INTERSTELLAR TECHNOLOGIES PRESIDENT AND CEO, DR. FABRIZIO PINTO, RECEIVES AN HONORARY MENTION FROM THE GRAVITY RESEARCH FOUNDATION FOR HIS LATEST ESSAY ON GRAVITATION InterStellar Technologies Corporation President and CEO, Dr. Fabrizio Pinto, was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Gravity Research Foundation in the Annual Essay Competition for the year 2002. In his paper, entitled “Casimir Force between a Gravitational Field and a Finite Object,” Dr. Pinto discusses his theoretical prediction of the existence of a Casimir force between a gravitational field and an object of finite size placed in such field. Usually the term Casimir force refers to the interaction between two physical boundaries, such as two slabs of material separated by a gap, or two or more fluid layers. The interest in the case of the award-winning paper submitted by Dr. Pinto lies in the fact that the force considered in his entry is between the gravitational field of the Earth and a slab – an effect that results in an additional pressure upon the slab itself. In other words, the presence of the gravitational field of the Earth is shown to modify the electromagnetic zero-point-field so as to produce a compression of the slab although no other material is present. Usually, computations of quantum gravitational effects show these to be well beyond what may be realistically observable in any Earth-based laboratory. On the contrary, Dr. Pinto concludes that, in the case of a microelectromechanical structure, this type of Casimir compression can result in relative effects quite larger than those caused by astrophysical gravitational waves and very possibly measurable. Interestingly, the equations he obtains contain the Planck Length, a quantity considered to play a key role in the quantum structure of space-time. Dr. Pinto’s paper, which received the award in May 2002, represents the latest product of his ongoing interest in the search for environments in which gravitation and quantum field theory converge in phenomena that can realistically be measured. For instance, Dr. Pinto’s paper “On the Role of the Planck Mass in Cold Atom Beam Scattering by a Massive Sphere,” which was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Gravity Research Foundation in the year 2000, contained a description of a ground-based experiment leading to the direct measurement of the Planck Mass, a quantity that typically only appears in such exotic processes as black hole radiation, or in cosmology. In 1994, Dr. Pinto obtained a Third Award from the Foundation for his paper on “Rydberg Atoms as Gravitational-wave Antennas.”

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