Paul,

I haven't looked at Dennis's report in years. It brings back memories. . . . most of which will never be given voice. In the '70s and '80s I was convinced that straight-forward E+M and GRT would not lead to any physics of interest in solving the propulsion/transport problem; that one would have to find "new physics" coupling E+M and GRT. That's why I was interested in "non-minimally", or inductively coupled theories. They are all (well all the physically interesting) theories are 5 (or more) dimensional theories. The only remotely credible physical leads in this business were Faraday's attempts to show inductive couple of E+M and gravity, and Arthur Schuster's and P.M.S. Blackett's conjectures on rotational generation of magnetic fields by electrically neutral massive bodies.

The theory I used as a guide was a simple 5-D formalism developed by George Luchak to describe Blackett's conjecture. It clearly displayed "non-minimal" coupling terms in the E+M equations. And it appeared to show such terms in the gravity equation -- or so I thought at the time. In the fall or 1989, after finding a calculational error, it dawned on me that the time-dependent term in the gravity equation really had nothing to do with "non-minimal" coupling. The term was present only because of the inertial behavior of matter in a relativistically correct way of looking at things. Being pretty slow, it took me several years to figure out the details of "Mach effects". That path can be traced in the papers I published on this between 1990 and 1995.

When I figured out that all that was needed to do the propulsion/transport thing was a correct understanding of inertia -- that no "new physics" was needed -- I was relieved and disappointed. Disappointed because I knew then that no "new physics", and the attendant glory, was involved in what I was about. Relieved because I foolishly thought that if no "new physics" was involved it would be relatively easy to convince main line physics types that they should pay attention to the arguments and experiments. I have learned in the last 15 years that it's much harder to get people to pay attention to things that they think they already understand than it is to get them to pay attention to novel "new physics" types of stuff.

Go figure. . . . :-)

Best,

Jim