ABSTRACT
Trying to acquire new information from the unknown world is not the only way in which we might exploit its riches. Another would be to ask it practical questions about things we cannot do. It might give our technology a huge boost. Again, I cannot imagine what might be available. My first instinct would be to ask questions about the sort of technology of which glimpses have already emerged in the physical world. All our technology assumes that every material has a set of stable properties, essentially set by the forces between its atoms. Accordingly, instances in which they appear to alter briefly (as in Chapter 11) seem very puzzling to us. Thus, one of the tricks which we might want to know more about is some way of bending metals easily. ‘Spoon bending’, for example, which has both been shown on television and denounced as trickery, would be a very clever way of bending metal if it could be made repeatable and reliable. At present it is neither.
