ECN Forum Forums Photo Discussion Forums Photos for General Discussion OT:Need a Time Machine?

Limeric time :-)

There once was a young man named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light
He left one day
(In a relative way)
And returned on the previous night!

Backwards travel would definitly be wonderful If I could land in Sunset Beach Hawaii in the late 1950's. Hang out in the empty waves with Dale Velzy, Greg Noll, Dewey Weber, all the greats. But since I can't I just have to be happy to watch "Riding Giants" on dvd. What a great movie.

There was a time traveller called Finn,
Who took his machine for a spin.
He was only away
For half of the day,
So he passed himself coming back in.

Back went Finn, long-ago and afar,
In his time-machine travelling-car.
"Oh! The marvels I've seen,
In my old time-machine!"
And his wife said "You Liar! You've been at that Bar!"

Stangely enough, an anti-grav machine (AGM) might be more feasible than popping back to visit the ancestors and tossing some tea into the harbor. Research has shown that Earth's gravity is reduced in the vicinity of a rapidly-spinning disc. The postulation is to create a 'flywheel' of novel form; thin at the perifery and thick at the hub, and of a geometrically progressive contour such that the stress due to centripetal force is equal throughout the disc section. Mounted in very low friction bearings, and immaculately balanced to eliminate shock loads, vibration and fatigue failure, the disc runs in a casing in vacuo to reduce friction to a minimum. The rpm required is phenomenal, and as yet the strongest known materials, ( composites at say 800,000 psi ) would fail at a tiny percentage of any useful reduction in G,
but thats just an engineering problem!
Equipped with a compact multi-disc, ( for steering and manoevering), back-pack version, running on NiCads, you could make a fortune changing church light bulbs!!
Downside? A disc failure takes out several city blocks...

Alan


[This message has been edited by Alan Belson (edited 10-24-2005).]

There was an interesting show on TV here last week about UFOs. It examined the various possible reasons for the rash of sightings years ago, including -- as you would expect -- classic cases such as Roswell in 1947 and the saucers over Washington, D.C. in 1952.

It looked at the work of German scientists who worked at the various Nevada and New Mexico test sites at the end of WWII, and the files of what were then secret government projects, quite a few of which could certainly have been taken for alien spacecraft by many people at the time.

Right at the end of the show, they visited a guy in Seattle who was conducting anti-gravity experiments in his garage. He had constructed a "saucer" which seemed to consist primarily of some sort of aluminized film (mylar perhaps, or something similar) above which and supported on 2- or 3-inch high insulators ran a wire around the periphery.
We didn't hear much about the power source operating below, but there was brief mention of induced high voltages and whether it was an ion wind of some kind which was providing the lift. It was certainly impressive.