Primer: T. Galen Hieronymus and the "Eloptic" element analyzer (US Patent 2,482,773, 1949)

Study document for the reader (Step 4). It adds no new verdicts: the verdicts are the arbiter's (arbiter.md). Source tags: [read] from the patent itself (the only document in the project folder), [web] from the Investigator's notes or a reviewer's web check, with URL, [memory] recalled, with confidence, [calculation] reproduced in example.py.

Source note: the patent is fully readable, so there is no source gap for it. But the patent publishes no measurements. All of the inventor's later numbers (his 1988 autobiography), John W. Campbell's 1956 build, Lee Hite's engineering test and the Huntsville/Apollo accounts come from the Investigator's web notes (research/2026-10-04-*.md); none of those books or PDFs is in research/files/ yet, the Investigator read the autobiography by keyword search only, and no reviewer re-read them (the deep reads QE asked for await the owner's approval to download). This primer was revised after QE (qe.md) and the arbiter's QE revision; no headline verdict changed, but one sub-verdict (isobars, claim 3) is now conditional. The Fig. 3 chart numbers are read by eye from a small drawing (about 10 percent uncertain).

Interested parties: Hieronymus (patentee; his company Radiation Laboratories, Inc. sold the instruments), his circle (his wife Sarah, Tompkins and Bird, the autobiography's preface writer), Campbell (an editor who promoted "psionic machines", no commercial stake found), Hite (a critic, no commercial stake stated). Their descriptions are given as theirs.

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1. The idea in one paragraph

Thomas Galen Hieronymus (1895-1988), an electrical engineer at Kansas City Power & Light (from 1919) [web: Hite pp.4-6, https://leehite.org/documents/The%20Hieronymus%20Hoax.pdf ; autobiography p.89, https://archive.org/details/the-story-of-eloptic-energy ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_machine ; all via the Investigator], patented in 1949 an instrument he said could tell which chemical elements are in any sample, at room temperature and without touching or heating it. His starting idea is that every element gives off a faint "radiation" (he later called it "eloptic energy", from electrical plus optical) that can be picked up by a coil, carried along wires like a current, tuned with radio capacitors, and bent by a glass prism like light. Heavier elements bend at wider angles, so the angle at which the "ray" leaves the prism names the element, read off a chart of angle against atomic weight. The detector is unusual: the operator strokes a lacquered metal plate with a fingertip, and the plate is said to feel "sticky" when the instrument is set to the right angle. A decade box of resistors is turned up until the stickiness just survives, and its setting is said to measure how much of the element is there. The patent supports the idea with one experiment: seedlings in a dark basement, wired to metal plates out in the sunlight, grew green, while an unwired control did not. The patent also offers a second form in which a lens replaces the prism, and the element is read from where along the lens axis the "focus" falls (Fig. 4; patent claims 10-12) [read: pp.4, 6]. The patentee writes plainly that what happens at the touch plate "is not known" [read: p.4].

2. What you need to know first

Light as photons; photon energy. Light of wavelength λ (lambda) has frequency f = c/λ, where c = 3.00 × 10^8 m/s is the speed of light, and comes in packets (photons) of energy E = hf = hc/λ, where h = 6.626 × 10^-34 J·s is Planck's constant. Visible violet light (400 nm) carries 3.1 electron-volts (eV; 1 eV = 1.602 × 10^-19 J); ultraviolet (UV) at 200 nm carries 6.2 eV. Read: Serway, Moses and Moyer, Modern Physics (or Krane, Modern Physics), the chapter on the particle nature of light.

Thermal (black-body) radiation and the Boltzmann factor. Every object emits radiation because of its temperature T (in kelvin, K). The chance that thermal motion supplies an energy E is proportional to the Boltzmann factor exp(-E/kT), where k = 1.381 × 10^-23 J/K is Boltzmann's constant; kT is the typical thermal energy, about 0.026 eV at room temperature. Planck's law for the spectrum contains this factor; it is why a room-temperature object glows in the infrared (peak near 10 micrometres) and not in the visible. Read: Schroeder, An Introduction to Thermal Physics, the chapter on photons and black-body radiation.

Atomic spectra. Atoms emit light at sharp wavelengths (spectral lines) when an electron drops from an excited level to a lower one. A cold atom sits in its ground state and does not emit; it must be excited first (flame, electric arc, spark, laser). The pattern of lines is set by the electrons, so by the atomic number Z (number of protons), not by the atomic weight A (the mass of the atom in atomic mass units, u). Read: Krane, Modern Physics, chapters on the hydrogen atom and many-electron atoms.

