Zero To Eighty.

Full title Zero to Eighty: Being My Lifetime Doings, Reflections, and Inventions, Also My Journey Around the Moon, published as the invented memoir of “Akkad Pseudoman” — a pseudonym of the Princeton physicist Edwin F. Northrup, who explains in his preface that the narrative, though “pure fiction,” exists to carry a serious technical proposal into general circulation. The book imagines a scientist born in 1920 looking back from the year 2000 on a life whose central achievement is humanity’s first flight around the moon and back; all of the supporting science, in Northrup’s words, has been “worked out in considerable detail” and kept “free from the fanciful,” segregated into a Technical Supplement so the narrative can be read on its own.

That supplement centers on Northrup’s polyphase electric gun: a kilometer-long tube wound along its length with solenoid coils, energized in sequence by three-phase alternating current so that a travelling wave of magnetic force sweeps down the bore, inducing currents in a conductive projectile and accelerating it — without mechanical contact — toward escape velocity. Worked equations derive the thrust, the ampere-turns per centimeter, and the current needed from the projectile’s mass and target speed, and define “slip” as the lag between the projectile’s velocity and the travelling wave’s synchronous speed.

A further section, “Power Shifting Device,” describes switching relays that energize only a short, moving stretch of the gun’s roughly fifty-seven metric tons of copper coil at a time — about fifteen meters of it — cutting the resistive power loss by two orders of magnitude. Northrup illustrates the same principle at a survivable scale with an “Electric Line-Throwing Gun,” a two-meter coil gun with a ten-meter pusher cylinder able to cast a life-line 500 meters using a twenty-five-kilowatt generator, and closes the supplement by working out the orbital mechanics of a lunar “load-ship,” computing the circular-orbit velocity needed to satellite the moon at a chosen radius.

Published simultaneously in the United States and Great Britain and printed at the Princeton University Press.