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Everyone talks about the Bermuda Triangle,
but no one warns you about its colder, weirder cousin.
In the heart of Alaska lies the Alaska Triangle, where planes disappear, hikers vanish,
and the only thing that shows up reliably is my Wild Alaskan Company seafood box.
I'm being serious here, guys.
I definitely don't trust flying over portals, but I do trust this fish.
Most seafood?
I can't even look at it without wondering if it was farmed in a glowing vat near a nuclear power plant.
But this fish, 100% wild caught, flash frozen off the boat,
delivered straight to my door like it teleported through one of Eric Davis' wormholes,
Just real fish.
I don't quite know.
But something that transcends kind of our chemical combustion modalities that will take us interstellar.
I think I know enough about electrostatics to say that, but we're always still learning.
So there was an incident that trapped 11 people in a spin test facility where they accidentally set off a rocket, a solid rocket.
So Kennedy Space Center has kind of led this effort to study this phenomena and test it.
So what we've done is we've understood some of the needs for NASA that are in the electrostatics realm.
For example, the dust mitigation aspect.
So we can embed that into glass.
with size.
It has to do with dynamics.
It's fascinating.
Yeah, I always found it interesting that Townsend Brown, along with his thruster work, which, you know, involved, you know, what he thought would lead to interstellar travel.
Just anything.
I mean, just to the moon.
I don't know if you know this.
Yeah, he is my mentor, so that's where I learned electrostatics.
That's wild, but he saw your experiment, and he was like, oh my God, there's something else here.
Never did.
What'd she do there?
She's in the launch services program.
You encase the darn tube.
But could, could the 10 million of thrust turn into newtons of thrust?
And could we end up launching things into space with this, you know,
What are the ideal materials for this sort of experiment?
Well, we're dealing with high voltage, so we need materials with high dielectric breakdown
I don't know what the results of those were.
They weren't particularly interesting.
And so it's fascinating.
Coolant forces are the biggest killer in vacuum or in air.
It's so interesting.
If you look to the bottom right of the screen, you'll see the voltage that is applied.
You can also see the current in the center, the electric field, and the runtime.
But the ITO walls that surround the thruster pack, shown by that clear, transparent plastic, is perfectly grounded.
So that eliminates Coulomb attraction to the wall.
DC eliminates a lot of that.
Yeah.
And then when you turn it off and it's still there, that eliminates a lot of that.
there's a transient on 11% of those days.
But if there's been a nuclear test the day before,
So that 11% versus 19% is about a 68% increase in risk for a transient if you've had a nuclear test.
This has been very helpful.
Because people have done this.
Oh, cool.
The examiner's office is doing a thorough peer review.
I think it was 11 or 12.
My dad would make haunted houses in our garage in New York.
Really?
What does that even mean?
Make haunted houses in your garage?
Built a haunted house for the hotel that he worked at.
A giant Holiday Inn, I think it was, or Hilton in Connecticut.
And it was a massive haunted house.
And his job was to build the whole darn thing.
So he liked that.
So the next year we did it at our house.
And we charged people like 50 cents to get in and go through the haunted house.
And it was probably, I think it was a 9 by 11 single car garage haunted house.
And we made $1,100.
That's how many people showed up.
It was crazy.
It was a lot of fun.
But, you know, we had a haunted house.
And it would go on for several weeks.
One night, while I was there working it, a whole bunch of cars came into the driveway.
And I recognized one of the kids getting out of the car.
He said, Charlie, go look, look at that.
And he shows me, you know, we look up.
And there's these six bright white lights at the top of the trees.
Just hanging over the trees.
which I thought was hysterical.
Many years later, my wife and I experienced this.
Helicopter hangs over.
Under the water, come back out.
Because I didn't know what the heck that was.
That's wild.
If we went faster, it went faster.
It was mirroring.
And he said that everything that he ever learned about his work, he learned instantly.
I would say, yeah, some of the math is just very discretized.
Oh, we'll try this and big leap there.
And you say you're getting an effect.
Fascinating.
Do you.
I don't know.
But there are a lot of these, you know, what's a good example?
Was this really important factor for determining the thrust in the experiment.
And like.
You know.
An opposite of gravity force.
Yeah.
Or the.
That I don't want to go down.
Like.
Well then you can make a teleportation device.
Hasn't happened.
I mean, if anybody should, you know, deserves it.
What do you mean there's no physicists?
Why am I the only physicist?
Because there's a live arrest warrant out for him now.
Theresa May, former prime minister of the UK, has finally given him kind of, you know,
Um, it's interesting stuff.
You'd be attracted to walls or floors or ceilings.
You have to make sure you're not doing that.
So that's very well explained with Coulomb's Law.
Sure.
Yeah.
So I did not think we needed QC, QCD, quantum chromodynamics, W particles, Z particles.
So they're not real particles.
I said, OK, this is a good model.
So there's already an asymmetry sort of in the charges, even with two charges, which I
thought was useful because I wanted to try to get that with classical dynamics.
But that was the first thing.
And the other thing, there were 12 terms now instead of four.
And when the momentum changes, another momentum is created or absorbed.
First of all, it sounds like you're saying you can get a momentum.
So, you can't have a virtual radiation mode in QED.
So, the basic idea is you can have polynomials, so you can have, you know, a constant term, then a linear term, and then a quadratic term.
And the idea is, if you're doing an approximation, let's…
So, I've seen some of your notes. Obviously, you haven't published something yet, so I haven't…
You know, I looked through what you were able to send me, but I'm just realizing now that you
mentioned time-independent perturbation theory, which wasn't what I was thinking. So, maybe that's
worth disentangling. I'm not saying you necessarily have an error there, but I'm just realizing that now.
No, I mean, I haven't done QED in 26 years.
Yeah, yeah.
So, could use a refresher.
Yeah.
But I was just intrigued by just doing the time-independent perturbation theory and getting
something. I'd love your help translating some of that. The vertices that don't end. I understand
these particles don't… they're not real, right? You can't capture them. But I pictured them more like
electric fields where you can't pull the field from the charge, right?
Huh? Have you now, field line.
It doesn't work that way. And that's what these things, I think, represent. So, that's why we
have things like renormalization, these really complicated tools to try to address these infinities.
A lot of infinities here.
that is a fundamental property of charge. Fields. Which QED, I think, explains quite well. So,
but is it conserving energy? You know, that's what you have to think about. Is it conserving energy?
him publicly. I've seen these results. I've seen him, his iteration rate, first of all, is phenomenal,
right? He's just always testing new things, trying different stacks with different materials and
all this ion wind stuff and that's because you're ionizing the air. So you just remove the air and
do it in vacuum and I'm good, right? No ion wind to worry about. But what if there's ions or electrons