frederick III was an interesting character. He did die of throat cancer a few years before Heinrich Hertz. He’s also been the center of speculation regarding an assassination conspiracy theory. It’s certainly true that his political outlook ran opposed to that of his son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ultimately led the German Empire to ruin in the First World War. It appears unlikely that Kaiser Frederick III would have led his country down the same path.

The Venona Project was a classified effort to decode Soviet communications, as Amit described. A key lesson of WWII era communications security was that no matter how good your codes are, if the people using them get sloppy, they can be defeated. I’m confident this lesson continues to be relearned in the Internet era.

The Radium Girls” were young women who worked at a factory using radium paint to make glow-in-the-dark watches and clocks. They would lick the tips of their paint brushes to create a sharp precise point, and in so doing ingest some of the radium paint. Others painted their fingernails with the radioactive paint to obtain glow-in-the-dark nails. Many of the women died of cancer caused by the high radiation doseage.

Might Lieberman have chosen McCain as a unity running mate in 2004? I don’t know, but there was certainly a great deal of speculation regarding McCain selecting Lieberman as a running mate in 2008.

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