Shopping for a
telescope for your daughter these days can be the starting point for
pondering upon the many millennia that were needed to turn pure technological
fantasies into commercial realities. In the last century, however,
the pace at which new discoveries move from the laboratory to the
store shelf has accelerated incredibly. The goal of the R&D effort
at InterStellar Technologies is to translate abstract quantum vacuum
concepts into commercially viable products within the shortest possible
time.
An
almost ordinary shopping expedition...
In order to
fully appreciate both the challenge and the immense potential of
developing useful and profitable products based upon quantum vacuum
engineering, it may be useful to reflect upon some preliminary historical
and social considerations.
Let us for instance
say that your daughter wants to carry out an astronomy research
project for her fourth grade science fair. You search around the
house and you realize there is no optical instrument that she might
use for this project. So, after browsing through magazines, the
Yellow Pages, and the Internet, you decide to drive with her to
a few local optics product stores to check out small telescopes
to make a purchase for her project.
You are not
too happy with what you see in the first couple of stores and place
some calls from your cell phone to another store that is farther
away to make sure they actually have in stock what you are now considering
getting. Finally, you make it to this last telescope dealer on your
list.
As you walk
in, you see many telescopes on display everywhere - all sizes,
different mounts, and different types of telescopes. It does not take you
much to realize that this store not only probably offers what you
are looking for, but that actually you now find yourself challenged
by the many choices available: refractors, Newtonians, Schmidt-Cassegrains,
Maksutovs, German equatorials, fork mounts, and even electronic
databases able to find, lock on, and track any object your daughter
might want to see!
It is quite
incredible - you find yourself considering - that an elementary
school girl these days may have access to a computer guided telescope
that can be coupled to your laptop and that can be equipped to acquire
images in thirty seconds you could only see in a few rare books
when you were a child!
There is a lot
to learn from following this development from those early days of
completely empirical experimentation to an initial understanding
of the principles of optics, to the invention of usable instruments,
to the beginnings of the art and science of modern telescope making,
all the way to marketing and commercialization to an enormous customer
base worldwide of an item that initially was the object of contention,
ridicule, Inquisition trials, and, finally, begrudged acceptance.
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…several
millennia in the making!
Considering
the seven hundred year-long path weaving from those mostly anonymous
master opticians exploring the behavior of lenses and mirrors by
trial and error in their European shops in the Middle Ages to your
daughter being able to view star clusters at the edge of our Galaxy
on a computer monitor completely boggles the mind. How could this
happen?
As you drive
home with your daughter's new telescope, you expand your thoughts
and you consider the rest of the technology involved in your shopping
expedition. The Yellow Pages you used earlier in the day would by
themselves have attracted the admiration of most of the human beings
who ever lived on this Earth since they first appeared in Africa…
The automobile
you are driving and the airplanes that most likely were involved
in shipping parts to the facilities where the telescope was assembled
were invented in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. There
are many men and women who are still part of the work force today
who remember the days when the sight of an airplane elicited the
same reaction as an early Apollo launch to the Moon. And yet, today,
it is conceivable for any motivated individual to learn in a few
months how to enjoy that same privilege of flying that Leonardo
could only dream about in the Renaissance - less than one hundred
years after the first flight at Kitty Hawk!
And what about
the personal computer you used for your initial Internet search?
What about your cell phone to call the stores from your car? The
technologies that made these developments possible - electronics,
integrated transistors, rockets, satellites, telecommunications
-- went from initial conception in the mind of early visionaries
to your computer store for use by children in less than fifty years,
as opposed to centuries as in the case of the telescope, and millennia
in the case of the printed word.
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Our
goal: the quantum vacuum as a contemporary market resource
We are now at
the beginning of yet another technological revolution -- one in
which we want to see InterStellar Technologies Corporation take
the quantum vacuum from the abstract minds of the early pioneers
of quantum mechanics to the mass commercialization of profitable
products that will affect and improve the lives of millions in such
areas as energy, propulsion, communications, and medicine.
Perhaps one
of the most central strategic concepts in this plan is that of keeping
our focus upon the end result of the process of Research and Development,
without letting any of its parts take over the others. Very simply:
The central goal of our Research and Development activities is to
bring our first profitable products to the commercial arena within
the shortest possible time.
Of course it
will be unavoidable, likely, and even desirable that, on the way
to our central goal, our R&D efforts will contribute to our
theoretical understanding of the quantum vacuum; it is likely that
our experimental activities will produce new approaches to measuring
and detecting dispersion forces; it is desirable that some or all
results we obtain be protected so that our intellectual property
portfolio be enhanced with holdings that may even not directly relate
to our primary mission. However, all this must not detract from
the final objective that I want to restate for clarity and emphasis:
The central
goal of our Research and Development activities is to bring our
first profitable products to the commercial arena within the shortest
possible time.
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The
R&D effort at InterStellar Technologies Corporation
The Research
and Development effort at InterStellar Technologies Corporation
is articulated along the following six directions of thrust:
1. Theoretical
Research
2. Experimental Research
3. Applications Research
4. Intellectual Property
5. Proof of Concept
6. Commercialization Research
Activities in
these areas are intimately interrelated and they all contribute
towards the final goal of translating our ever deepening understanding of the
quantum vacuum into commercial products within the shortest possible
time. In particular, continued managing effort is dedicated to preventing inadvertent overemphasis of one area of development at the detriment of others.
For instance,
the primary mission of R&D activities at InterStellar Technologies
Corporation is not to just achieve a theoretical understanding of
the quantum vacuum; it is not to just devise more sophisticated
dispersion force experiments; and it is not to just patent and prove
new technological concepts.
The primary
mission of all these elements is to consistently work together to secure and to protect the knowledge necessary to technologically
prove applications of clear commercial value so that the company
may develop into a financially viable organization within the shortest
time horizon our circumstances can allow. The time frame within
which our theoretical understanding and experimental activities
translate into profits is the ultimate measure of success of the
R&D activities at InterStellar Technologies Corporation.
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