‘As the Hughes Company has recently informed us, the attacking weapons are so deluded electronically that they attack a “ghost target” of the dimensions of an aircraft-carrier and literally fall into the water. All we can conclude from the hitherto scanty data is that antennae are installed on both sides of the aircraft-carrier. Mini-computers are fitted in the operations room. The system is supposed to be able to follow several hundred signals simultaneously.
‘On receipt of a signal the system automatically measures the transmitting frequency. The computer separates friend from foe. Then it selects the tailor-made electronic ‘cloak of invisibility’ for the specific frequency spectrum. The enemy flies to an electronically depicted but non-existent target.’ (17.5.1978)
Fantastic, but that, too, has existed before.
In the Indian national epics Mahabharata and Ramayana we can read about weapons and flying objects which could make themselves ‘invisible to the enemy’. Even the ancient destroyer Shiva sometimes disappeared into thin air before the eyes of the enemy. History repeats itself. That is a model worth emulating. We are on the way back.
Reports like the one that NATO possesses an antitank rocket that hits the target regardless of the weather is no newer than the invention of the neutron bomb which only kills living creatures and leaves inorganic matter undamaged. Water under the bridge are also crossings of men and animals, of man and machine in cybernetic units, whose practical application will be announced for the next century. But there is a little more to be said about that.
Is history repeating itself in a fatal way?
For years a really fatal ‘example’ has been worrying me. As I told you that I wanted to introduce dangerous ideas into the conversation, I can let it out at last.
Let us take the terrifying idea that crazy minorities unleash a global war of destruction on our planet.
What targets would they turn their murderous weapons on?
On the uninhabited Sahara? Surely not.
On the inaccessible Himalayan mountains? Hardly.
On the ice caps at the North and South Poles? Why?
On the settlements of poor Indians in the South American Andes? Never.
On the palm-clad atolls of the South Seas? What for?
On the haunts of the aborigines in Australia? Never.
On the huts of the negroes of Central Africa or the poorest of blacks in the so-called Republic of Mali? What would be the point?
On the North American Indians in the deserts of Mexico and Arizona? Definitely not.
On the descendants of the Maya in the jungles of Yucatan? Scarcely.
On the jovial Russian farmers in the wilds of the tundra? Without rhyme or reason.
On tribes in the Amazon? What harm have they ever done?
The targets of the warring parties will certainly lie in the centres of civilisation where millions live and work. These are precisely the territories that are supposed to vanish from the map.
Now it is not true that massive atomic attacks will subject our planet to radioactivity for all eternity; life will continue, especially in those places where no bombs fall. Moreover living creatures, including man, are more adaptable than we think. On top of that, modern and future weapon development tends to evolve destructive weapons with ‘cleaner’ radioactivity. Limited territories will be saturated with deadly atomic bombs, but they will only be effective for a limited time. Both attackers and defenders are equally interested in having such weapons. What use is victory over a country that can never be inhabitable or cultivable again? Who gets anything out of a radioactive Europe which the victor cannot enter?
At all events men, groups of men, will survive in the Sahara, in Tibet, at the Poles and in the Andes, in the South Seas and the interior of Australia, in Africa and the deserts of Mexico, in the Russian tundra and the Indian reserves of Yucatan and the Amazon—but there will also be survivors of the catastrophe in the civilised nations with advanced technologies.
There may be thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who survive the global conflagration—they live scattered throughout the world. They know nothing about each other. They all wish and hope that they are not the only survivors, yet there are no contacts or news. Each and all of them are an island.
The survivors speak different languages and dialects. If they did make contact, how on earth would they understand each other? Radio, television, telex—all means of communication have been destroyed. It is like day zero. No factories are working. There is no supermarket with goods for sale. No cars on the streets. No aircraft in the sky. The survivors are on their own. The big Robinson Crusoe adventure begins.
In those days a western engineer succumbed to the enticements of a travel agency and had begun his holiday in the highlands of Tibet when the great war broke out. Familiar with all the horrors of atomic war, this man knows that no kind of transport will ever take him home and he also knows that he no longer has a home. What does he do?
He has been fully trained as a technologist and is therefore far superior to the Tibetans in technical matters. Like the ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes (285-212 B.C.) he can make his discoveries anew, discover his law of levers again, recalculate the content of areas and bodies and the Archimedean point outside the earth again. The Tibetans admire him.
On the basis of his knowledge, the engineer calculates that somewhere on the earth other groups, too, have survived the atomic attack. In any case he wants to know exactly what happened elsewhere. Curiosity spurs him on . . . as it does other groups who survived and have intelligent technologists in their ranks. Sooner or later our engineer will go on an expedition.
