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"To go out on January day and run around on the beach under a golden sun makes a very great change in your outlook on the universe."
- Robert Silverberg
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| Artificial Space-Warp Drive | ||
| Providing the motive power for a ship by creating gravity to fall into. |
Although you can find gravity drives of one sort or another, this is the first use of this illustrative concept in science fiction.
| Stretch out a thin sheet of elastic rubber, Whidden had suggested, and place upon it a number of metal balls of various sizes and weights. Each ball, in proportion to its mass, will distort this two-dimensional rubber sheet into the third dimension, just as gravitating bodies distort our own four dimensional space-time into higher dimensions. The balls on the rubber sheet will roll together, just as masses gravitate together in our familiar space.
The idea now occurred to Whidden: “If I distort the rubber sheet by some other means than the metal balls, as by poking my finger into it, I will have thereby created an artificial gravity. If I move this distortion along, by running my finger along ahead of one of the balls, the ball will follow my finger. Why not then artificially distort space in advance of a space ship, and thereby pull the ship along after the distortion, at any desired speed?! It will be like holding a carrot on a pole in front of a mule’s nose, to induce him to move.”
 (From Artificial Space-Warp Drive ship from 'The Immortality of Alan Whidden' by R.M. Farley) ...Being the same sort of true scientist as his mentor, he too plunged into a mathematical analysis of his hunch; and when he believed that he had deduced the correct formula for an artificial space-wrap [sic], he set about producing it in his laboratory, preferably by electricity. He found the way. He built a small model space-ship. He was able to cause it to set up a disturbance ahead of it, which would make it gravitate in that direction... |
| Technovelgy from The Immortality of Alan Whidden,
by Ralph Milne Farley. Published by Amazing Stories in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the anti-gravity drive from The Last Evolution (1932) by John W. Campbell and the gravity drive from Star Ship (1950) by Poul Anderson.
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