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Daedalus

On Fri, 25 Jun 1999, brian whatcott wrote:

Ariadne chased him off to the pages of Nature (UK), if I recall,
in the seventies...

Oh yeah? I don't get Nature, and never noticed Daedalus there. Guess
I'll have to hit the library and catch up on his column.

There's an excellent book THE INVENTIONS OF DAEDALUS: A Compendium of
Plausible Schemes, David E. H. Jones, 1982 ISBN 0716714124

Also, amazon.com lists THE FURTHER INVENTIONS OF DAEDALUS, not yet
published. Oh boy!

Among other wonderful crackbrained ideas there's his "gyroscope-
substance" composed of spin-oriented camphor, peristaltic carpets which
clean themselves, ships driven by inversely-propagating bow-waves,
extracting ancient sounds from pottery, and SPHERICAL MOLECULES MADE FROM
GRAPHITE SHEETS!!! Among other things he recommends these for low-drag
lubricants because of their ball-bearing properties. And he wonders about
the feasiblity of placing other molecules within the spherical
carbon-lattice. Yes, Daedalus apparently predicted Buckminsterfullerine.

Just goes to show that if you write down a list of totally ridiculous
crackpot ideas, a small portion of them will hide revolutionary science.

The knotted b-field is on page 146


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