[nomad]

Appreciated your post, Everymansmedium. Yes, I did encounter ITEK from time to time. We put together a modal test system for testing the Orbiter in the OPF or on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center (I was based out of Houston, JSC). Our control room with computers and data acquisition system was in an Air Stream house trailer. Another trailer was used to haul shakers, power amps and other ancillary equipment. We used PCB signal conditioning, Zonic data acquisition and multi-shaker FRF post-processing, etc., along with HP workstations. We were given a 24 hour window to do the modal test. I also did finite element models and merged the modal test model with the FEM to do damage detection after flights (started with before-flight baseline modal test and FEM).

You put a lot of ideas out there. At some point I realized my brain had missed a turn in the road (or the road was continuing straight when I swerved). I've got to study your ideas. You are quite creative in your thinking.

I didn't mean to leave time out of the picture in my previous post. The established picture in the usual presentation of Special Relativity has every observer moving straight forward along his own 4th dimension (time axis) at the spead of light. I was just raising the question of who or what is really doing the moving, since the spacetime diagrams of Special Relativity always imply that all material structure (including physical living bodies, i.e., brain neurons, etc.) must be configured as static 4-D structures. Therefore the material bodies could not be in motion. The only thing left to move would be something we don't yet understand--that embodies consciousness. Perhaps something like a wave of consciousness, moving at the speed of light along the 4th dimension--maybe it's a universal consciousness, maybe there are just local consciousnesses associated with each individual brain).

It's exactly analogous to watching a movie. But, instead of the movie film strip moving through the projector, our consciousness flies at the speed of light along the 4th dimension watching a stream of a continuous sequence of 3-D frames. Each frame may be separated by a Planck time (10^-43 sec), although the frequency response of our consciousness averages out the sequence to yield the impression of a continuous flow of time. Maybe that's the kind of thing Einstein had in mind when he referred to reality as an illusion.