The Intergalactic JCB

The thousand different shades of green I can see outside the window are quite breathtaking, as I daydream away over this keyboard wondering when inspiration might find its way in to my fingers.

There are no diggers working away anywhere in my vicinity thank the stars, but for some reason I have a vision of one visible between the birch trees, a savage looking JCB digging up the bowling green, scattering brown earth and burnt umber onto the palette. It shakes its jaws and more lightweight matter is dispersed into the damp atmosphere.

And then it came to me. Instead of having a mere artisan JCB digging in the dirt, could you have a more sophisticated intra dimensional digger, carving its way through space time? Tunnelling like the Eurostar to the galactic destination of your choice?

It would require colossal energy, perhaps akin to that of a Black Hole, perhaps even powered by one, to operate, and would have jaws the size of a medium sized asteroid. Its teeth however are as small as quarks, and move like a quantum chain saw as they slice the fabric of space apart.

The more it digs, the more it sinks into a well in space-time of its own creation, a relativistic jet of super energetic matter indicating where it once sat on the surface of the universe. The navigating entity, man or machine, uses complex multi dimensional spinor mathematics to plot a path through the rent in space, and although the process takes forever relative to the machine, it takes place out of time and thus to observers takes no time at all before it carves its way back to the surface again, at the chosen destination in whichever galaxy, or indeed universe, of choice.

The passengers are now ready to embark in the shuttle vehicle, to fall out of our space, only to re-emerge to here knows when, to see wonders beyond imagination.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01/10/2013

To Lick a Quantum

The Dimension X story I listened to the other day, featuring a male dissident and a typically attractive woman, involved people being reduced to a size way beyond the sub-atomic, and living their lives on a planet like electron orbiting a nucleus.

In the space of ten of our seconds, Einsteinian time dilation caused them to spawn an entire - presumably rather inbred - race that reached a glorious peak before dying out to leave one last message for folk in the our-scale reality.

*Note - Dimension X and X Minus 1 need an article to themselves one day.*

For some reason, this made me think about the curious property known as Quantum Flavour Number...

Sub atomic particles indeed have a flavour - leptons can be flavoured as electrons, tau particles or muons, ditto their corresponding neutrinos. Quarks are flavoured according to charm, strangeness, topness and bottomness.

As ever, this is essentially made up stuff designed to cover up  immensely complex mathematics and the all but beyond understanding properties of these particles. You could call them "banana, strawberry, blackcurrant and lime" and it wouldn't make a difference.

But what if it really did? What if all the quarks, neutrinos and leptons did actually taste of something. Imagine being shrunk down to a size by which relative to you, an electron is the size of a lollypop. Lick it! Perhaps you might get a jolt of electric charge to add to the experience, but then the flavour bursts through. Is it sharp and citrusy? Or sweet and mellow. Will sucking the cranberry flavoured charmed quark ease an acid bladder? Perhaps a blueberry flavoured tau super neutrino will de-fur your arteries, and reduce your risk of a heart attack?

But the crazy thing is, even this wild surmising is nowhere near as fantastic as the universe of the super small actually is. I don't understand it, and I suspect the number of people on the planet who really do is barely in double figures.

It's a mad universe, however it tastes.

Leeloo and Creating the Perfect Woman

In "The Fifth Element" - one of my favourite films ever, and one that inspired my sister to create an award winning cocktail - Bruce Willis is on the phone to his cab company manager describing the state of his love life after his wife left him.

"I don't want any woman...I want the perfect one" he states, or words to that effect.

Luckily for him, perfection in the form of "Leeloo Dallas Multipass" crashes out of the sky through the roof of his flying taxi, and immediately he has found her. Thus his perfect woman is a tall, orange yellow haired supreme being, created to fight the ultimate evil in the universe, and with a nice line in wearing bandages.

The perfect woman is of course a myth, in fact people's imperfections are far more interesting than what is perfect. I find the idea of perfection to be rather bland and boring - Lucian Freud would have been a very boring artist if all he'd painted were perfect people, and if the universe were perfect, we and nothing else in it would exist.

But should you be that hung up on the idea of having a relationship with "The Perfect Woman", as I see it, you have three options.

1) Accept that perfection is unattainable, and settle for the imperfect woman best suited to you, and enjoy a  happy relationship.

2) Accept that perfection is unattainable, and decide that rather than settle for anything less you will settle for a life of monastic purity untained by fleshy desires.

3) Accept that perfection is unattainable BY NORMAL MEANS, and take up a career following women around, kidnapping them. and surgically harvesting their best bits in a cellar of torment soundproofed to conceal the screams. Thus, in the 19th century gothic novel manner, you can create the perfect woman from lots of bits of others. The drawback to this is the fundamental illegality, and the fact that you never quite know whether you have harvested an abnormal brain or not, turning your Natalie Portman faced, Jennifer Connelly busted creation into a psyschopath with nothing on its mind apart from THE EXTERMINATION OF LIFE!!!!!!

I leave the choice to you.

Copyright Bloody MUlberry 26.06.13

CONCEPT - Oscillations Through the Earth

The most exclusive club on earth is The Polar Parachutist Club. These Polar Parachutists are unique, in that their particular descending-under-silk past-time takes place without any actual parachutes.

