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starship-design: Dark Matter




Hi all; no one's heard from me for awhile 'cause I've been busy becoming 
Dr. Ken.  Of course that's no reason to take me any more or less 
seriously...

This is the comment which brought me out of "retirement":

>        Which leads me to a pipedream i had last night.  Given that there
>is a lot of DM out there, thinned out though it may be, a starship >could
>use it as a fuel and/or reaction mass, at least at high speed when the
>flux is higher.  Anyone know of any exotic particles that decay
>covienienly, preferably liberating lots of juice as they do so?


Well, actually...

I don't know if anyone remembers me going off about time-reversed matter 
a few years back, but I've kept thinking about it.  In fact, I've 
written a full paper summarizing my ideas.  The basic motivation is to 
give the universe the same symmetries that the laws of physics already 
have.  The basic conclusion is that a large portion of dark matter 
should be time-reversed photons (with a future boundary condition, or 
"cause", rather than the normal past boundary condition).  If I'm right 
(which I'm almost certainly not) these photons would interact with 
normal matter in a very strange fashion, releasing energy when they hit.  
I've devised an experiment that's capable of proving me wrong, but apart 
from that there's no objective difference between this work and a lot of 
crazy cosmology out there, so I don't expect anyone to take me too 
seriously.

Anyway, the full paper is now online at:

http://members.xoom.com/KenWharton/symm.htm

Figure 4e shows a simple schematic of how this "dark matter" might 
interact with ordinary matter.

If you get bogged down in the paper (a common occurance), a quick summary 
of the concepts can be found here:

http://members.xoom.com/KenWharton/symm2.htm

Hope it's somewhat comprehensible (and that it doesn't ruin my career as a physicist!)

Ken

P.S. I now work with the guy whose thesis concluded that axions exist (this 
was the work done in Italy that someone mentioned).  He told me that he made 
a terrible blunder in his data analysis, and when he re-did the calculations 
the axion effect mostly went away.  He had already graduated at that point, 
but still wasn't too pleased to learn his thesis was totally wrong...