Science Hobbyist

When negative-index materials first were announced, I realized that I could make a cool optics exhibit for a science museum …without using any (non-existent) neg-refraction materials. The key idea is to embed a low-refraction material within a sea of high-refraction material. Don’t use exotic photonic crystals in vacuum, instead do it in an aquarium full of water. Or use heavy syrup, or jello. A blob of plain water in a tank of heavy agar will have a lower refractive index than its surroundings. Light should be partly guided around the blob. So try this:

Coat a small model of “stealth” aircraft with a layer of dilute gelatin. Immerse it in a small tank of very dense gelatin, and allow it to harden. Or even better, cover the model in layers of aerogel, with normal aerogel layers near the model, and very dense gel near the water. Now when viewed against a white background, the aircraft should appear much smaller than it really is. That’s the “cloaking” effect: where the axial rays still strike the hidden object, but off-axis rays are bent away, causing the object to optically shrink in size. If the effect is strong enough, a fairly huge object can appear as a tiny dust speck.

Now lets get some military funding!

Rather than miniature jello models, we can use high power plasma to cover an aircraft in sculpted-gradient hot air, causing light to be guided around the hidden center. The wide thin fuselage provile will seem to be reduced to an invisibly thin line. Or if that doesn’t work, use plasma to produce a very thin hot layer against the aircraft surface, then shape the wings/fuselage so visual angles are shallow, and a “silvery coating” mirage covers the whole airplane. By reflecting the optical background, the aircraft disappears for any distant observers. Don’t fly too fast, or the wind will disrupt the perfect 100% mirror coating.

Questions: if you were inside an invisibility cloak, what would you see? That’s easy. A cloak is similar to a bubble under water. If your eyes were in the exact center of the sphere, you could see out just fine. But if you moved away from the center, the outside world would seem to shrink enormously, same as if you were looking through a powerful concave lens. This is easily fixed: just use infrared goggles. The cloaking effect is designed for visible light. Infrared cameras should still be able to see your cloaked aircraft. And pilots wearing IR goggles should be able to see just fine. So when an invisible “flying saucer” lands in your back yard and uncloaks itself, check to see whether “USAF” is printed on the side. Or at least “no step,” “canopy release,” and “jet fuel only.”

I always wondered what the transmitter antenna looked like for megawatt broadband shortwave radar. It’s the HAARP array, but built on a gigantic vertical wall! See photos of the defunct rusting ‘Steelyard’ Duga3 transmitter in Russia. And here’s the irritating sound it made on sw radio for over a decade.

2/7/96 Created Vandegraaff and Static Electricity subpage.

Met Mike Huffman, mad inventor. Started a temporary majordomo list for discussing his device, calling it Vortex-L.

There aren’t any good Tesla Coil pages. Only fan pages for that rock band. Guess I’ll have to make one myself.

Uploaded some keelynet files called “MRA DEVICE” to my Weird Science section, and spread some announcements on various newsgroups. The resulting flamewar on sci.physics.fusion and alt.sci.physics.new-theories continued for weeks!

I figured out how to use NCSA MOSAIC freeware. Downloaded Trumpet Winsock from Australia. Created a webpage on eskimo.com called Amateur Science, typed in some of my old science museum ideas, some schematics, etc. Uploaded 10meg of Keelynet files and started “Weird Science” page. Convinced Yanoff, Virt. Library, and these two guys on Stanford “akebono” to list my page. Those were the days, huh?

I heard about a service in Seattle called “Connected dot com” which gave real internet access for only $30 per month (at 2400baud!!!!)  I think my addr was billb@hebron.connected.com.  Many months of fun.  Then after about six months I noticed that I wasn’t getting billed.  And when I missed payments, nothing happened!  I contacted other users and found that nobody else was receiving bills either.  I later heard that the whole user base at connected.com simply stopped paying.  Then the Sheriff’s department raided the ISP and shut it down, confiscating all the hardware (which apparently was stolen property.)

Mid-1992
I discovered a secret “hole” that gives free internet access. This was a big deal back here in 1992. On the 300baud dialup BBS card-catalog for the Seattle Public Library there was an option for searching periodicals, but the search window was something called “Gopher.” Ignore the periodicals, because Gopher then led off into a vast network of other sites. After discovering this thing called “Archie”, I could find sites that accessed something called “Usenet Newsgroups.” I wasted months searching around in all that stuff. I REALLY wanted to learn how to write my own Gopher pages. Too bad it didn’t have pictures. Now that would have been a good idea: hypertext like Gopher was, but with graphics! Why, that would let people publish their own free textbooks. People could display anything they wanted, and the whole world could come and look at it! What if billions of people could poke around in your filing cabinet? What would you put in it for them to find?