R. I. A. R.

The machine [from the movie Contact]
gvg908

I was talking earlier about how stuff accumulates and how it is a constant battle to keep from getting buried by all your stuff.

Now we come to my Dad's papers. We lived in Seattle up until I was in the 6th grade. Dad was an aerospace engineer working Boeing. He worked on inertial guidance systems, which made use of gyroscopes. Gyroscopes bothered my Dad, it really bugged him the way a gyro could apparently defy gravity by only being supported on one end. It bugged him so much that he convinced himself you ought to be able to make a machine that could completely defy gravity, if you just did the right things with some rotating weights. 

He called the machine RIAR for Radial Impulse something something. The basic idea was that you could swing a weight on a long radius in an overhead arc and that would generate an impulse in the upward direction, and then at the end of the arc, the radius would become very much shorter so it would return upward much quicker than the first arc, so the downward impulse would be much shorter. Since the upward arc was longer than the downward arc, the upward force would be larger and if would lift itself into the air, i.e. you would fly. 

Problem is that while shorter radius means quicker turnaround is also means more centrifugal force. So depending on how you looked at the problem, and how you finessed the trajectory of the weight, you could convince yourself that it should work. Or you could be stuck in the Newtonian physics box and conclude that it wouldn't work. My Dad built one model, and while it did move, it didn't fly and wasn't convincing. I bought some materials like 40 years ago with the intention of building my own model, but I never got a round toit. It wouldn't be too tough, all it would take is a bottle git-it-done.

Anyway, my Dad left behind a couple of boxes of papers covered with diagrams, drawings, equations and notes. I've sort of been meaning to sit down and look through them, but it would take getting my head in the right space to deal with it. I feel like I should at least look through the papers, see if there is anything that looks like it is worth preserving. I suspect most of it is just chicken scratches, notes made while he was thinking. And it has the potential to suck me in and I'll end up spending days going through them. Gaah! Meanwhile the two boxes are riding around in the trunk of my car. We are full up inside.