Re: [OT] Alderson Drive

On Wed, 30 Aug 2000 11:07:50 -0400 Jerry Han <jhan1@home.com> wrote:

> I just got an email from somebody who was looking for information on 
Alderson Drive. According to him, there was a real person named 
Alderson who actually had a scientific basis (accurate or not) that 
Pournelle and other sci-fi authors have used. [...] Has anybody out 
there heard anything about this? Is this true? <

Yes, it's true. Dan Alderson worked (works?) at JPL (I think) and he 
worked out a pseudo-scientific basis on which the Alderson drive is 
based. It requires the existence of a fifth fundamental force and a 
"parallel" universe which has rather different properties to ours -- 
the precise details escape me at present, but see below.

> If so, does anybody have any information pointers on the web? <

No web links or anything like that, but Niven and Pournelle once wrote 
an article for Galaxy which described the work behind a lot of the 
stuff in "A Mote in God's Eye", and what the characteristics of the 
Drive (which were vital to the story) were mentioned there. Only 
qualitative description, though -- I gather that Alderson worked out a 
lot of stuff using some fairly complex equations, but they were only 
mentioned, not quoted. I could scan that bit of the article if your 
mate (or anyone else) is interested. In addition, a bit more can be 
found in the sequel to Mote, "The Gripping Hand"/"The Moat Around 
Murcheson's Eye", in which certain astrophysical aspects of the Drive 
are important.

It was also fun to find that the INSS MacArthur was based on a model 
kit -- and I had the kit! Shame it got left behind when I moved to the 
UK.

Phil, who made a couple of "Imperial" starships not unlike the Mac from 
bits of ESU and NAC ships put together.
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