Yes, Motherfucker, Yes: DARPA To Begin Researching "Casimir Force," Which Could Lead to GravBelts, Landspeeders, and Flyin' Cars

Yes, yes, and yes! Like James Joyce having an orgasm.

Rogue Pentagon boffinry overlords have decided to weigh into a hot new crazy-science field: That of the mysterious Casimir Force, the tendency of nanoscopic, barely perceptible spacetime ripples - lapping at the edges of the "quantum vacuum" in which all matter exists - to push things together.

Casimir stickiness, at present, is so imperceptible and tiny that it can be detected only by the use of special microdetection apparatus featuring solid golden balls. Nonetheless it genuinely exists. Indeed some boffins have previously speculated that one might - by the use of a cunningly crafted sheet of nanofabbed "left-handed metamaterial" - reverse the effect, fashioning a Casimir repellor platform and so causing objects to levitate on "literally, nothing". This would be achieved using the fabled, perhaps infinite, potentially universe-imploding "zero point energy" which has been widely speculated upon.

But the possibly goldenballs-powered hover ship - or even the more realistic unbelievably-thin-bacofoil frictionless ice-rink solution - has remained in the realm of theoretical conceit thus far, for lack of backing.

Now, however, that has changed. Legendary US bonkers-boffinry bureau DARPA* has decided to fund research into manipulating or reversing the Casimir effect. It's possible to theorise that the DARPA chieftains' interest has been piqued by the implicit possibilities for levitating bakeware, which would be so useful for the agency's known nutritional requirements.

...

Sadly it appears that the levitating sky-galleon or nothingness-repellor drive spaceship will not be an early application of the new technology, which seems fairly certain to work only at the nano scale to begin with.

But we can dream.

Thanks to Arthur.

posted by Ace at 07:32 PM

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