Yes, it would be preferable to have a voluntary 'charity' for research into high frontier tech. Profits enjoyed by investors when they occur of course.

this is wonderful;; Thanks!

I'm still trying to figure out how to use my kilowatt
ham radio to slow people down on our little county
road! -- j

p.s. I might just use my kilowatt sound system
to call out Twenty-Five Miles Per Hour as they
cruise through at forty.

This is cool stuff. Commercially similar technology is the plasma speaker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyVTvtgm...

This speaker creates a shock wave from the arc, which is modulated to create the sound. It has the benefit of being a "mass-less" driver, with essentially no dynamics to color sound at high frequency. It was developed in the 50's, but had the negative problem of making a lot of ozone (good for UV, bad for people).

High powered arc generators have been developed to generated electric fields like an EMP. They typically rely on a Marx generator, which uses a bunch of low voltage sources (capacitors), that are quickly put in series with a set of spark gaps, to produce a very high voltage. This high voltage is used with an antenna to produce a concentrated high electric field. This field can destroy electronic devices and even shut down engines.
Toy examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkL_OQhJ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lTw7box...

It seems Boeing is doing something of this kind with beam forming to produce controlled shock waves to counter an incoming shock wave.

Not really a force field, but an active response to a sensed, effect. Clever idea, and clever marketing. A ways off.

A little more mature technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtMgnRMI...
Very effective for asymmetric threats. Necessity is the mother of invention. Leave it to the Israelis to develop and field such a practical thing.

GE hasn't been a real military tech player for a long time.

I was one of those sadomasochistic programming types who enjoyed machine language, octal, and hexadecimal, tolerated Fortran and C++, generally hated any structured code, and loathed Ada.

It's not exactly "star wars" force fields... or even close.

It's just an idea based on the physics of pressure waves. Apparently they rapidly superheat the air in a specific area to redirect the pressure wave from an explosive blast, in theory keeping the human being (behind armor for the shrapnel that still hits them) from being ripped apart from the pressure wave.

I've tried to write Ada. The manual defining the language was written by a committee of lawyers, in heavy-duty lawyerese. Gag!!

True as far as it goes, but Boeing certainly has a few people I'd like to persuade to shrug.

Bingo! But that is why it is so important to say Boeing == Force Fields. It is like saying NASA == warp drive (which they are experimenting with). It opens the door, gives permission, to legitimate investigations by private parties (where qualitative breakthroughs may occur...though, given the cost of physics the breakthroughs may be in mathematics rather than in physics).

Jan

I hope so.

"young physicists are bluntly told that if they evidence interest in cold fusion it will cost them their careers"

Until they prove it works and change the name of the effect.

Not effective against shrapnel, I think, only partially from the concussion wave of the explosion.
Not effective in the political sense either ;^)
I think that's a controlled media efffect.

Thanks for the helpful analysis, scojohnson.

Thanks. Of course the military will survive.

No shockwave with EMP, it's electromagnetic and more or less travels at the speed of light, so by the time it could be detected, the damage would already be done. There are other ways to protect against that, the military has had EMP-shielded avionics / computers / weapons systems for years. The civilian systems & power grid are the vulnerability there.

Does /will this technology work for EMP bombs? Seems to me protecting the grid from EMP strikes is a big deal.

The most important aspect of this article is that it has removed the 'silly SF' stigma from the viable concept of 'force fields'. There may be commercial ventures into this area, now that it is considered legitimate science. (The negative labeling of effective-FTL and cold fusion have significantly impeded any development in those areas. I have read that young physicists are bluntly told that if they evidence interest in cold fusion it will cost them their careers.)

Jan

I see. In other words, it intercept a shock wave from a high explosive. And is meant to be manageable enough to protect a cavalry vehicle, like the HumVee in the accompanying diagram.

A shield like that could protect a ship.

So while you couldn't yet imagine the Gulch having a force field to protect it from a direct bomb strike, Ragnar Danneskjöld would likely equip his ship, and the squadron of fighter/attack planes I'm sure he would carry, with this technology. Imagine the protection from flak.

Came to the same conclusion, but its still the first step in an actual energy barrier.

Deflecting tornadoes from towns? The monster that ripped through Tuscaloosa missed my home by a quarter of a mile further on by Birmingham.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=plea...

