Moving Things We are starting to learn new things in science which could lead to answers we have been seeking for quite some time. One of these things is the fact light can move objects. Yeah, I know this sounds impossible, but it is true. A test was conducted in a laboratory where a laser was on one side of a track and a moving mirror on the other. The mirror moved toward the end of the track, it was being pulled back by a rubber band. When the laser fired at the mirror, the mirror slowed down and eventually stopped. The photons shot at it were able to stop the mirror proving light can stop, move or lift objects. One might ask what good is this and the answer would have to be it can be useful and may have been useful in the past. Think of this, using a laser engine to power a spaceship where not much push is needed to propel a spacecraft. Another use might be to move heavy objects in space. Could something like this have been used by ancient people to move huge rocks? What we have here may be the beginnings of a tractor beam. In case you don’t know what I am referring to, in Star Trek the spaceship Enterprise was fitted with a tractor beam, a device which could tow other ships and move big objects. So many things from Star Trek have become real devices. Another way to move objects is by using sound. This is called acoustic levitation. Much the same way as objects can be moved by light they can also be moved by sound. Both light and sound travel in waves. The University of Tokyo has been working on this for years and so have other labs. An area is surrounded by speakers and an object is put in the center. If the object is small and light it will remain in the air being held up by the sound waves. Some people suspected the ancients may have found a way to move things with sound using a simpler method since they had no electronics. An older method of moving objects without actually touching them is with magnets. This method has been studied for a very long time. It has recently been applied to transportation. Maglev trains are appearing everywhere. The train tracks have magnets on them with a pole facing up. Under the train are magnets with the repelling pole facing down. The magnets never actually touch and the train is propelled by turning the electronic magnets on and off moving the train forward. At one time magnets were thought to be magical. Maglev means magnetic levitation. Arthur C. Clark once said if technology was sufficiently advanced those who saw it for the first time would think it was magic. Here is a question for you, could the ancients have used magnets to move heavy rocks? Most would say no because the magnets they had, such as lode stone were not powerful enough. It could be however they knew of deposits which were much more powerful and this knowledge has been lost over the ages like many other things. Figuring out how to move objects has been going on since the first caveman tried to figure out how to move a large rock. Humans are pretty good at it. It is still a mystery to us how the ancients built structures some of which had stone which weighed over 100 tons. This mystery does not only apply to the past. When the Coral Castle was built in Florida from huge pieces of coral by one man who claimed he only used a rope and tackle scientists wanted to know how he really did it. To add insult to injury one night he moved the entire structure a few miles away by himself claiming he used a pickup truck. I don’t think there is anyone who believed this was possible. We have managed to develop some pretty powerful machines for moving things by mechanical means. The Belaz 75710 is the world’s biggest dump truck. It can haul over 450 metric tons in one trip. It is basically used mostly in mining. Belaz is a Canadian company which specializes in heavy equipment. To give you an idea of how much the average long bed dump truck hauls it is about 25 tons. This means the Belaz can hold as many as 18 trucks meaning it saves a heck of a lot of trips. For years the preferred method for moving things was getting them onto a boat and floating them down a river or even over the ocean. It was recently found the ancient Egyptians used boats held together not by nail or pegs but by ropes. These boats were strong enough to carry the blocks of stone which were used to build the pyramids at Giza. The Egyptians would build dams and when the Nile flooded the would have a wide canal dug and let the water into it so their boats could get close to the construction site. It was very ingenious. At one time steam power was the accepted way to move things. Huge steam powered shovels were used to move material. These can be seen in photos of the construction of the Panama Canal. Steam shovels were used all over the world. Steam was also the main way to move people by mechanical means for quite a few years. We kept building steam powered train engines and making them bigger and more powerful until finally diesel and diesel electric took over. Does this remind you of anything we are doing today? Rocket power is the primary way for moving people and cargo into space and as we did with the steam engines of yesteryear the rocket keep getting more powerful and bigger and they probably will continue to do this until a new and more efficient technology is found. The same is true in other areas such as the building of scientific telescopes. If we go back to ancient times the big breakthrough in moving objects came when someone decided a strong animal was more efficient to use to move an object than a man. In places like India and Africa where there were elephants this must have been incredible to those people since an elephant is so big and strong. In most of the ancient world horses were used to move objects and even today our engines are measured in horsepower. There will always be things which have to be moved. It could be dirt, rocks, household goods or even people.
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