Dean Drives, Hockey Sticks, and Credibility

June 1960 saw an incredible cover picture on Astounding Science Fiction magazine: a US Navy submarine was shown orbiting Mars. The cover article described a new propulsion system that could be retrofitted to existing technology to make an instant interplanetary spaceship.

Remember, this was eleven months before NASA sent Alan Shepard in a sub-orbital test of the new Mercury-Redstone booster. And yet Astounding editor John W. Campbell showed a nuclear powered sub making a trip to another planet.

The reason was the Dean Drive, a revolutionary proposal from Normal L. Dean. The problem with rocketry was well known even in 1960: to send a rocket to another planet, you had to throw away most of the rocket. More specifically, you have to burn 99% of its mass as fuel, expelling the exhaust out the back in order to drive the rest of the rocket forward.

Newton's Third Law was the problem. To get an action (moving the rocket towards the neighboring planet), you needed an equal and opposite reaction (burn fuel and expel it out the back). The Saturn V monster that took us to the moon had a lift-off weight of 6.7 million pounds, only 100,000 pounds (1.5%) of which was lunar payload. Dean said he'd developed a better way, a reactionless drive.

Rather than using the forward push from rocket exhaust, Dean said he had a machine that would convert rotary energy to linear energy. In fact, he had one that he showed to Campbell, which looked like it generated 0.05g (actually one-eighteenth of the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth). This doesn't sound like much, but is actually huge - this is far more thrust than anything else available today (even ion drives), and running it continuously would allow the spaceship to build up incredible velocities.

Jerry Pournelle was on a team that tried to license the design from Dean, unsuccessfully:

Dean may or may not have been sincere, but he was certainly hard to deal with. He was so afraid -- or purported to be afraid -- that his gadget would be stolen that he wanted lots of money up front before he'd show it to us. Why he showed it to John [Campbell] and Harry [Stine] I don't know; it was from their report that I concluded it was worth going back East and trying to buy the thing, and I convinced the General that we ought to put up the money...

It may be that Dean thought that with at least two potential buyers (there's some evidence of a third but I don't know who it was) he could play tight and up the price. Perhaps he could have -- I'd have recommended far more than half a million if it worked -- but he wasn't going to get any takers until he showed the darn thing, and he wouldn't DO that. Oh. He also wanted a promise of a Nobel Prize. In my case I was perfectly willing to promise it. Of course I had no idea how I'd go about getting it for him, but I suspected that if he really could overcome Newton's third he'd have no trouble on that account.

Anyway, nothing came of it all. If it worked I never saw it work, and neither did the 3M team. The original device as described by Campbell and Stine was never found after Dean died, and the thing described in the patent doesn't work and isn't, according to Stine, what Dean showed as a working device.

Of course, it didn't work. Campbell believed in it right up to his death in 1972, but as nice as a reactionless drive would be (and it would be very nice indeed), there's no There there: we'll have to get to Mars without it. Secrets can get you attention, but not riches, and certainly not a Nobel. Unprecedented claims require unprecedented proof.

We are, in a sense, seeing the same thing going on today in the Climate Change debate. On one side, we have the IPCC, the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (of "ClimateGate" fame), and Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph. The climate is warming dangerously, we are told, and this is sudden and unprecedented.

On the other side of the debate, we have a bunch of people who are basically in the same position that Pournelle was when he was dealing with Norman Dean. They're asking for proof. What they're hearing is pretty much what they heard from Dean: No dice, just give us our money (fabulously expensive Carbon tax/trading schemes). And our Nobel.

Oooooh Kaaaay.

