On 9th February 2020, this blog will be eleven years old. 621 blogs and goodness knows how many comments have been posted, and there have been nearly 1,500,000 visitors. My original intention was to try to draw more attention to Johann Bessler’s wheel; I’m not sure how successful that has been but I’ve enjoyed writing my blogs and reading the comments.
I was thinking about the difficulties we face in convincing people that Bessler was not a fake. For much of my life I have researched Bessler and his wheel, and I have remained convinced that his claims to have built a genuine continuously moving wheel, enabled by gravity, cannot be refuted. I didn’t need to think about it for long before I realised that the maidservant lied. So it often surprises me that no one, out there in the ‘real’ world, would spare me one minute of their time to look at the evidence or consider my point of view.
Throughout the last eleven years I have avoided discussing politics and religion because each has its own adherents and devotees, who remain committed to their beliefs and I have no desire to tread on anyone’s toes. But it has always seemed strange to me, as an atheist, that there are sensible, down-to-earth realists who dismiss any chance that Bessler’s wheel might have been possible, and yet believe that a man performed impossible miracles, was born of a virgin, came back to life from the dead etc etc. I’m not belittling anyone’s beliefs and I respect their right to believe in a particular religion or branch of politics, but why is it so hard for those same people to at least consider that it is possible for a weight driven wheel to spin continuously as long as it is within the gravitational field? There is more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.
Of course I know the answer, and only today I heard a discussion in which a celebrity expert on astrophysics told how a famous American solar physicist, Eugene Parker, who in the mid 1950’s, developed his theory of super sonic solar wind and predicted the Parker spiral shape of the solar magnetic field in the outer solar system. His theory was not accepted by the astronomical community and when he submitted the results to The Astrophysical Journal, the two reviewers rejected it. The editor of the Journal overruled the reviewers and published the paper. His work was resoundingly verified years later.
In 2017, NASA renamed its Solar Probe Plus to the Parker Solar Probe in his honor, marking the first time NASA had named a spacecraft after a living person.[3] In 2018, the American Physical Society awarded him the Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research. It is not uncommon for scientists to present new ideas which are at first dismissed by their peers, as in Parker’s case and then subsequently accepted. So many times the experts have later been proven wrong and their own ‘expertise’, dismissed, rubbished and scorned!
I put the words ‘belated recognition’ into google and it found that there were dozens and dozens of examples of belated recognition in a variety of fields and subjects. There are too many to mention, but none as delayed as Bessler’s.
One day someone will reconstruct Bessler’s wheel and, whoever it may be, and then their efforts will win belated acknowledgement for Bessler’s amazing discovery.
JC
