Earliest known Yuri Gagarin signature 17 April 1961



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Yuri Gagarin, first man in space 12 April 1961

 

In Sept. 1961 I received a card with Yuri Gagarin's picture and signature, dedicated to a 17 year old radio amateur, OZ3CF - - me!

It is dated 17.4.61
It then went on spending the next 50 years in my files with other cards from my rather inglorious teenage years as a so called "Ham".

Recently I dug it out and began to research its story.

It is namely one of the earliest known signatures by the famous first man in space. How on earth did he manage to sign this only 5 days after his flight?

Interestingly it is connected to another famous Russian: Ernst Krenkel, polar traveller and radio man aboard the illustrious M/S Chelyuskin, that foundered in the Arctic in 1934.

Here is the story:

March 1961: Ernst Krenkel, President of the Federation of Radiosports in the USSR and I. Lemyanov, General Secretary, prepare for the Amateur Radio Contest USSR DX/MIR 1961.

They are also involved in the planning of a public ceremony to be held after Gagarin's now imminent spaceflight , where they will present him with a diploma celebrating the first human-to-human VHF-Contact (Very High Frequency) between Space and Earth - assuming he returns safely to Earth!

Ernst Krenkel, who is an avid radio amateur and who has retained the call sign RAEM used at M/S Chelyuskin, see: http://cookefamilytree.lefora.com/2011/02/03/ernst-krenkel/   prints a Gagarin photo-card with the info of the USSR DX/MIR-contest that will take place later on 30 April with the obvious intention of sending it to the top winning positions in the contest, some signed, some probably not, due to numbers.

12 April 1961: Gagarin spends 98 minutes in space.

 

17.4.61 Ernst Krenkel passes Space award to Yuri Gagarin

 

17 April 1961: Krenkel "stuffs" a handful of the Gagarin photo-cards in his pocket and goes to the ceremonial celebration and hand-over of the Communication diploma (See photo) - probably in Moscow.

The authorities could not wait slinging Gagarin onto a silver tray and serve him ready cooked to the world at large! This was way over medical check-ups in priority.

Krenkel passes a handful of the cards to Gagarin, explains, and asks him to sign (which Gagarin always happily did) - this time on the date of the ceremony: 17.4.61
Luckily for Krenkel, it was Gagarin who ascended into space and not Titov, the other potential cosmonaut! - - Or perhaps Krenkel also had a bunch of Titov-cards printed in advance?
As Robin McKie writes in an article in the Guardian in March 2011:
"Behind the scenes, powerful forces had been backing Gagarin [above Titov]. Khrushchev knew spaceflight was a potent propaganda weapon. Khrushchev and Gagarin were both peasant farmers' sons while Titov was middle-class, If Gagarin could reach the greatest heights, then Khrushchev's rise to power from similarly humble origins was validated."
A powerful propaganda blow had been dealt to the Americans.
Front man: Yuri Gagarin, who had almost perished during the descent from space in a capsule that wouldn't cut itself loose.
Brains and chief rocket designer: Sergei Korolev, who remained unknown till his death on the operating table in 1966, as his body proved inoperable due to the damage sustained in the Kolyma Gulag!

 

OZ3CF 1961

After 30 April 1961: USSR DX Contest; OZ3CF sends in his log to the ubiquitous P.O.Box 88, Moscow - the only Russian address that would accept incoming letters - except for Krenkel, who had specific approval to use his private address in Chapligin Str 1-A!

Considering the standard for contest stations in 2011, my 1961 station (left) could hardly inspire envy - - - the only boon was an incredibly sensitive and well performing 11 tube receiver and 40m of free hanging antenna wire to the chimney of the old Hotel Marienlyst in Helsingoer. I have forgotten the details of the transmitter, but believ it to be a Geloso VFO followed by a bird's nest of wires, a home-spun amplifier with an 6146 tube (60 Watts) and an antenna tuner.





USSR DX/MIR Diploma 1961



5 Sept. 1961: Contest adjudication is completed and the diplomas for the winners are prepared and signed by Krenkel and Lemyanov (picture right). My diploma has nr. 68. It is uncertain how many are issued, but I got a 2nd place for Denmark. 



