There’s a story going round about physicists in St. Andrews having a theoretical dodge for the Casimir effect. Which, if it turns out to have practical realisation, is goodbye friction for nanomachinery, hello brave new world. Or something like that.
The same group, apparently, were amongst those who posited theoretical frameworks for invisibility, a little while back. Curiously, of the four research groups who’ve suggested approaches for this, three are in Britain. Which leads to the inescapable conclusion:
Our aliens are better than your aliens.
Two things:
- That’d make a great T-shirt, &
- As a phrase, it doesn’t appear in Google.
Dibs!
[update: “Their aliens are better than our aliens” doesn’t appear either. Astounding.]
[update 2: this post took less than 10 minutes to show up in Google. Searches for these phrases are no longer empty. Impressive.]
[update 3: Dang. There’s one existing Google hit for the phrase “Our aliens are better than their aliens“, to a mailing-list archive post from 1999, that appears to be a Google ad honeypot.]
[update 4: “My aliens are better than your aliens“: no Google hits.]