Week 1

Simon's Weblog

Sunday August 4th. Day 1

I arrived in Sway without any great incident. It took us three hours on the nose from London. I rode roughshod with the kit in the van.

However tightly packed it was, it still needed one of us to be in the back to make sure some of the more sensitive equipment didn’t slip, and if it did, that we could stop right away.

Kip was lucky and pulled the long straw, and so he went down by train.
Luckily there was only a little seepage, and that was from the drum of dichloroethyl ether, but it is only minorly corrosive, and so it was a quick and basic clean up. The cops stopped us only once, just outside Winchester.

As I searched my bag for the transport permits I soon realised that they were not interested in what we were carrying, but more in the roadworthiness of the van. Admittedly it was an old GPO van, on its last legs, driven by our trusted driver Jim, (who due to an extra ordinary sounding night out the night before was also on his last legs), but it and he was cheap and cheerful, and all that we could afford.

Anyway the police kicked seven bells out of the tires, casting expersions on the exhaust and demanding to be shown that every light and indicator worked independently from each other.

Due to an extraordinary stroke of luck, they all did, and we were released to continue on our journey of no more than 50 mph due to a faulty yet officially un-questioned faulty thermostat.

When Kip arrived we were sitting in the pub garden waiting for him to turn up to help in the delicate operation of unloading the equipment.

It was five p.m. and still a murderous 32 degrees in the shade, and none of us had the energy to unpack the gear, so we merely carried it to the studio, stacked it up and relocated to the pub to toast our minor, but first victory, that of all of us arriving in one piece.

I’m going to bed now, but I suspect I will not sleep.
It’s not the seepage of the dichloroethyl ether, which should be contained until the morning that was worrying me, nor the opportunity lying ahead, the opportunity of finally making the force field that was keeping me awake. The reason I would not sleep was one of displacement. It’s a long way from London to Sway, and in a way the silence of the countryside is disconcerting and almost eerie.

Monday, August 5th. Day 2

I managed to awake without sleeping a wink. I got up, bathed and dragged my computer up stairs and then plumbed it in. It all still worked. I was relieved. I offered up a prayer to the slave labourers who had built it. I went downstairs to the kitchen and breakfasted. It was at this point that I realised it was still only 6:30.
So sleep deprivation is one of the many things the New Forest has to throw at me. No matter, there is much work to do and early mornings
Will help the day be productive.

We got to the studio about 10 o’clock. The staffs were busy taking down an exhibition and understandably had no time for pleasantries, but were helpful in advice but were unable to proffer any support.
We spent the morning unpacking our equipment. Most of it made the journey, a couple of pieces, mainly the RCX and a couple solenoids on the decompression unit were bashed about a bit, but most of it looked fine. We were still too disorientated to test anything, and it was hot as hell, and so we merely kept ourselves busy by ticking of our inventory to make sure that we had brought everything with us that we needed. There was a slight panic when we could not find an essential bit of kit, the magnatron, but it was, as always in the last box we opened, stored away in the bathroom, where we had quite rightly, but absent mindedly put it the night before, away from any of the electrical equipment that it would almost definitely ruin.
Luckily I had remembered to recharge the battery on the refrigeration unit, and so the magnatron appeared to be holding up well.
The biggest job was moving the back up generator to shed 5 (our studio is made up of five separate spaces), and it pretty much takes up all the space, but shed 4 was slightly bigger and the magnatron fitted in comfortably.

The heat was un-bearable, so we blacked out the windows and called it a day. I guess it still hasn’t sunk in yet that we are here, and finally get to test all our theories. It’s taken so long to get anyone to believe in them, that I’m not sure if I believe in them myself anymore, but I have been through the maths a thousand times and it all seems to add up. In theory, that is.

Tomorrow we have more work to do in the studio. I guess I should start calling it the laboratory, as that is what it will become, but I’ve never understood the division between the art and science thing.
I blame the renaissance for that one.
Still, another day waits, and so to bed.

Tuesday, 6th August. Day 3

Another day of setting up the lab. There is a lot of kit to fit in a small space, and we have to be very particular of the zones. The zones are the different areas where we will carry out different levels of experiments. Each level is based on possible danger. As a sweeping generalisation we have come up with these three colours coded zones. Yellow for low risk, red for medium, and blue for high. As this is still un-chartered territory for us, we most probably made some mistakes in our risk assessments, but it’s better to start with something than nothing. The storing of the magnatron is proving to be difficult, as even when not plugged in it is still very powerful and so keeps on causing fluctualations in our monitors. However most of the gear seems to be working, but we are
Still waiting on some of the most important parts to arrive from Cambridge. We haven’t heard from some of our more important suppliers, which are a worry, but I guess it is still early days.

Still, we have created enough space to work in, and set up the first stage of our apparatus. All we need now is the rest of the gear to arrive.

I still can’t feel that excited about the project until we start the experiments, but these obviously cannot be rushed, as we need the results to be verifiable, and so the set up is all-important.

Apparently the hottest day of the year so far, with very high humidity, which we still do not know whether is a good or bad thing. We know we need the humidity, but we also need to control it to carry out the tests properly, so it is still all a bit trial and error.

Due to the heat we clocked off early again today, and so another frustrating day, but until the rest of the kit arrives our hands are tied.

