Those M&D words: Gating

[Monte Davis]

> "With the proper deployment of Spring Constants and 
> Magnetickal Gating, 
> Power may be borrow'd, as needed, against repayment dates deferrable 
> indefinitely."

> The term appeared in the 20th century according to my SOED. 
> Is it a blatant 
> anachronism, or maybe the term was used in the 18th century with some 
> different meaning?

After no research whatsoever, I'll put my money on "blatant [and deliberate]
anachronism." To me it has overtones that make it even more so:

1) in quantum mechanics, one implication of the uncertainty principle was
virtual particles (including photons and electrons we'd usually interpret as
energy). What had been the Newtonian "bookkeeping" of conservation of matter
and energy turns out to have a little wiggle room in it. Anywhere, at any
moment, particles and their antiparticles can appear out of nothing and then
annihilate each other, as long as a quantity combining their momentum and
the time of existence stays below a certain threshold. In this case,
"repayment" is deferable  -- although not "indefinitely" -- and certain
observed phenomena can only be explained in <ahem> light of this jittering
sea of virtual particles. 

2) more recently, Hawking radiation: Steven H. showed that if a
particle-antiparticle pair shows up just at the event horizon of a black
hole, one can get sucked in while the other flies off (and is promoted to a
real particle). Until then the dogma had been that absolutely nothing comes
out of a BH; the consequence of Hawking's idea was that in fact they emit a
faint "glow," and  -- because on a large scale matter and energy *are*
rigorously conserved --  they shrink over time (the smaller, the faster) and
eventually evaporate.

Not quite the _perpetuum mobile_ that dances teasingly through the pages of
M&D <tick...tick...tick>, but teasingly close.