Persistent
Top Posts
-
Recent Posts
- Innovations of the Big Dig 3 – Scheme-Z => Zakim Bridge, Conclusion
- Innovations of the Big Dig 2 – Slurry, Jacking, Freezing
- Innovations of The Big Dig 1 – the Concept
- Obscure Creators of the World #2: Robert Dennard
- The Invention of Lawn Inflatables
- Where is Nobel-Winning Science Done?
- Tech Crime Seems On the Rise
- “Oppenheimer” and the Limits of Scientific Influence
- Space Has Become Cheap
- Hawaii – Land of Peril
-
Join 31 other subscribers
Meta
Archives
Tag Cloud
- avatar-ish
- best-lists
- big-tech
- Big Dig
- electric-cars
- energy-ish
- hypatia
- infrastructure
- inventing
- mad-science
- mit-ish
- movie-ish
- movie-ish political-ish
- obscure-creators-of-the-world
- people-and-numbers
- political-ish
- sf-ish
- solar inverters
- space-balloons
- space-ish
- tech-culture
- tech-culture political-ish
- tech-history
- tech-life
- Tech life in New England
Tag Archives: mad-science
Mad Science #7 – Radioactive Lighting
Charles Fraser-Smith had a problem. He had a lot of problems actually; he was the chief gadgeteer for the British espionage agency MI6 during WWII. He was responsible for all the gear that agents would need on the Continent, from … Continue reading
Mad Science #6: Nazi Fusion Fraud
I can’t believe I’ve never come across this story. An actual Nazi scientist, Ronald Richter, was working on an actual super-technology, lithium-hydrogen nuclear fusion, in an actual secret lair, the island of Huemul, surrounded by razor wire, machine guns, and … Continue reading
Mad Science #5: Fluorine-Based Rocket Fuels
One of the purest examples of maniacal engineering is the field of liquid rocket fuels. These chemicals have to contain as much energy as possible, and so are dangerous by definition. A fun and opinionated version of their development … Continue reading
Mad Science #4: Geo-Engineering With Nukes
Nuclear devices, what are they good for? Almost nothing, it turns out. They’re close to useless as weapons, since the goal of war is domination, not destruction. The nuclear powers have been in dozens of wars since 1945, and have … Continue reading
Mad Science #3: Land Mine Follies
Two stories of mad science this time about this vicious class of weapons, and one about how they ought to be done: Radioactive Nazi Land Mines Like Mad Science #1, the first story comes from Atomic Adventures (2017) by James … Continue reading
Mad Science #2 – Zapping ICBMs with Nuke-Induced Radiation Belts
Another great recent source of crazed science stories is Sharon Weinberger’s thorough and refreshingly skeptical history of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, The Imagineers of War. DARPA has been all the rage for the last few years because … Continue reading
Mad Science #1 – Soviet Space Station Rayguns
I’ve been reading a lot of juicy stories about completely crazed projects recently, so I’d like to pass some on. These were projects that made sense to someone at the time, but were really awful ideas, ones that you can … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 