Krenkel now 'grabs' the Gagarin cards and includes them with the diplomas. As they are issued uniquely on the occasion of the USSR DX/MIR-contest, proven by the text on the reverse (MIRU-MIR = Peace to the World!), all Krenkels cards are sent to participants and no one else, some signed, some not, depending on how many Gagarin had time to sign. There could easily have been 1000 contest participants, but it is unlikely there were more than a few signed cards.

And who knows how many of those have been lost with time, dumped with 'useless' old QSL-cards as the old guard of Radio Amateurs have morsed their last 73 (=kind regards)?

Krenkel then writes the dedication "to OZ3CF" on top of the card. Although written in  the same colour as from Gagarin's pen, it cannot possibly be Gagarin writing this text - but Gagarin may have used Krenkel's pen to sign whatever number of cards Krenkel brought with him. It also looks as though Krenkel's signature on the diploma is produced using the same black ink/pen as on the Gagarin card. 

The enigma of one of the earliest Gagarin signatures after his space flight has thus been solved - with the help of Robert McLeod, an American collector of space memorabilia, and Mike Hewitt, G4AYO, an English radio amateur, who has researched Ernst Krenkel's history in minute details.

There are many fake celebrity signatures in circulation and Gagarin's is no exception. Even 'stamped' signatures produced after Gagarin's death exist,  but my story and the date create a unique provenance, that guarantees this one to be genuine.



SP5AHL, Henryk Kotowski,  Poland 1962



Nov. 2011.

On the wall of SP5AHL, my friend Henryk Kotowski, now SM0JHF, there's a banner reflecting the Sea of Peace, the East Block's pet name for the Baltic Sea).

I had this banner as well, but I have lost it in the chasm of time.

I thought for a while this pennant was sent to amateurs of the USSR DX/MIR contest - but he now tells me it was issued by the East German (DDR) radio organisation, presumably July 1961.
Memory is a joker!

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Wild Duck breast in red wine/cream sauce

Wild duck is in my opinion rather hopeless to prepare. Or was.
The meat is dry, the skin has little fat, plucking them is a total pain in the proverbial and roasting or grilling only produces un-chewable leather pouches.
So when someone gives you 4 freshly shot ducks, what do you do?

Here's a success story.

The main thing is to pluck them.
4 wild ducks in our case.
The village trick seems to be: pour boiling water over them and remove feather and down.
Right.
You try - not a simple task. And it stinks.

Having somehow succeeded, with feathers flying all over the garden, in the flowerbeds and the rather unpleasant smell of dead duck feathers (yeah - that's the verdict of a city dweller), we gave up on the plan to have 4 'duck steaks' for the freezer and proceeded to cut out the breasts and the legs - and dump the skin.
Lots of blood and dark meat!
There isn't that much meat beyond breast and legs anyway.

All went into the freezer.

Now for the preparation:
Wild duck is very dry, chewy and really not suited for oven, grill or a quick fry-up.
I decided to marinate the breasts in red wine and cognac for 2 hours (more would be better), cover them in thyme and chopped rosemary, wrap them in 3 pieces of streaky bacon each and slow cook them.

Make sure the joining points of the bacon are at the same side of the breasts.

Put the wrapped little darlings in the pan over low heat in a mix of a little oil and butter, cover, and roast-simmer for 20 min.
Turn them (the bacon is now glued firmly to one side of the breast) and continue cooking under a lid for 30 min.
Remove and keep warm.
Mind you - this is a recipe for someone NOT going for pink wild duck meat, which is dangerous at any rate.
There are ways to get around that, but that's beyond me.

Add chopped onion to the pan, a little of the marinade to loosen the tasty bits and let the onion simmer for 10 min.
Add the rest of the marinade and - if you have it - a little sweet wine like Marsala.
Simmer on, add cream, sieve to remove onions - and you have the most delicious sauce.

Serve with smooth mashed potatoes (Olive oil, butter, milk and lots of chopped parsley).
Heaven -

Dry wild duck?
Never again.

