Anti-Gravity Research Confirmed

Anotherone was among a large number of people over the last few days who've written in about research that BAe seems to be funding on Project Greenglow, an anti-gravity project.

Comments

Maybe, but not that way

[Per Abrahamsen]

If you went back 100 years and told the leading physicists (sp?) of the day that 100 years from now, we would have the ability to photograph a human body in such a way as to be able to see the complete size and shape of objects within it in three dimensions, they would have been highly skeptical, might have even said it was impossible.

If someone 100 years ago had funded research for such a 3D device, people would have claimed he was wasting his money. And they would be correct.

It might be that true anti-gravity one day may be possible, although nothing currently indicate it, but if so it will be because of breakthrough in basic science, not because of any project with an anti-gravity gadget as its goal.

Re:Sometimes they are just cranks...however funded

[BrotherPope]

Your point is good and you deserve your positive moderation, but...

failures and cranks: phrenology, mediums as masters of the fourth dimension, any number of numerological schemes, orgone energy

Ouch. Orgone energy does not, IMHO, deserve to be put in that lineup. Especially here on /. Now, I'm not an expert on the subject but I do know that the others are either outright scams or were heard out. Wilhelm Reich never really had his day. In fact, the U.S. Government seized his books and papers and burned them back in 1957. Clearly a First Amendment issue, which is a favorite topic around here.

Granted, this is a poor argument for orgone energy, but it is my understanding that very few have recreated Reich's experiments before declaring him a crank or a failure. Peer review wasn't possible because nobody would take the time to hear him out. The same thing has happened in gravity research in the past (the exact reference eludes me) and we have adequate reason be concerned that the scientific community may be too ready to cry 'crank'.

For more information (including an interesting discussion about arguments), read this excerpt from Wilhelm Reich in Hell by Robert Anton Wilson

Eugine Podkletnov's Paper...

[Epitaph]

Here's a link to Eugine's paper that created quite a ruckuss in 1996.

Also, here's a 1998 Wired article that gives a good deal of background about Podkletnov, and why his paper was so badly recieved. It does meander a bit. I'd recommend skipping the boring parts where the writer recounts his visit with some other nut who thought he could duplicate Podkletnov's experiment. It is funny though, and it does show a lot about how a bad scientific method can produce erroneous results.

Enjoy!

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Epitaph

Better Copy of Eugine Podkletnov's Paper...

[Epitaph]

I found a better copy of Podkletnov's paper on the Los Alamos National Laboratory's e-print archive server. It's available in a bunch of formats, including PostScript, PDF, ASCII, and DVI. The previous link I posted didn't have the diagrams included with his paper.

It's better to actually read the paper and draw your own conclusions than to simply listen to what other people think about it and accept their views.

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Epitaph

Re:Frivolous ? Maybe not

[infodragon]

I agree, this type of research, IMHO, is definitely not frivolous, but for another reason... Serendipity. Even if anti-gravity is impossible the research will lead to other, unintended discoveries. Part of the search for anti-gravity is the search for the graviton. No one has ever seen a graviton, measured the strength of a graviton, or observed the effect of a graviton's movement. By approaching the problem from a different angle you may uncover unknown properties of physics. During their experiments they may uncover certain properties of physics that could revolutionize the world. They may have to develop equipment that is completely new. These ideas may give somebody else an idea for a practical invention that benefits all of man kind.

These same ideas can be applied to the trip to the moon. What did we directly get from going to the moon? A couple of moon rocks! Was it worth while for just a couple of moon rocks? IMHO, NO! But what we did get was numerous advances in computers and software. We got such things as Teflon and tang and many other things that I cannot think of right now.

Anyway any type of valid research is always more valuable than anyone can measure. Who knows what will come of it or who the research will inspire that will give us concrete results? The value is more than we can afford not to invest in.

You wouldn't be so impressed if you studied.

[Tau Zero]

I recall that in Britan a while back someone actually got a frog to float by using a powerful magnetic field.."

Yup. They did it using the well-known property of oxygen, namely that it is paramagnetic (very weakly magnetic). It takes a much more powerful field to lift something full of water than something full of iron, but it can be done. It isn't terribly useful, though. The only use I saw for it before this was a demo of liquid oxygen adhering to the poles of a magnet. I take that back, you could use it to guarantee ullage of your oxidizer in a zero-G environment.