I'm suddenly thinking of invention ideas on that last page of Popular Science. Some of those are funny many years later.
I'm also thinking of people suing a town because a deflected tornado took out their farms and rural trailer parks.

The Internet was a military invention (originally called "ARPANET" after the Advanced Research Projects Agency), as were many of the efforts to miniaturize and ruggedize electronic components. Efforts to standardize communications busses were originally military efforts. Where we quickly lost the lead to the commercial industry was in advanced software languages, with the last effort to standardize was with "Ada". I can easily see these force fields being offered by the armored limousine companies, leading to commercial efforts to improve on them quickly following.

That is partially accurate. There are several sources of military 'game changing' technology. The first and obvious is R&D procurement contracts. The federal government really isn't in the business of employing 10s of thousands of engineers. Rather, they have a few think-tank types (scientists) that come up with some ideas that may turn into a procurement contract that includes research & development for the company to design/build.

The second way is when the facilities such as the Dept of Energy National Laboratories and DARPA come up with something new, and they do kind of a dutch-auction to sell it to the contractor producing the best bid to commercialize the technology - this usually is either some up-front money paid, or could be a payment from the government to take it the rest of the way to a useful product, and then royalties paid to the lab on the patents it may include as a license fee. A substantial part of the budgets for national labs come from that - some are as esoteric as early network security or IT network management concepts and technologies (NMAP, etc.) to more advanced cyber defensive weapons technologies (you would never see our offensive weapons sold that way for national security reasons).

The other aspect of commercialization is when weapons contractors are freed to sell weapon systems to friendly governments - this is usually be executive order and/or legislation, and good examples would be General Dynamics selling guided missile frigates to Taiwan or F16's to Israel and the rest of the free world. We sell old stuff around the world, but it would be decades before say the F22 would be sold out that way. An exception is the Joint Strike Fighter that can be down-scaled in technology as a common platform sold to other NATO/allied countries - common airframe, weapons hard points, and engines for ease of maintenance around the world but only the US version would have advanced counter measures and targeting or our crypto boxes. Of course, the other countries might put their own tech in them after receipt. There is value to us in having common platforms though, in the event of another land war in Europe, not supporting 20 different aircraft with spare parts is quite a bit easier than everyone having their own stuff and we have a lot of different industries to defend.

As for a commercial technology use for this - I really can't think of one, it is somewhat like reactive armor it sounds like that we have used on our tanks for years. For that, an incoming explosion sets off a directed (outward) reactive explosion that repels some of the energy out (or negates it).

In this case, it's using plasma to disrupt a shockwave - which can be demonstrated easily in water I would think, sound waves don't travel well across different densities (thermal layers) under water, and subs use that as a defensive acoustic advantage. If the plasma creates different densities in the air, we can assume the shockwave would be disrupted by whatever measure according to the amount of energy put in. It probably takes a lot of energy though for a rather modest change in explosive energy received. You're looking at next-generation power cells/capacitors, etc., to charge a system like that for the initial discharge. Could probably adapt the non-lethal sonic weapons for something like this as well, may be where they got the idea from.

As designed, this isn't something you would carry around with you like a Jedi Knight on your person, this would take some serious hardware to support. Probably too much for a fighter jet, or you would give up to much performance & agility to house it and would be an overall negative.

Rather, might make an excellent counter-measure on say, Air Force One, against a nearby shrapnel explosion (for example), and would likely make its way into Boeing commercial jets if eventually declassified or something as an anti-terrorism measure.

I suspect we already have much-more capable systems though on board, such as an aircraft-version of a Patriot Anti-Missle Battery, etc.

Yet again "Government" did not build that.

Pretty cool tech. I would note a few things that stood out to me.

1) requirement for atmosphere. The shield's effectiveness is based on the density of the atmosphere in the immediate area between the impending explosion and the vehicle/structure. That means that altitude erodes the effectiveness of this technology. It is in all likelihood completely worthless at normal flight altitudes.

2) it only reduces the effects - it doesn't stop them. It's a good first step, but it can hardly be called a "shield". It's a damper at best.

Just keeping things real.

It stops some energy from nearby explosions from entering the protected area.