Refraction, Snell's law and dispersion. When light crosses from one medium into another it bends: n1 sin θ1 = n2 sin θ2, where n is the refractive index (speed of light in vacuum divided by speed in the medium) and θ is measured from the normal (the line perpendicular to the surface). If n depends on wavelength (dispersion), a prism separates colours. For glass and quartz n changes only by a few hundredths across the visible and near UV. Read: Hecht, Optics, chapters on propagation of light and geometrical optics (prisms).

Resonant LC circuits. A coil (inductance L, in henries) and a capacitor (capacitance C, in farads) resonate at f = 1/(2π√(LC)). A broadcast-radio tuning capacitor (up to a few hundred picofarads) with a coil of tens of microhenries resonates near 1 MHz. Lumped circuit theory works only when the parts are much smaller than the wavelength; optics (rays, prisms) works only when the parts are much larger. Read: Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics, chapter on electromagnetic waves; any electronics text (e.g. Horowitz and Hill, The Art of Electronics) for LC tuning.

A little statistics: chance in a blind trial. If you guess one of 10 equally likely answers, your chance of being right is p = 0.1. The chance of k right out of N independent tries is the binomial probability C(N,k) p^k (1-p)^(N-k). This is the tool for judging whether a human-operated instrument beats guessing. Read: any introductory probability text, the chapter on the binomial distribution.

3. The textbook view

(a) Cold matter does not glow in violet or UV. The thermal emission at wavelength λ is suppressed by roughly exp(-hc/(λkT)). With h, c, k defined above and T = 300 K:

[calculation, example.py step 1; agrees with all three reviewers and the arbiter]. Across the patent's 40-90 F (278-305 K) the 400 nm factor stays between about 10^-57 and 10^-51 (arbiter). Element-specific emission does exist, but it needs a source of energy: flame and arc spectroscopy (excite with heat or a discharge), X-ray fluorescence (excite with an X-ray beam; the line frequencies grow with (Z-1)^2, Moseley's law [memory: high]), or radioactivity (only some isotopes). There are also real weak room-temperature emissions (chemiluminescence, exoelectron emission, ultra-weak photon emission from living tissue measured with photomultipliers [memory: medium]); none is universal and element-specific.

(b) Spectral lines are not ordered by atomic weight. Strongest lines: lithium 671 nm, sodium 589 nm, potassium 767 nm [memory: high]: not monotonic in A. Atomic mass shows up in optical spectra only as tiny isotope shifts (parts in 10^5 or less of the wavelength). The tool that sorts atoms by mass is the mass spectrometer, which needs the atoms ionised and in a vacuum.

(c) A prism spreads violet-to-UV light over only a few degrees. For fused silica (quartz glass) the index follows the Sellmeier formula n²(λ) = 1 + Σ B_i λ²/(λ² - C_i), with λ in micrometres and three fitted constant pairs (B_i, C_i) (Malitson 1965 [memory: high]). It gives n = 1.4701 at 400 nm, 1.4878 at 300 nm, 1.5505 at 200 nm. Ordinary glass is opaque below about 320 nm [memory: high]. Section 5 shows the consequence.

(d) Wires and prisms belong to different frequency regimes. Violet light is 7.5 × 10^14 Hz. The patent's coil and "standard radio broadcast type" condensers [read: p.3] tune near 10^5-10^7 Hz. To resonate at 7.5 × 10^14 Hz even with 10 pF would need L of about 4.5 × 10^-21 H, far less than any piece of wire (mathematician). A metal reflects or absorbs light within nanometres of its surface; it does not guide it like a current.

(e) A felt "stick" on a coated plate is a real effect. Electrovibration: a voltage between a fingertip and a conducting plate under a thin insulating coat changes the friction the finger feels. It was first reported in 1954 with "110 V at 60 Hz" and "dragging a dry finger over a conductive surface covered with a thin insulating layer", giving a "rubbery feeling" [web] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrovibration . It is used today in touch-screen haptics. The other textbook candidate is the ideomotor effect: small, unconscious muscle actions driven by expectation (the mechanism behind Ouija boards and dowsing rods), which can change finger pressure and skin moisture and so the felt drag [memory: high].

