J-P.
Petit : Biography
...Jean-Pierre
Petit was born in 1937. In 1961 he graduated from National Aeronautical School
of Paris (fluid mechanics speciality).
...
...At school
he accomplished a certain amount of unpublished personal works on a supersonic
disk nozzle, and on very thin hypersonic flat jets, which were full of many
paradoxical features.
...In 1961 he
was invited to join Princeton University and for the journey there he boarded
the steamer named Mauretania, the one which was built just before the Titanic,
in England. Fortunately it was a good journey an no iceberg was encountered.
...In Princeton
he joined the James Forrestal Center, directed by Professor Bodganoff, but
his stay was very short.
...When he arrived
at the laboratory, he found it was deserted as everyone had gone out for lunch.
Petit's curiosity got the better of him and he decided to have a look around.
He neglected the signs saying "restricted area, authorized persons only",
and he discovered a very strange machine which was disk shaped. He decided
to inspect it, so he got on-board.
...When Dr.
Bogdanoff got back from his lunch, Petit decided to talk to him about what
he'd seen. Bodganoff got angry :
' Your crazy" he says "do you know that is a top secret
machine !".
Petit replies :
"No kidding, it will never work. It is just a ground effect
machine, you will never de able to take off with that '".
...The conversation
turned sour and Petit had to quit the university and leave Princeton immediatly.
Without a penny, he earnt his living in New York selling drawings in Greenweich
Village in order to earn the money for his return ticket.
...The steamer
he took for his journey, back to France, was the "Liberté" of the well-known
"French-Line" and this was to be the last trip as she had been sold to a Japanase
Comany who wanted to transform her into a floating hotel.
...No icebergs
were seen during the return voyage, just an autumn storm with an extremely
violent west wind. The waves were 30 meters high and the sea was covered in
foam. Nearly everyone suffered terribly with sea-sickness. The distance between
to tops of the successive waves finished comparable to the length of the ship,
approaching 300 meters. Like the wind, the waves arrived from behind and on
one side. The ship which has been navigated at just about the same speed,
suddently started to oscillate. Petit remembers :
- On all the ups and downs, the ship inclined at 43°.
On board two were dead. An old lady fell in her cabin and knocked herself
on her basin and a stewart who didn't have the presence of mind to let go
of his tray, smashed the top of his head at the far end of the corridor.
Petit was able to observe this phenomenon from a superior
deck of the ship.
...The captain
decided to turn to the west in order to face the very dangerous waves. Petit
was fascinated by the storm. One night he wanted to explore the lower deck,
normally forbidden to passengers, to observe at close quarters the raging
sea. The mountains of block water and whote foam blocked the horizon. Suddently
Petit realises that one of the waves floods the ship bridge, which becomes
swamped with water and he himself risks being swepted out by one of the waves
to be left alone in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of the
night, in the ship's wake. He just manages to save himself.
...When Petit
returned to France, he took up his military service, became a lieutenant in
the Army, and ran a military gliding club in Fribourg, Germany. In his spare
time he made 200 free-fall parachute jumps.
...Somewhat
disappointed by his experiences in Princeton, he became an artist for several
years. He made a profession in painting and engraving copper and lithographic
stones in Paris. Then he joined a company located in the south of France which
had a test-site for powder propelled rockets.
...But he he
got rapidly bored with it and joined a State Research Institute. He worked
on a MHD power plant, a short duration system based on a so-called "shock-tube"
(short-duration shock driven wind tunnel). The latter produced hot and dense
argon flow during 200 microseconds at pressure : one bar, temperature : ten
thousandd degrees, velocity : 2500 m/s.
...Combining
this flow to a transverse two tesla magnetic field, one gets a strong induced
electric field VB, and an electric current, flowing through wall electrodes
and external loads. At such high temperatures the electric conductivity of
argon is high enough to have huge amounts of electric power density : two
megawatts for a MHD channel as large as a beer can.
...We are now
in 1965. People were interested in high efficiencies of MHD power plants (theoretically
: up to 60 %). The labs were rich in all countries and they spent money.
...MHD men dream
to be able to couple their generators to high temperature reactors (htr).
Inert gases like argon or helium would cool the heart of the reactor and pick
out thermal energy from it. Adding 2% of cesium would increase the electrical
conductivity.
...Htr people
refuse to think about reactors working at temperatures higher than 1500°.
MHD needs 2000 ou 2500.....
...Then people
think about a two temperature system (in the US : Kerrebock, and in Russia
Shendlin and his coworkers). The idea is simple. A fluorescent tube is a two
temperature device. The gas, neon, is cool. Proof's that you can touch it
with your hand. But the electric field gives large energies to free electrons.
These electrons strike the fluorescent layer, inside the glass wall, which
therefore reacts, emiting white light.
