MadSci Network: Physics |
I know this question was forwarded to me because this has come up before in some prior question, I will therefore essentially re-iterate my former answer. My father and his brother were both engineer/scientists at the Philadelphia Ship Yard at the time. If anything of a secret nature were happening, they would have been the one's who were directly on it. I've heard so much fuss, and saw a sci-fi movie entitled, "The Philadelphia Experiment," that it finally dawned on me that people took this seriously, (I thought it was just a story) or believe it really happened. What seemed more interesting to me have been the descriptions people rendor of this design, mostly based on Tesla's work. I asked both of them (my father and uncle) point-blank what people were talking about, since they were there, designing and building these things, and why or how people came up with this story. The Eldridge, among other ships, were being fitted for 'de-gaussing,' which means that the large magnetic fields produced by the ships (as a result of being long, metal, and pulsing with electricicty) were being 'cleaned up' to make them less visible 'to their own radar and navigation systems.' In other words, the massive metal hulls, loaded with electric current from the ship's operations, interfeared with the ship's own radar and navigation systems. And now the radar technology was changing, to use shorter wavelengths of the radar range, and more susceptable to being distorted by the ship's large electric fields. They engineered a way to cancel these fields out by running large Tesla coils along the length of the entire ship in very specific locations, even changing wire diameters from very thick to hair-like thin in some places, to absorb the fields by magnetic inductance and thereby cancel the ship's electric fields out. This technology is now over five decades old, gone common knowledge and later abandoned for better ways, although back then, it was regarded as secret, with the logic that the enemy might not be able to engineer a way to clean up their own ships magnetic interference, and therefore not be able to use the newer technology of radar – which gave us an advantage. They might not even be able to detect our radar emissions for the same reason, and not even know, therefore, that we were watching by a wavelength of radar they could not work with. Some of the scientists and engineers referred to this process as 'making the ship invisible.' Apparently, some workers (not educated in science) misunderstood what they were hearing when the scientists and engineers would refer to making the ship 'invisible,' refering to making the ship's massive metal hull invisible to it's own radar, or rather, making the hull so that it would not interfere with the ship's own radar. Some fifty years later, the rumor/fantasy has evolved, thanks to some media and the internet, to all of the sci-fi it appears as today. But most of us probably don't want to believe that. It's infinitely more amusing to believe that a ship became invisible, travelled through time and space, etc… What actually happened will not change regardless of what we choose to believe. I therefore recommend whichever reality you find more amusing.
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