Readers may recall that in one of the columns I submitted during my recent trip to China I discussed a peculiar mystery surrounding my cell phone battery.
Specifically, ever since I’ve had this particular lemon of a “smart” phone, the battery drains within hours whenever I am on Catalina, even when the phone is in airplane mode or even when the phone is off. It’s just something I have gotten used to.
Readers may recall that in one of the columns I submitted during my recent trip to China I discussed a peculiar mystery surrounding my cell phone battery.
Specifically, ever since I’ve had this particular lemon of a “smart” phone, the battery drains within hours whenever I am on Catalina, even when the phone is in airplane mode or even when the phone is off. It’s just something I have gotten used to.
The mystery arose in China when I realized that this same phone and battery would go days without having to be recharged, regardless of what mode the phone was in or whether or not it was turned off.
Well, the update to this mystery is that within a few hours of returning to Catalina, the cell phone battery that only needed to be recharged once a week in China had drained from three-quarters full to zero in only about four hours. And at that point, I had yet to plug the charger in anywhere in the United States, so you can’t blame Edison. In other words, I was still using the same “Chinese electricity” that had served me well up until returning to the Island.
So, you say, the battery drains when the phone is off because it’s a defective battery or because it continues to transmit its location to our friendly neighborhood NSA. The problem with that theory is it presumably would have been the same situation in China.
Could it be that there really is something different about Catalina from a physics standpoint? Something that might account for the mysterious draining of battery power?
Ever on the lookout for so-called logical explanations for mysterious phenomena, I asked my brother Fritz, the aerospace engineer, if he knew any bonafied electrical engineers that might be able to help with this. His response was “Nope, I don’t know any electrical engineers that specialize in voodoo.”
So much for that idea.
I’m sure there’s a “logical” explanation for it, bearing in mind that what we consider a “logical” explanation today is often yesterday’s pseudoscience. By extension, who’s to say that the pseudoscience explanations of today aren’t the “logical” explanations of tomorrow?
Take those radio waves that carry our conversations over cell phones, for example: It wasn’t until 1867 when James Maxwell first theorized the existence of radio waves that anyone had any idea that such a thing existed. This energy had been dancing all around us and through us from time immemorial and we had no clue it was even there.
We had no idea that everything we could see with our eyeballs represented only a tiny sliver (the visible spectrum) of all there was to “see” in this universe. Maxwell was, of course, ridiculed in some circles until 20 years later when German physicist Heinrich Hertz proved the naysayers wrong.
So is there something “special” about Catalina from a scientific perspective? One person who did indeed think so was none other than Thomas Townsend Brown, our resident quantum physicist who lived on the Island in the ’70s and ’80s. I’ve written about his exploits before, such as his reported creation of artificial gravity fields and his supposed work on the Philadelphia Experiment.
The U.S. Navy was certainly impressed with him as well and kept him on the payroll—complete with personal bodyguards—from the 1930s, through the dark years of the war and then some.
But Dr. Brown was fascinated with the physical properties of Catalina Island, specifically the Pebbly Beach area.
Our own Chuck Liddell knew Dr. Brown in those days and recalled that the good doctor would walk up and down the beach hand selecting certain rocks.
“He felt that the Pebbly Beach area was a special area and that somehow (the energy) had morphed into the rocks,” said Chuck. “He was able to put battery connectors on them and he showed us how the rocks did give off a significant amount of energy.”
In fact, Chuck said Dr. Brown was toying with the idea of somehow “harvesting” the rocks for the purposes of power generation.
“He never talked about how long the energy would be coming out of the rocks,” said Chuck. “His whole concept was that this was a cheap source of energy.”
Dr. Brown’s daughter Linda told me once of an incident involving these unique rock specimens.
It happened back when the family lived in one of the old Quonset huts out at Pebbly Beach, where Dr. Brown did much of his research.
Linda recalls answering a knock at the door one night only to find four members of a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine that had been anchored offshore for a few days. One of them was an officer, and at least one of the other crew members was armed with an automatic rifle.
Dr. Brown, apparently expecting the men, welcomed them into the home and proceeded to bring them a box of some of the rocks he had collected over the years.
Linda noted that the rocks had what appeared to be copper anodes and cathodes on them.
After a brief discussion, the Navy men thanked Dr. Brown and left with their box o’ rocks. The following day, the sub was gone.
Linda’s father never did explain to her what that whole episode was about.
But that was all part and parcel of life with her father.
We all know that there is something indeed “special” about Catalina Island, something that goes beyond the marvelous climate, the picture-postcard vistas at every turn and the general amity among the folks who live here.
But is there something more to it than that? Thomas Townsend Brown thought there was.
And remember, the pseudoscientific explanations of today, just might be the logical explanations of tomorrow.