...Americans
and Russians think that in certain adequate conditions, a two temperature
MHD generator can work, say at a gas temperature of 1500° and electron
temperature of 2500-3000° Kelvin. You get good electrical conductivity
(which depends on electron temperature), good efficiency, in fact, good everything.
...But in 1964
a young Russian went to an International MHD meeting in Newcastle, U.K. The
young E.Velikhov, who belonged to the Russian team. As a theoretician, he
prohesizes :
- Your two temperature plasmas will be fairly unstable.
You will have plane electron density waves, transforming your working gas
into a ... capaciror, a succession of high and low electrical conductivity
layers. The electric current will not flow, therefore no electric power, nothing.
"I have calculated all that" he said.
...Nobody believed
him, but it turns out to be the true. In Warsaw in 1967, Ricateau, the French
builder of the plant "Typhée" in Fontenay-aux-Roses, concludes :"we
face the wall the the Velikhovs electrothermal instability".
...In 1965 Petit
joined the Institute of Fluid Mechanics at Marseille, which was directed by
Professor J.Valensi, (now deceased). Copying the American Bert Zauderer, the
French used shock tubes to produce at source hot gas flow, quickly driven
towards small MHD channels. They proved to be relatively low cost experiments.
The two teslas magnetic field was delivered by a capacitor bank. The MHD channel
was built in plexiglass and the electrodes were made of red copper.
...In France
the French Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA, the Frenche department
dor atomic energy) held almost the MHD activity in "closed cycles". But their
huge generator "Typhée", in its large room, turned out to be unstable
as all his brothers over the world. The electric power output was close to
nothing.
Then the guys at the CEA say :
"Why don't we try to simulate that with these small shock
tubes, in the lab of Marseille ?".
...The idea
came from a young student of Kerrebrock : Solbès. In Marseille the
contract was rapidly signed up, although there nobody knows what a two temperature
generator is. Recently engaged, Petit learns plasma physics. In 1967 Sutton
and Sherman had just published their excellent book (Mac Graw Hill) entitled
"Engineering magnetohydrodynamics". Petit understood the problem, buildt,
and published his own theory of Velikhov's instability and had an original
idea. He discovered, through his theoretical studies, that when the plasma
becomes "fully ionized", if fast enough, the instability does not occur. The
ionization stabilizes the plasma. This phenomenon was rediscovered fifteen
years later by a Japanese, who called it "to climb the mount Fuji" (due to
the peculiar shape of the instability growth rate curve, looking like the
famous Japanese vulcano).
...In 1966,
the experiment calculated by Petit was fully successfull. For the first time
in the world a MHD generator works with two temperatures and large power output,
in stable conditions. Gas temperature : 6000°, electron température
: 10,000°. Output power : two megawatts (during 200 microseconds...).
Petit's collegues were skeptical. But Petit said :
- Let's put 2% of carbon dioxyde in the gas. It will absorb
the energy of the electron gas, transforming it into vibration energy and
radiative output. The process will be very fast, due to large cross section
of the CO2, and I have been able to compute that.
...Once again,
Petit's predictions were sound. He confirmed that he is a good prophet and
he was able to present his work at the International MHD Meeting of Warsaw
in 1967. Later the temperature of the gas was successfully lowered to 4000°
Kelvin. The stability of the plasma was confirmed by photos taken of it on
the first available american electronic camera.
...The director
of the lab was enthusiastic. Everybody thought that this was the solution
and all dream to lower the gas temperature to 1500°. Of course, the shock
tube is just a simulator. But people think the idea is great and should solve
the problems of the "big brothers", the full size MHD converters.
...The lab's
boss decides to run the experiment on his own, as usual. He put his own team
on the plant built by Petit by his own hands, and rejects him in a small room,
under the roof. There, Petit calculates again and laughs : the boat is a pierced
boat. The theory shows that this method will not allow them to make the gas
temperature lower than 4000°. All that excitement for nuts....
...During the
next few monthes Petit works like hell to build his "lifeboat" : a Phd thesis
based on kinetic theory of ionized gases. He knows he will have to give up
seven years of hard work, here, and leave the lab.
...Downstairs,
things don't work so well. The boss' collaborators have made many errors and
almost destroyed the MHD convertor. Valensi orders Petit to come back and
rebuild the almost destroyed machine. But too late. Petit's Phd thesis has
come to an end and he leaves the lab, whick sinks. Tired by all that noise,
Petit decides to transform electrons into stars, in the equations, and to
join the Observatory of Marseille. (Practically, for the specialist : transforming
the Boltzmann equation into the Vlasov equation, whose second member is zero).
He works there since for than 25 years.
...We writes
30 books. Some were translated into English (The Adventures of Archibald Higgins).