What I think all this research amounts to is something along the lines of "If we use enough power and a big enough magnetic field, gravity won't like us anymore."

It could amount to a bunch of different things:

1. Someone providing some money to tinker at the margins, making sure that the "fringe" stuff is experimental error. (This is likely if the people at the top have a clue.)
2. Someone convinced that the "fringe" stuff is real, and throwing money at studies to prove as much. (This is likely if the people at the top watch "X Files".)

It'll probably take time for the news media to sort out exactly who's behind this and why, assuming they're interested in actually going in-depth as opposed to a "gosh-wow" news item to play to the UFO cultists. What would be really interesting would be some studies of electron-beam repulsion of incoming supersonic airstreams; anything which can propagate a pressure wave faster than sound (as an electron beam could do) could reduce shockwaves and their consequent drag. I saw something about this once, with a note that the research had been suppressed. Well, it's time to unwrap it.
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Sometimes they are just cranks...however funded.

[orac2]

"They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan.

I know there is a fondness for the underdog, bringing down the close-minded orthodoxy and opening up a brave new dawn, etc, etc, but I would remind everybody that the reason the scientific community is sceptical of far out claims is because most of the time they're right to be. We remember the triumphs of paradigm busting: Gallileo, Mandlebrot, Einstein. For very good reasons we forget the failures and cranks: phrenology, mediums as masters of the fourth dimension, any number of numerological schemes, orgone energy, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Just because part of the military-industrial complex is funding it is no seal of authority either; remember all the reports of the Cold War intelligence services - on both sides - funding psychic distance viewing?

All greenglow has are some unpeer-reviewed reports and some highly criticised publications. Measuring weight reduction of a superconducting spinning disk, especially with the magnitudes of loss suggested, is not a difficult experiment. The fact that theses results have not been duplicated, despite the fact that superconductors are common materials these days in most university physics departments should raise the flag of sceptisism for everybody: Extreme claims require extreme evidence

Can you handle the truth?

[MrScience]

I suggest you read this article at Wired.

What was proposed is not anti-gravity (though astrophysicists are now thinking that this may be a common occurrence). It is gravity shielding. When a correspondent at British Sunday Telegraph received the already-accepted page proofs for the article submitted to the respected Journal of Physics-D, he wrote an article for his newspaper using the word anti-gravity, rather than gravity-shielding.

There was an instant firestorm of ridicule about how anti-gravity was impossible, etc, etc. Podkletnov was let go from his university, his paper was dropped from the journal before it was printed, and he retreated out of the country.

What many people forget is that, "in 1990, a senior scientist at the University of Alabama named Douglas Torr started writing papers with a Chinese woman physicist named Ning Li, predicting that superconductors could affect the force of gravity. This was before Eugene Podkletnov made his observations in Tampere, so naturally Li and Torr were delighted when they heard that Podkletnov had accidentally validated their predictions."

The trick is that Podkletnov was using a very odd combination of materials in his ceramics. This creates an extremely brittle disc that is difficult to spin at high speeds. This guy is an expert in his field, and few have been able to create super-conducting ceramic magnets in this ratio that don't break up at the necessary RPM.

A quick excerpt from the link: True, Podkletnov wasn't a physicist - but he did have a doctorate (in materials science) and he knew how to do careful lab work. When he wrote up his results, his papers were accepted for publication in some sober physics journals, and at least one theoretical physicist - an Italian named Giovanni Modanese - became intrigued. Modanese didn't dismiss the whole idea of gravity shielding, because on the subatomic level, we simply don't know how gravity functions. "What we are lacking today," according to Modanese, "is a knowledge of the microscopic or 'quantum' aspects of gravity, comparable to the good microscopic knowledge we have of electromagnetic or nuclear forces. In this sense, the microscopic origin of the gravitational force is still unknown." At the Max Planck Institute in Munich, he developed a theory to explain the shielding phenomenon.


Oh, and before you go equating this to cold fusion, and saying that it is/was totally bogus, read this article. Read it through to the end, and you will find the interesting results of the experiment, regarding cold fusion.


You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.