Interocitor, Krell Metal, Warp Drive

I've studied all the latest technologies in movies. I used replay, freeze frame, nothing gives quite enough detail to tell how they did it. Think what we could do with these secrets! I'll keep trying and let you know if I come up with anything.

One Invention I do not Understand: The Airplane

I think I get airplanes until I look at helicopters. The thrust from a helicopter's rotor holds it up. In order to hover, the rotor's thrust must equal the weight of the copter. Requires a big engine. Okay, I get that.

An airplane's lift comes from its wings. The prop or jet propels it forward and the wing provides the lift, which I get. A quick lookup shows that an airplane engine's thrust is about one-seventh of the weight of the plane, which is a nice savings. The efficiency is changed but not drastically so whether the plane is flying forward or in a tight circle.

The other thing you notice is that a helicopter's rotor is shaped much like an airplane wing. Really two airplane wings circling tightly around the center point. So if a helicopter is nothing more than an airplane sweeping out a circle, why can't it be held aloft with an engine whose thrust is just one-seventh of its weight?

Where we are Today is Like Where the Egyptians were with Microvave Ovens

Today, microwave ovens are commonplace, but before the 1940s, they were completely unknown. Imagine how overwhelming such technology must have seemed thousands of years earlier at the time of the Egyptians.

All the necessary materials existed in their time. But they did not have the shadow of a notion of how to build one. The key component, the magnetron tube, is basically a series of shapes formed so that when electrically excites it, it oscillates at great power. Not unlike taking a piece of wood and carving it into the shape of a whistle, and suddenly, you seemingly breathe life into an inanimate object.

The Egyptians would have also needed electricity. Simple battery power would have sufficed. A battery consists of acid, such as lemon juice, and two different metals for the electrodes, such as copper, iron, lead or others. A jar is filled with the acid with the electrodes dipped in to it without touching. For higher voltage, connect in series.


A more sustainable electrical source is a generator, either powered by wind or the Nile River, which looks pretty slow moving for this purpose. A generator's main components are a coil of wire and a magnet along with knowing the right way to orient them together.

The materials needed to make microwave ovens were readily available at the time of the Egyptians. The laws of nature were the same as they are today. The air could carry radio waves and the metals and juices could carry electricity. But one thing was missing. The notion that such a thing was possible. Or that a thousand other things we take for granted today were possible.

What was lacking was a whole series of cultural structures. The idea of engineering was almost non-existent. The great pyramids were engineering feats, but they did not generalize their methods to other fields. Instead, it was more of a priesthood, with secret ritualistic practices that were actually pragmatic steps learned over previous generations of building smaller pyramids. They thought it was a divine secret that was blasphemous to share. In retrospect, this was a huge mistake that caused hundreds of generations to spend longer times warming up baby bottles, except that they didn't have those either.

Modern engineering consists of a specialized education, heavily steeped in math and science. Most importan of all, the methodology used by engineers guided by the belief that alternatives can be systematically tested and improvements can be made. The math and science of ancient Egypt were weak at the time but the methodology was possible.

Similar revolutions in thinking would have to be made in the scientific method that allows the discovery of the laws of nature from which new products are eventully made. And better math was needed. Quite an elaborate infrastructure, and one that the Egyptians would have had no reason to believe was the right sort of institutions nor would pay off in any significant way. And with all those things, a microwave would not have been the first result of their effort, but the thousandth or ten-thousandth. But they were in power for a long time.

What would have changed their methods more quickly would have been an almost accidental innovation, such as a microwave oven or something less complicated than that, by an individual that was unusually methodical and transparent in the use all these disciplines. It would have shown in one shot, all the pieces needed to do research and development that will create wonderful new products.

Even in modern times, this rarely happens. The inventions are made public but the methods of discovery are kept secret. Such methods, often with limited further benefit to the inventor, could hold the secret to far-futuristic creations if someone in a different field, seeing nature from different vantage point, would use them. We already do these things to a certain extent, but our routine has added a kind of limitation. A new level of technological capability may depend on going beyond the amount of sharing we currently do if only for a while. Like the ancients, this may only be one aspect of a multi-pronged approach that we need to get to the next level.

The Need for Tough Antigravity Laws

With antigravity just around the corner, now would be a good time to start working on leglislation to control the use of it. We have laws for jay-walking, and that does not use a new invention at all. Here are my first proposed laws:

1. No hanging unsightly junk above your house just to get it out of the way.

2. No parking a car above another car just to avoid paying the parking meter.

3. No jay-floating

Those are the basics but there could even be more to come.

Anti Gravity: One solution

"Antigravity?" you ask. "You're not serious!"

Clearly, you fail to realize how serious I am. Let us first understand what gravity is.

Similar to magnetistm, it is like a field that emanates off every object and interacts with every other object. By that I mean with every object, not just odd numbered or even numbered ones. We must be precise if this is to work! Unlike magnetism there is no north or south pole. Every pole is the same and every one attracts, none repel. That's too bad, because if a certain element repelled, all we would need is a chunk of the stuff in our pants. It doesn't, so we must continue this article, painful as that may be, but at least our pants fit comfortably.

Gravity can also be compared to droplets in a waterfall. We make the analogy because just as light possesses the character of "duality", behaving in some ways as waves and in some ways as particles*, gravity can be viewed as waves and particles. Only after we have explored both can we harness its power. The trick, in this analogy, is to swim up the waterfall by paddling our arms faster than the drops are falling. We have to flail them fast enough to overcome our own weight also. This is quite an effort. Salmon can do it but they are not actually swimming through the water so much as jumping through it, only to fall back and in the best case, above the falls. By contrast, our dream, our vision is to be like a hovering salmon.

So we have our work cut out. No animal can swim against a waterfall. Even a machine such as a helicopter works better in dry air than it would in a waterfall. Our particle analogy does have a flaw. Whereas the water collects at the bottom of the falls, gravity never collects. Whereas water may or may not evaporate and rain back down at the top of the falls, gravity never seems to do this either. And there are no gravity storms. So it seems we are trapped, cornered, without any possibility of finding a solution. But I have one.

Conventional matter cannot oppose gravity. Nor have any fields been discovered that oppose gravity. But there is one thing that we have obverved: Every particle of matter attracts every other particle. At this point, I could get sidetracked and look for the odd or even numbered ones that don't but I am wise to that one. Not that. If an object is allowed to move freely momentarily suspended in the air, through the passage of time it will eventually be pulled to the ground, gradually accelerating with increased velocity. The clear solution then is this: Use matter that is traveling backward in time. A hunk of this stuff, through the passage of time from our point of view, or the negative passage of time from its perspective, would gradually pull away from the planet.

I realize this replaces one impossibility, antigravity, with another, the backward travel through time at a constant rate, to achieve the same effect as antigravity. To that, I would say, let's look for it, and let's further simplify the effort by removing the requirement that it must travel backward at a constant rate.

*Duality, for example, the bright sunlight on the beach while you peacefully watch the waves, only to be abruptly shaken from your reverie when someone kicks sand in your face, getting one of the annoying particles in the same eyes. You then step into the waves to wash it out. If you thought ahead and worked out with weights (which works best in a gravity field such as the planet you are on), you may return to the beach and beat up the guy who did it.