You and I know Terrence Howard as the Academy Award-nominated star of Hustle & Flow, or Empire, or a slew of other movies and TV shows over a long, successful acting career. Turns out, Howard also has a strong interest in chemical engineering, specifically as it pertains to hydrogen propulsion. Recently, Howard visited Uganda to promote a new hydrogen technology he claims to have discovered — one that could “defend the sovereignty of the country as far as technology is concerned.” I admit, I’m not up to speed on my theoretical chemistry, so maybe you can listen to what Howard describes here and explain it to me like I’m five years old.
OK, so, let’s take this step by step. “As a child I studied chemical engineering at Pratt Institute,” Howard says. “I was there for two years until I saw that there was an inconsistency with the maths there. I went out to explore a new way of understanding how the universe worked and I was able to define the grand unified field equation they’ve been looking for […]”
We need to pause here, briefly, to note that Albert Einstein spent his life trying to understand a grand unified theory, and failed.
Picking back up with Howard! “… I was able to define the grand unified field equation they’ve been looking for, and put it into geometry, and with that geometry I was able to put props on that.”
Not really sure I follow that. If Howard had achieved something that has evaded physicists, mathematicians and chemists for nearly a century, one assumes we’d have heard more about it. But we haven’t gotten to Howard’s main point yet.
“What I’m saying is, now we have invented a new form of flight that I would like to bring here to Uganda to replace the drones, to replace the helicopters, to replace the planes. We have all the funding necessary. What we need is just a fertile ground on which to build this.”
We seem to have made a pretty huge jump here, from the interactions of electrons and protons to flying machines. Maybe if we ride this out a little further we’ll get some clarity?
“This is the geometry of hydrogen. This is the proton itself. Any bond that hydrogen can make, our lynchpins are able to make. We’re talking about unlimited bonding. Unlimited predictable structures, supersymmetry, and the lynchpins are now able to behave as a swarm, as a colony that can defend a nation, that can harvest food, that can remove plastics from the oceans, that can give the children of Uganda, the people of Uganda, an opportunity to spread this and to sell these products throughout the world so we’re no longer just selling agricultural products and pieces from the land.”
Yeah no, I’m still lost.
Admittedly, I am not a chemical engineer, nor a theoretical physicist. The last hardcore science course I took was in 2008, when Howard portrayed Lt. Col. James Rhodes in Iron Man. If you have the background to make sense of the hydrogen-powered theory Howard is pushing here, please, explain it in the comment section for the rest of us.