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There are Gravity Stones from the 60's scattered among US colleges to > "remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in or
by mLuby 7y ago
There are Gravity Stones from the 60's scattered among US colleges to
> "remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents"
Decent way to get students thinking about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation#Monuments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation#Mo...
- mojomark 7y agoI took a look and found plenty of semi-insulators out there, but no peep about what association those materials have to do with taming the gravitational force - or am I missing the point?
- garmaine 7y agoMaybe it means a gravitational insulator?
- jacobreg 7y agoOh the story behind that is a wild ride from start to finish. Babson's sister drowned when they were children, and he decided the real reason that happened is anti-gravity technology wasn't sufficiently advanced to prevent her drowning. He spent a large amount of his philanthropy funding anti-gravity research for the rest of his life. Edit: Just realized this is mentioned in the article you linked.
- wolfd 7y agoIt's still worth a call-out. The other line in the article that always gets me is "Sometimes, attendees [of the Gravity Research Foundation] sat in chairs with their feet higher than their heads, to counterbalance gravity." It feels like absurd lore in Fallout, but probably actually happened.
- hackerbabz 7y agoWhy did he think to mention airplanes? The whole concept of airplanes would be obsolete with anti-gravity.
- saalweachter 7y agoI feel like in 40% of SF stories it will at one point be important that your spaceship not have the glide ratio of a buttered brick, even if it has an antigravity drive.
- regularfry 7y agoDepends on the nature of the anti-gravity drive. If it's like an engine, which needs some sort of process to operate, then yes, it can fail to work and you want a backup system. If it's a specific material, which works like a magnet in that the anti-gravity effect is present as a result of the passive configuration of matter, less so.
- saalweachter 7y agoThe Enemy could still shoot and destroy your cavorite plates, or the mechanism which turns them so that it does or doesn't block gravity from the desired direction.