[2] Cook is also known for demonstrating that aerial surveys can map surface radioactivity to enable much more efficient prospecting for uranium ore,[2] for inventing electrostatic detection of hazardous ice crevasses, and for developing other novel techniques in remote sensing.

[7] For some time afterward this group's experimental systems led the field in performance—its members were continually breaking new ground and extending the range of radar's capabilities.

[7] They often tracked a B-17 bomber sent from Bedford Airfield for their use, trying variations in frequency and polarization, the use of chaff and jamming countermeasures, and trying to evaluate the use of propeller modulation signal amplitude to identify friendly versus hostile.

Cook built a portable test stand from a wooden box, with a thrust gauge, tanks for fuel and oxidizer, valves with long control rods, and electric ignition.

John, Bob Smith, and others built rocket motors of steel, aluminum, ceramic, silver from coins, etc., using the lathes and other facilities of the M.I.T Student Model Shop, where some of the members maintained the precarious good will of the man in charge.

Some of their number managed to obtain liquid oxygen from the nearby Arthur D. Little company, which was developing a portable military "lox" generator and was dumping excess product fuming and freezing everything, into the gutter.

This gave their most successful test—the rocket motor roared with a ten-foot plume of flame filled with standing shock waves, with the thrust gauge off-scale for ten seconds or more.

When it also developed that he would soon be leaving Cambridge, he resigned as president of the MIT Rocket Research Society and turned it over to Robert Kraichnan, who would later become prominent in relativity.

Cook read extensively in the Physics Library on gravitational topics, developed a thesis plan, and performed a program of experiments using an Eötvös torsion balance (an extremely sensitive gravity-sensing instrument) owned by the Geophysics Department in the Mineral Industries building.

However Prof. Duncan, the department head, advised Cook that as he'd had serious difficulty with some important mathematical physics courses, it was recommended that he leave with the MS and not come back.

Having a master's degree, Cook was treated as someone special by visiting Texaco officials and Mr. Roos, and it was suggested that he could be a Crew Chief or could be asked to join the laboratory staff in Houston.

In the winter of 1949 Cook attempted to complete an experiment begun during his master's work: to detect a tangential gravitational field purportedly produced around a rotating body (according to certain published theories).

Westinghouse engineers showed Cook blueprints of the building, which had a floor of great cast-iron plates 6" thick, resting on brick piers on bedrock.

During his final attempt at Westinghouse Cook was told that a famous engineer in the research lab wanted to see him, Joseph Slepian, who asked about the theoretical basis of a tangential gravitational field, and proceeded to cast doubt as it's not an effect predicted by Einstein's General Relativity.

Here, Cook conceived an improvement in electric logging technique: a thin-sheet current path controlled by 'shielding-current' electrodes, analogous to the Kelvin potential shields he had learned about at the University of Utah.

The Geophysics department had just bought a small, portable geiger counter, which did respond well to the gamma rays coming from rock samples Cook had gathered from the Mauch Chunk camotite outcrop.

In fact, scintillation detectors having both a much larger cross- section and much higher detection efficiency were already in airborne use in Canada and by the U.S. Geological Survey, although many of the details were secret.

Cook attempted to cast a large sodium iodide crystal in a glass baking dish, using one of the Department ovens, with poor results.

He also ran fairly accurate (1.5%) radiation profiles at various heights over several gamma-ray sources: boxes of ore, the Mauch Chunk uranium deposit, and 0.1 gram of pure radium borrowed from a hospital!

Cook continued teaching, including developing a new course in Oil Well Logging methods (electric resistivity, self-potential, gamma-ray, neutron, sonic velocity, etc.

His education nearly complete, Cook wrote letters offering his services to several oil companies and other labs (the natural employers of geophysicists) located in the subtropical Southwest, as wife Vi needed warmer climate.

In Tulsa at the Stanolind Oil Co. where Dr. Pirson worked, Cook got on well with Dr. Dan Silverman (Chief Geophysicist), but inexplicably never got a formal offer from them.

In San Antonio, Bill Mussen, head of Geophysics at the Southwest Research Institute (whose start-up literature Cook had seen at Penn State), showed a new organization and a fascinating project that needed him: evaluating new oil-finding inventions.

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was founded by Tom Slick, one of the heirs of a millionaire oil wildcatter, on a big ranch west of San Antonio.

He arranged to meet with proponents to see their ideas and equipment in action, traveling the Western states, and attended geophysical and oil trade conventions and exhibits.

To maintain his 'second profession' of teaching, Cook taught math[12] in night school at the San Antonio College for two years, including trig, analytical geometry and calculus.

In the three years Cook operated the Bulletin service he improved the composing and printing, and he'd done major analyses of several unconventional techniques, which appeared to have some scientific basis or were being seriously considered by several oil companies.

The major conclusion Cook reached was that the ground is very difficult to 'see through' by any physical process provided by nature, and that the conventional seismic reflection method was by far the best at that time.

As the Bulletin service was ending Mussen sold a contract to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Fort Belvoir, Va.) to develop new methods of detecting buried, non-metallic land mines.

They continued to improve instruments and techniques over the years, but could never defeat the many 'false anomalies' produced by variations of tilt and height of the detector, and by inhomogeneities naturally present in the ground.