(f) Seedlings need light to make chlorophyll (in most plants). In flowering plants (angiosperms: grains, beans, cress) the step protochlorophyllide → chlorophyllide is done by a light-dependent enzyme (LPOR), so seedlings grown in true darkness are pale yellow ("etiolated") [memory: high; partial web support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiolation]. Gymnosperms (conifers) and green algae also have a dark-operative enzyme (DPOR) and can green in the dark [web] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protochlorophyllide_reductase . Very small light doses start greening [memory: medium].

4. Where the inventor departs

What the inventor got right to start from: elements really do have characteristic radiations; spectroscopy really does identify elements by them; a prism really does sort radiation by an angle; tuned circuits really do select signals; felt friction on a coated plate really does change with an applied voltage. Each piece of his design is borrowed from real physics. The departures are in how the pieces are joined.

How the inventor later restated the principle (his own words, via the Investigator): in 1941 he hypothesised the energy refracts "in the order of the contents of the nucleus" [web, autobiography p.89, https://archive.org/details/the-story-of-eloptic-energy]; elsewhere "in direct proportion to the atomic weight" [p.228]. He attributed to eloptic energy properties that no electromagnetic wave has together: conducted by some conductors and insulated by others, shielded, stored, amplified, refracted, focused, diffracted, reflected, carried on light, destroyed by X-rays and UV, no inverse-square fall-off, and (1972 notes) refracted by an opaque black Plexiglas prism [web, autobiography pp.173, 227-228; Hite appendix pp.33-34, https://leehite.org/documents/The%20Hieronymus%20Hoax.pdf]. In other words, by the end he no longer claimed it was ordinary UV light. That matters for the verdicts: the optics calculation below refutes the claim as the patent states it (violet/UV through glass or quartz), but not an unspecified new entity, which can only be tested by blind operator trials.

5. Worked example: can a quartz prism produce the patent's angle scale?

Question: if the "radiation" is violet-to-UV light, as the patent says [read: p.2], and it goes through a quartz or glass prism, as the patent says [read: p.3], how many degrees can the prism spread it over, and how many degrees does the patent's own chart need? Every number below is reproduced by example.py.

Run: .venv/bin/python review/Hieronymus-TG/example.py

Step 1. Is there any violet/UV light to refract? At T = 300 K, kT = 0.0259 eV. A 400 nm photon is 3.10 eV, so E/kT = 119.9 and exp(-119.9) ≈ 10^-52.1. At 40 F (277.6 K) and 90 F (305.4 K), kT is 0.0239 and 0.0263 eV. Thermal emission in the band is zero for practical purposes. We carry on anyway, granting the patent its radiation, to test the prism step independently.

Step 2. Refractive index. From the Sellmeier formula for fused silica (the best UV-transmitting material the patent allows; glass is opaque below about 320 nm):

So from violet to far UV, n changes by only 0.08.

Step 3. Trace a ray through the prism. Let θ1 be the angle of incidence from the normal of the first face, and α (alpha) the prism's apex angle. Then: - first face (Snell): sin θ1 = n sin θ2, so θ2 = arcsin(sin θ1 / n); - inside the prism, the angle at the second face is θ3 = α - θ2; - second face (Snell): sin θ4 = n sin θ3 (if n sin θ3 > 1 the ray is totally internally reflected and does not leave); - total deviation δ (delta) = θ1 + θ4 - α.

The patent gives an incidence "of the order of 5.5 deg" "to the face" and prism faces "at angles from 30 to 60 degrees" [read: p.3]. Both are ambiguous, so try every reading. "5.5 degrees to the face" means 84.5 degrees from the normal (grazing incidence, the reading that gives the most spread).

Worked by hand for α = 30°, θ1 = 84.5°, λ = 400 nm (n = 1.4701): sin 84.5° = 0.99540; θ2 = arcsin(0.99540/1.4701) = arcsin(0.6771) = 42.62°; θ3 = 30 - 42.62 = -12.62° (the ray meets the second face on the other side of its normal, which is fine); sin θ4 = 1.4701 × sin(-12.62°) = 1.4701 × (-0.2185) = -0.3212, θ4 = -18.73°; δ = 84.5 - 18.73 - 30 = 35.77°.

All cases (degrees):

(At 5.5° from the normal, 45° and 60° prisms totally reflect some or all of the band.) The mathematician and arbiter used 210 nm as the lower end and got 2.6-5.2°; going to 200 nm, where silica's index starts climbing fast, gives up to 6.1°. Either way: the whole violet-to-UV band fits inside about 3 to 6 degrees.

Step 4. What the chart needs. I read Fig. 3's line 45 from the rendered page as starting at 10° at atomic weight 0 and reaching about 42° near A = 113-118; the slope is 0.25 to 0.28 degrees per mass unit [read: page image p.1, my reading; the reviewers read 0.25]. The patent's printed example fixes it: scale 30° gives A = 79.2, so slope = (30 - 10)/79.2 = 0.253. A hidden assumption to state first: the drawing itself stops near A = 120. So take two figures. - Robust figure (drawn part only, no extrapolation). Hydrogen (A = 1.008) to A = 115: 0.25 × (115 - 1.008) = 28.5°, or 31.9° with slope 0.28 [calculation, example.py step 5]. - Extrapolated figure. The patent says the chart continues "to include all known elements when the full size chart is employed" [read: p.3], and the inventor's later bismuth reading (about 61.7°, Step 6) lies on the same line. Using angle = 10 + 0.25 A: hydrogen at 10.3°, bismuth (A = 208.98) at 62.2°, a range of 52 degrees. With slope 0.28 the range is 58 degrees.

Step 5. Compare. Available from the stated materials and band: at most about 6° (about 3° for the more typical 30° prism). Needed, drawn part only: about 29-32°, which is 5 times the most generous spread and about 9-10 times the 30° prism's. Needed, extrapolated to bismuth: about 52-58°, 9 to 10 times the most generous spread and 15-20 times the 30° prism's. The conclusion does not depend on the extrapolation. This is the arbiter's "Refuted by calculation" for the dispersion mechanism (claim 3 (i)).

Step 5b. The lens variant. For a thin lens the focal length is proportional to 1/(n-1) (lensmaker's equation). For silica n - 1 is 0.4701 at 400 nm and 0.5505 at 200 nm, so the focal length at 200 nm is 0.4701/0.5505 = 0.854 of that at 400 nm: the focus moves by only about 15 percent of one focal length across the whole violet-to-UV band [calculation, example.py step 5b; agrees with the arbiter's QE revision]. In ordinary glass, opaque below about 320 nm, the span is smaller still. A scale with a separate focal point for every element from hydrogen up would have to fit inside that 15 percent. The arbiter folds the lens into the same claim 3 dispersion verdict: it is a second route to the same assertion, not independent evidence.

Step 6. A point in the inventor's favour, weighed fairly. In his 1988 autobiography Hieronymus gives readings on a quadrant divided into 1600 parts: a beryllium isotope at about 186 and bismuth at about 1097, "with a certain apparatus arrangement" [web, autobiography pp.237-238, via Investigator; read by keyword search only, and which instrument and scale produced them is not yet established]. One division is 90/1600 = 0.05625°, so Be = 10.46° and Bi = 61.71°, a slope of (61.71 - 10.46)/(208.98 - 9.012) = 0.256° per mass unit. That matches the 1949 chart's 0.25 within a few percent, forty years apart. It shows his readings were self-consistent. It is not independent confirmation: both come from the same person, both define a straight-line scale, and the chart was built per instrument from known samples [read: p.4], so a straight line through two calibration points fits anything. And whatever produced the readings, Step 5 shows ordinary dispersion of violet/UV light could not.

Step 7. The printed example. At 30° the chart gives A ≈ 80 (79.2 in the patent). Calcium is 40.08 [memory: high] and would read 10 + 0.25 × 40.08 = 20.0°. The patent writes "If atomic weight 79.2 is calcium" [read: p.4]: the number fits the chart, the element named does not. 79.2 lies between selenium (78.97) and bromine (79.90) [memory: high]. A slip in the illustration, not proof of anything else.

Step 8. What a fair test would need. If the instrument works by some other route (the operator, an unknown entity), a blind trial decides it. Ten sealed vials, each one of ten elements, scored right or wrong: guessing gives p = 0.1 per vial. P(5 or more right) = Σ_{k=5..10} C(10,k)(0.1)^k(0.9)^(10-k) = 0.0016, about 1 in 600 [calculation, example.py step 7]. (The physicist's "about 1 in 1000" is the right order; the exact figure is 1 in 612.) Five out of ten would therefore be strong evidence; no such trial is on record.

6. Evidence table

Verdicts are the arbiter's final verdicts (arbiter.md).

Other material kept in the record whatever the verdict (mostly [web] via the Investigator, sites.md and research/; each item carries its own tag): - Patent family GB 663,978 and CA 486,008. A grant is not evidence that a device works; patent examiners in this era did not require a working demonstration [memory: medium]. Patent attorney: C. Earl Hovey (signature on p.1 [read: page image p.1, as read by QE]; autobiography p.89 [web, via Investigator]). - Origin: the inventor says he built the first "energy Analyzer" on his birthday, 21 Nov 1941, with Dr. Grace Edwards, D.C., of Omaha present, three years before the 1944 parent application [web, autobiography p.89, via Investigator]. - Earliest claimed field use: he owned some of Albert Abrams's first instruments and, with Stanley Rogers, did mineral-finding experiments; he reports that the energy of buried silver, gold and other minerals leaves the ground at an angle that varies with the moon cycle [web, autobiography p.88]. Tompkins and Bird tell of buried-silver experiments on the Kansas prairie with a ground rod: the energy was diverted downward for a few hours about every 2.5 days, correlated in some ways with moon phase (Investigator's paraphrase) [web, Secret Life of Plants p.333; both via Investigator, https://archive.org/details/PeterTompkinsTheSecretLifeOfPlants]. A testable claim; no data in the passages read. - The inventor's own numerical claims [web, autobiography pp.173, 227-228, 267, via Investigator]: analyzers behaved erratically for hours after atomic-bomb tests; radioactive isotopes "radiate" from a few inches to two feet or more; per-isotope "radiation distances" (vanadium 18.5, 5.5 and 15.5 in.; bismuth 13, 24.5, 22 and 26 in.), the long-range ones taken to be radioactive isotopes. Testable in principle; no tables, operator names or blinding in the passages read. - Production mix (Hite, a critic): about 200 desktop medical units at $1,500, about 10 optical substance-analysis (prism) units, and 12 or more consoles at $2,000 [web, Hite, via Investigator]. If right, the patented prism analyzer was a minor product; most instruments sold were medical rate instruments related to the Pathoclast (his "Electric Biometer" line, autobiography p.89). This bears on how far Hite's Pathoclast test reaches toward the patented analyzer. - Huntsville: the autobiography's preface ("Rho Sigma", identified by Tompkins and Bird as NASA-contractor engineer Rolf Schaffranke) says about 20 engineers heard the Hieronymuses, some "duplicated" the instrument "with success", and a 300-copy report with graphs went to Wernher von Braun. Tompkins and Bird add that the Hieronymuses tracked the astronauts' vitality (Apollo 8, Apollo 11 and later), reported a "lethal" belt around the Moon, and that the analyzer "went dead" while the capsule was in the Moon's shadow though radio worked, and kept working behind the Moon during the radio blackout while the capsule was sunlit [web, Secret Life of Plants pp.338-340, via Investigator]. Documented in two published sources from the same circle (1973 book, 1988 preface); the report has not been found and no log has been seen. In principle the shadow and blackout statements can be checked against mission timelines. - Submarine test off Key West (crew "vitality" tracked at 50 ft): one source, the autobiography p.315; no data. - Hite's statement that Hieronymus admitted wording the patent so it could not be built: Hite gives no source, and Campbell built it from the patent alone. Kept as Hite's assertion. - Biography and records leads [web, via Investigator]: Hite says Hieronymus was a senior member of the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers) and a fellow of the AIEE (American Institute of Electrical Engineers), unverified; Hite thinks the "Dr." was an honorary doctorate and could not confirm an engineering degree; both are Hite's statements [Hite pp.4-6]. An AIEE membership list names "Hieronymus, T. G., pres., Radiation Laboratories, Inc., Kansas City, Mo." (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6413714/6434038/06434067.pdf ; fetch blocked, date of list unknown). The Truth about Radionics (1947, anonymous; the attribution to Hieronymus is a newsletter editor's "highly probable" guess, unverified). The Eloptic Directory (with Sarah Hieronymus, Sept 1976) and an Eloptic Medical Directory (1977 copyright entry). Joseph Goodavage, "An Interview with T. Galen Hieronymus", Analog, Jan 1977 (not yet found). - Critics (Gardner 1957, Sladek 1973, Williams 2000, Sampson and Vaughn 2000) classify the device as pseudoscience; their characterization, not experiments on the analyzer. - The record goes dark: Radiation Laboratories, Inc. (Kansas City) stops about 1950. The inventor says new banking rules on out-of-state promissory notes and AMA-driven FDA pressure on users ended it [web, autobiography p.90]. Competing explanations (arbiter): commercial failure, regulatory pressure, absorption into another firm (Hite names Pathometric Laboratories and "Radionics Incorporated"), practice-based circulation among customers, suppression. The arbiter finds commercial failure and practice-based circulation best supported by the (inventor-side) evidence; regulatory pressure rests on his account alone; no positive evidence for absorption or suppression; Hite says he "remained uncensored"; one FDA query found nothing. The monthly Experimental Special Data Bulletin (Jan 1948 to at least Jul 1949) has not been located and is the most valuable missing primary source.

