Velocitas Eradico

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A test shot fires from the Office of Naval Research-funded Electromagnetic Railgun prototype launcher located at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division.

A story from a little over a year ago reported a 33 MegaJoule test. A blog post at Scientific American puts the design range at 20-32 MJ, so it seems the refinements are now in areas other than the energy (e.g. better efficiency, moving from a research device to a better-engineered on that can be deployed). That article also refines the expected range of the gun.

The Navy says that the railgun project, initiated in 2005, will yield a 20- to 32-megajoule weapon that shoots a distance of 50 to 100 nautical miles (roughly 90 to 185 kilometers).

Sexier than Lab Rats

Teller Reveals His Secrets

Some of them, anyway.

I remember an experiment I did at the age of 11. My test subjects were Cub Scouts. My hypothesis (that nobody would see me sneak a fishbowl under a shawl) proved false and the Scouts pelted me with hard candy. If I could have avoided those welts by visiting an MRI lab, I surely would have.

But magic’s not easy to pick apart with machines, because it’s not really about the mechanics of your senses. Magic’s about understanding—and then manipulating—how viewers digest the sensory information.