[net.bizarre] This is serious!

peter@kitty.UUCP (Peter DaSilva) (08/09/85)

> This area of research brought to mind another potential problem.  Let's say
> that NASA comes up with a spacecraft which can travel at or near the speed of
> light.  Do its on-board computers get slower and slower as the magical velocity

Reminds me of some of my weirder brainstorms, like a substance made of a
crystal of charged black holes (charge opposed gravity). Won't work, of
course, unless they're black-hole monopoles (:->). But boy talk about a rigid
structure! Also you could dope it with bigger holes & make a hell of an optical
computer... run real slo, though, because of the time dilation near the event
horizons.

jnw@mcnc.UUCP (John White) (08/11/85)

> Reminds me of some of my weirder brainstorms, like a substance made of a
> crystal of charged black holes (charge opposed gravity). Won't work, of
> course, unless they're black-hole monopoles (:->). But boy talk about a rigid
> structure! Also you could dope it with bigger holes & make a hell of an optical
> computer... run real slo, though, because of the time dilation near the event
> horizons.

I once had an idea where a ferro-electric substance is used as the gate
insulator of a dynamic ram (possibly over a very thin gate oxide).
Then it won't have to be refreshed and it would be non-volital.
Also, a slow, wafer size version could be made and used as a super-fast
hard disk. (bad rows mapped out like bad sectors on a regular hard disk.)
- John N. White <mcnc!jnw>

fred@gymble.UUCP (Fred Blonder) (08/12/85)

	> From: peter@kitty.UUCP (Peter DaSilva)
	> Newsgroups: net.arch,net.micro,net.bizarre
	> Subject: Re: Re: This is serious!
	> Message-ID: <287@kitty.UUCP>
	> 
	> Reminds me of some of my weirder brainstorms, like a
	> substance made of a crystal of charged black holes (charge
	> opposed gravity). . . .  But boy talk about a rigid
	> structure! . . .

Bah! If the charge exactly balances gravity, its effect ought to
decrease according to the inverse-square rule, exactly the same as the
gravity, so it would balance the effect of gravity at any distance. The
charge would cancel out the gravity, so your ``crystal'' would be about
as rigid as a drunk salted slug.
-- 
All characters mentioned herein are fictitious. Any similarity to
actual characters, ASCII or EBCDIC is purely coincidental.

						Fred Blonder (301) 454-7690
						Fred@Maryland.{ARPA,CSNet}
						harpo!seismo!umcp-cs!fred