7. What a learner should take away

Solid. Elements do have characteristic radiations, and spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence and mass spectrometry identify them. Electrovibration is real: a finger really can feel a changed "drag" on an insulated plate carrying a voltage. The patent's detector, a lacquered metal plate stroked by a finger, has the plate-coating-finger geometry it needs [read: pp.3-4]; the patent does not say how the plate is powered. The 60 Hz mains on the plates, which would make it a textbook electrovibration setup, comes from Hite's tracing of a Pathoclast and from the inventor's 1972 notes [web, Hite pp.6-14 and appendix, via Investigator], not from the patent. Hieronymus was candid that he did not know why the plate responded, and his numbers were consistent with each other over forty years.

Wrong, and why it is instructive. - The thermal claim fails by about 52 orders of magnitude. The lesson: always ask where the energy comes from. Spectral lines need excitation; "at room temperature, without special treatment" is the exact condition under which atoms do not emit visible or UV light. - The prism claim fails by a factor of about 5 on the drawn part of the chart alone, and about 10 when the chart is extended to bismuth (more for a typical 30° prism). The lesson: dispersion is a small effect. A prism that separates violet from UV by a few degrees cannot lay out ninety elements over fifty degrees. A two-line Snell's-law calculation would have shown this in 1946. - One entity cannot be both a broadcast-band current and an optical ray. The lesson: every physical object has a size compared with the wavelength, and that comparison decides whether circuit theory or optics applies. - A chart built from known samples and then used on the same samples proves nothing until a blind unknown is identified. The lesson: calibration is not confirmation. - Atomic weight is the wrong variable. Chemistry and optical spectra follow Z (the electrons); mass appears only in tiny isotope shifts. The isobar pair Ti-50/Cr-50 shows it: same mass number, different elements.

Genuinely open. - Does the "stick" appear with the power off and still track the sample when the operator does not know what the sample is? Campbell and the inventor say it works unplugged; Hite's electrical mechanism needs power. Nobody has run the blind, powered-versus-unplugged comparison (arbiter's open question 1). Two observations of Campbell's sharpen it [web, Astounding Aug 1956, via Investigator]: success depended on the operator (best with young girls, worst with technically trained men), which fits an expectation effect; and the build would not work with a burned-out or defective tube, plugged in or not, which an expectation effect does not obviously explain and which sits oddly beside "works unplugged". Is the defective-tube observation reproducible, and does it hold with the supply disconnected (arbiter's open question 10)? - What do the autobiography's data tables (pp.228-267) actually show, and who ran the instruments? Which scale did Analyzer No. 508 use, and does the inventor claim the instrument separates the isobars Ti-50 and Cr-50 by angle, or only that his computed factor does (open question 11)? Until that is read, the resolution half of the isobar verdict stays conditional. - When did Campbell first report the ink-drawn "symbolic" machine, and what result did he claim (open question 12)? - Does a wired-but-unexposed plant box behave like the wired exposed ones (open question 9)? - Did the Huntsville duplication report exist, and what did it contain? - Does a wired plant replication exist? It is cheap: one flowering species, a photometer-checked dark room, many boxes randomly wired, unwired and grounded-only, chlorophyll measured blind. - Why Radiation Laboratories ended and where the Data Bulletin is.