Wednesday 7th August Day 4

Still no much needed essential kit. Spent the day on the phone to Cambridge and setting up this website.

Thursday 8th August Day 5

Ditto.

I need to return to London tomorrow, and so it feels like a week has passed and that we have achieved very little.
I Feel I don’t have much to write about until it all begins, but hopefully next week we can start for real. We really do not know if the experiment will work, and even if we do manage to create the force field I have my doubts that it will be invisible, but we have it on good advice that it will. However we need the rest of the kit, and it is frustrating waiting for some idiot to send it to us.
Next week is when it all begins, I’m damn well sure of it.

Kyp's weblog

DAY 1 Sunday August 4th

“a suitable extent of conductor in the form of one or more lengths”

Having packed up our kit we are heading into the field. The van was so full we had to leave some stuff behind including me. I pulled the short straw and cycled to the new lab from Southampton.

I passed New Milton – I’d been reading the map the wrong way round and got severely lost but with a good end result – stopped off at some nurseries and did some enquiries about temperature regulation (important) and humidity (critical) for the static force field experiments. They looked perplexed as I tried to explain to a limited degree what we were trying to do and they’ve agreed to give us some humidifying equipment, including tubing, water heater, pump and motors as well as a dew point analyzer that they’ve had kicking around.

I arrived exhausted to find my fellow traveller cooling off in the village pub. Simon had thankfully remembered to recharge the refrigeration unit which is always temperamental on its failsafe battery supply. No disastrous chemical leakages so far. Start moving the kit into the studio/lab tomorrow.

DAY 2 Tueday August 5th

Woke up very early. Is this what tie people get up in the countryside? I thought it might be something to do with the journey ahead in terms of the mad idea coming good, but realised that the house we’re staying in is constructed like a greenhouse with windows in the most inconceivable of places. Gave up the ghost by 6 am and watched the remainder of the dew burning off the fields from the garden. The raw honesty of the countryside. Full of bloody crows.

Cycled to the studio leaving Simon to chase up equipment orders. Unpacked a lot of the kit and secured the building. The studio isn’t that big and we need some space so that there’s no electrical inteference for our experiments so that our detractors can’t accuse us of false readings. The backup generator takes up all of shed 5. The high voltage supplies (which Simon mistakenly keeps referring to as the ‘magnatron’ because of the time they were all on full tilt and acted like a huge electromagnet pulling his watch – with his hand still in it – onto the caging) are in shed 4 with a rudimentary bit of shielding so that the sensors in shed 1 don’t always show 10 on the scale. As Simon pointed out, we really need a generator with 11 on the dial. Refrigeration unit holding up even in this extreme heat, but at least the heat means we can get on with some of the naturally occurring static charge experiments quicker than we’d anticipated.

Notified electricity board in case they wonder what’s going on. They asked me if I was the bill payer. Think I coughed loudly at that point. Must remember not to mention it to the gallery. Have to shut down by 7:00pm because of the soap opera tea-break draw on the grid. One of the power units seems to be acting weird so have ordered some parts. It’ll slow us down a bit on some of the ion charge experiments but we’re still knee-deep in boxes and wiring. Needless to say I forgot some of the how-to diagrams so will be severely scratching my head as I figure out how to try and put things together.

DAY 3 Wednesday August 6th

postman didn’t have any special delivery for us. worrying. our cambridge supplier seems to have gone into hiding. went cycling to lymington and brockenhurst. kept seeing a tower above the treetops. thought it was a beached light house at first as i kept seeing a light beacon coming out from what looked like a porthole. asked the staff here about it. someone said it was disused, someone else said it had been turned into someone’s house. A third person said that someone was buried underneath it. Good structure for doing some tests. Will have to investigate.

Got out the dew point analyzer and worked out how to use it. Good day to do it – hottest day ever recorded again. With what we’re doing it seems a bit like ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’.
In the afternoon Simon demanded we run some safety checks due to the extreme heat
Fair enough, I thought and so we split up and did a sweep of the sheds.
Two hours later, Simon returned with three pages of readings, and I returned with all the stickers I had just removed from the kit I bought off a guy in Brick Lane. The stickers said things like ‘condemned: severe earth leakage’ and ‘Safety check failed’ and ‘ For spare parts only: Do Not Connect’..
I used half a bottle of turps and three stanley blades to remove them all, and I feel safer already.

DAY 4 Thursday August 7th

still nothing in the post. Have been calibrating a few optics and started looking at maps of the area for possible help or hindrance from the local geography. Really ought to work out where true North is too. Sway itself, on the surface, doesn’t seem that unfamiliar for this neck of the woods. The local shop’s cat was parading around outside with a mouse this morning. not quite dead either. just twitching. Pet lovers eh.

Been watching motorists trying to drive round horses on the road. Very good. In London, they should get rid of speed bumps and just have horses staring meaningfully at cars from the middle of the road.

DAY 5 Friday August 8th

well, good contact with a couple of scientists in the States but bad news on the engineer front. we’re trying to persuade a reluctant engineer on the precautions we’re taking with the force-field experiments but he keeps on muttering about lethal voltages etc. he’ll eventually come round. I’ve posted him some information on how to stop static build up, so hopefully he’ll be able to help us in stopping it just enough to not be lethal. Haven’t told Simon yet. Need to know basis. He’s off to London tomorrow ,whilst I’m going to explore and have a bit of a holiday.