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Paintings Sept.-Oct. 2011



Storm over Kattegat, Denmark, Memory of many
5 hour crossings in the 1950s.    Oil on canvas, 50x70cm



My Canna explosion, summer 2011
Oil on canvas 50x70cm

Einstein's Relativity Theory crumbles

Proof of NO foreshortening of distance in Einstein’s Relativity
                                          Theory.


I shall use Einstein’s own preferred imagery - with an example nicked from Frank Atkinson's book "Time - the missing parameter in physics":

Consider a train on an embankment.

Mark the place on the rails where the first wheel touches the rail, call it F, and also the place on the rails where the rear wheel touches the rails, call it R.

Place an observer, Jim AlKhalili, on the train and another, Brian Cox, on the embankment.

Now place a trigger mechanism just in front of R (RF) and another just behind R (RB).
Use these triggers to ignite 10 Tons of Semtex, but ONLY if both have been depressed at the same time.

Set the train in motion and observe what happens. When the train’s front wheels hit RB, nothing happens – and nothing happens when the front wheels hit RF.

No surprise there. So far so good. Both Jim and Brian are safe.

Now repeat the experiment and accelerate the train to a speed being a major proportion of the speed of light and ask Jim AlKhalili what he saw exactly when the front wheels hit F.

“Yes, oh wonder, my old pal Einstein told me, that the embankment would shrink as I wuschj past R and F – and indeed it did! When my rear wheels should pass R, they actually hit RB instead and depressed the RB trigger, as the embankment had shrunk a little. And just as importantly: Einstein would have been happy to know, that I didn't observe any shrinkage of the train at all, just as he said”

Then let’s see what Brian Cox had to say.

“Hang on Jimmy boy – my embankment didn’t shrink – it is definitely you, who have shrunk! This confirms the relativity Albert talked about.  I saw it with my own eyes: as your train became a little shorter, the rear wheel didn’t hit R, when you said it hit RB. In fact it hit RF exactly at the moment your front wheels hit F”.

So clearly the train hit RB and RF at the same time, using Einstein’s favourite example.

Did 10 Tons of Semtex send Brian and Jim into orbit and did the unlikely event of the train being in two places at the same time really happen?
Of course it didn’t.

If at this stage you want to use the Lorenz Transformation to prove the above mathematically, be my guest! It will all be confirmed - but I promised to use no maths in this proof.
Quod erat demonstrandum!!!

Guys, face it: Einstein was wrong and Jim AlKhalili is now on his way to Primark to buy edible boxer shorts, as he promised.

Because: as there is no foreshortening of the distance travelled, when we move close to the speed of light, and as we know that such speeds cause a dilation of time, it now looks as though the speed of light barrier has been broken.

Of course, Jim might save an unappetizing meal by claiming, that it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. Pheew –  he is actually right!
Because the observed time depends on the observer. Does that mean that one can travel faster than 300,000 KM/sec when time dilates?
Definitely.

At the end of 2011 scientists were ripping their hair out, because a recent CERN experiment seemed to prove, that Neutrinos could travel faster than light here on Earth.
Yes - but Neutrinos have no mass?
Hmmm - just a tiny little mass, which according to Einstein would have made the whole CERN set-up implode with a big bang?
Ahh - so perhaps there IS a Higgs Boson?
I am afraid not.
It was all down to a mistake in the measuring equipment - a fact that was communicated at a 120 dB lower volume than the original result of the experiment.
Otherwise we would have been  back in almost medieval darkness.
And now the scientists at CERN have  declared, that their search for the elusive Boson might be abandoned.
It isn't there.
Did you hear me? It isn't there!!
Just as elusive or non extant as a cure for the common cold.

And as Dark Matter isn't there either (a bonkers idea in the first place, only invented to explain why our galaxies don't fly off the Universe faster than we can spot them), the only way forward is: Back to the drawing board, all you bright physicists, who are glued to Einstein with Araldite - and let go of 100 year old errors.
Start with an active physics parameter, fo rexample: TIME.
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Speed of Light revisited

and the limits of Einstein's E=mc2 revealed.

