High art, music video, polemic
Technical readout (pdf)
Calorimetry redux
Go ahead, figure out
the Fourier transform microwave specroscopy experiment from the chemistry.
Do left and right shoes vacuum free fall identically? Do chemically and macroscopically identical, opposite geometric parity atomic mass distributions falsify the Equivalence Principle?
Physics is well apprised of said benchtop apostasies. Its academics replied with a succinct and specific assessment of testing elegant (defective) theory against benchtop real world observation,
"Fuck you."
Ya gotta love those guys! An Eötvös balance costs $2 million and lives in its own isolation bunker. There are perhaps seven of them on Earth. A Fourier transform microwave spectrometer is also rare to find and big bucks - but academic chemists let you borrow it on weekends. Hey - it's only dials (and enough EM radiation to fry a hamburger in the next building). We'll see.
Let us expect that Uncle Al is trivially correct where 94 years of impassioned and proficient theoretical assaults summed to nothing. What good is it? We need some bombastic bullshit to make this thing Media fly. If you want to bake a big fancy cake using cat litter box effluent, think "NASA."
NASA can barely haul boar tits off this planet's surface. The chance of mankind doing any interstellar cruising would fit within a flea's navel and still leave room for three grains of pepper. NASA is utterly hopeless re The Starflight Handbook, a Pioneer's Guide to Interstellar Travel by Eugene Mallove and Gregory Matloff. Mankind is going nowhere fast, or slowly, even with a War on Drugs budget and a Department of Education Ministry of Truth.
Uncle Al's parity Eötvös, parity calorimetry, parity levitated balls, and parity molecular rotation spectra experiments seize the ethereal fundamental fabric of spacetime and twist it into a wedgie. The simple expedient needs two opposite geometric parity atomic mass distributions. Crystal lattices in enantiomorphic space groups P3121 / P3221 or P31 / P32 qualify. 31 screw axes are right-handed, 32 screw axes are left-handed for solids. Gas phase molecules of twistane are good in vacuum. Dilithium crystals were silly (though, curiously, the props were quartz crystals in space groups P3121 and P3221).
Nobody wants a nice cruise to Epsilon Eridani, 10.79 lightyears distant, suffering a tiny scratch and then a sharp "crack!" in the engines. Go call the AAA when you are suddenly 1427 miles beneath Pacoima, CA. No matter how hospitable Lucifer is to unexpected visitors, nobody voluntarily drives to Pacoima.
NASA projects are bizarrely executed and wickedly expensive. NASA missed Mars with a $350 million spacecraft because English and metric units were mixed. NASA molded Space Scuttle solid fuel booster segments in California for launch in Florida. Tunnels beneath intervening mountains have their diameters Mil-Spec traceable to the width of two horses' asses pulling Sargon of Akkad's 2300 BC Mesopotamian war chariots. Boosters cannot be wider in diameter and fit, nor can they be cast as monoliths to avoid joint pain and Challenger, er, challenges.
Our trans-dimensional overthruster elements must be renderable as miniature souvenirs for Congressional hearings. Only gold will do! Lest the budget burst before our bureaucrats are assigned shapely, ah, consultants, a soupçon of outlandishly hazardous dopant will be added to temper collectors' enthusiasm. Beryllium is a particularly foul biohazard singularly costly in oxygen-free high purities. A quick look through digitized crystallographic databases targets beryllium auride, chiral space group P213, as an enantiomorphic intermetallic pussycat.
That is silly on all counts, but Congresscritters will not know it. 21 screw axes are racemic. AuBe is a low temperature superconductor. As Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory requires mirror symmetry for Cooper pairs of electrons... the space group is mis-assigned. Good for souvenirs, bad for starships.
Giant crystals of brilliant red cinnabar are in space groups P3121 and P3221). We'll settle for ultraperfect and pure X-plate quartz in both hands from Sawyer Technical Materials LLC. Glycine gamma-polymorph crystallizes in space groups P31 and P32. School kids can grow them. NASA managers will have those engines strapped under their butts with an option to say "GO!"
Quartz or gamma-glycine, enantiomorphic single crystal ingots will be single point diamond CNC machined and then ion milled to nanometer tolerances. Inserted into massive maraging steel jaws the crystallographically inverse-parity cylinders will be subjected to piezoelectrically trimmed immense reciprocal torques just short of material failure - the Instron Parity Drive. The universe is in for a big thrill (and pillaging, followed by realtors).
"Black space suddenly looked horribly wrong as the ship began to slip through progressively uncompactified dimensions in exponentiating IPD starflight. A newbie on her first slide down the sharp edge of spacetime swallowed most of a long, long scream." This gives Uncle Al a techno-woodie just thinking about it. Will the crew have problems parallel-dimension parking?
Give the civilian vessel a nice friendly name like the Chelsea Damned." If it is military and has a vast poop deck, go with the Hillary Ramrod Clinton. There might be curious biological side effects like everybody barfing into their console V-Ports as the dimensionality of thought isn't quite compensated from relative nanogram imbalances of the single crystal elements. Or perhaps all the ladies will launch into multiple orgasms from 16 Hz vibrations rattling the entire ship (some recruiting poster, eh?). Alas, if one of the quartz bars shatters from the stress... Baikonur sleigh ride! And don't stand behind the thing when the clutch pops SOP, "behind" being somewhat relative as these things go, because "behind" won't be there any more.
One question remains: How will we inveigle Ultra-Liberal Senator Edward Kennedy to shake his Left Wing booty to our tune? Resurrection aside, nothing is impossible (or at least unfundable) when diversity, equal opportunity, affirmative action, reverse discrimination, minority rights, wymyn's rights, intergender rights, and some quietly deep-sixed audio tapes from Chappaquidic are co-signing the expense chits. I doubt serving New England boiled dinners and Harp beer on-board will be enough. We'll need stewardesses! Perhaps Ted's descendents and their remoras have some superannuated dusky mistresses they would like to see go where no man has gone before. Add an unwanted ivory-skinned tenured teacher from an Inner City school, and were off!
The first tiny step is return to the moon. Scoop up a few tonnes of lunar regolith, eBay it, and we're self-financing.