K.M. sent me this article from "our friends at phys.org" and when I saw its contents I was.... well, both stunned and surprised, and yet simultaneously, not stunned and surprised. But in either case, my reaction was that I simply had to blog about it, and emailed K.M. with profuse thanks for bringing it to my attention. You'll see why in a moment.

But first, a little background.

Nine years ago(it scarcely seems possible to me now), I wrote the final book in my Giza Death Star trilogy, outlining my very radical and extremely speculative argument for what I call the "weapon hypothesis" of the Great Pyramid. That book was The giza Death Star Destroyed. On pages 124-127 I wrote about a strange device called a "Hieronymous machine," which, to sum it up, was a machine, or rather, a drawing, a schematic, of the circuitry of a machine, that appeared to work exactly as the machine itself. That's right: lines and symbols on a piece of paper that performed exactly like the actual machine it detailed.



Such nonsense is fun, the stuff of Dr. Walter Bishop and a Fringe television episode perhaps.

As I noted in that book,

"The machine itself was a simple device, given a patent by the U.S. Patent Office in September of 1949. The machine was "build around a broad band voltage amplifier" and was designed simply to detect and analyze metal alloys cheaply and accurately."(p. 125)

As I also noted, about twenty per cent of the people who bought the machine simply could not get it to work properly, and there was no apparent reason for their failures.

Yet, another individual, John W. Campbell, a science magazine editor, bought the machine and found it worked perfectly. But he was intrigued by the failure rate and decided to investigate.

What he discovered is what belongs in the area of "fringe science," for during one test of the machine being run by a student, the machine was running perfectly....

...except that Campbell noticed that the student had simply forgotten to plug the machine in!(p. 125). As I noted in the book, Campbell was intrigued by this very strange anomaly, and decided to investigate further. Eliminating static electricity buildup as an explanation, he then decided to see if the machine would continue to run without an electrical supply, which, oddly enough, it did.(p. 126) The conclusion that Campbell drew from this was that the machine was not an electrical machine at all, but some other kind of machine. The question was, what kind?(p. 126)

Campbell evolved a theory that the relationship between the parts of the machine somehow functioned as the machine, in other words, it was the relationship of the parts that were the origins of its functionality, rather than the parts themselves. Campbell decided to test this hypothesis by replacing the soldered circuits of the machine with a wiring diagram or schematic. Once again, the machine worked. Intrigued by the results, another researcher named Harry Stine reperformed the experiment, using the coils, dials, and prisms of the original machine, but replacing the connections by inking the circuits on a card. Again, the experiment worked.

As I put it in The Giza Death Star Destroyed:

"While this might suggest that the ink itself was somehow conducting electricity, it is nevertheless difficult to see how a two-dimensional circuit diagram would not simply "short out" where the circuit lines would cross on the diagram."(p. 126)

Well, what has all this to do with "our friends at phys.org"? Simply this:

Pencil drawing of a sensor actually is a sensor

In case you missed it:

"The sensors were drawn on paper that was placed on an electric scale in order to measure and maintain a consistent drawing force for each pencil-drawn sensor. The drawings were then glued on printed circuit board (PCB) strips, and a strain gauge mounted on each PCB strip. Then Kang applied cycles of stress to the sensor using a four-point bending technique, and measured the sensor's voltage change under the applied stress through an electric circuit. "He found that different pencil grades produce different GF values, and therefore different PZR sensitivities. Specifically, the higher the ratio of clay to graphite, the greater the change in resistance under the applied stress, and the greater the GF. "Kang explains that these differences can be attributed to variations in the initial tunneling distances between neighboring graphite, with an increase in tunneling distance corresponding to an increase in GF. "'The graphite tunneling effect is from one graphite through the insulator of clay to another graphite,' Kang said. 'The tunneling structure looks like a metal-insulator-metal.'"

While this is still a long way from the Hireonymous machine anomalies and hypotheses of Campbell, it is nonetheless a step closer to it than we were before, and it appears in some small degree to corroborate my idea that, for whatever reason, the ink on Campbell's circuit schematics did not "short out" and appeared to function as electrical conductors even when the inked lines were crossed. Significant, too, perhaps, that we are also looking at yet another amazing property of piezoelectrics that can detect the minute stresses on a piece of paper... that too, makes me wonder once again at just how much the pyramid builders really knew, when they knew it, and whence their knowledge came.

See you on the flip side.