The Third Plane

Okay, so I’m reading this cheesy book called The Philadelphia Experiment. Written at the tail end of the 70s, it purports to detail the sketchy “facts” behind the alleged actual physical disappearance and teleportation of a Navy vessel in October of 1943.

Not until page 76 (out of a 162 page book) do we get our first nugget of real “physics.” And a few pages later, I come across something that I must admit, begrudgingly, is intriguing.

Let me just confess that my physics is extremely rusty. Rusty like that old swingset that came with the house. Rusty like every door hinge in my house when I’m tiptoing about at 3 am in an insomniac fit. Though I enthusiastically took three semesters of physics and math classes and got decent grades, we’re talking nearly twenty years ago. I’ve forgotten more physics than most people know, though I never really knew much to begin with.

So take the following explanation with a great big saltshaker.

In a nutshell, electricity and magnetism are two fundamental phenomena unified as the electromagnetic force. An electric field generated in a metal coil induces a magnetic field at a right angle to the first field. There was a physical mnemonic we learned where you held up a hand – I forget which one – thumb upwards. The thumb represents one field, and the fingers at a 90 degree angle to the palm represent the other.

Now what the authors of this book propose – or the sources quoted in the book, I should say – is a third field, one at right angles to the other two. This is because our physical space consists of three dimensions. They drop hints that this third field is a gravitational field, is something that Einstein was considering for his Unified Field Theory, and is something that the Navy was tinkering with during this Philadelphia Experiment. I continue reading on to see if and how these ideas are followed up on.



[Note: In this two-dimensional diagram, the x-plane represents time. But we actually live in a 4-dimensional spacetime. Therefore, that third plane still sits there, awaiting discovery, as the wave travels through time ...]

Doesn’t this sound intriguing? I lack the in-the-know, however, to tell intuitively whether this is legit or bogus. Perhaps if I was independently wealthy, or a bachelor hermit, or a hungry, up-and-coming grad student, I’d look into this much further. But for the time being, I have to remain content to read these guilty pleasures and wonder.