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The Stonehenge connection (Recent Mail)

Hi, Jerry, Thought I'd just sit here and let you know a bit more about me this Sunday - feet up - nearly Christmas - splash of wine - logs on the fire etc., etc., this is going to be quite a long piece of mail.

Whilst I find claims for anything around "mystical energy" extremely irritating when unsubstantiated (yet again of course) I am forced by personal experience to admit to an open-minded attitude to certain strange and unexplained phenomena.

I've been a UFO nut since I was born (January 1947 and Roswell combined - some birthdate !!!) and, like any reasonable and rational being, a non-believer in anything supernatural until actually witnessing evidence for myself. More on this to follow...

I was educated in a Christian environment but never took any of it on board ; that being said, one had to go along with it for the sake of peace. At secondary level of education, I gained what used to be called "O levels" in six subjects - with a distinction (honours) in mathematics. At advanced level, I intended to study Pure Maths, Applied Maths and Physics but I'm afraid the Art Room beckoned so strongly and the Maths got so ethereal and apparently meaningless that I gravitated to that said Art Room by default and ended my education with a Distinction "A level" in that (Art) - and flunked all of the Maths and Physics exams...

Also, Rock'n'roll had taken a secure grip on my nuts by 1963 and I was gigging three nights a week on guitar and vocals in a variety of Beatles/Stones - type bands - the call of the teenage knicker elastic was irresistable...

Art and metalwork aside for a moment, nothing I learned at school, beyond basic arithmetic and Use of English, was ever of any use to me in my career. I had steadfastly refused to learn any history or geography as I fervently believed them to be redundant and for the most part imaginary - and I wasn't that far off the mark, as it turned out! They don't tell you about the slave-and-drug based economy that formed the foundation of your homeland, do they?

By the age of 13 I had stolen my first school desk lid to cut a guitar body from and started to dabble with electronics (pick-ups and wiring). I had had a soldering iron in my grasp by the age of six - my dad was an RAF radio mechanic in WW2 and ran a TV - radio repair business through the 1950's. The first guitar I actually sold was to Peter Frampton in 1965 - he was a junior in my school when I was on the point of leaving.

Before the days of computer type-setting, lettering was essentially a hand-done thing. I was taught how to (first) make and then (second) how to use a stencil knife and became a master stencil cutter. Drawing sophisticated curves for a living helped a lot later when it came to guitar making, I guess. Throwing curves is what this universe seems to do best...

I suppose you could have called me a "late hippy" - it wasn't until 1970 that I did that "turn on, drop out" thing and forever lost contact with the planet I thought I knew. I had the rare and strange (and nowadays impossible) honour of getting to stay the entire night alone at the centre of Stonehenge in 1972. That was fun. I left a large flat stone of my own atop an earthwork nearby and retrieved it four years later. It had been made into an altar by the very many visitors it had obviously had since I left it there four years earlier; so I took it back home and for all I know, it's probably still cemented into the front door step of my old place.

Doing the odd guitar repair for a local music shop led me to my first pro workshop in 1974 and my business exploded with a (word of mouth only) reputation and international rock stars came in their droves to my bench. I could apparently work magic, sometimes making a guitar work better just by briefly handling it - without the use of any tools. "How'd he do that?" they'd say...

String mechanics is a very special subject and in my experience, most time-served luthiers never actually get to understand what is really going on in a vibrating string. They'll bang on for ever about specialist woods and fancy inlays and how old instruments sound better than new but never give a thought to the core of the matter, so to speak; I mean the string and its "soul" requirements. Working with other people's treasured musical instruments carries a special kind of responsibility and I like my world to be nailed down to sheer, cold hard facts but there's a problem around that...

My skepticism about things paranormal was shattered in 1978 after moving out to the countryside of Kent - into a 17th century oak-beamed cottage. We started ripping out all of the modern panels and plastic crap and within a couple of weeks, I'd seen enough "ghosts" to last most people a lifetime.

How these things occur is beyond my understanding - I have no answer but what I can say is that in a complex Universe composed entirely of electricity, short-circuits are likely to be somewhat common - and then there's blesséd Quantum to contend with. We don't really know diddly do we? I don't, that's for sure.

When I first opened my web site I included a biographical page including the story of an "encounter" I had in this flat two and a half years ago. It topped anything else I'd ever seen for total strangeness - Nick (vortex) may have a full version saved somewhere - mine's lost in a hard drive crash some time ago. To précis, I was the unwilling recipient of what I later discovered to be a fairly common phenomenon - a "walk-in". In case you've never heard of a "walk-in", it involves the appearance of something like a "ghost" (but not a ghost) ~ in a different category entirely. It comes from the same territory as "remote viewing" I believe. Definitely some time-shift is involved.

Thank you for your letter of 22nd August and the papers and drawings relating to sonoluminescence. The beautifully produced drawings led me to think that I might be able to understand the apparatus, but I am sorry to say that having read carefully all the text I am still in the dark. It is not even clear to me what the device is supposed to do, still less, how it is achieved.

I have asked a colleague who plays the guitar for his thoughts and he is as mystified as I am.

Mr. Acworth's jump from the particle physics world 'Superstring Theory' to music strings is a quantum leap in the wrong direction, and I'm afraid a perfect example of the old proverb 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'. Superstrings were nothing to do with musical string or any other strings for that matter, the word was used as a convenient description of the matter that forms the basic building blocks of the universe... Using a coiled magnetic field to contain plasma is not a new idea; it is the basis of the dream of cheap electricity from ZETA to the present day 'Tokomaks'. An open-ended coil will not contain plasma; the system must be a toroid. Apart from anything else a wound string built on the basis of a music string would not have the required strength. I cannot see any future in pursuing this idea.

Apart from anything else a wound string built on the basis of a music string would not have the required strength