is easy, but moving the engine requires well, a steam engine, weighing quite a bit. If only you could move the people without the need to move an engine. Isambard actually came up with a solution. This is bizarre. He created several miles of vacuum track where the compartments had paddles extending down from the underside of the carriage and into the vacuum[†] pipeline. Place a vacuum pump at one end and hey presto, loco-motion. Unfortunately, vacuum technology at that time was at best okay, and the valve material he used was leather to separate the vacuum from the air. In a couple of years it degraded. The concept was genius like the next one, the electric car, so like the turbine jet, micro-chip, encryption, modern computer and all sport – we, the British, decided to do nothing serious about it, except win freedom for the World by cracking Hitler’s encryption with the first computers. Of course, if we had developed the Jet Engine or Churchill’s own favourite the tank instead of the Cavalry in the 1930’s then we wouldn’t have gifted Hitler Europe in the first place. No, clearly no commercial applications anywhere amongst that lot. On the other hand, the American economy grew by 50% in the War Years.

At 2. The electric Car. No printing liability insurance even comes close to covering the outburst which should follow next. We had electric cars in 1832-3[‡], there are electric cars on the Moon, right now but not yet on its impoverished, grubby sister planet – the Earth. In that sense they got it right, they developed the right technology just someone in goods inwards got the delivery docket upside down and it ended up on the wrong planet. By the way, postage costs are about $1m per Kg in case we want it back for its MOT.

At 1. actually its number 22, or I should say it is Section 22. That’s what they call the no access restricted floor at the Patent Office[§]. If you fit the profile and you have about 20 years patent experience, no criminal record and lets say, an amenable background, and are therefore a civil servant facing ‘life’ you get the invite. Now it’s a floor we are talking about which is off limits to everyone else at the Patent Office and the divide is not merely a physical one. The Clerks of Section 22 Patents are virtually mute on the subject. They don’t talk, joke about or fraternise with civilians on the subject of their work. These are classified Patents which never see the light of day. They are for use in military and other applications that the Government deems appropriate and appropriately the people who work there are signatories of the official Secrets

Act. So the most likely answer to my question “Dude, where’s my [Sky] car?” is – its in Section 22. Until we can unlock that door, we are doomed to drive tractors, burn fossils and blow up space ships and aeroplanes. Sadly – this is clearly not a joke. What was that again about the British inventing microchips, encryption, computing and jet turbines but yet to feel the benefit? I wonder how they never got to the stage of actually being developed.

If you think this is crazy, consider the Lorenz cipher, used by Hitler’s High Command and cracked by the British using the world’s first computer in 1944 to confirm the D-Day Operation. To this day, the mock up version they recreated using valves and standard telephone exchange equipment (just like the original) can break that code faster than a Pentium 2 processor[**]. That machine was built over 70 years ago but was dismantled after the War because we didn’t want Vlad in particular or anyone else to know we could do it. Still think its crazy? So, we’ve seen reverse logic and reverse engineering, is this reverse cleverness, isn’t there a word for that?

So what is the solution, go back to basics, I did it on my PhD. Stop pretending we know it all and go back, find something better than what we have. Question everything and stop dismissing everything we don’t understand, there are bizarre physical phenomena at the fringes of science that we know about but can’t explain. Science needs to be more open-minded and more honest about its best guesses, because that’s all they are and its all we’ve got and its not solving our problems, right now, today, its making things worse. Bin pride and revere that which is truly strange to us. Fundamentally, we are creatures of habit and that need for the familiar is finishing us off.

[*]http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/43156/20040709-0000/agspsrv34.agric.wa.gov.au/programs/app/barrier/history.htm
[†]http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_events/atm ospheric_railway.php
[‡] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car
[§]http://www.ams.mod.uk/aofcontent/tactical/toolki t/content/defcons/archive/014_10-04.pdf
[**]http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/rebuild.htm and conversations with Bletchley Park If you want to save some time, go to the Vehicle Technology website and see our additional free content and click on the reference links instead of typing them in.