canaries in the sunshine – a crowdfunding campaign

Canaries in the Sunshine is a crowdfunding campaign on the Pozible.com platform.

Pozible is a Melbourne-based company which has been operating for ten years and which has raised over ten million dollars for a range of campaigns over that time.

Canaries in the Sunshine is a text unusually situated: it occupies a liminal space between poetry and science. In summary, it’s a survey of the free energy movement and tangential energy research areas. Free energy is a recognisable but controversial term. I prefer to use the term radiant energy, more accurate but far less recognisable. Whatever we call it, it has many adherents and believers, people who know all the significant moments along its timeline and its key players. But those outside this circle know very little about the subject. It is as though it has been algorithmed out of existence.

I decided, through this work, to provide a window into this world for those who live outside it. It is a world rich in leading edge ideas, and intriguing characters and inventions. I have studied some undergraduate science, but I would never call myself accomplished in any scientific field. I am a layperson in this respect. But I could see a very compelling human dimension within this scientific endeavour, the language is often rich, and the spirits and the personalities of the inventors and researchers are often captivating. I therefore decided to write the final results of my research in sonnet form. In this form, I give myself only 14 lines to tell a story. For some, it requires a double sonnet (eg The Lockridge Device) or a triple sonnet (eg The Perpetual Motion Holder of Edward Leedskalnin). But the intention has been to make the key ideas more accessible to the reader. And also fun!

My greatest wish has been to fire the imagination of younger readers, to see science as an ongoing experiment which can only get better over time. The people at the leading edge have left the common understanding of science far behind in its wake. We will catch up to them in ten or maybe one hundred years. This is an exhilarating study and I urge you to explore it and you can do this buy supporting the campaign. I expect once the campaign for the publication and printing of the book is closed, it will only be available online as an e-book.

For your information, I have listed below the titles of the poems in this work: