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Every so often there is a buzz that someone has made a stunning break through in the Physical Sciences and achieve something wondrous. Antigravity, a space warp, cold fusion, action at a distance or some such. There are persistent rumors that people who know better than us are seriously researching exotic physics and indeed physics is become so bizarre that it would take a really arrogant person (such as the English scientists who declared the end of Physics after Newton had enunciated his laws of motion) to say any of these things are really truly impossible. There is a sort of suspicion that if we can’t go through the problem maybe we can go round it.
The latest example of this is the so called Emdrive developed initially by a small English company SPR (Satellite Propulsion research) Ltd The developer Roger Shawyer has good credentials and does not seem a lunatic but that has not stopped a lot of people some of them very well qualified themselves responding to a recent article in New Scientist with a mixture of scorn outrage and the scientific version of frothing at the mouth. This is because the claim if true will transform space travel and given that the Chinese have taken up the idea ahead of the rest of the space faring world it will see the Chinese with a healthy lead in a radical new development.
The Chinese team has purchased rights to part of the process and claims to have verified the theory and made progress with its practical application since June 2007. The team headed by Professor Yuan at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in Xi’an is building a thruster based on Shawyer’s theories scheduled to be completed by end of this year.
The device that has sparked their interest is an engine that generates thrust purely from electromagnetic radiation – microwaves to be precise – by exploiting the strange properties of relativity. It has no moving parts, and releases no exhaust or noxious emissions. Potentially, it could pack the punch of a rocket in a box the size of a suitcase. It could one day replace the engines on almost any spacecraft. More advanced versions might allow cars to lift from the ground and hover. It could even lead to aircraft that will not need wings at all. One can’t help thinking that it sounds too good to be true.
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Swiss deploy glass airliner

Stealth tech spied at Geneva airport

A certain Harry Lime once famously explained that “in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance”, whereas in Switzerland they had “brotherly love … 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”.

Well, it’s taken them a while, but the Swiss have finally challenged this uncharitable analysis of their contribution to human advancement with the deployment of a sensational glass airliner, spotted mid-cloak down at Geneva aiport:

A semi-transparent airliner on the tarmac at Geneva airport

The Swiss are not normally noted for their transparency, as their banking system attests, but this technological marvel is a clear challenge to the US’s own cloaked aircraft, reportedly used to carry out rendition flights to Guantanamo without attracting the attention of pesky pinko-liberal human rights activists.

Quite what use Switzerland will make of its invisible air transportation remains to be seen, although it seems the ideal method for clandestine export of cuckoo clocks to Third World dictatorships and the Axis of Evil.

From From Theregister.co.uk/2007/09/07/glass-airliner