Other groups will do the same. Each group suspects that there will be fellow-men who have survived.
Before they set out they will leave messages behind in case strangers visit the place they are vacating. What language would they use for the messages? They would have to say succinctly and intelligibly:
We were here and we are coming back.
There is drinking water here.
We are going north (south, east, west).
We are led by an engineer (priest, architect, pilot, etc).
Danger: deadly small animals.
Warning: a very aggressive native tribe 40 miles to the north-west.
We possess the pre-catastrophe range of knowledge.
A doctor lives in the north gorge of the mountain.
Berries are poisonous. Do not eat.
Edible fish in all ponds.
Contaminated territory to the north and west!
Living in need themselves, they will make a present of all their experience to other survivors, their brothers in need. They will deliberate how to explain why they are going where, whether women and children are with them, whether mutants immune to radioactivity are on the expedition.
The original question remains: in what language do they tell the strangers?
The Tibetans do not speak a word of English, and even our engineer is baffled when a Russian addresses him, while Cyrillic characters are like surrealist drawings to him. What is the answer?
Tourism brought millions from all countries to other parts of the world. International athletic meetings mixed people from many countries together; they too, were victims of the catastrophe. Is it not reasonable to assume that educated intelligent men were among the survivors everywhere? Saharan Arabs do not understand the South Sea islanders. Should they speak English? Russian? Chinese? German? Or French, the language of diplomacy? Or any of the other 3900 languages?
There is only one international means of communication—picture language. And that goes for modern man, too.
That has been tried and proven daily. The Indian who lands at Frankfurt finds his way through the confusion of the airport because pictures show him the way. To the exit, the luggage collection hall, the customs, the WC’s, telephones and taxis. In the spa of Baden-Baden the non-Germans-speaking Australian sees at a glance where there is spa water, where th
e theatre is, where to find the swimming-pool or an emergency doctor, and what sights he should not miss. At the Olympic Games everyone is told by picture where to change money, where interpreters can give additional help, where the bicycle-racing track is and where the outdoor orchestra is playing.
All without speaking or writing!
By pictograms.
The last twenty years have seen the development of more than 500 universally intelligible pictograms which enable even the illiterate to visit foreign countries without being able to read. In its travel brochure, Baden-Baden alone includes more than 100 pictograms used in the spa that have long since become reliable tourist guides. The pictograms have achieved what Esperanto never did: communication between people without the need for speech.
Pictograms can be more than simple indications. They can be used to form whole sentences. For example, a bunch of grapes means ‘wine’, a man with a castle in the background means ‘this is the way to the castle,’ a man aiming a gun means ‘this is shooting land’. The foreigner gets a clear message from the three pictograms: ‘If you want to drink a glass (or more) of wine, please take this road to the castle; you can also shoot up there (if you have a permit).’
A mathematician could tell us how many combinations can be made out of 500 pictograms. It is certainly a figure far higher than one’s chances of winning the football pools.
Pictograms are the international language of our time!
Back to our groups which survived the great catastrophe. Even if they were not familiar with pictograms at home, they would have to invent them in their need. Every intelligent being would realise that it was pointless to write messages in ‘his’ language. The obvious thing is to think out simple stylised figures and symbols and chisel, scratch or scrape them into rock-faces. Signs that they themselves would understand if they met them.
Above: modern pictograms in the streets of Baden-Baden.
Below: ancient pictograms from rockfaces in British Columbia and California.
For twelve years I have been travelling like a tramp all over the world. Among the Hopi Indians, USA, in the ghost town of Sete Cidades, Brasil, in Kashmir and Turkey, in South Africa and the Sahara, in Northern Europe and Southern France, in California and North Italy, in the South Sea islands and in the Philippines I have photographed rock drawings and engravings. I got to know White Bear, a chief of the Hopi Indians. He took me to a secret canyon on the reservation which the Indians protect from the curiosity of strangers. The walls were covered with ‘pictograms’. I asked White Bear if he could read the signs. Not all, he said, but he did know most of them.
I want to know for whom and for what purpose his ancestors had left these signs.
The old Indian explained to me that his ancestors had emigrated from south to north—not, as scholars claim, from the Bering Straits in the north to the south—and that the tribe had often split up and formed new groups during the great trek. In order to convey the experiences of the groups who had gone ahead to those following behind they had used rock drawings.
Why, it flashed through my mind, are there rock drawings from different epochs?