Instead, a diamond drill of non-terrestrial design, operating in a high energy oscillating tensor gravitational field, cores the earth like an apple from pole to pole.

Wearing a quantum heat proof suit, they just jump from the north pole, and travel through the earth's core to the south pole, the tips of their heads emerging from Antarctica, before gravity snatches them back the other way.

This continues, a simple harmonic oscillation like a spring until the jumper arrives at equlibirium rest at the centre of the earth, before they are hauled out on carbon nanotube lines, to share a beer and vodka with his or her friends, and reminisce about their amazing adventures, right through the centre of the earth.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23/06/2013

CONCEPT - The 11th Dimensional Universe Printer

This is something that does exactly what it says on the (very large) tin.

Rather than make your own personal design of mug, or copies of Richard III's skull, the 11 Dimensional printer makes Universes to your own specification.

What you need is a very very high energy environment, and a method of producing an anti (or inverse) gravitational field that leaks back into the 11th dimension from where our gravity originates, according to theory.

The printer utilises the holes punched into Dimension Number 11 by the inverse gravitational force, and washes backwards and forwards across the interface forcing exotic particles through the divide, and into their new environment, an inflationary bubble within the brane multiverses; a new universe.

Customise your universe how you want. Do you want the value of Pi to be 4, or 2, or 222? No problem, the 11th dimensional printer can handle this. Do you want gravity to work backwards, a planet the size of Jupiter to be as light as a feather, and a feather itself to crush you if you try and stand up on it? All yours. Gold shall burn like coal, and lead balloons shall float to the edge of atmosphere like the dispersing seeds of a dandelion. Superstrings the size of bass strings shall vibrate the fundamental particles of your universe. And one day life shall evolve, and what oh what form shall it take?

It all depends what bits you throw in the mixer.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 29/04/13

CONCEPT - Sailing the interstellar wind

I was in a reflective mood the last couple of days, so I day dreamed myself out of the solar system, and set myself adrift on the winds of deep space; a silent lonely drift, but a perfectly peaceful one where you could enjoy the beautiful universe undisturbed for all eternity.

It is the case that as I write, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are in the process of crossing the Heliopause, the point at which the solar wind is overcome by the prevailing forces produced by the the stars and cosmic rays. Although arguments continue as to what degree if at all the craft have finally crossed it, this is regarded as the edge of the solar system, the beginning of deep, endless space.

And how would I like to explore it.

Of course, I cannot, but I dreamed up a vehicle that could. It would perhaps launch and journey outward like a Voyager, designed to produce high end science of whichever solar system bodies it encounters, and powered by an ion drive for long term thrust.

But as it crossed the Heliopause, marked by a change in "wind" direction and an increase in galactic cosmic rays, the nature of the craft would change. A set of gigantic, charged particle sensitive sails would emerge, thrust would be turned off, and the craft would use the gentle thrust of the prevailing radiation to sail down stream, out into interstellar space. It would feature a longer lasting nucelar power source than the Voyagers, enabling a more powerful transmitter to be used, enabling earth to remain in contact longer with the craft and perhaps the sails could be used to harness the power of cosmic rays and the solar wind to provide a little extra power.

And on and on, until the end of time, shall the interstellar ship sail upon the galactic trade winds, perhaps with my ashes upon it. Who knows?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/04/13

CONCEPT - The Solar Lighthouse

I was in a mood for thinking today, and as I sat scrawling in green biro in my notebook - like Kingsley Amis' demonic LS Caton - a few interesting ideas came to me as I stared at my fruity tea bag leaking bits like a demonstration of entropy.

Question; assuming we decide that the risk of  "How to serve man" or rampaging martian tripod scenarios is low enough, how do we signal our existence to whatever lifeforms on Goldilocks zone planets there might be?

We can send space probes with cutesy drawings or gramaphone records on - bad luck if our aliens have reached the mp3 stage like we have - or we can wait for our radio and tv signals to leak out into space far enough, by which time they would be so weak as to be incomprehensible.

OR you could make our solar system into a lighthouse.

I figured, as I sat scrawling over my sievable cherry and vanilla tea, that you could costruct an enormous reflective surface, or perhaps rather a flexible array of many many mirrors, or even nano-reflectors (I'm not a scientist!). This orbits the sun in such a way that the sun is at the focus of the reflector, and thus its light can be beamed in selected directions. Perhaps a form of lensing could be added to intensify the light, I have no idea.

It would be perhaps best to site the array out above the north or south solar pole to avoid interfering with our sleeping rhythms and is out of the reach of most asteroids.

So yes, initially I thought this would be a method of sending powerful morse type signals to selected targets. You move the array around as required, and then control the signal by changing the alignment of the individual reflecting surfaces so at times they are perpendicular, essentially, to the sun's light. But then I also thought you could use it for perhaps lighting and warming selected solar system bodies, perhaps as part of a terraforming process.

Anything else? Well, it could provide impetus for a solar-sail powered craft. It could even, perhaps, deflect asteroids away from the earth by the phenomenon of radiation pressure. It cant be that much more far fetched than painting half of such an asteroid white to save humanity.

It might also be totally pointless, an impossible to construct folly borne of idle thought by a writer with a wonky cuppa. But I love thinking these things up! And (I hope) bigger cranks than me have changed the course of our existence...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/04/2013