Impossible?

© 2016 – J C, An Anonymous CFO. All rights reserved*

A few years back, in a conversation I’d had with a young, self-assured Chemical Engineer, the matter of extraterrestrial visitation arose. His position was clear from the outset: interstellar distances are so vast as to render such visitation impossible. Notwithstanding the obvious and begged question “Is this trip really necessary?”, my suspicion was (and remains) that this is a perspective shared by most Physicists, Astrophysicists, and Astronomers. From my perspective, however, “unfathomable” and “impossible” are not synonymous. One may not know how, or even if, interstellar travel is possible; one does not therefore know that it is not. A lack of evidence of possibility is not evidence of impossibility.
 
We seem desperate for certainty, so much so that we cling to our models of the world, of reality. We are, seemingly, bedazzled by them, as if they are a form of jewelry with gemstones so filled with light, so precisely cut and finely polished, that there appears nothing else worthy of a turn of the gaze. I am reminded of a simple, though remarkable, toy called The Levitron. In a sense, it is the physical embodiment of an answer to the question “Using ordinary permanent magnets, how does one stably levitate one such magnet above another?” The problem is one whose solution most in the scientific realm characterize as “relatively simple”; yet, until late in the twentieth century, the consensus among physicists as to the prospect for permanent magnet levitation could be summed up in a word: Impossible! In 1983, a heedless and most tenacious tinkerer named Roy M. Harrigan realized the impossible and patented what was to become known as the first spin-stabilized magnetic levitation device – the prototypic Levitron – employing essentially nothing more than permanent magnets. And, as if to furnish a line of cosmic poetry with an exclamation point, in 1984, a college drop-out named Joseph Chieffo, unwitting as to Harrigan’s brilliant, but still obscure, invention, produced his own distinct, spin-stabilized permanent-magnetism-induced levitation device. History is replete with seemingly impossible discoveries by inspired pioneers who are simply too passionate and intuitively attuned to be impressed by “impossibility”.