Re: starship-design: Wild thoughts

["Gene Marlin" <rmarlin@network-one.com>]

So, for example, if you could create a
>fiber-optic ring and pump a large amount of laser light into it,
>you would make it heavier; the sum of the energy-momentum vectors
>of all the photons in the ring would add up to an energy-momentum
>vector that has a mass.  The ring also has to exert a centripetal
>force against all the photons bouncing around its outside to keep
>them contained, so eventually you could rupture the ring by
>putting enough photons into it.

Either way, with electrons and photons, tunneling is also an issue. 

Thanks for the information about EM fields and superconductors, too.