iWork

Also as part of my fancy schmancy new job, I get to work ... a lot. Like, say, from 9am - 10pm yesterday. Of course this is paltry labor compared to the lucky souls who work in investment banking, but it's a change of pace for me. And it leaves less time for blogging. Or anything other than sleeping.

That said, check out this craziness about a super-powerful gamma laser:

An exotic molecule built from electrons and antimatter is being touted as a route to powerful gamma-ray lasers.

An electron can hook up with its antiparticle, the positron, to form a hydrogen-like atom called positronium (Ps). It survives for less than 150 nanoseconds before it is annihilated in a puff of gamma radiation. It was known that two positronium atoms should be able to bind together to form a molecule, called Ps₂, and now David Cassidy and Allen Mills from the University of California, Riverside, have made that happen. First, they trapped positrons in a thin film of porous silica. Those positrons captured electrons to form positronium atoms, and the pattern of decay rates signalled that some of these atoms had teamed up to form Ps₂ (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature06094).

If positronium atoms could be forced to merge into a kind of "super-atom" condensate, it would decay in bursts of identical gamma rays, which could lead to gamma-ray lasers a million times more powerful than standard lasers. "It's like comparing a chemical explosion with a nuclear explosion," Cassidy says.

From issue 2621 of New Scientist magazine, 18 September 2007, page 23

Sweet. Maybe when I'm done with this job, I can work for a company making gamma laser cannons mounted on gravitomagnetic platforms. And I'll get to ride my unicorn to work every morning.

Anti-gravity?

So what if I'm a huge nerd who likes speculative scientific findings. This report from NewScientist last November discusses findings from some European scientists funded by the European Space Agency that spinning superconductors twist space-time in a manner 17x more powerfully than predicted by Einstein. So what you ask? Here's the money paragraph from NewScientist (i.e. the only paragraph I truly understood):

The results could be out in a year or so. If they are positive, it puts the technology of science fiction on the horizon. Levitating cars, zero-g playgrounds, tractor beams to pull objects towards you, glassless windows that use repulsive fields to prevent things passing through. Let your imagination run riot: a gravitomagnetic device that works by changing the acceleration and orientation of a superconductor would be the basis for a general-purpose force field.

So far, there's nothing I could find that confirms the work done by these Europeans, but if you want to read some crazy conspiracy theories and reports of a gravitomagnetic device that "punches through brick walls" you can go here.

Despite all the sci-fi fanboy fantasy, there is some real science behind this, as demonstrated by Gravity Probe B, now orbiting the earth. Early results show that Einstein's predicted gravitomagnetic effect exists. The question, can it be effectively amplified by superconductors, and, furthermore, when are they going to put spinning superconductors in my sneakers?

UPDATE: In thinking about this, I remembered this story from the Chicago Tribune about the airline workers who claimed to have seen a UFO that left an "eerie hole in overcast skies." I'm no physicist, but that hole would be consistent with a directed gravitational force that acts on anything with mass, like water vapor. Spooooky.