White Bear knew the answer. Different groups and their descendants returned to the same places to carve new discoveries and good and bad news. Rock drawings and engravings had the same value as wall posters have for Mao’s Chinese today.
Oswald O. Tobisch collected some 6,000 rock drawings and compared them with each other. Using twenty tables he demonstrates how closely European, Asiatic and American picture-writing groups are connected. Tobisch concludes from his comparative study that all cultures must have been reciprocally influenced, indeed that ultimately the rock drawings must have had a common origin.34
The Indians still use pictograms today. They have never stopped using ancient stylised patterns, i.e. pictograms, in their typical artistic products. The subjects of the North American Indians’ sand drawings ‘tell stories’ in the same way and even the tapestries of the Andean Indians include pictograms.
Can the phenomenon of the millions (!) of rock drawings all over the world be explained by a world-wide catastrophe?
Would history repeat itself after a catastrophe in the present?
Would survivors seek the path into the future, their union with other survivors, by means of rock pictograms?
Is the past approaching us; is it overtaking us?
Is the present seeking the ‘kiss of death’ with past history?
If the latest weapons systems are christened with mythological names, if we rediscover an internationally intelligible picture writing, if our delving into the deep dark springs of the past are so obvious, does the original reason for this lie in antiquity, in early history, or is the reason inherent in ourselves?
Is our consciousness a perpetuum mobile, an eternal cycle, the paths of which lead from past into the future, from the future into the past? Where does it begin, where is its primal cause, where is its original impulse?
Is it presumptuous even to pose the problem of the original spark that set off this cycle?
Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951) would be assured of his special status in the sciences simply because three of his students won the Nobel Prize: Werner Heisenberg (1932), Petrus Debye (1936) and Wolfgang Pauli (1945). Hans Albrecht Bethe, another student of Sommerfeld’s, is one of the leading nuclear physicists and is head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Los Alamos Atomic Research Centre.
Teacher of the famous, Sommerfeld himself was a modest figure, although he discovered the majority of the laws governing the number, wavelengths and intensity of spectral lines. His most important book Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines was the standard work on atomic physics for decades.
But Sommerfeld was (too) far ahead of his time with one of his discoveries. In addition he had the bad luck to announce it just before the publication of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which caused a tremendous sensation in the scientific world.
Sommerfeld put forward the theory that there were particles that were faster than light and had the peculiar quality that the more energy they lost, the faster they travelled.
Einstein’s theory obscured Sommerfeld’s bold idea, for it claims that particles on the verge of the speed of light have infinitely great mass.
Once introduced to the world, speculative theories with even a trace of probability do not lose their power of attraction. Since Sommerfeld’s announcement at the turn of the century, generations of physicists have ‘toyed’ with the theory of faster-than-light particles. Gerald Feinberg, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Columbia University, New York, was first able to set the discussion going again in 1967 with his work on faster-than-light particles.35 He also gave particles a name. Feinberg called them tachyons, coming from the Greek word tachys = fast. Once again scientists countered that, according to Einstein, nothing could be faster than light, but some experts on elementary particles fell in with the fascinating idea and supported the view that faster-than-light particles must exist.
Can the bold idea be reconciled with Einstein’s irrefutable theory?
Einstein’s theory of relativity states that a body that does not have the speed of light in one inertial* system cannot assume a speed faster than light in another inertial system. So if a particle on the borders of the speed of light acquires infinitely great mass, it can neither reach nor cross the boundary of the speed of light.
*An inertial system is a non-accelerated frame of reference.
Is this correct? When it originates and disappears, light itself behaves like its particles, photons and neutrons, which move at the speed of light, indeed their velocity is never less. Elementary particles have already been accelerated to 99.4% of the speed of light, without infinite mass, in every large synchrotron, such as the one in the CERN near Geneva.
What powers the photons and neutrons? What is their ‘secret’? All they have is the energy of motion. If they are brought to a halt, they vanish without a trace.
Dietmar Kirch36 divides elementary particles into three broad classes:
Particles like nucleons and electrons. (They travel below the speed of light).
Particles like photons and neutrons. (They travel at the speed of light).
Tachyons. (They travel faster than light).
First of all, tachyons only exist in an inertial system which is not yet accessible to us. So there can be no contradiction of Einstein’s theory. Just as Class 1 particles always travel below the speed of light and cannot be made to exceed it with finite energy, the tachyons of Class 3 always travel faster than light and cannot be slowed down to the speed of light.
Tachyons exist in a different inertial system. They behave in exactly the opposite way to the elementary particles in the inertial system which we know and in which we live.
Signs of the Gods? Page 14