I knew it!
The Hadron Collider group has verified, that a particle can move faster than the speed of light in certain circumstances.
Well, they may have had their measurements in a twist - but even close to the speed of light is fine for the following purpose.

This means that a particle - even with an infinitesimally small mass - at close to the speed of light did NOT increase its mass to infinity, as predicted by Einstein.

I have mentioned earlier in this blog, that old Albert got it wrong.
In fact he knew it, but preferred to modify his equations and explain, that a train speeding along an embankment would increase its mass towards infinity, as the speed approached that of light.
The simple fact is that mass stays constant. Heureka!!!!
It is the speed of light that varies in the E=mc2 equation, due to the scientifically proven time dilation of the superfast train.
Now it is proven and the scientific establishment simply doesn't know what to do with it.
So they shut up.

Infinity is a strange thing, that we can only express mathematically, but not comprehend.
An infinite Universe.
An infinite mass.
Time that always was and always will be.
All rather esoteric for the human brain.
But try 1/0 (one divided by zero), or rather 1/0.0000000000000000000000000001 and you get the point.
Yes - a very big number.

A train with an infinitely great mass is a very heavy matter.
But a quantum sized particle at the speed of light would be an equally heavy matter, according to Einstein, as infinity remains infinity.

Can anything go faster than the speed of light?
Probably not (!!) - this is the limit in the time dimension in which it is measured.
Can anything go faster than 300,000 Km/sec?
Absolutely - if time can dilate or contract it all depends upon who is watching and measuring, as a second is not a second any more.
Time dilates
- close to a great mass (Galaxy),
- at very high speeds and
- at high temperatures
Otherwise it contracts.
This is an accepted, measurable fact today.

As
Speed = d/t,
where d= distance, t=time
even mathematically challenged people can see, that with a constant d and variable t, speed varies.
Einstein tried to circumvent the limit of 300,000 Km/sec by saying, that at speeds close to that of light, d would become shorter.
Rubbish - it is easy to prove this can't be the case, actually using Einstein's own arguments.
I shall return to that later, ramming a big, wooden stick through the Relativity Theory.

Once Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, Jim Al Khalil and the other celebrity phycisists, who have stayed glued to Einstein, are forced to look scientific facts in the eyes (and they will have to sooner rather than later) a veritable revolution will take place, as we have to start with Newton again and scrap all the rest - - - or something to that effect.

Does E=mc2 work at all?
Yes it does - as a practical approximation as long as we stay within our Earthly time dimension.

Once the Earth was flat and the Sun circumnavigated the Earth.
Copernicus was ridiculed for his heliocentric postulate, which surely didn't make the Earth flatter or helped making the Earth continue to be the centre of the Universe.

The truth in science is never decided by majority votes.

I look forward to the cosmological revolution coming up.

Simested Aa (River), North Jutland

Many years ago I took a photo of an almost undisturbed Bronze Age landscape in the north of Denmark.
A small river winding its way through a meadow, backed by Bronze Age tumuli - a refreshing sight, compared with the disappearance of waterways through drainage or canalisation.

Ripe for a painting - and here it is.
An early summer evening with a full moon:
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Simested River, oil on canvas, 50x70cm, Jorgen Faxholm 2011

Les Vendanges 2011

Spotting a sunny gap in the rain and facing  a wet weather forecast for the next 7 days, I decided to pick my grapes Saturday 3 Sept.

The year had started promising with the warmth and sun in April and May, but June and onwards put paid to all hope of an abundant 2011, concluding with the wettest and coldest August in living memory.

The Triomphe d'Alsace in the front garden fought a brave battle and saved the day.

Triomphe d'Alsace grape bunch Sept. 2011

It played the role of General Bluecher, coming to the rescue of the otherwise lost battle of Waterloo in the patio, where constant rain and little sun caused the Brant grapes to be either green and unripe or downright rotten.

The best of the grapes held about 18 Oechsle - not like last year's 21!

The front vine produced no less than 2 full buckets of grapes and they were in excellent condition.

My refractometer told me: 23 oechsle  (sugar scale) - that is as good as it gets!

And here's what a typical Triomphe d'Alsace from the front garden looked like this year.

