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Just when you thought anti-gravity was dead for good. Hey, at least this thing sounds like it will work as advertised...

Ever since i saw the polywell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell/ 6 months ago, i have spent every waking moment researching these new approaches to fusion. Plasmas found in fusion typically display a maxwellian particle distribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell-Boltzmann_distribution/ This basically states that there are different numbers of particles containing a different amount of energy. The fact there are so many particles moving at different energies gives rise to a phenomena called Bremstrahlung radiation (german for braking)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung_radiation/ this is when particles collide with electrons giving up energy. Bremstrahlung and synchrotron radiation are two main energy loss mechanisms in fusion power schemes. Focus fusion is maxwellian and suffers from the above. Sadly the inventor of the polywell Dr. Robert W Bussard passed away on the 06/10/07. He was dearly mourned by the fusion community. In many of his papers and in his final interview http://www.americanantigravity.com/graphics/interviews/Robert-Bussard-Interview.wma/ he stated that only non maxwellian fusion regimes can hope to achieve above break even power. Tri alpha energy recieved 40million in venture capitol for its idea. Focus fusion are rallying for support, and the polywell has finally recieved some limited investment from the navy to repeat WB 6's results of 10^9 neutrons per second. The polywell is non maxwellian fusion regime that is basically a 150kev particle accelerator utilizing a virtual cathode. It is in my opinion the only machine that will achieve beyond break even power, yet despite this it has suffered from an crippling lack of investment and interest. As we speak now WB 7 is being constucted and should have results by May next year. If all goes well in the next few months expect big things. We are about to witness another Manhattan Project !

the "anti-gravity lifter" on a recent mythbusters worked on this concept (makes thrust. no anti-grav)

I predict another inconclusive result.

I am sure the skunk works at CIA/Boeing have all the data/results/secrets already.

Hell, they made the SR71 back in the old days, imagine what they have NOW!!!

They wont say ever!!! Stupid top secret morons, showing it off will not hamper anything. I bet Boeing just wants to make another $500billion to $1500 billion selling conventional aircraft for
the next 25 years, then they will bring online the new models later.

Good article at http://www.americanantigravity.com/documents/NASA- TM-2006-214547.pdf

"NASA Memorandum on Advanced Propulsion
by R.L. Sackheim, J.W. Cole, and R.J. Litchford (NASA MSFC)
Where is U.S. space flight today, and how did we get here? After 40 years, why are we slowly converging on a slightly updated Apollo architecture? Why is there no Moore's law analogy for rocketry?
Clearly, we have arrived at a watershed moment in space flight history, and it is essential that we reflect on such questions in a forthright way. Decisions are now being made that could set our future course in space for decades to come, and it is appropriate that we examine the logic that brought space transportation full circle almost back to where we started."

[Quite] frankly this is the same kind of criticism the Wright brothers, Columbus, and the Apollo project got.

Wright Brothers heard, "It can't be done!" ...from concerned friends and envious/prideful colleagues.

The Wright Brothers prototyped their design and successfully tested it. The only risks were financial and the dangers were limited to the two brothers themselves. (and a handful of volunteers/friends) They succeeded.

Columbus heard, "It's impossible!" ...from the paranoid monarchy, court, the Church, and the ignorant masses.

Columbus found like-minded people, built his case, and successfully pleaded it to a semi-sympathetic ruler. (It doesn't hurt that there were some romantic ties.) In the end, the reigning powers saw fit to invest in his dream. They risked the financial burden, and only the adventurers under Columbus (ok... slaves, too) were at risk. They succeeded in ways they never could have imagined at the time... also failed in other ways, but that's another essay altogether.

NASA Scientists behind Mercury/Gemini missions (before Apollo) heard, "You'll fail!" ...from the ignorant masses and a global community that was afraid we'd get it done first. (U.S.S.R., for one)

NASA sallied forth, armed with new technology and a scientifically-sound principle. They approached it with a reasonable escalation of factors, had a few mistakes along the way, but in the end can be held as one of the "safest" Space Exploration Programs ever conceived. For those programs under NASA, it was an unquestionable success.

In aeronautics terms, I rate the "Space Elevator" as a "Spruce Goose"; it's a grand idea, and would be marvelous to behold, but the ump-teen factors of entropy and random disaster loom so closely that it appears doomed from the start. Furthermore, the potential of a mass-shift that could affect the Earth's own sidereal rotation (even if very slightly) presents a risk factor that can not be appropriately measured.

Think of it! Would our very forms of measuring time and the calendar year have to change because of this project? We can already confirm the length of a year to 1/1000 sec., yet a "very small change" would be a negligible difference?! Please!

[A] space elevator on the moon is possible, using the (unstable, but stable if attached to moon with string) Lagrange point between earth and moon. (for which we actually already have sufficient strength materials)

If you're referring to the equilibrium of a Lagrangian point it's a safer idea, but still amounts to a tremendous challenge.

Calculating the Lagrangian point for Earth/Moon orbits means that it's relatively closer to the Moon than the Earth by a fuzzy factor of six. (still around 280,000km away from Earth) It may be possible, but how is it practical?

Now I'm no rocket scientist, but it may be a marginal (marginal) advantage to actually landing on the moon. In the ending cost-analysis, I believe it would take a while before such a delivery platform "pays for itself". Even then, you still need a reiable delivery system from Earth.

I find it interesting that you chose to (try and) pick-apart my contentions about this fanciful science-fiction, and yet completely ignored my mention of actual technologies in the midst of grassroots and only-slightly-sanctioned research.

A Vortex Thruster could make the propeller nearly obsolete as a form of propulsion.

Propulsion in the vacuum of space nearly always meant using some expelled substance to get moving; what if there was a previously undiscovered physical force that we could fully understand and har

http://www.americanantigravity.com/articles/574/1/ Aurora-%26-Beyond

Yes, if it was easy in 1964, imagine today, with better automation and manufacturing abilities and computers.
Just remove the managers and their 'control'

Wow, what a great idea.

Now if only we could combine this with crystal power cells!


http://www.americanantigravity.com/hutchison.html

STAIF 2006.

The whole article is about the U.S. being interested in *testing* the theory. To do this, you build a big-ass torroid (6M) and get it spinning fast (> 700m/s) and then energize a big-ass magnetic field (>37 T) and measure to see if the effect occurs. The effect in this case measuring something like 3 newtons.

This sounds a whole lot like the weird Podkletnov Antigravity machine. Torroid ... check, magnetic field ... check, strange force ... check! I'm no physicist, what do you think?

I could be wrong, but I'm sure you're talking about Eugene Podkletnov - http://www.americanantigravity.com/podkletnov.html - he appears to have been the instigator of the whole rotating superconductor malarky.

Hey, that's kinda rude. Slashdot's got some issues with pervasive audience negativity, but that doesn't mean that it's a public venue to criticize a story that you don't like. Try a personal email next time.

Tim Ventura
http://www.americanantigravity.com/

To run anything as power hungry as a laptop.
You might be able to run a watch with it if
you designed it carefully to watch your power
consumption.

" I think that you might get at least a couple of milliamps of high-voltage current from it. "

http://www.americanantigravity.com/plasmavolt.html

"electic" should be "electric".

Also, I may have given the impression that the Ionic Breeze creates enough breeze to lift itself into the air. What I meant to write was that it creates a breeze, and there are devices that create similar breezes, and these other devices are light enough, for the amount of breeze that they produce, that they can lift themselves into the air.

Finally, the link that I gave was to a page that links to various other pages, some of which explain the technology. This page, about halfway down, gives a summary explanation. Note that they also discuss a "Biefeld-Brown Effect", which IMO borders on pseudoscience.

It's a method to get money from people for information that is freely available on the Internet.

