Last week I read this article from Scientific American, which talks about the 3 types of neutrinos. Bizarrely, as a neutrino particle flies through space it actually oscillates between all 3 types. If you could fly along with it, you would see the particle shifting between each one. Even more bizarre is that scientists now think there's a 4th type of neutrino that may be a link to dark matter, and if you were were flying along, you would see the neutrino disappear as it shifted into this new type, then reappear some time and distance later when it shifted back. And, ranking as the most bizarre of all (the taking of the bizarreness cake!), all of this is eerily similar to a story Alvin Schwartz told in An Unlikely Prophet, which I didn't have room to share in my original blog post about the book.
The story is how something called laminar flow (a concept from fluid dynamics) caused the FBI to censor Superman.
In the early 1940s, Alvin Schwartz was writing the Superman comic strip for daily newspapers. He'd created a boring, "by-the-book" physics professor who refused to believe Superman could fly faster than the speed of light because it violated Einstein's theories of relativity. Schwartz wanted Superman to prove the professor wrong, but he couldn't think how to do it. He was stuck.
One weekend, while visiting his wife's family in Canada, he turned on the TV to pass the time. A BBC program happened to be on, which showed an experiment demonstrating laminar flow. I couldn't find an online video of exactly what he saw, but I did find one that was very close. I've embedded the video below, and I recommend watching it now. It's only 2 minutes long, and it is wild. Here it is (and here's a direct link):
In the experiment Schwartz watched on TV, there was a beaker filled with a liquid (glycerine), with 1 drop of black ink on the surface. As the beaker was stirred the drop spread out into a long thin circle, and then disappeared completely. When stirring was reversed, the long thin circle reappeared, and formed back into the original drop of ink.
Watching that experiment caused Schwartz to have a mystical experience. He understood that "the universe was always a single whole" and "that nothing was ever lost". He says:
In other words, a particle could disappear into the whole and then reemerge a moment or possibly even centuries later.
(That sounds strangely similar to the neutrino article!)
The "universal totality" Schwartz experienced also gave him a sense that time does not exist. And if there's no time, the speed of light is no longer a barrier. And that gave him an idea on how to solve his Superman story. He had Superman stand inside a particle accelerator (called cyclotrons back then). When the professor saw that Superman was unharmed by the smashing of atoms, he was finally convinced that Superman existed beyond the laws of physics.
But there was one other thing Schwartz intuited from his mystical experience:
He went on to describe it as "some sort of secondary 'big bang'." So, as Superman stepped out of the cyclotron, Schwartz had him say to the professor: "I almost let you see the greatest explosion that ever happened at the same time. But I decided not to. For your own safety. It would have blinded you."I had also seen something else in that timeless and universal all into which I had plunged as I watched that [BBC] experiment. I had seen, coming out of that cyclotron, an explosion greater than anyone had ever seen before on earth.
With the story wrapped up, Schwartz sent it to the editor and that was that. He didn't bother reading the comic strip as it was printed in the paper. But, years later, he read an article in the New York Post called "Superman Had It First". He learned that the FBI had censored the end of his Superman story before it was printed, because the Manhattan Project was still "the world's most carefully guarded secret" at the time! The FBI even interviewed Jerry Siegel, one of Superman's creators, but neither he nor the publisher wanted it known that Superman was being ghost written, so they never told the FBI who the real author was. And then they never bothered telling the author that the FBI censored his story!
I tried finding an online copy of that New York Post article, but wasn't able to. I did find this clipping, though, from an unknown newspaper. It claims that instead of printing Schwartz's ending, the publisher had Superman step out of the cyclotron, say he "never felt better", and then go to a baseball game where he played all 9 positions.
