The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [67]
NDT also uses visible spectrum. The "Mark One Eyeball" is still one of the most powerful inspection tools in the arsenal. But NDT then goes beyond using other wavelengths of radiation: infrared and ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, and gamma rays, and beyond.
Nondestructive testing is moving from application to engineering structures into our everyday lives through application in the medical field.
One of our dad's unrealized dreams was the possibility of using several NDT methods simultaneously to probe into the unknown, and then combining those responses and comparing them to our experience. In a way, maybe that is the ultimate sixth sense that we sometimes seem to have—the unconscious use of several of our senses at one time, perhaps in very subtle ways, coupled with our experience to recognize a danger or a situation that is not so clear when we just use one or two of our senses. How else does one "sense" the presence of another person in a dark and quiet room?
The welding and nondestructive testing technology described in Falling Free is pretty accurate. Most of the devices described have a basis in real life (I'm not so sure about the Necklin rods). For example, the plasma arc, which Lois has as a formidable hand weapon is to a welding engineer a heat source for welding. Same with the electron beam. Back in the late 1950s, electron beam welding was a new and novel process. One of the OSU students, J. Whittier Slemmons, built one using junk in the early days of the process.
Lois consulted with Wally Voreck, a friend of my family who has spent a lifetime in the explosives field—some military and some industrial. Wally was also a voracious reader of science fiction and was pleased to read the book in an early form and to have a chance to offer suggestions to make the descriptions more authentic. I think it was he who suggested the explosive forming of something for Falling Free.
My own career has largely been devoted to titanium metal. I suppose that was the source for the choice of titanium for the mirror in the book. Titanium is just a metal with a fancy name, but it has of late come to signify something important enough that even credit cards scramble to usurp the name.
One maxim of our dad was the idea that whatever you would do, you should do it better than anyone else. He illustrated this at his Ohio State University office by displaying for many years, taped to the wire-reinforced door, a cartoon of a guy with an enormous ball of string and a caption "Whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability." Lois has gone on to fulfill that axiom in her writing.
We were taught, apparently by example, to take responsibility for our own actions and to behave in what I perceive to be a reasonably moral way. Sort of a proletarian form of noblesse oblige. Lois reflects this in Falling Free in the whole exposure of the innocent quaddies to the less innocent characteristics of man, illustrated particularly by the example of one radiograph that was presented over and over again as proof of the quality of many welds, and Leo's appalled reaction to this. I could see precisely the same reaction from our dad—and maybe it was a real case based on some work he did on the Alaska Pipeline.
Dad always claimed that his father sat him down one day in early life and asked him what he wanted to be. He responded, "An electrical engineer," thinking that he could drive the big electric locomotives that were just coming to the rails near Pittsburgh. His father's menial jobs provided