Soul Invictus

I was thinking about this today and I recall seeing a special a few years back that IIRC stated that the actual ship was to have not been visible and that it was said to have been seen in a different locale, and that those involved suffered horrible after effects.

Any science buffs care to expound on their knowledge of what went on and the theory behind time travel and/or displacing objects from their current locale?

Regards,

Soul Invictus

The Lone Ranger

According to the U.S. Navy, it's a bunch of baloney.

I'm inclined to agree.



Considering that it was Charles Berlitz (who wrote several sensationalist and utterly nonsensical books on such things as the so-called "Bermuda Triangle") who was largely responsible for making the "Philadephia Experiment" widely-known, I'm even more inclined to doubt than anything even remotely like this ever occurred.

Cheers,

Michael

Soul Invictus

Not to sound conspiratorial, but wouldn't you expect the Navy to marginalize the events? Is there any verifiable sources to corroborate what happened? Is the Navy willing (or have they been willing thus far) to freely release info surrounding the events, or are they tight-lipped about it (to the best of your knowledge?)

The Lone Ranger

Well, of course one wouldn't expect the Navy to release any classified documents or anything. Still, if the website's info is accurate, the logs and operational records of the ships that were supposedly involved are available to the public and make it clear that no such experiments ever occurred.

I've read speculation that the Navy tested some sort of device that was theoretically supposed to make a ship invisible to radar by generating some sort of jamming field, and that this is what sparked the "Philadelphia Experiment" legend.

It's hard to see how such tests would have made anyone sick, much less caused the more spectacular results that some have claimed.

Cheers,

Michael

Jesse

The originator of the whole Philadelphia Experiment story was either crazy or a pathological liar:

http://web.archive.org/web/200206011...es/allende.htm

I don't think there's a single shred of evidence for it beyond this guy's story.

Koyaanisqatsi

Well, all you'd have to do is backtrack stealth technology and you'll arrive around the time of the alleged Philly experiment.

We had stealth fighters operational in '91, which means they were in testing phase in the seventies and eighties, theoretical in the fifties and sixties. The ability to jam radar came out just about at the same time radar did (late forties/fifties).

It's certainly plausible that a story about the Navy testing various ways to jam radar got turned into, "Navy Testing Invisibility" tabloid nonsense.

But let's say it was true and the Navy successfully teleported an entire aircraft carrier (and crew), only to have the crew all fused with the ship (which is part of the legend). That would have meant we had teleportation ability for at least fifty years now to work out all the "kinks."

Even if it weren't useful for humans and the oil cartel stopped its use for transporting appliances and inert material of various kinds (as I've heard is the consipiracy theory behind its secret), the military would certainly use it to teleport bombs right into Hussein's bedroom.

Aside from that, think about what teleporting an entire aircraft carrier (and it's crew) would involve (especially back in the forties/fifties). You would have to somehow encapsulate a certain volume of spacetime and generate enough power to somehow instantly freeze frame all atomic movement within that volume in order to then chart the exact positions of hundreds of billions of quadrillions of electrons and atoms and quarks of the strangest kind (); copy them, somehow, perfectly; annihilate the originals; then paste the copies into a different location (i.e., a different energy state) and then somehow set it all back into proper "continuum" within that different energy state.

Imagine cutting and pasting a picture of your head onto the body of Arnold Schwartzeneger in Photoshop and then throwing your computer into a bathtub.

Or consider the idea that you manage to freeze frame a certain immense vollume of spacetime and just hold it there (in an a-temporal quantuam state) and then release the "pause" button so that the volume appears to us in a different location because we've moved, but it did not. This would be an incredibly impractical manner of teleportation, don't you think? If I wanted to teleport to Paris for the weekend, for example, I'd have to physically line myself up with where Paris is going to be in its part of the global revolution/orbit on Friday at, say, five pm EST. I wouldn't move, I would simply be suspended "outside of time" somehow and then "released" at the point when the Earth's rotation/orbit placed the streets of Paris (and not a tree or a house or a life threatening altitude, up or down from where I was "frozen;" don't want to freeze frame in Denver, the mile high city, only to "unfreeze" a mile above the Eiffel tower). This is how we went to the moon; by charting where Tranquility Bay (the landing area chosen) on the moon would be three days from the initial launch.

Actually, there'd be another, more serious problem, since the reason the moon launches worked, was because the ship and the astronauts were part of the whole system and not a-temporal to it, so you'd not only have to figure out where Paris would be, but also where Earth will be. It's hurtling through space as space expands, so if you were removed from the continuum somehow, within a day compared to Earth time, you'd be, effectively, out in the space the Earth just left behind.

Unless you went into a sort of dimensional "fold" so that you could emerge at any spatial point in spacetime like a quantum fluctuation, only "guided."

Then there's also the possibility that the volume you "freeze framed" (i.e., the ship) was physically present (in other words, not "a-temporal," just absolutely frozen in quantum movement, to coin a phrase) and pushed into a different energy state; nudged, as it were, like a tug boat pushing a barge down the river. This is, of course, preposterous.

But, while you may have noticed that all of the above deliberately mirrored many familiar things in popular culture and some current theories of teleportation (including a possible explanation for why the crew was "fused" to the ship), the energy necessary for any such experiment (if it were even physically possible), would have to be something on the magnitude of a galactic black hole. If that kind of energy were ever released on the Earth, it would pretty much instantly obliterate a huge chunk of our galaxy, let alone our entire solar system.

Which is to say, highly implausible, even if we did have help from the greys...

Arken

Bad '80s movie with Michael Pare? Yeah, sure. Why?

wade-w

Just a small nitpick; radar was around in the late thirties. It played a key role in the Battle of Britain. Also, the Bismarck had radar fire control systems.

braces_for_impact

Why make invisible ships when you already have them. They're called submarines.

andy_d

The groundwork on "stealth" technology was done by the British, not the US. They gave the technology to the US because they didn't have the resources to develop it into working airframes.

Another nitpick: The first F117s were actually operational as early as 1983. They just didn't tell us for a while