210. BURKHARD HEIM
This is some truly mind-bending stuff:
Scientists are thinking of building an extraordinary anti-gravity machine which - if it works - could make "hyperdrive" starships a reality.The life story of this man, Burkhard Heim, is also amazing, and a tribute to the powers of the human mind and spirit.
The design is based on the ideas of a little-known but brilliant German physicist who modified Albert Einstein's theories of space and time.
Burkhard Heim postulated a multidimensional world in which the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are coupled together.
Last year, a paper drawing on the concept won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Future Flight prize.
It envisaged an engine that could not only defeat gravity but propel a space craft through multidimensional hyperspace at unbelievable speed.
Using the drive, it would take as little as three hours to reach Mars, and just 80 days to journey to a star 11 light-years away.
Testing the idea would require a huge rotating ring, several metres in diameter, placed above a superconducting coil to generate an intense magnetic field.
If the theory works, a large enough current and magnetic field should cause the ring to float free by reducing gravity.
Stretching technology to its limits
Building such a machine would stretch existing materials and technology to its limits. But one space propulsion scientist in the US thinks it might be possible.
Roger Lenard, from Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, runs a powerful X-ray generator known as the Z-machine.
He told New Scientist magazine that it could "probably generate the necessary field intensities and gradients".
Source
posted by JD @ 6:25 AM
12 comments
12 Comments:
People might travel into space eventually. But the Star Trek type of exploration is flawed at the core.
For exploration purposes, we will be sending robots into space first. Not humans.
Space is not human-friendly.
Can we concentrate on facts and realities, please? If you start to talk about anti-gravity, you might as well talk about perpertual motion machines, or about teleportations. None of these stuff are real!
Wildwell wrote:
Time to delete from my favourites I think..
Bye, Wildwell. Thanks for your contributions and best of luck.
JD
Here's the New Scientist article on Heim:
Link
jeezes. when did this blog turn into slashdot???
i'm with wildwell, can we stick to peak oil please?
i have a suggestion, jd. start a new blog called "singularityiscoming" or something. i'd read it. i find this stuff very interesting and am not a total skeptic. i think if we don't kill ourselves we've got a lot of amazing shit coming in the next 95 years.
but you're doing a disservice to a mostly excellent blog about a very specific issue by posting such totally unrelated content. not to mention that the content you posted has been talked about all over already and most of your readers have, i'm sure, see it, or would have soon.
c'mon man, i don't want to see you scaring off folks like WW. he's one of my favourite members of the PoD gang.
Right on, pop. Point taken. I posted it because it was interesting and it was the first time I'd heard about it. I'm pretty skeptical about it myself, but it's interesting to talk about. I'm human. :^/
Note, however, that peak oil isn't about oil at all -- it's about all the things which will replace oil (unless you believe peak oil marks the endpoint of civilization rather than a transition). So it's no wonder if the topic strays away from oil. The last thing I want this site to be is a site nervously obsessed with day-to-day oil trivia. The pessimist sites are holding down that angle.
Which brings me to my last point. I don't think this post is what pushed WW over the edge. It was the nuclear stuff. In fact, I think that is where the great "splitting of the sheets" is going to occur -- between the pro-nuclear and the anti-nuclear side. Unfortunately, despite how much I like WW, he's more comfortable on the other side.
(Cool picture, BTW. Gotta get me one one of these days...)
Is there anything more absurd than a doomer rejecting ideas because they are "theoretical?" BS in spades! What is doomerism but theory? It is all theory, you DW!
You must have heard of all the doom theories of the seventies and eighties? How most assuredly hundreds of millions would starve in the eighties, the world would run out of oil in the early eighties, a new ice age was imminent, the civilised world would collapse by 1999. Theory of doom.
You just do not like competing theories, although you like your own theory well enough.
:0)
jd, i understand that there's more to peak oil than oil itself. but warp drives? what's in between? i think that's what this blog should stick to.
as far as WW, you can't really speak for him. i'd like to see him change his mind and come back and post again.
i find it ironic that in #198 you were talking about the splintering in the doomer community...
roland and freak:
but don't you guys understand how that kind of forward thinking deters the discussion of mostly short term effects of Peak Oil? we've already lost one superb contributor to this blog (and no, i don't think it was the nuclear issue) and a random visitor looking for info on peak oil lands on #210 and reads about warp drives is not likely to stick around.
i understand what you guys are saying. all these things are possible. i have my own reservations about whether they will be achieved or not and why but they have nothing to do with peak oil either.
to me Peak Oil is a problem right now whether or not peaking is occuring. this immediacy of the problem is why i found this log so compelling. musics of the #210 sort don't really do anything to help the understanding of the issues and may drive potentially valuable contributors away. it makes for a bad signal/noise ratios from the pov of someone looking for info on PO.
okay, i think i've ran out of ways to say the same thing :D
Things that make you think, hmmm? http://www.earthtech.org/publications/ibison_tardyons_and_tachyons.pdf From a think tank on similar subject matter found here.
http://www.earthtech.org
Grrr, all attempts to attach the urls to text failed in preview and it appears cut the long url off. Just go to the home site for the organizattion the second url. Or find their link on Wiki at bottom of Heim article then click the url they have at bottom for their publication list to find one on tardyons and tachyons, austensibly the matter behind dark matter and repulsive force appaernetly accelorating the universe expansion. The organization appears to be mainstream. But your mileage may vary.
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