8. Check yourself

1. Using E = hc/λ and kT = 0.0259 eV at 300 K, estimate the Boltzmann factor for 250 nm light. Is the answer bigger or smaller than for 400 nm?
2. A fused-silica prism has n = 1.4701 at 400 nm and 1.5505 at 200 nm. Without computing, explain why no choice of apex angle (that lets the light out) can stretch this to the 29 degrees the drawn part of the Fig. 3 chart needs (52 degrees if extended to bismuth).
3. The patent's chart is built by placing each known element near the coil and marking where the plate sticks. Why does this calibration, on its own, not show the instrument can identify an unknown sample? Design the smallest test that would.
4. Hite found a 60 Hz-pulsed RF signal on the plate of a Pathoclast. Campbell reported his build "works as well unplugged". Which explanation of the "stick" does each observation favour, and what single experiment would decide between them?
5. In the dark-basement plant experiment, list three things besides "radiations conducted by wire" that could make the wired boxes greener than the control.

9. Further reading

Mainstream: - Hecht, Optics (refraction, prisms, dispersion). - Krane, Modern Physics, or Serway, Moses and Moyer, Modern Physics (photons, atomic spectra, Moseley's law). - Schroeder, An Introduction to Thermal Physics (black-body radiation, Boltzmann factor). - Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics (waves in conductors and dielectrics). - I. H. Malitson, "Interspecimen comparison of the refractive index of fused silica", J. Opt. Soc. Am. 55 (1965) [memory: high] (the Sellmeier constants used here). - Electrovibration overview [web] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrovibration ; protochlorophyllide reductase [web] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protochlorophyllide_reductase .

The inventor and his circle: - T. G. Hieronymus, US Patent 2,482,773 (1949), "Detection of emanations from materials and measurement of the volumes thereof" (the project document); family GB 663,978 and CA 486,008 [web] https://patents.google.com/patent/GB663978A/en . - T. Galen Hieronymus, The Story of Eloptic Energy (1988 autobiography) [web] https://archive.org/details/the-story-of-eloptic-energy (pp.88-90, 123-124, 173, 227-242, 266-267, 308, 315 most relevant; so far read only by keyword search, a full read is pending). - J. W. Campbell, "Psionic Machine - Type One", Astounding Science Fiction, June 1956, and the August 1956 follow-up [web] https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v57n04_1956-06_EXciter-LennyS ; https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v57n06_1956-08_Gorgon776 . - P. Tompkins and C. Bird, The Secret Life of Plants (1973), chapter "Radionic Pesticides", pp.332-340 (secondary, retells the inventor's accounts) [web] https://archive.org/details/PeterTompkinsTheSecretLifeOfPlants . - Journal of Borderland Research vol. 44 no. 3 (May-June 1988): obituary, "Growing Plants in the Dark", Simon Martin's cress trial [web] https://archive.org/details/journal-of-borderland-research-vol-xliv-1988 .

Critic: - Lee Hite, "The Hieronymus Hoax" (his title and characterization; engineering study of a Pathoclast, with the 1972 "Random Notes" appendix) [web] https://leehite.org/documents/The%20Hieronymus%20Hoax.pdf .

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Answers to Check yourself

1. E = 1240 eV·nm / 250 nm = 4.96 eV; E/kT = 4.96/0.0259 ≈ 192; exp(-192) ≈ 10^-83. Smaller than at 400 nm (10^-52): shorter wavelength means more energetic photons and an even steeper suppression.
2. The deviation depends on wavelength only through n, and n changes by only 0.08 (about 5 percent) over the whole band. Larger apex angles magnify the spread, but they also push the ray toward total internal reflection, and before that limit the spread is still only a few degrees (6.1° at a 60° apex and grazing incidence). Getting 29°, let alone 52°, would need n to change by several tens of percent, which happens only near an absorption resonance, where the material stops transmitting.
3. The chart only records where the operator, knowing the element, felt the stick; knowledge of the answer can shape the reading (ideomotor effect), and the instrument is never asked to predict anything. Minimal test: a helper codes sealed vials of, say, ten elements plus blanks in random order; the operator, who does not know the code, records a scale reading for each; compare the hit rate with chance (5 of 10 by guessing is about 1 in 600).
4. Hite's signal favours an electrical (electrovibration) cause, which needs power. Unplugged operation favours the ideomotor/perceptual explanation, which does not. Decider: same operators and samples, blinded, with the mains connected and disconnected (and the plate shielded), and an oscilloscope on the plate.
5. Any three of: light leaking into the wired boxes (wires and plates passing through walls can let light in; tiny doses start greening); differences between boxes (seed lot, soil, watering, aluminium lining); the species (a conifer or alga can green in the dark); an electrical effect of the ground connection or of fields picked up by the outdoor plates; observer bias in judging "green" with one control and no measurement.