I got two copies of this book, an action I reserve only for my most treasured books. I regard it as very important, a milestone, even a classic. Although the book is not written by a professional author, and lacks an index, the ground breaking nature of the scientific content more than offsets these minor faults.
Backed up by 15 years of experimental work with consistent positive results, Graeff opens the door to yet another possible alternative source of energy that is right on our doorstep. Gravity. But now I've said that, please don't rush either to condemn or to extol. Read on. Graeff shows how it is possible to demonstrate the energy's presence with homemade apparatus taking up reasonably little space. And after seeing many of his experiments in the book showing high levels of scientific understanding and engineering precision, one has to face the near-certainty that the harvestable energy is there, constituting a "gravity machine". But the quantity of energy is absolutely microscopic.
Science and Humanitarianism weave together seamlessly into a delightful and moving account of Graeff's life and work, in a somewhat higgledy-piggledy fashion, through vignette after vignette. The Amazon.com page allows you a useful preview peek in the book, but it fails to show any of the science. Chapters 1-10 are mainly autobiographical; chapters 11-26 are mainly scientific. Some might see Graeff as a bit naive but I found his candid observations disarming and refreshing.
Already at the age of 11 he is experimenting. He grew up in Nazi Germany and survived Hamburg's horrific destruction by fire-bombing. Memories are etched in his mind and do not lessen with the passage of time. After the war ended, he and a few friends are determined that the university classes need to start again, and they discover that one classroom has survived the bombing. No chairs, no textbooks, little food or fuel, and a daily programme of rubble-clearing, but never mind. Later on he is invited to the US on a peace-building programme, but he wryly notes the US's own racial discrimination at work. All this plays into his distrust of all authority, his determination to build peace not war, and his passionate desire to develop alternative "peaceful energy". Personal warmth balances a superb engineer's mind, training, inventiveness, and lifelong experience which includes forming and running his own successful company SOMOS for many years. He designed and developed his own engineering products, obtaining many patents.
Completely disillusioned to discover the lie under which Germany had been living in the second World War, Graeff's distrust of "appeal to authority" now extended even to the most hallowed laws of Science - including the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Graeff explains. Put simply, this law says that all temperatures in the physical Universe are tending to level out. One detail of the Second Law, formulated by James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and Willard Gibbs, states that "a column of air in equilibrium has the same temperature throughout". This detail is generally taken on board today as holy writ, proven to death, and Heaven help those who question it. Yet this detail only exists in some of its formulations, was never actually tested, and Loschmidt, a friend of Clerk Maxwell, disputed it.
On retirement, Graeff takes up his old hobby - experiments. He expects Clerk Maxwell's formulation to be correct. But when he tries to create an environment which has exactly the same temperature top and bottom, he finds, unexpectedly, that he cannot do so. His fine engineer's nose sees that these unexpected results challenge the correctness of the Maxwell-Boltzmann detail of the Second Law. Graeff is determined to test the phenomenon, as thoroughly as his means, abilities and time will permit! He collects a houseful of scrap parts, thermos flask interiors, insulators, metal containers, thermocouples, thermopiles, thermistors, datalogging equipment. He designs apparatus able to measure minute temperature differences, to an accuracy of 0.001K or even less.
One day his plane flight is delayed. With time on his hands, and the knowledge of a lifetime, he suddenly realizes he can formulate the theory needed to explain his results. It feels right. But it does not match his results, which are actually too high. Presently he realizes that his theory needs an important modification - and with it, his experimental results come close to his calculations. These results do not contravene the Second Law, but they do require a modification. As he says: "The trouble is that up till now, nobody has found a "Maxwell's demon"... the results of my experiments during the last 13 years could change this... I realized that gravity has the effect of [this demon]".
Graeff provided a thermodynamically neutral environment by constructing alternating layers of conductors and insulators, placed in his thermostatically-controlled cellar. Thermopiles were used to detect extraordinarily small temperature differences. Later on he included thermistors to show that, near enough, the environment kept a steady temperature AND a steady positive temperature gradient. In contrast, Graeff's test specimens at the core vertical "axis" of the apparatus showed consistent negative temperature gradients. Even when he upended his apparatus, the negative gradient reformed over the next few hours each time, despite being re-surrounded by a positive gradient. This reversal also eliminates bias in the thermocouples.
"But this contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics! This can't be true, and anyway we don't want to examine it or even to have our prestigious department's name associated with your crackpot work!"
Yet the experimental results with negative temperature gradients keep on coming in. Many photographs, diagrams, explanations and graphs in the book show this happening, how it happens, why it happens (according to Graeff's thermodynamics theory) and how the reader too can make it happen and replicate the experiments, in accordance with good scientific practice. Please, says Graeff, test my results!
Graeff's work has amazing potential, if we explore implications. It has the capacity to correct (not destroy) a fundamental law of physics, moreover one which is a basis on which Climate Science has been built for over 150 years. Perhaps the tiny gradient could not have been caught experimentally earlier on. Perhaps it needed Graeff's engineering expertise and modern equipment. And Graeff's effect has, perhaps, just perhaps, the potential, if we can multiply it several thousand times, to truly develop a peaceful source of energy for humankind.
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2.8 out of 5
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