I will have to do something serious about the Triomphe d'Alsace in the patio, though.

Most grapes were small, even dry and with few exceptions not well developed .

Perhaps it is fighting another losing battle with roots that can't find a way under the Yorkshire slabs?

Normally vines are pretty good at sending their 'suckers' deep down - in Chateau Neuf du Pape up to 10m, but something is seriously wrong here.

Further investigation will have to wait till late autumn.

Once the condition has been clarified, I will try my luck with 3 Chardonnay vines, replacing 3 of the Triomphe d'Alsace branches. I have them prepared in pots at the moment.

Apparently Chardonnay is a late ripener, but I put my trust in the global warming, although this seems to have stopped around 1998.

A mix of Triomphe d'Alsace and Chardonnay is nice: a white grape with structure and character mixed with a red 'teinturier' - it must be a winner, if we can get them to become ripe at the same time.

So far 12.5 litres of must is bubbling away for the next 4 days.

This should produce 15 bottles, if 2 litres of pips and grape skins are taken into account.

Not good, but not too bad either.

The Big Bang - or just a fizzle?

I have mentioned it before in my blog and I shall surely keep coming back, but after BBC4's feature "Lost Horizons" about the Big Bang, Dark Matter and uncritical (i.e. wrong!!) adherence to Einstein's General and Special Relativity Theories, I have to get this off my chest:

I agree with Fred Hoyle:
There never was a Big Bang - at least not in the form that created the Universe.
Sadly, he died in 2001, so he's not here to say: Well done Jorgen - or more correctly: Frank Atkinson, who woke me up.

Two axioms stood out in the TV feature:
1. The scientists claim, that the redshift of light from distant galaxies implies that everything is moving away from everything. This could only have been caused by the Mother of All Explosions, the Big Bang. Otherwise galaxies wouldn't fly hither dither, leaving more and more space between them. But do they? Some scientists claim that our own galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy will collide in the future - somewhere between 2Bill years and 15Bill years from now. Semantics, I'd say - but it indicates that not all galaxies are moving away from all other galaxies. In fact, there are many examples of colliding galaxies.
2. Scientists still cannot find the Dark Matter - however, they stubbornly maintain that it takes up 70% of matter in our ever expanding Universe.

Come on, guys!!!
We now know that 'time' is a parameter that is as connected to energy as the other side of the medal is to the first. Energy cannot exist without time and vice versa. But as the law of energy conservation says that energy cannot disappear or just increase, so we can conclude (roughly) that time has always been - although perhaps in HUGELY dilated form if we assume the Universe once was a super dense ball in a non-extant soup (a bit far fetched, but why not).
Time can become dilated and consequently the speed of light increased (or decreased if time is contracted) in order to maintain the 300,000 Km/sec. Dilation happens close to a large gravitational field or if a body moves at a speed close to the speed of light.
This we can measure as undisputable.

So how about axiom 1?
Some years ago Science would have us believe, that the redshift of light (stretching in wavelength) was due  to the Doppler effect. As we observe this around the globe, the consequence is that we are at the centre of the Universe and that idea, I believe, was droppped hundreds of years ago, except if you are a creationist.
Next, the scientists forced their theories to conform with the idea that space was able to stretch and contract light - - but there's no scientific evidence that this happens.
The fact is, that we are a little lost!!
What if the Universe is infinite and NOT expanding?
The Hubble telescope keeps surprising us with galaxies in areas that were thought empty, assessed to be 40Bill Light years away.
In a 14.7Bill years old universe?
Time to review the space-time curvature and other obsolete ideas.

We know that light is emitted as photons, travels as electromagnetic waves and is observed as photons at the receiving point.
We also know that large gravitational fields dilate time, meaning that as the light passes through the Universe, it is constantly being pulled or pushed through dilated 'time-fields'.
This is bound to cause considerable redshifting - more so, if the light comes from very, very far away, exactly as will be the case in an infinite Universe.
No expansion, no balloon stretching, no strings - just an enormity we cannot grasp.
And sometimes, most of the time in fact, the redshift is so enormous that it disappears out of sight beyond infra red.
And therefore we cannot see it.
It also loses so much energy that virtually nothing is left over, when it reaches us.
Perhaps that explains the 2.7 degree Kelvin, almost absolute 0, that we observe. Perhaps it helps explain the so called background radiation, which science wants us to believe stems from the Big Bang.

