[725] in Professors_Quote_Board
Papadopolous, 6.004
dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (dcctdw@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Mar 9 21:59:26 1993
I'm not going to do this even remotely the justice it deserves, since it
started about halfway through the lecture, but it was absolutely hysterical
and so here goes. :) My apologies in advance; i asked for a script, but
he had a notion of what he wanted to do and was just improvising.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
So, the last half hour of this lecture, I want to review something
for the quiz that I forgot about that the TAs reminded me of. <various
moans/screams from the hall> There's a new family of logic chips called
the FTL logic family. {On the lecture notes, it says 'c.f. R. Daestrum'}
So, you take this chip and put it between two field generators -- now, this
chip needs to be a isolinear gate. Why? <pause -- very blank looks from
the audience> Well, it's because these field generators are producing a
symmetrical subspace field over the chip. <various people, myself
included, start saying Aha...> Right? Right?
{throughout this whole thing, he was playing up the aspect of "this is all
intuitively obvious" by giving us looks of "this is really easy background
stuff" etc... after letting clueless frantic people stew for awhile, he
went on}
Well, ok, what does FTL stand for? <about three people yell out
the right answer> Right! Faster Than Light. So, if we look at the work of
Z. Cochrane, '61... heh, that's 2061... we get this interesting graph.
And what is this a graph of? <points at the lecture notes; the title of
the graph is a blank entry> Oh, c'mon... You mean, none of you know this?
It's Warp Drive Theory! Right--
{and immediately jumps into this explanation, which i was laughing too hard
to really remember}
So, let's go back to the chip. Why does the subspace field need to
be symmetric? <various people flail about; the most coherent was "because
that way you can power the cloaking device!"> No! Because a symmetric
field is non-propulsive! <half the people get it; the other half are
totally lost> Well, you know that with warp drive, you put a non-symmetric
warp field around your ship, but back to this computer.
{at this point, he pulls out overhead slides:
a cutaway diagram, showing the computer assembled on several decks,
with an attached subspace generator column
modules of the computer, including I/O from sensors, terminal
access points, dual main computers, plus a backup engineering computer
physical placement of the main components, noting how in a saucer
separation, how the saucer would have the dual computers and engineering
would still have theirs...}
Well, this brings us to a big problem. {The lecture notes say:
"How do we cross the subspace domain for c > 1?"} We have this FTL
computer in its subspace domain. And over here, we have normal logic, for
terminals and workstations. And in between, we have this optical data
link. So, the lossage we have here is not noise -- noise is gone. Since
it's optical, a blue databit here <pointing to FTL side> would appear over
here as... <a few people shout out the right answer> right, red. So, the
lossage is dominated by... right, Doppler shift.
{at which point, he showed a compressed version of an original series
episode -- the one with the M5 computer}
