A friend of mine is in the process of developing a magnetic engine. He has build some prototypes and is currently working on developing a better one. Info on this is located at:
I think that this brings up a lot of interesting ideas. One idea that clearly comes to mind is that lots of development relating our concepts of atoms connect - in a somewhat indirect way to the idea of magnetism, though it is a bit difficult to see that clearly. So one interesting thought on this line is scaling the idea of a magnetic engine - to the nano-engineering level. I'm not sure what has been done directly in that way.
Otherwise, I don't have a lot of details on it other than what is on this site.
Gelernter, Kurzweil debate machine consciousness by Rodney BrooksRay KurzweilDavid Gelernter Are we limited to building super-intelligent robotic "zombies" or will it be possible and desirable for us to build conscious, creative, volitional, perhaps even "spiritual" machines? David Gelernter and Ray Kurzweil debated this key question at MIT on Nov. 30.
But that's because you're thinking of software as you know it today, if in fact you have a massively parallel system, as the brain is, with 100 trillion internal connections, all of which are computing simultaneously, and which in fact we can model those internal connections and neurons quite realistically in some cases today. We're still in the early part of that process. But even John Searle agrees that a neuron is basically a machine and can be modeled and simulated, so why can't we do that with massively parallel system with 100 trillion-fold parallelism? And if that seems ridiculous, that is ridiculous today, but it's not ridiculous with the kind of technology we'll have with 30 more doublings of price, performance, capacity, and bandwidth of information technology, the kind of technology we'll have around 2030. These massively parallel systems with the complexity of the human brain, which is a moderate level of complexity, because the design of the human brain is in the genome and the genome has 800 million bytes, but that's uncompressed, has massive redundancies—ALU's repeated 300,000 times. If you apply loss that's compression of the genome, you can reduce it to 30-50 million bytes, which is not simple, but it's a level of complexity we can manage.
> From: Jack Sarfatti > Date: November 12, 2005 1:58:01 PM PST > To: Dan Smith > > > Here is how it all works Dan in a Nutshell: > > The world is a sequence of spontaneous broken symmetries. > > Each time a symmetry is spontaneously broken in the vacuum a new > emergent order of complexity is born. > > Gravity is such an emergent order. > > The vacuum consists of a local coherent part and a local incoherent > (zero point fluctuation) part. > > Both parts, however are nonlocally coherent from the Einstein- > Podolsky-Rosen effect. > > The local coherent part gives Einstein's gravity and inertia of > matter together. The local incoherent part (ZPF) gives both the > repulsive dark energy and the attractive dark matter, which you get > depends upon scale and the strength of the local coherent part's > intensity. > > Einstein's gravity comes from the local coherent part's "Goldstone > Phase". > > Inertia of leptons & quarks (the building blocks of real matter of > atoms ... us) comes from the square root of the intensity of the > local coherent part AKA Higgs field. > > The Portal is a special structure in the Einstein geometrodynamical > field made stable and possible by the manipulation of dark energy. > The latter can be done directly by SUPER MIND because MIND is a > PHYSICAL FIELD and INNER CONSCIOUSNESS is a PROPERTY of that > PHYSICAL MACRO-QUANTUM FIELD with SIGNAL NONLOCALITY. > > Parallel universes are also special structures in the > geometrodynamical field. There is nothing supernatural here. It is > your primitive mind that mistakenly thinks this is supernatural UT > beyond physics. Hell Dan I don't need UT to get scared. Just tell > me a ghost story. The point is that one's emotional responses to > this stuff DON'T MATTER when you want to understand REALITY! > >