The device described uses the same principle as the "Ionic Breeze" air filter that you see in those obnoxious TV commercials. It works by ionizing the air, giving it an eletric charge. the air is then drawn to a plate with an opposite charge. If this is configured correctly (as in the Ionic Breeze air filter), it can create a breeze with enough power to lift the device into the air (due to Newton's law of equal and opposite actions/reactions). Here is a page that has a more thorough explanation, plus pictures of several devices, and instructions on how to build your own.

Build Your Own Ion-Propulsion Craft

Check out this page for some nifty things you can build that may work on ion-propulsion. I thought it was a hoax at first, but my friend convinced me to build it in high-school, and the thing really did work. Of course, the efficiency was terrible. We were using an old monitor as a 20,000 volt power source, so power dissipation was probably pretty high. That was enough to lift the 2 gram device and 1 gram of payload.

The article mentioned the website American Antigravity as a source of information about this "electrogravitics" phenomenon. I clicked on the section about theHutchison Effect. It is said to be "...a very complex scalar-wave interaction between electromagnetic fields and matter." To me, it just proves that people without a solid background in science will believe almost anything they see.

Take, for example, the pictures in the document. This picture shows what looks like a butter knife embedded in some sort of metal. The metal looks pretty much like tin, lead, zinc, or some other metal with a low melting point. Maybe his scalar waves did this, or some idiot dropped a butter knife in a solder pot, let it cool, and cut it in half to reveal the knife. Who knows.

The best part comes from the videos at the bottom of the screen. Here, you see this little toy saucer take off and "magically" fly around the room. Video 3 shows the saucer resting on a wooden plank, with the camera close by aiming right at the little magic toy. Soon enough, it takes off and flutters about. Funny how all this energy in such a little space has no ill effects on the camera and its metal bits just inches away. The next 3 videos look remarkably alike, this time showing the craft at a distance. Notice how it lifts and flys, and something on the right hand side of the screen jingles around with similar movements. Again, there are metalic objects within very close distances (like the chains hanging nearby), but the "scalar waves of magic" (my quote) do not affect it. I bet that thing on the right is a fishing rod or a hollow tube with string in it used to manipulate the craft for the camera.

Alas, we will never know the truth, because unfortunatly, "...Hutchison's experiments have been exceeding difficult to replicate due to the extraordinarily complex arrangement of waveforms that is seemlingly required to generate the Hutchison effect."

Folks, take most of this stuff with a grain of salt. Sure, flyers fly (I've built one using a busted monitor as a power supply - it work, but according to my calculations, takes about 8000 Joules of energy for a 30 second flight, about the same energy as a family sedan going 7mph, which is quite inefficient), but they just work on well-known principals. Next time you see an "Ionic Breeze" air purifyer, put your hand next to it - you will feel the ion-induced wind blow against your hand. Same thing going on with the lifters, just with a bit more power and a different shape.

The article mentioned the website American Antigravity as a source of information about this "electrogravitics" phenomenon. I clicked on the section about theHutchison Effect. It is said to be "...a very complex scalar-wave interaction between electromagnetic fields and matter." To me, it just proves that people without a solid background in science will believe almost anything they see.

Take, for example, the pictures in the document. This picture shows what looks like a butter knife embedded in some sort of metal. The metal looks pretty much like tin, lead, zinc, or some other metal with a low melting point. Maybe his scalar waves did this, or some idiot dropped a butter knife in a solder pot, let it cool, and cut it in half to reveal the knife. Who knows.

The best part comes from the videos at the bottom of the screen. Here, you see this little toy saucer take off and "magically" fly around the room. Video 3 shows the saucer resting on a wooden plank, with the camera close by aiming right at the little magic toy. Soon enough, it takes off and flutters about. Funny how all this energy in such a little space has no ill effects on the camera and its metal bits just inches away. The next 3 videos look remarkably alike, this time showing the craft at a distance. Notice how it lifts and flys, and something on the right hand side of the screen jingles around with similar movements. Again, there are metalic objects within very close distances (like the chains hanging nearby), but the "scalar waves of magic" (my quote) do not affect it. I bet that thing on the right is a fishing rod or a hollow tube with string in it used to manipulate the craft for the camera.

Alas, we will never know the truth, because unfortunatly, "...Hutchison's experiments have been exceeding difficult to replicate due to the extraordinarily complex arrangement of waveforms that is seemlingly required to generate the Hutchison effect."

Folks, take most of this stuff with a grain of salt. Sure, flyers fly (I've built one using a busted monitor as a power supply - it work, but according to my calculations, takes about 8000 Joules of energy for a 30 second flight, about the same energy as a family sedan going 7mph, which is quite inefficient), but they just work on well-known principals. Next time you see an "Ionic Breeze" air purifyer, put your hand next to it - you will feel the ion-induced wind blow against your hand. Same thing going on with the lifters, just with a bit more power and a different shape.

The article mentioned the website American Antigravity as a source of information about this "electrogravitics" phenomenon. I clicked on the section about theHutchison Effect. It is said to be "...a very complex scalar-wave interaction between electromagnetic fields and matter." To me, it just proves that people without a solid background in science will believe almost anything they see.

Take, for example, the pictures in the document. This picture shows what looks like a butter knife embedded in some sort of metal. The metal looks pretty much like tin, lead, zinc, or some other metal with a low melting point. Maybe his scalar waves did this, or some idiot dropped a butter knife in a solder pot, let it cool, and cut it in half to reveal the knife. Who knows.

The best part comes from the videos at the bottom of the screen. Here, you see this little toy saucer take off and "magically" fly around the room. Video 3 shows the saucer resting on a wooden plank, with the camera close by aiming right at the little magic toy. Soon enough, it takes off and flutters about. Funny how all this energy in such a little space has no ill effects on the camera and its metal bits just inches away. The next 3 videos look remarkably alike, this time showing the craft at a distance. Notice how it lifts and flys, and something on the right hand side of the screen jingles around with similar movements. Again, there are metalic objects within very close distances (like the chains hanging nearby), but the "scalar waves of magic" (my quote) do not affect it. I bet that thing on the right is a fishing rod or a hollow tube with string in it used to manipulate the craft for the camera.

Alas, we will never know the truth, because unfortunatly, "...Hutchison's experiments have been exceeding difficult to replicate due to the extraordinarily complex arrangement of waveforms that is seemlingly required to generate the Hutchison effect."

Folks, take most of this stuff with a grain of salt. Sure, flyers fly (I've built one using a busted monitor as a power supply - it work, but according to my calculations, takes about 8000 Joules of energy for a 30 second flight, about the same energy as a family sedan going 7mph, which is quite inefficient), but they just work on well-known principals. Next time you see an "Ionic Breeze" air purifyer, put your hand next to it - you will feel the ion-induced wind blow against your hand. Same thing going on with the lifters, just with a bit more power and a different shape.

here

So I'm a karma whore ... sue me

check out americanantigravity.com

This is a site run by this guy I used to work with...pretty interesting stuff.

I think it messed with his head a little though.

This antigravity device looks like it holds some promise. We just need to solve the problem of shrinking that 20 Kilovolt power supply down to the size of a walnut, providing a means of lateral thrust (maybe some of those devices mounted as thrusters on each side?), and providing an insulated cabin (so the crew doesn't get electrocuted when they use the full scale ship) as well as a more powerful power supply to provide effective payload lift.

The nice thing about this system is the lack of complexity (zero moving parts), and the ability to cheaply provide redundancy in the propulsion system.

You can order all the parts you need to build and test one yourself including the power supply at the website...might be an interesting little weekend project - if I can just keep the cat, dog, and kids away from the high voltage power supply...(my wife won't let me buy one because she is afraid I will electrocute myself - or the kids...)

http://www.americanantigravity.com/