In reading some Campbell-written 1950’s Sci Fi, reference is made to a “hieronymous” machine. What did this thing actually d? has anyone ever built one?
Here’s the Wikipedia entry for this:
(You know, you could have looked this up yourself.)
As you can see, it was a fairly absurd idea that for certain sorts of machines, you didn’t have to build the machine itself. You could just draw a diagram of the machine on paper and that would do the job of the machine as well as making it out of the components (vacuum tubes or whatever) that it was built of. John Campbell wrote editorials in defense of a lot of nonsensical ideas in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Doubtlessly many people tried to make this idea work, but they quickly saw that it was basically ridiculous.
Built one? You can buy one. A company named Lifetechnology makes 'em. From what I recall it was a psionic machine that worked symbologically. You could draw representations of resistors, tubes, and circuits and the thing would work as if it were real.
Does it require a symbologist to operate one? Paging Robert Langdon…
The machine is of course named for artist Hieronymus Bosch, who Felipe de Guevara (no relation) described as “the inventor of monsters and chimeras”, a chimera being an impossible and wacky fantasy.
:: rushes up behind dangermom and claps hand over her mouth::
Are you nuts! Are you TRYING to summon Dan Brown??? Because that’s what happens if you that Robert L— I mean, that name three times in a row!
That will teach me to make logical but totally erroneous assumptions.
Thanks for the correction.
Will Hieronymous Bosch ever forget Machine Toole and find true symbology?
That’s the beauty of it - it doesn’t do anything.
Well, sure, but that doesn’t mean it brings no benefit. Take that gadget the Council of Elron uses. It doesn’t do anything, but it rakes in the money. A diagram of the device would work just as well.:dubious:
Martin Gardner wrote about them in the added material to later editions of his book In the Name of Science (later re-titled Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science). Of course, Gardner didn’t believe imn any of this.
Campbell, for all his knowledge and story-telling savvy, fell for lots of pseudoscientific claptrap, including (besides the Hieronymous Machine), the Dean Drive, the CAT principle, and, most famously, Dianetics (and later Scientology).
If only. THAT page makes more sense than a lot of Campbell’s pet ideas. “CAT” stands for “Critical Action Time”, and if you look around , you can find it in discussions of the Dean Drive.
http://www.inertialpropulsion.com/index.htm
Campbell, I recall, used it in an odd way that differs from the possibly reasonable way the above page does, and seemed to think that Newton’s laws weren’t quite right (I mean, even not invoking relativity or quantum scales), and you could build a reactionless drive.Here. Look at this article from a 1962 issue of Campbell’s magazine, Analog:
This is a fascinating topic and I want to thank the OP for bringing it up. Ralph, I’ve got to say, I’ve given you some crap about your spelling in the past and whatnot, but honestly, you ask some of the most interesting questions in GQ.
Sounds like it might have been the inspiration for an old Justice League of America villain, Doctor Destiny. At first he created a device that could alter reality. Later while in prison, he discovered that he could dream about building such a device, and his dream construct would work just as well as a real one.
The story “The Silver Crown” by Robert C. O’Brien has a different version. In his story, the “Hieronymous Machine” is a semi-magical mind control device, which is directed by one of two crowns: a black one that corrupts the user, and a white one which overrides the black one but can only be used by a sufficiently pure and selfless person.
Fascinating…does anybody know if L RON Hubbard ($cientology founder and high priest) incorporated any of the “Hieronymous” technology into his wacky e-meters?
How anyone (even in the 1950’s) could take this junk seriously s beyond me!
Anyway, this machine wa supposed to detect the “eloptic” (electro-optic?) radiation from minerals-exactly what were you supposed to do with it?
I can see selling bogus "machines’ that make you healthy, flatten your cellulite, etc…but what were you to do with a Hiernoymous machine?
I doubt it. Scientology -maters seem to function as skin resistance meters, and are sort of low-order lie detectors, which I’m sure is a big help in serious auditing… Scientologists will haughtily argue the matter with you – “Can someone make their resistance go DOWN? Do they re-absorb sweat?” well, no, but they can grip the cans tighter or looser, or do other things to affect the reading.
The Hieronymous machine, from what I understand (I’ve never looked up the circuit diagram) seems to be pretty much of a kludge.
Measuring the electrical conductivity of your skin is what the Scientologists tell you they’re doing, but I’m not so sure.
I “got myself tested” on one of their machines and they’re ridiculously easy to beat. Squeeze the right hand tube and the needle ticks to the right. Squeeze the left hand tube and the needle ticks to the left. I gave bogus answers for a while and my tester person turned up the gain all the way. Could still decide which way to twitch the needle by just squeezing. (At that point it helped to relax the off hand instead of squeezing the on hand.)
The tester pretty much figured out that I was scamming his test box, so he went a flipped a switch and asked me one more question. Sure enough, he’d reversed the roles of the hands, so I just smiled and squeezed left instead of right and gave him the same damn answer I had before.
He may not have used it in his religion, but Hubbard certainly uses the idea in Battlefield Earth:The big secret of the Psychlo teleporter tech being that the real circuits are simply drawn with some sort of “polariser” tool on the circuit board - as in, just the circuit diagram! - and the apparent circuit is a dummy.