Consequently, there is no reason to invent this explosion.
It quite simply never occurred!!

Now axiom 2.
Dark Matter is an extraordinarily crazy invention, that came about, as we couldn't explain how the clumps originated that were responsible for the creation of galaxies.
It is there to fit the scientists' mathematical equations.
But isn't that exactly what science is NOT about - the wrong way around.
Guys - look it in the eyes: the equations are wrong!

Scientists have even descended into deep mines and caves in order to detect the Dark Matter, well out of interference from any background radiation.
And found nothing.
Yet they tell us that it has mass and takes up 70-80% of matter in the Universe - but emits no radiation (hence "dark").
Newton's law about mass attracting mass, although at a power inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the bodies and directly proportional to the bodies' mass, seems to be universal. This leads to another discussion: is gravity distributed in waves, as claimed by science, or is it instantaneous across the Universe? It is commonly agreed that the Universe is homogeneous ('orderly') on a grand scale. I doubt this would be the case with gravity working 'only' at the speed of light. The conclusion is the extraordinary thought, that gravity 'just is' and also that gravity is a consequence rather than just the so-called "weakest power" at all. This is another topic I shall pick up later - with the help of Frank Atkinson.

The 14.7Bill number is a guess, based on the redshift. But as we haven't explained the origin of the redshift and rather used it as an explanation - unscientifically - this is a wet thumb in the air.
Well, some say the world is only 6000 years old, but compared to infinity 14.7Bill years is as good a guess as 6000 years.
More importantly, if the Dark Matter has been there for a very long time and if there is a lot of it, wouldn't it have collected the odd floating visible, proton and slowly dressed itself up - just like the Invisible Man, who could only be seen when he wore coat, hat and scarf?

Dark Matter therefore appears to be a very un-scientific invention, much like the belief in the existence of an "Ether" - a belief Morley and Michelson defused many years ago.

Are we not getting closer to the realisation that
- there never was a BIG Bang
- there is no Dark Matter
?????

If the above can be agreed and if Einstein's General and Special Relativity theories can be defused (they  can! They self-eliminate - see my blog-entries from Oct 2011) there are at least 3 consequences:

- We have to start all over again, as we still haven't found the unifying theory between the very large (the Universe) and the very small (Particle Theory)
- the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is a waste of money - a lot of money.  Well, almost - we have now paid to know that we don't know; If Higgs Boson and recreated Dark Matter remain elusive we should probably close it down. Unfortunately scientists are unwilling to eat humble pie despite the fact, that they could sit down at their desks and drill a big hole in the Special Relativity Theory using just a bit of brain power, pen and paper!
- perhaps 'time', as a lost or underestimated physics parameter, should be taken out of the moth-bag and checked as a stepping stone to a solution, a very elegant one in fact.

There are more consequences, as if the above were not enough - and some of them have deep impact on our beliefs, both religious and more practical.
It can be tough enough to realise that mass is constant and lightspeed variable, depending on the observer's time dilation.

If there is a God (trust me: there isn't!) she has certainly made it difficult for us to get to the core of the creation process. She's teasing us, lifting just a bit of her dress, but not letting us see the whole leg.
Perhaps that's all we will ever see.
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The Multicultural Human Condition IX

To all of you, who think the Dutchman Geert Wilders has got it wrong:

The 94 bus from Picadilly towards Chiswick was almost full at Regent Street in London.
But there was an available seat next to a woman dressed from top to toe in a dark sheet.
Only her eyes peered out through a narrow slit.
I sat down and got an immediate reaction: "You can't sit here! I am a muslim woman".

What happened to the "Ummah"?

In my modest opinion: present day Muslims have lost it.
As much as the Christians have got their mental knickers in a twist.
In fact - there's religion for you!

I leave further thoughts and comments to the reader.
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