Unprecedented claims require unprecedented proof, and we're simply not seeing it. Mann famously would not release his computer code and data, but was ultimately shown by Steve McIntyre to have fudged his statistics (specifically the R² number that showed whether their results were relevant or not). The story of this, and the incredible contortions that the "Hockey Team" went through to get subsequent, equally flawed papers into the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) is described at length at Bishop Hill in Caspar and the Jesus Paper. Once again, data was withheld when requested:

To have key arguments in the SI [published article's Supplemental information] was most unusual and it quickly became apparent why it had been done: the SI was nowhere to be seen. Even the peer reviewers appear not to have had access, and once again, Amman refused McIntyre's request for the data and code. His reply to this request was startling (and remember that Amman is a public servant):

Under such circumstances, why would I even bother answering your questions, isn’t that just lost time?

As with Mann's original hockey stick, the statistics for this supporting paper were also entirely bollixed up. Statistically, the results were meaningless. That's some impressive "unprecedented proof", right there.

The problem that is emerging for the people claiming catastrophic warming is that the scientific work they are relying on seems very sloppy indeed. When the CRU was asked for their raw data so that their results could be verified, they first refused, then refused a Freedom of Information Act request, and then - when people still wouldn't stop asking - claimed that they'd lost the data. The IPCC AR4 report, supposedly based solely on peer-reviewed science, was found to be one-third based on Press Releases from environmental advocacy groups. The scientist heading up the Working Group 2 portion of upcoming IPCC AR5 is still falsely claiming that the science shows that hurricanes are getting worse due to Climate Change. It's not - or at least, there are no peer-reviewed articles that show this:

I see that four climate scientists, including the incoming head of IPCC WGII, Chris Field, have written up an op-ed for Politico calling for political action on climate change. That they are calling for political action is not problematic, but the following statement in the op-ed is a problem:

Climate change caused by humans is already affecting our lives and livelihoods — with extreme storms, unusual floods and droughts, intense heat waves, rising seas and many changes in biological systems — as climate scientists have projected.

I have sent Chris Field an email as follows:
I read your op-ed in Politico with interest. In it you state:

"Climate change caused by humans is already affecting our lives and livelihoods — with extreme storms, unusual floods and droughts, intense heat waves, rising seas and many changes in biological systems — as climate scientists have projected."

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39664.html#ixzz0tbNjwMYY

I am unaware of research that shows either detection or attribution of human-caused changes in extreme storms or floods, much less detection or attribution of such changes "affecting lives and livelihoods". Can you point me to the scientific basis for such claims?

This is Roger Pielke, Jr., no Climate Change Denier like me, but an honest scientist and one of the world's experts on hurricane damage. He didn't hear back from Dr. Field.

Sloppy. Add to this the ClimateGate email exchanges where the principals (Mann, Jones, et al) discuss deleting email messages, refusing to release data, and how to prevent publication of opposing scientific opinions by taking over the peer-review process, and you get the flavor of something very different from the typical view of scientists in white lab coats. A comment to Pielke's post is a must-read for this flavor:

The drugmaker Glaxo, we now learn, has been lying for years about its blockbuster diabetes drug. Turns out this multi-billion dollar drug doesn't perform as well as an older drug (in a test paid for by Glaxo), and it also gives people heart attacks. Glaxo withheld and hid this information for years.

I very much hate to say this, but Glaxo's behavior reminds me not just of Michael Mann and Phil Jones -- all their erasure of emails, hiding of data, marginalizing and blackballing articles not to their liking -- but of much of the climate change establishment.

He has specifics. RTWT.

Dean didn't die rich, and neither Mann nor Jones have gotten rich either (although Al Gore certainly has). Dean didn't get a Nobel, and neither Mann nor Jones have either (although Al Gore did). But Mann and Jones have done something that Dean did.

They've put their credibility in a very shaky position. The fact that there are multiple inquiries into their conduct is all you need to know to realize that even the "consensus view" establishment knows this. The fact that none of the inquiries have issued an indictment is cold comfort to Mann and Jones. They'll have to get to Mars on their own, figuratively speaking. What they're burning to generate political thrust is their credibility. As with Interplanetary travel, it'll all be gone long before they arrive at their destination.