The Future And You -- March 6, 2013

Dr. James K. Woosley (physicist and lecturer) is our featured guest.

Topic: Areas within particle physics which still offer the promise of discoveries in the near and distant future. Some of these discoveries may yield new energy sources to power our growing civilization, or the propulsion methods needed for interstellar travel to become reality. Some may even allow us to engineer our way around the light barrier and build faster-than-light spacecraft.

Sub-topics Dr. Woosley covers: Antimatter, Tachyons (particles that can only travel faster than light), Neutrinos, Quarks, Quantum Chromodynamics, String Theory (manifolds and membranes), higher and lower dimensions of space, Supersymmetry, Preons, the Rishon Model (by Haim Harari), and a bit about the Higgs Boson.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 6, 2013 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 66 minutes] These audio segments were recorded on June 21, 2012 in Chattanooga Tenn, at the science fiction and fantasy convention LibertyCon.

Dr. James K. Woosley received his bachelors in Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics from Western Kentucky University. From Vanderbilt he received a masters in electromagnetic analysis of nerve impulses, and a doctorate in experimental particle physics. After which he went on to a career in the aerospace industry in Huntsville.

[Side note:] Dr. Woosley's description of preon theories surprised me because I had created a preon theory myself back in the 1980s and 1990s, though I did not call it a preon theory since I'd never heard of such a thing. I called my fundamental particle a pip, and described in detail how all the known subatomic particles were made of pips and nothing else; as well as how the fundamental forces of nature were created by the behaviour of pips and nothing else. In the mid 1990s I tried to get some attention for my theories by mailing them to a couple of scientific journals, but they were never published. Eventually I used my preon theory as backstory and local color in my novel Skinbrain. I did this by summarizing it into the rantings of an alien physicist being tortured by a human physicist who kidnapped him for his advanced scientific knowledge. If you're curious and wish to read MY version of a preon theory, Skinbrain is available from Amazon, in Kindle format, for just $2.99. The reviews have been excellent. They average four and a half stars.