Friday, October 29, 2004
1. WARPED SCIENCE: BEAM ME UP SCOTTY, THEY'RE CRAZY DOWN HERE.
Making the rounds in Washington this week is a 75-page Air Force Research Laboratory report, Teleportation Physics Study (my spell checker balks on "teleportation," and well it should). This is not the IBM entangled photon stuff; this is transporting people across space. The subway does that, but it's not included in the report. Instead it describes "conveyance of persons by psychic means," and "transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes." The contractor for the study was Warp Drive Metrics in Las Vegas, and the author was Eric W. Davis, PhD, FBIS. We couldn't find Dr. Davis in American Men and Women of Science, so we googled him and Warp Drive Metrics. Warp Drive Metrics has no website. We did find an article by Dr. Davis, Wormhole Induction Propulsion, prepared for the 1997 NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop, which NASA had refused to allow me to attend (WN 15 Aug 97). His affiliation then was the National Institute for Discovery Science, Las Vegas. The NIDS website displays an Oct 15, 04 notice from its president that the Institute is on an "inactive status." Desperate for information, we contacted the Project Manager of the study, Dr. Franklin Mead, Senior Scientist of the Advanced Concepts Office. He's not listed in American Men and Women of Science either, but he has a 1996 Patent (5,590,031) for a system to convert zero point energy to electrical energy. Apparently it's not available yet. He could not give me the exact cost of the teleportation report, but said the subcontractor, ERC Inc., would know. We called ERC, but teleportation is just one small part of a huge contract. Two weeks ago we learned of the Air Force positron bomb (WN 15 Oct 04). How many fantasy weapons are taxpayers buying?
2. SUPERCOLLIDERS: ARE PARTICLE ACCELERATORS A THREAT TO LIFE?
The Raelians have been pretty quiet since they announced that baby Eve had been cloned (WN 27 Dec 02). That was two years ago. Now the Raelian Scientists Association is urging that "supercolliders" be turned off "to protect life at every level of existence in the universe." The Raelians believe all life on Earth is the result of intelligent design, and so do a lot of fundamentalist Christians, but that's where similarities end. Raelians think our creators were scientific space aliens. (Have you ever noticed how silly everyone else's religion is?) Raelians also believe the universe is fractal, with an infinite number of fractal levels of life. Thus, supercolliders might be destroying life in infinitely small worlds. WN does not believe there is much supporting evidence, but we'll watch where we step.
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