The research papers which finally emerged from this particular investigation are still in the Graveyard file, and I have no hope that they'll be released to non-government physicists within the foreseeable future. If you don't get the story from me, you'll never get it from anyone; and I've enough on my conscience now to be indifferent to a small crime like breaking Security. Besides, as usual, this particular "secret" has been available for the taking for years. A man named Schuster, you may know more about him than I do, wondered out loud about it as far back as 1891, before anybody had thought of trying to keep scientific matters a secret. He wanted to know whether or no every large rotating mass, like the Sun for instance, was a natural magnet (That was before the sun's magnetic field had been discovered, too.) And by the 1940's it was clearly established for small rotating bodies like electrons a thing called the Lande factor with which I'm sure you're familiar. I myself don't understand Word One of it. (Dirac was associated with much of that part of the work.) Finally, a man named W. H. Babcock, of Mount Wilson, pointed out in the 1940's that the Lande factor for the Earth, the Sun, and a star named 78 Virginius was identical, or damned close to it.

Now all this seemed to me to have nothing to do at all with gravity, and I said so to my team chief, who brought the thing to my attention. But I was wrong (I suppose you're already ahead of me by now). Another man, Prof.

P. M. S. Blackett, whose name was even familiar to me, had pointed out the relationship. Suppose, Blackett said (I am copying from my notes now), we let P be magnetic moment, or what I have to think of as the leverage effect of a magnet the product of the strength of the charge times the distance between the poles. Let U be angular momentum rotation to a slob like me; ang1lar speed times moment of inertia to you. Then if C is the velocity of light, and G is the acceleration ,of gravity (and they always are in equations like this, I'm told), then:

(B is supposed to be a constant amounting to about 025. Don't ask me why.) Admittedly this was all speculative; there would be no way to test it, except on another planet with a stronger magnetic field than Earth's preferably about a hundred1times as strong. The closest we could come to that would be Jupiter, where the speed of rotation is about 25,000 miles an hour at the equator and that was obviously out of the question.

Or was it? I confess that I never thought of using