These books were printed in the US, England, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Russia,
Poland and... Iran.
...In the little
stories of the Iranian Ayatollah, you find the heroine Sophie scantilly dressed,
and they exercise their right to make her dress decently as customary, with
a tchador. An Iranian artist takes charge of this operation for her. Iran
is not the only who exercises these changes of clothing of the heroine. The
second country was America. When these books came out in the U.S.A., they
were taken by the department of mathematics at the University of Berkeley.
Petit came to this University to give a conference and he brought with him
the books already printed in England. He offered the books to the library
which put at the disposition of the students two types of books, all in English
language. Some carried the words "cleaned version" and the others" carried
the words "original version".
...It was twenty
years ago. These issues are, without a doubt, difficult to find now. The series
includes :
-
Here's looking at Euclid
-
Computer magic.
-
Everything is relative.
-
Black hole.
-
Big Bang
-
The silent barrier
-
Run, robot, run.
18 titles were printed in France.
...In 1977 Petit
discovers the first micro-computers Apple-II. He writes the first computer's
assisted 3d designer program (Conception Assistée par Ordinateur ou
CAO), which works efficiently on small systems (48K, the 64K). He sells 1,500
copies of this software.
...During the
next 8 years he runs a computing Center. At the same time he learns modern
geometry with Bernard Morin, a famous blind mathematician, and draws the eversion
of the 2-sphere. He also invents a new eversion of the torus, and publish
this work at the French Academy of Science. He shows that the meridian lines
of the mysterious Boy's surface can be ellipses. This will later enable Apery
to build the first implicit equation of the surface, sixth degree.
...In 1975 Petit
belongs to the Observatory of Marseille. But the old MHD ideas still run around
inside his head. In 1965, during the MHD experiments, the slowing down of
the plasma, in the MHD channel, was so strong that a front shock wave occured
and moved at the input of the channel. This was due to Lorentz force JB. Producing
electric energy slows down the gas : its' kinetic energy is transformed into
electricity.
...The higher
electricity production the higher the gas slowing down effect. As predicted
by Petit, a shock wave should appear, and it did.
...Later, at
the end of the sixties, clever and low cost acceleration experiments were
carried out in the Fluids Mechanics Institute of Marseille, by two researchers
: B.Fontaine and B.Forestier. They showed that using the MHD converter as
an accelerator, the velocity of the argon plasma ( 2,750 m/s when entering
the channel) could grow up to 8,000 m/s, in a ten centimeters long MHD accelerator.
...But at the
beginning of the seventies, the MHD research stopped in all countries.
...In his observatory
Petit was still thinking about the marvellous MHD world. One day, he said
:
- If having an effect, with the Lorentz force is intense
enough that I can produce a shock wave, why can't I cancel a shock wave, located
in the front part of a body moving in a gas at supersonic velocity, just by
sucking this gas by suitably designed Lorentz force field. In a word, is shockless
flight possible, at supersonic velocities ?
...The idea
seemed completely foolish to conventional fluid mechanics specialists. They
said :
- You must have a shock wave system.
...Petit was
not convinced. When he attended his aeronautical school in Paris, he used
a water free surface flow analogic simulator. Today they have completely disappeared
from universities and labs. But, in the sixties, one used it to simulate the
shock wave system around, for an example, a flat wing :
...If some readers
are interested, some information can be eventually given in that web site,
about MHD topics and shock wave cancellation.
...In short,
in 1976, Petit calculates the parameters of an MHD experiment, used a one
tesla magnetic field, water, plus chlorid acid, free surface flow, electrodes
and cancels the water wave located in front of a one centimeter model.
...Later he
directed a Phd thesis on the field, the one of Bertrand Lebrun.
...For the fluid
mechanics specialist, shock waves occur because "Mach lines focuss" :
...Where Mach
lines accumulate, shock waves tend to grow. But Lorentz force changes the
local Mach angle and the local Mach lines system. With his student, Bertrand
Lebrun, Petit shows in 1982 that through a convenient Lorentz force field,
the self crossing of the Mach lines could be avoided, so that the shocks do
not form.
...Furthermore,
all that could be experimentally tested, with a transverse magnetic field
and a wall electrodes set. Petit and Lebrun present the work at the 7 th International
Meeting of Tsukuba, Japan, 1987 (but, due to lack of money, they couldn't
get there).
...Lebrun computed
the field with a set of Mac Intosh computers, old ones belonging to colleagues
of Petit. Each night, each machine worked on a piece of the field, and each
morning Lebrun picked up the results as he passed by with his motorcycle and
synthetized it on his own Mac Intosh. An original multiprocessor system.
...Anyway the
calculations were quite convincing. Petit had planned to test it with a shock
driven channel, as usual. These old systems were almost obsolete, but a lab,
located in Rouen, France, still owned an old one. Petit conviced to french
CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) to support his reseach
and an MHD program was planned, with some financial support. The idea was
simple. The old shock tube provided a short duration (200 microseconds) hot
(10,000°K) and dense (pressure : 1 bar) argon flow. In a first step, a
strioscopic system, based on the light of a small laser, showed the shock
wave system, around a flat wing, with sharp edge.
...Then, during
another test, MHD would be operated, with an adequate magnetic field (a 2
teslas filed, provided by a capacitors' bank) and suitable electric discharge
in the plasma, through wall electrodes (also due to capacitors' discharge).
Then one may have expected that the Lorentz force would cancel the wave, especially
the front waves.
Petit :
- I'm sure this would have worked successfully on the
first test. All was carefully computed....
...But the French
Army stopped all that. The military were very much interested by the concept,
for their own use, but their underlying idea was... a supersonic cruise missile
and perhaps something else, who knows.
...At the end
of the eighties Petit discovered that the reason of State was a solid reality.
...Nobody can
fight against the Army. He finally gave up and shifted towards theoretical
cosmology, in 1987.
...In 1987 Petit
came to the department of Fluid Mechanics of Berkeley, whose director, today
retired, was his old good friend Tonio Oppenheim, who invited him to give
a lecture about MHD and shock wave cancellation.
...In the same
room, another collegue named Kunkle was sat. He was the director of particules
accelerator in Berkeley University. During Petit's lecture, he laughs all
the time. Finally, Oppenheim, puzzled by this colleagues unusual behaviour,
asks him :
-
Dear professor Kunkle, we have been for friends since
many years. You trouble the conference of my friend Petit, why ? -
Sorry, it's just too much for me. Petit is explaining,
to all these young students, in clear words, a lot of research which are currently
held in the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. But there, they are considered
as highly classified. In fact so classified that I am not authorized to tell
you one word about it. But they are... very similar. That's all that I can
say.
In 1987, for Petit, it was the end of the MHD story. He
published three papers of theoretocal cosmology in Modern Physics Letters
A, in 88-89.
...Since 1977
Petit had been very interested in Sakharov's ideas (twin universe model).
He published two papers in the french Comptes rendus de l'Académie
des Science, this year. Ten years after the MHD parenthesis was indefinitely
closed, he was back on the subject.
...He published
a new paper in Nuovo Cimento in 1994, entitled "The missing mass problem"
(reproduced in Geometrical Physics A, 1). Another one in Astrophysics
and Space Science, 1995 (reproduced in Geometrical Physics A,2). Then
the troubles started. Many papers, sent to several journals, were returned
without submission to a referee, with short sentences, like :
- Sorry, we don't publish speculative works.
...In February
1997, at last, an answer, from Astronomy and Astrophysics. The referee answered
"I think the paper is provocating and interesting" and asked a dozens of
different questions.
...The game
began and continued for ten months. The questions were relevant, but enlarged
the papers a lot. The initial paper had 22 pages. As when new questions arrived,
the paper grew more and more, finally up to 90 pages.
...The referee
asked for a complete cosmological model, and asked .. sixty questions. Petit
wrote seven successive versions. The epistolary exchanges with this anonymous
expert were always cordial. Petit thanks the referee for his relevant questions
and the referee thanks him for his patience.
As the paper is now too large, Petit suggested to cut
it into two parts. Then suddenly, in December 1997, the Director of the Journal,
James Lequeux, wrote to Petit :
- That's enough now. This will never end. I'm stopping
it. That's my decision and it's final.
...No warning,
no incitement to end the job, nothing. Just this abrupt and unexpected decision.
...Petit asked
for a chance to get some pages published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and
suggested submitting a shortened version to the referee, composed by that
which the man had approved along the long correspondence. Lequeux refused.
...Petit asked
Dr. Lequeux to transmit a last letter to his referee, in which he asked :
- Do you confirm the rejection decision of the Directeor
of Astronomy and Astrophysics ? If yes, could you send me your final scientific
arguments.
...No answer
has been received since January 1998, the twelfth. In a last letter(26/03/98),
Dr Lequeux wrote to Petit (see the Log Book) :
- I recall that the Director of the Journal is the only
one who decides if a paper is or is not suitable for publication and that
the referee's report is only consultative.
End of story.
The web site created by Petit has several aims :
-
To submit past and new works to scientists, in order
to receive their eventual opinion and remarks, if they have some to formulate.
They will be reproduced. If they are relevant the papers will eventually be
modified. If they are not the author will try to explain why. -
To diffuse some knowledge about groups theory, geometry
and other different topics. -
To inform people.
Since 2005, september the third, number of connexions
: