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Gravitational Repulsion Effect Claimed
TekPolitik writes: "Eugene Podkletnov, the physicist who claimed to have discovered an anomalous gravitational "shielding" effect in the 90s, but withdrew his original paper prior to publication, has finally published a new paper on the topic. The paper describes a new experiment that is related to the original experiment, but the nature of the new experiment is more suggestive of an inverse gravitational effect (that is, the device creates a gravitational push away from it), or in Trekkie terms, a repulsor beam. Aside from claiming to have pushed things around at a distance, Podkletnov claims that the results directly contradict general relativity." Let's see if I can summarize: the author claims that with a certain very cold superconductor transmitting a large quantity of electricity in an intense magnetic field, he has observed a "new" force which repulses objects.
Maybe you ought to RTFA befor talking out of your lower orifice. Magnetic effects can be attenuated by the interpossitioning of shielding. This was attempted and no attenuation was observed. Charlatans usualy don't pull a paper, and spend several more years doing research to verify their results, befor finaly publishing. And they definately don't ask for others to join in finding answers. Also only one of the authors was Russian.
Maybe boeing & lockheed can use this "technology" to build their hover planes
A law attributed to Godwin
Has these words inscribed therein,
"If of Germans you speak
Of feces you'll reek."
Thus is the Net's greatest sin.
will be the first SF author to casually drop a reference to the "Podkletnov effect" in their next novel?
When we ran electricty into a conductor, and things get pushed away we called it:
GRAVITY
Your URL is not found...
Who cares? Gravity sucks.
Must... not... nit-pick... willpower... weaking... ARGH!
IMO, you're throwing around the word "mass" a little too loosely. Technically speaking, there are two kinds of mass: inertial mass (that which resists a change in motion) and gravitational mass (that which attracts other mass, a gravitational "charge" so to speak). Under current physics, they just happen to be the same (that is, 1 kg(inertial) = 1 kg(gravitational). They tend to call it the equivalence principle.
On the other hand, this equivalency principle is a side-effect of general relativity (which states that it is impossible to tell the difference between force due to linear acceleration and force due to gravity, so therefore you can't tell the difference between the two types of mass). If this experiment holds true, what we have on our hands is an object with low mass (inertial) and a high mass (gravitational), which negates the principle and possibly does some ugly things to general relativity.
Assuming that the lines of gravitational potential are continuous then to move a single particle from outside the shield into the shield, up vertically and then out of the shield and back to it's original position will cut the number of potential lines equally once going up and once going down. Draw it on paper if you don't believe. It seems to me that the only thing the device achieves is to locally change the orientation of up and down.
Effectively moving something from outside the shield into the shield at the same time will take work. Or if you place a marble on a flat table inside the shield it will have the tendancy to roll across the table to out of the shield as if it is rolling down hill.
I don't get it. Isn't it more interesting from a technological viewpoint to have a theory which combines gravity and EM but gets very small-scale things wrong, than to have a theory that combines quanta and EM but gets very large-scale things wrong? Why would Witten's proof be any more of a nail in the coffin than proving that GR is inconsistent with QM would be for GR?
Actually, fuel is a very small portion of the cost of launching the space shuttle, on the order of 1% or less of the total cost. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen are cheaper per gallon (or liter or whatever you prefer) than gasoline.
The cost comes from the huge crew needed for the shuttle and how amazingly complex of a machine it is. This is directly because of the amount of raw chemical energy required to achieve orbit, and the cost would decrease if some magical anti-gravity device were developed, but the cost wouldn't go down directly because of using less fuel.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Sneak up behind them
Walk backwards towards them if they are facing you, making sure they never have a chance to get a good look at your face.
find someone else who is just as disoriented as you.
I suppose those might also apply if the problem was in fact your face, but it should help you rule out "bony frame" if all works well.
If someone can debunk the original experiment, and find a more conventional cause for things, then I do care.
As for the touchy aspect of things, let's go back the beginnings of research of a similarly touchy phenomenon back in the 1940s.
Physicists had just learned of the nature of nuclear fission, and had hypothesized about a "chain reaction", which would be self sustaining, if a critical mass of fissionable material could be gathered, with a moderator to slow down the neutrons enough to be captured.
The Germans tried using graphite as a moderator, and came to the conclusion that it was unsuitable, and thus devoted all of their energy to using heavy water as a moderator.
When the scientists at the U of C here in Chicago did the same experiment, they came to the conclusion that it was marginal as a moderator. Fortunately for them, Leo Szilard knew that Boron (which absorbs MANY neutrons) was used in the commercial production of Graphite in the US. Once they had that impurity out of the way, we did what the Germans knew was impossible, on December 2, 1942, and had our very own sustained nuclear chain reaction.
I suspect there are similar effects at work in Cold fusion, and in the experiments we're discussing here. Failure to replicate an experiment, does not invalidate it.
--Mike--
If I remember my calculous correctly, this is "because" the fields propogate in a spherical nature. At any given distance, the field is the same along the surface an a sphere, which grows at 4*PI*r^2, I think.
If you are able to get a true beam that never widens, then the cross section is constant, and thus the force never weakens.
This is pretty hard to do, however, and there is likely to be some widening of a beam, however over a small enough sampling with a large enough margin of error, this could seem like the force does not vary with the distance.
That's my 2 cents. I've been out of multivariable calc for 6 years, so I might have something wrong. Anyone care to comment?
The Earth doesn't suck, the Universe Blows! (IMarvinTPA, but I forgot my password, and I think I don't have the e-mail address the account here wants to use.)
i heard that the main tank leaks about 1,000,000 litres of H2 an hour when it's full, pre-launch.
I'm sorry, but if you had read the paper, you might not need to ask such a stupid question.
Just a minor point here. The summary says that this directly contradicts relativity. Meanwhile the abstract of the actual article says "cannot be explained in the framework of general relativity." This might seem like a quibble, but it's a pretty important point. General Relativity, like Quantum theory is an incomplete description of the universe. They both work very well a describing the universe, but on differnt scales. The physics community is still searching for the unified field theory to unite the two, or rather supersede them. This observation could be the one that leads to the development of a more complete theory. Or, it could be something else.
If I recall correctly, temperature is related to the average velocity of the molecules in a system. since space itself is a vaccume, there would be no temperature related to it.
The temp of an object in space, on the otherhand is directly related to its proximity to an energy source(in our case the sun).
(For those who don't see the relevance, "where the Sun is" is different than where its light is coming from because it takes a while for the Sun's light to reach Earth and the Sun is in a different place than we see it -- both relative to Earth's orbit and in its orbit around the Milky Way.)
I read a small article in Popular Science, though I cannot presently locate it, within the last year or so that stated a female researcher had developed a disc with a very similar function. I find it interesting that this man's research is portrayed as being the first in his field. Also, I have an article in my home directory that came from the PS website (found it while looking for the first article) that gives Thomas Townsend Brown credit for testing similar discs in the 50's!
Well as long standard physics make my car drive, television set working and enabling me to warm my dishes in the microwave I will stay with them. A theory is only as good as it implications are, and stay true implications on 'normal' things are right far common that the tranversal stuff. I think some people just want to against, and seeing exactly in your comment, I tried to speak in the language of the supernatural with their words, what it results? You twist things either you want it. Telepathy and telekineses are two different things point. If you have a theory to combine both give it a new name. But seeing people like you to repulse from their own stuff as soon you try to respect and to file it, just shows it doesn't go against the application but just beeing against scientific methods in general like. Telekinese and Telephaty are suddendly no longer okay and a cool thing as soon a guy excepts it's existing gives them a name and start to file phenomens in this catagory. then suddendly they you can't do this, thats again the evil science.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Of course, that philosophy will get you in trouble with my friends in the string theory department, most of whom take the view that when you get to a deep enough level of understanding, the workings of the universe are entirely defined by the underlying mathematical structures. Their argument is that, at some level, there isn't anything left to describe, and physics reduces to a bunch of staggeringly nonlinear mathematical relationships (mostly dealing with the topology of the spacetime metric at string-theory scales).
Of course, I'm entirely unqualified to speak further on this subject, as I mostly do astrophysics myself. But hey, when you have friends who will randomly drop by to announce that they no longer believe in spacetime, and can plausibly back it up, you learn stuff. :-)
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
If anyone out there actually believes that the laws of physics as science currently see them are real, they are living in a very strange world. Miracles happen daily, people can levitate, see auras and teleport telepathically.
I am reminded of the subatomic particle the anomalon, whose properties vary from lab to lab, and the neutrino which has mass in the Soviet Union but not in the United States.
I must recommend the excellent book The Holographic Universe - by Michael Talbot - for those people that still think this high tech Physics is anything more than a few people's fantasies.
Getting is a degree isn't a waste of time for stupid people. If you need to pay someone thousands of dollars to have someone hold your hand and tell you what books to buy and read (which incidentally are FREE at the library), then perhaps you should re-evaluate *who* the loser is.
They can afford the power bill because they don't live in California, which is currently gettining screwed in the ass by Texas with Pres Bush and Spenser Abrahmson looking on while they mas... we wont go there today.
If you're not in a position to reproduce the experiment, then you're not in a position to even think about whether the paper is "true" or not. You can argue about the theory, since you can run those experiments with enough knowledge, but this paper is about experimental results.
Yes, there is usually a panel of people review work for entrance to a journal, but this guy didn't submit it a journal. But that's really just a way to select which things get into the journal since they can't publish all submissions.
In other words, you want someone to think for you. Even papers that went through a committee before it made it into the journel isn't to be trusted on those merits, only the merits of the contents.If you're not able to judge the merits of the content, then that's too bad. It's fair to trust other people's eruidte opinion of the paper, but what good is a paper to you if you don't understand it, quality approved or not?
The peer-review and peer-validation process is fundamental to science, but it is much more than some guys presiding on a panel deciding what gets put into a journal or presented at a conference. Skeptisism is more fundamental to science than peer-review or peer-validation, and you can't suspend skeptisism just because someone else told you it's okay.
Yes, it is convienent to narrow someone's work to one paper, but peer-review is really a process, and not limited to one paper. If this guy publishes a paper, then any reviews should also get published. So what if they don't get attached? It may be less convienent to you, but it is not harmful to science or the peer-review process. You're just used to how journals work. But it doesn't mean that it's not good science to publish without using a journal. It just means less of the process has occured before your eyeballs see the paper.
The point of a journal is convienece; a place to record the science of a topic. It is not the only way to do legitimate science.
I would find it most pleasing to gain more information about that Impulse Gravity Generator Based on Charged YBa_2Cu_3O_{7-y} Superconductor with Composite Crystal Structure, but darned, I lost my password for netnanny again. We should not filter for xxx, it can kill you.
Still, on the subject of Tesla, I've always been amused the that skeptics dictionary lists him as a "pseudo-scientist" and pretty much removes and credibility these hardcore skeptics might have had with me. Anyone who spends the bulk of their time trying to _disprove_ things (not being able to prove a negative is a fairly basic scientific rule) and calls one of the greatest electrical engineers ever born (who did the "impossible" more than once I might add) a psuedo-scientist for trying to actually do something constructive, is a bigger kook than any of the mystical "woo-woo's" they like to rave on about so much.
horseshit.
that is a truly poor interpretation of goedel's theorem.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
It'd be really interesting if it wasn't authored by a crackpot. Black helicopters and agents for the New World Order reign supreme in her world.
Sorry Bev, need to out you here.
You are to late my dear man.
Michael Xavier.
Lord Magneto
It's three parts photons to five parts crack cocaine.
This is fascinating stuff! Read the paper - they got identical deflections in pendulums 6m from the device and 150m from the device!!!! Even if it's not gravitational there's some wierd stuff going on. They describe the anomalous "force beam" produced as being extremely focused. How many here would love to see measurements of the timing of the voltage discharge relative to the deflections of the pendulums?
is comedy. He's discovered the comic force.
This experiment won't really work. Even under General Relativity and assuming the speed of gravity is the speed of light (and not instantaneous), the equations show that the Earth will orbit a point fairly close to where the Sun actually is, not where it appears to be. The relative velocity between the Sun and the Earth distorts the point of attraction such that the Earth appears to orbit the Sun's actual position (or pretty damn close -- if it was perfectly accurate, binary pulsar orbits wouldn't decay). The only way to check this would be to stop the relative motion between the Sun and the Earth. If gravity were instantaneous, you'd see the difference right away, whereas under GR, for eight minites the Earth will orbit where the sun would have been if it hadn't stopped dead in its tracks. Unfortunately, this is not an easy experiment to set up...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Why stop at the PLANET, use this same technology to move between planets and to move between galaxies!
Graivtons have been predicted (they would have spin 2), but never observed.
Well, not really an argument, but one theory works best depending on your scale, and there is no theory that works at all scales.. Also, if how you describe normal gravity were true at all scales, then how is energy carried into the bowling ball, so that it moves?
In other words, mass either interacts directly with spacetime causing it to curve (in which case, where is the force carrier?) or normal matter has / emits gravitons which do the same thing.
Or some other theory which hasn't been thought up yet.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
First off this guy's done this before and people can't reproduce his findings. So i don't know about this.
Second of all if this is real it's not all that odd concidering that Einstien expects his own work to be alter or improved or even totally disproved.
There are no "laws" in physics only observations and theories.
Well it's common knowledge that quantum theory and geneneral relativity threory contradict each other, at least one of them is not 100% accurate.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Right while you take non-magnetic stuff, but what happens if you take a solid iron block?
Actually, a Xenon strobe or Arc discharge lamp when firing creates a plasma arc that has an approximate effective resistance of about 1 ohm. Trust me on this one, I used to design strobe lights for a living. 500 Jolts into 1 ohm develops a current of 500 amps according to Mr. Ohm. Waaaay less than 10 KA...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
All theories are going to have some undefined terms. It's like a dictionary; some words can never be properly defined. At best we can understand how the terms relate to each other through equations. Therefore someone can always claim that we don't understand basic terms, such as charge, since these terms don't have a definition grounded in simpler phenomenon. This is not a flaw of the theory; it's just the nature of any theory. A flaw in a theory is when it makes predictions that don't correspond to reality. For example, Newtonian physics has trouble predicting the specific orbit of Mercury, while general relativity does a much better job. Given this criteria, electromagnetism seems like a fairly solid theory. I'm not aware of any experiments that conclusively show it is making bad predictions.
Chris Mesterharm
It may not, tho.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Thanks for pointing this out; I caught it on the second reading. Now, can you tell me what metal the "metal spheres" were made of?
And this book about flying frogs describes the phenomena as well.
When i first read that book i was thoroughly Freaked Out. It's one thing for frogs to fly thanks to magnetic levitation, quite another when they start riding lilypads into your house. I've since trained my cat to attack flying frogs.
-f
www.blackant.net
The paper hints that the results at 150m were about identical to those at 6m. It seems the 'wave' travels freely through matter, and then only effects the ball at the far end of the setup...i assume this discriminatory behaviour is because the ball is moveable. so all the fixed obstructions eg. wall etc, simply don't take any energy from the wave. the wave can't have infinite energy, it seems reasonable to assume. but then what about the 150m of freely-moveable air molecules in between? surely a lot of air gets moved (depending on the width of the beam) and should influence the results at 150m. there's a general lack of experimental thoroughness in the results.
Mmm. Relative movement.
You know what? I followed through this post intently until I reached the part about ...government...Roswell...and aliens...It was then that I realized that this post had nothing to do with Maxwell's Equations, Einsteins theories, and some guy named Kaluza.
Sir I don't think you have to worry about your grammar as much as what you type when you smoke your "cigarettes".
I saw this in my post after posting and thought 'damn' should've been clearer.
Thought experiment #3 (taking it further):
It would seem that the AHGMD producing the shielding effect would necissarily have to create other impossible effects in order to achieve a situation in which it may escape the thermodynamic paradox (and behave like a normal powered device). Imagine the AHGMD with a fixed power consumption and proportional gravity shield running; when a massive object is positioned over the device in the partially nulled G-field it would also have to some how reinstate the gravity field above IT to compensate for the energy consumed by the AHGMD levitating it!
This seems totally incomprehensible to me and would seem to imply that the AHGMD would by definion, be required to consume an infinite amount of energy (since there is no way you could prevent it from potentially lifting an infinite amount of mass) in order to escape the paradox(therefore precluding it's possibility).
my head hurts. goodnight.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
They may have shot themselves in the foot with this paper. If an experimental scientist observes something strange, they should by all means report their results. But throwing wild speculation about things like anti-gravity into the mix is a quick way to get the results ignored. Why not just present the paper with no conlusion? Just say, "Here's what we found, can anyone make sense of it?"
Free Hans!
And thermodynamics isn't violated because you're not getting any energy from these moving electrons.
Bullwinkle: "Rocky? Why is that mountain floating?"
Rocky: (excited) "Bullwinkle! We've found the source of UpsiDaisium!"
Boris: "The moose and squirrel have found it. Now we get rid of moose and squirrel."
Natasha: "But how do we get to the mountain Boris dear if we kill moose and squirrel?"
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
Okay, this is crazy talk. If the effect of this machine is completely independent of distance, wouldn't the entire planet and beyond have felt the effects of this experiment? I don't know about you, but I certainly didn't notice any papers inexplicably sliding off my desk any time within the last few years.
Gravitational effects vary with the square of the distance as well:
F = (G * m1 * m2) / r^2
Quick, someone get a creationist in here - their amusing take on the laws of entropy will whip us up a perpetual motion thingamajig in no time! -Nano.
in 98 or 99...there was an article listing the names of a few scientists persuing 'gravity shielding' and repulsor technology... anyone have details on that?
in fact, it is quite old, superconducting has been around for quite a while. I did many research projects on the meisner effect (http://www.google.com/search?q=meisner+effect&btn G=Google+Search) in my spare time, in HS and middle school. Check the link above for more info if youre interested (its just a google search). Indeed, the real breakthrough would be a materialthat superconducted at higher than room temperature. When I was doing my own research, the hottest they could superconduct was at the temperature of liquid nitrogen ($12/gal. at Roberts Oxygen) and the metal was a yiddium-*something ive forgotten* compound*.....
It's meant to be a rule of thumb for people who aren't electrical engineers. It is very adequate for what it does, and your needlessly complicated version indicates that it is you who needs the refresher.
Basically it is meant for situations in which there is a conductor and a bunch of non-conductors. It isn't meant to accurately describe the laws of electromagnetism or the behavior of complex circuits.
The enemies of Democracy are
No. You'd need to contradict the Special Theory of Relativity (the older of the two) for that.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Blenderhead, you snorfkus!
We, the hornimornis of Lurminastas, hereby prumhend you to dungernas gruntig medlantax! We entrind and pruntilate your extusive menifoncle, and jurislunctantly, of course, rezag memblish pernumble.
You have been warned.
Hmm... unfortunately this 5th dimension added by Kaluza is not a part of some massive cover-up, but is a well know and respected idea. It is know for being slightly ahead of its time, yet quite visionary just the same. However, it fails to incorporate or explain the other 2 forces (strong/weak nuclear) and is considered incomplete. Much of Super String Theory is based off of the idea of "compactified" dimensions first proposed by Kaluza and simultaneously by someone named Kline(sp?) only in SST there are something like 12 dimensions and not 5.
I'd say it would have to be exceptionally unbelievable. I'm still waiting for a theory on those green women that Kirk was always hot for...
Give them an inch and they'll take a foot. Much more than that, you won't have a leg to stand on.
...and mod this guy up, please.
My view of Tesla is somewhere in the middle. He was a great genius and a true inventor (unlike that marketeer and lab manager Edison) but towards the end of his life he suffered from mental illness. His obsessive-compulsive disorder is well documented, and any number of examples can be given of great men falling in love with an idea, and losing their self-critical facilities as they age (vis. Linus Pauling's obssession with Vitamin C).
The erronous view of Tesla you attribute to skeptics probably has more to do with his cult's deification of him, rather than his real work. The man himself wrote little about his work other than his patents.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Does anyone else find it funny that the address for the main researcher is a Hotmail address?
I can just see his subject lines:
Confused about your supposition on the nature of superconductors
Get out of debt now
Want Happiness?
Hot teens waiting for you
Do you have a copy of refrence 19 from your July paper on hand
Get your degree now!
Yikes.
Different radiation patterns will vary with distance in different ways. Uniform radiation falls off as the square of the distance, but beamed radiation does not. All that this guy has shown is that the radiation is beamed. There's no new physics in that.
I briefly touched on this while writing a post earlier, but it's been bugging me more and more so I feel the urge to elaborate. The guy does something involving extremely high currents over short periods of time (read: powerful electromagnetic radiation source), and somehow attributes this to a quantum anti-gravity! It's easy to criticise Podkletnov's experimental technique, but this logical leap is so flawed it's hillarious.
He writes: If the effect is truly gravitational, then the acceleration of any test body on which the impulse acts should be in principle independent on the mass of the body. ... Here, however, we encounter a conceptual difficulty. (The difficulty lies in the author's inability to use reason.) Suppose [we put in the beam] a very massive pendulum. If the effect is gravitational (an unsupported and ludicrous assumption to begin with, but allriiiight) then the acceleration of a test mass should not depend on its mass. However it is clear that in order to give this mass the same oscillation amplitude of the small masses employed in the experiment, a huge energy amount is necessary, which cannot be provided by the device. Therefore the effect would seem to violate the equivalence principle.
There are at least two gaping problems with this logic, which is actually the springboard off which the author launches into 20 pages of pointless theory. First, it's a ridiculous extrapolation. He observes some (inconclusive, I'm certain, though he presents no data) evidence that the impulse given to the test masses is proportional to their mass. This means the energy absorbed by the free objects is proportional to their mass. Then he conjectures that a really large mass must do the same thing (by extrapolation), at which point it absorbs more energy than he has put into the pulse in the first place. I hope this logic sounds as bad to you as it does to me!
Then he cites it as a violation of the equivalence principle. It's really a violation of conservation of energy, which is by all accounts impossible. Even the quantum gravity theory he appeals to requires conservation of energy, as do virtually all possible physical theories. The equivalence principle simply doesn't apply to this situation, and even if it did, it would be satisfied. This principle only applies to the limiting case of a uniform gravitational field. On small scales, the gravity field near the earth is uniform enough. But his claimed effect would be highly non-uniform. Second, the equivalence principle is basically that the gravitational field is equivalent in every respect to an accellerating reference frame -- which explains why gravity fields produce a force on a body proportional to its mass.
Even though this paper uses a lot of big words (often misspelled), it is by no means scientific. The author conveniently ignores all the reasonable explanations for his radiation, presents no data whatsoever to support his claim that it's a gravitational force, and merrily plunges into a thoretical discourse having no bearing on reality.
Your link says they were levitating things inside a soleniod with a magnetic field of 16 Tesla. In his abstract he says that the device used only a 1 Tesla field and the object being affected wasn't even within that 1T field at all, only the device was. The differences are enough for me (a non-physicist) to believe that the two phenomena are not the same.
Note that the hydrogen is circulated through the engine feed pipes to chill them. This means that the hydrogen isn't just sitting in the tank, it's moving through pipes which are not as well insulated as the tank, which would cause warming and venting.
I also see that the pressure relief valve is set at 38 psi, but during prelaunch the tank is pressurized to 44.1 psi -- unless there's something not mentioned on that page, as long as the tank is at the 44.1 pressure needed for ignition, there will be continual venting.
Actually, your cat trained you to dislike flying frogs so you'd help stop the frog conspiracy.
Yes, they laughed at Newton. They laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the CLown.
Finally, Back to the Future 2 may not be too far off! I want to be the first with a hoverboard. Seems that the Skycar is already on it's way though.
-Shade
In fact, what Gospodin Podkletnov seems to have discovered is the basis of the infinite improbability drive.
As you all know, the first application of the fundamentel research, would be a prototype which causes clothes to jump eighteen inches away from the girl wearing them, thus breaking the ice at parties...
>> I suspect that independant verification attempts will not work when using non-ferrous target materials.
Actually, I first saw this story in 1996. It was initially thought that the scientist had reduced gravity in an area that went further than was measurable, straight up from a spinning super conducting experiment.
They would not have even noticed the effect if one of them wasn't smoking a cigarette. It was the ciggie smoke that they observed behaving strangely in the area above the experiment.
Running upstairs, they noticed that the effect went all the way through the building, throught each floor, in the area immediately above the experiment.
I was actually dissapointed to see the story hushed up for further research after only a couple of months. I still have an archive somewhere of all this stuff.
Anywho, great to see this progressing. I just knew we were going to get some real gravity revelations in my lifetime.
Oh, here's something.
Get the Hell off my planet, you slimy mobster Bush!
Why does Slashdot even give crackpots like this a voice? It's typical cold fusion, room temperature super conductors, perpetual motion engine bull shit. It's one guy claiming to have obtained a result that even he admits contradicts general relativity.
That's exactly what they said when Newton proposed the theory of gravitational acceleration (the famous "feather and cannon ball fall at the same rate" experiment) and when Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity. Both of those ideas contradicted conventional thinking, but came to be accepted as some of the most valuable scientific contributions of all time. While you could be right in saying that this is the scientific equivalent of vapourware, it would be worth your while to observe this point. History has told us time and time again that more people spend more time thinking and talking about what they can't do than what they can do.
Sure, sometimes these fantastic paradigm-shifting things happen. But when it's this far fetched, how about waiting for at least a little peer review?
Because peer review often takes time to verify/disprove your research. By that time someone else may have discovered it and you want to make sure your hard work accounts for something. So you publish as soon as you have something concrete. Even if it gets retracted later on (Element 118, for example) the point is that you've still asked the questions anyway. You may even inspire further research into the field (for instance, the synthesis of transuranics continues to this day).
And as a final note:
Get into the conversation, log in. Most people don't read AC comments.
Now that, I can agree with.
----------
When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
It's also a good way to introduce Intelligent Design Theory and other para-scientific endeavors by insinuating that because a theory cannot be tested that it is just as valid as a theory that was taken from the first few chapters of a millenia old book.
Don't bother waiting for anti-matter to be used for energy production. The techniques for producing anti-matter are exceedingly inefficient. A staggering amount of power is used to produce piddling amounts of antimatter in particle accelerators.
Furthermore, even perfectly efficient generation of antimatter would use as much energy to produce the antimatter as is recovered by its annihilation. (I.e., energy is conserved.) Just use the energy you were going to use to make antimatter, and use it for whatever you were going to use the antimatter for. Simply omit the antimatter step.
Is there a proof that gravitity does NOT travel instantly? If yuo can proof this you've a proof for gravity waves, right? Another mystery yet
:o)
That gravitiy does travel instantly is not a proof on violation of the relitiy theory. You must proof that gravitiy CHANGES can travel instantly, and that one can transfer information through this. Something not in contrast to the idea gravity expands instantly, so how about to say a remote view can only see changes in gravity after enough time has passed that lightspeed time/space factor passed toward him. You can't destroy or create masses, right? So you can't create or destroy gravity force. You can only pull apart an object into two, so the attraction force toward that object is seperated into two, so the once unified force is split into two, but does the remote viewer "feel" this "instantly" or not? Does the gravitiy information that these objects splitted travel with lightspeed or faster than light? Does there travel any information at all? Maybe the sum of attrcation stays the same, so theres no information send over. However my calculations do show a change in force.
Can I use two objects by frequently joining them together and ripping them a part to generate gravitiy waves? How fast would they travel then? Would gravitiy waves obey to the same laws as the electro/magnetic do? (light)
I wish I had a huge labratory where I can manipulate with millions of tons of mass
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Try removing the spaces in the address that /. added.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
... as real possibilities in scientific procedures?
A very interesting commentary at Randi.org (http://www.randi.org/jr/01-13-2000.html) quoted below.
....
....
Now, it's a fact that scientists are often, to most of the public, pretty strange folks. We've pretty well gotten over the notion that they all wear white coats, carry smoking test-tubes, and are male, but even they sometimes admit that they may not see things quite the same way that the rest of us do. One thing has always made me wonder about their world-view -- they almost never consider the possibility that a fellow- scientist might be directly cheating, or might be merely exceedingly naive. And, even if they do suspect such a situation, they scrupulously avoid even hinting at it, particularly in writing.
Being myself from Russia, I know that there is a plenty of cheaters and swindlers. They claim to invent all kinds of stuff, starting from graviational shielding to torsion generators. All of this is so much bullshit that Russian Academy of Sceince had to form a special committee on "Fighting Pseudoscience" (don't recall the exact name). BTW, the total financing of science dropped ~5 times in last 10 years.
So, I don't think that this crap deserves to have a story on /.
Not that I think that /. has high standards on stories, but still......
Danila
BTW Aren't floating cars what are known as amphibious and went out of fashion in the 70s?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Besides ferromagnetism, the strongest type and only manifested in certain materials/temperatures there's paramagnetism -- a weak attractive force and diamagnetism -- a weak repelling force.
While those types of magnetism are quite weak, they become noticeable in strong magnetic fields, and may cause objects to repel or attract.
We can't eliminate the forces caused by diamagnetism or paramagnetism, so we have to rely on our knowledge of the material to estimate what they are in that particular case. Anything left over after substracting those estimates must be a new force IF the estimates are correct.
Someone promised me flying cars buy 2000, I want flying cars! Why dont I have flying cars! Argh..
Podkletnov? This is basically the same experiment.
Do experimental physics preprints normally include photographs? I don't know, I'm just asking.
Female Prison Rape in NY
That gravitiy does travel instantly is not a proof on violation of the relitiy theory.
Actually, it is. General Relativity includes a term for the speed of gravity (c subscript g), and the success of the theory in explaining the orbital decay of binary pulsars and the accuracy of our observations place a limit on the difference between c-sub-g and c (the speed of light) of 1% or less. So, it is undeniable that either (a) the speed of gravity is within 1% of the speed of light, and not instantaneous, or (b) General Relativity is false.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I'm curious, however, as to why you love my post so much. As user #458, you're a respectable /. veteran. Tell me what you find so worthy of honoring with karma burn...(although you're still at 2 as of this post's timestamp...)
It was just fucking funny. I mean, really fucking funny.
Not only that, but your post was *neat*. You used everything properly, where you needed to, and brought in the superscript right where you needed it...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I'm glad you found the hyperdimensional physics info interesting... but why do you say 'disregard the Cydonian face'?
:)
IF it really is just a natural mountain, why does NASA spend so much time and effort making up fake science to prove that its natural? if it were really that obvious, you'd think they would just leave it alone.... but no, first they refuse to take more pictures of it, then when they finally do take another picture of it (under threat of lawsuit by a group named FACETS) they sit on it for two months while they prepare a hit piece against it that is as full of holes as.... well... i don't know... something that is really full of holes
if you look at the science behind the hit piece, it should be obvious that NASA is hiding something, God only knows what it really is that they are hiding, but they sure as shit aren't telling the truth...
they aren't called NASA for nothing :
Never
A
Straight
Answer
I taught myself a lot of physics out of books. I knew which books to read. And I'm not stupid. But it would have gone much faster with peers and teachers. Ultimately, it did, when I started taking courses in those subjects. In addition, when you self-study, you often get curious gaps in your knowledge, and there isn't immediate feedback to tell you when you're laboring under a misconception. So errors can propagate more easily. I think it's best to learn in an actual degree program to get good foundations, but to supplement your learning with your own reading so you're not limited. Of course, some subjects are easier to self-study than others. I taught myself much more programming, much faster, than I ever did with physics.
We used to barely understand magnetism, but now we manipulate it all the time.
I suspect that we don't actually understand magnetism, we simply harness it to our own ends. 200 years ago, we didn't do that.
We now barely understand gravity, but in the future we will manipulate it all the time.I suspect that probably, yes, we will.
Uh, no. Perhaps the law of gravity can be defied near black holes or in some other bizarre frame of reference. This does not mean that we will ever be able to do it. There is no "probably" about it. We might just as probably discover the true nature of gravity and find that it is completely impossible to defy.Sure. And that's entirely possible. But on the other hand, we can be fairly certain that the fundamental forces of nature occur on a subatomic level. We've only really been able to harness and understand fission for 50 years; we're still reading the table of contents on the book of subatomic phenomena. And it looks like it's a big, thick book, full of incredibly juicy stuff, but there's a lot of hard work ahead. Kinda like flipping through your first book on machine language programming.
What I'm merely suggesting is that I grew up in an age of scientific enlightenment - as did you. I trust and believe in science, if not just to make my life better, but at the least to make it more interesting. Now, since the fundamental forces seem to be more or less inter-related, I have faith in science. If we can harness two of the fundamental forces, why not the third?
Interestingly enough, plasma is widely held to be a fourth state of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma). And, while it's clearly affected by magnetism and electrostatic forces, it also seems to be unaffected by gravity. Now, I can convert water to ice or steam relatively effortlessly with technology; maybe one day I'll convert it to plasma? (Today, August 2001, I can convert argon to plasma at the flip of a switch in my bedroom. That's almost as cool as your website.)
Have faith in science. The best minds in the world are working on this one. I believe some sort of answer will come during out lifetimes.
When my father was my age, the first transistorized computers were shipping, but they still didn't fit on your desk. Think about it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
yeah, yeah. dmca. blah.
it's not funny anymore.
http://www.disclosureproject.org/
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
mov ax, 4c00h
int 21h
In other words, _exit(0) in DOS. So what?
Wonderful how you forgotten that gravity also gets weaker with distance. It follows the same relationship as magnetic fields. The k/x^2 relationship. So people stop craping about things you don't know let the guys with too much brain deal with it. Perhaps you should take your own advice. Magnetic fields, according to Maxwell's Laws, are only created by dipoles, and so magnetic fields decrease as (to an approximation) the reciprocal of the CUBE of the distance: k/r^3.
Which, unfortunately, blows a hole in your claim that gravity will one day be manipulated the way the electromagnetic force is today. The gravitational force between two protons is on the order of 10^-36 times the electrical force. That's what people mean when they say that gravity is weak.
Yet the gravity occuring on a subatomic level is sufficient to hold two protons together, in holy matrimony, despite their obvious lack of electrical... uhhh... chemistry.
Bollocks. The fact that the Sun is a sphere, and not a cloud of atoms evenly dissipated across the universe, is pretty strong evidence that plasma is affected by gravity.For sure. But what percentage of the gas in Sol is involved in fusion at any given nanosecond? This candle's been lit for billions of years and still has a lot more to go. The popular theory, as I understood it, is that the sun is primarily composed of superheated gases. The plasma is involved only in the fusion reaction which powers it; beyond that, it's gas, which remains affected by its own gravity.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Ummm, the sun is not a ball of gas with a little interspersed plasma. It is a giant ball of plasma. Plasma is an ionized gas. ANY gas as hot as the sun is automtically a plasma because the outermost electrons cannot be bound to the atoms at such a temperature (even for hydrogen) and are therefore ionized and thus it is a plasma by definition. Cold plasmas can be generated as well.
The answer is that the Earth is attracted to where the Sun's present position, not its retarded position. (Well actually, its "retarded position linearly extrapolated from its motion to where it is now".) Counterintuitive, but true, and it doesn't violate relativity or constitute FTL propagation of information. See the FAQ.
It's disturbing that the title of the paper mentions a gravitational force, and throughout the author refers to his radiation as a "gravity impulse". This is a premature, biasing assumption, and it makes the entire paper distasteful to read. A gravitational force would be the last thing I would imagine attributing to this effect, which is obviously electromagnetic in origin.
I have no concerns that he somehow set up the experiment "incorrectly". If this is not a hoax, then whatever he did to create the radiation is fine, as long as it's described well enough for others to reproduce. However, his tests of the radiation are biased toward the idea that it's gravitational and not electromagnetic. He does not use antenae and plot the frequency spectrum, for example.
There is no table showing the various materials used, at various distances, and the relative effects of the pulse on them. Because the pulses are not very uniform, many materials should be simultaneously tested. What is the confidence level of the hypothesis that various materials experience the same force, proportional to their mass? He only says that it's true, but doesn't show any data!! This is not even close to science. It's more like wishing real hard. If I were a reviewer of the article, I would ask for much more data to be presented.
Section 4b of the paper is highly flawed. Really, what evidence does he present for the case that this is not garden-variety E-M radiation? He says the force is proportiaonal to mass and mostly independant of material (without showing the data which may be perfectly consistent with other hypotheses). Fine, but the atomic charges are going to be proportional to mass, also, so it could be a high-frequency kind of thing. He should test it on, say, different isotopes of the same element. Or lead vs beryllium, to get a decent range. He says that electromagnetic shielding doesn't attenuate the radiation. Okay, if you say so, but please, what kind of shielding did you try? Did you use a conductor, or mu-metal? How large? How much? To what accuracy did you test this? Magntic fields are extremely penetrating, and a Farraday cage doesn't help. I know, my office is one floor up and one room to the right of an 8 Tesla magnet, and I can't put any computer monitors in the Southern half of my room!
Then in 4b he has some completely lunatic argument that his "new force" is not consistent with GR, because if he extrapolates the effect way beyond the range he has tested, he comes up with a violation of conservation of energy. "My tiny test balls received kinetic energy proportional to their masses, so logically, if I put a wrecking ball in the way it would absorb more energy than I put into the pulse! Ha!" He calls this a violation of the equivalence principle, which is absolutely wrong. It's a violation of conservation of energy, which is technically equivalent to saying that the laws of physics change from day to day (that time is not a valid symmetry).
Then the rest of the paper goes into theories of quantum gravity and stranger stuff, which is most certainly not proven physics (not that I don't believe it, but come on!). I didn't read any of it, because I would rather read good science fiction than bad science fiction.
Assuming this is not a hoax, I would be mildly interested in seeing a proper analysis of this high-energy E-M pulse. But there's enough genuine and important scientific research that is getting its funding slashed in the US (thanks, Bush!), so I hope experiments like this don't get more attention than they deserve.
Topher Cawlfield
Why does Slashdot even give crackpots like this a voice? It's typical cold fusion, room temperature super conductors, perpetual motion engine bull shit. It's one guy claiming to have obtained a result that even he admits contradicts general relativity.
Sure, sometimes these fantastic paradigm-shifting things happen. But when it's this far fetched, how about waiting for at least a little peer review?
We now return to your regularly scheduled "Oh gee, what if Superman fought Gandalf" speculation.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Goedel's Theorem: You don't know what you think you know.
Goedel's Theorem:
That isn't godels theorem at all.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
One shouldn't try to deny something because it violates everything we know. Bell did that and ended up proving (it is a theorem) that things either can travel faster than the speed of light (spooky connection) or our view of objective reality is incorrect. Either way, man's view of reality has never been the same. (If you have never heard of Bell's theorem just search for it on google)
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
The royal "we" is a substitution of "I". As the poster obviously meant "the human race" when he said "w", you appear to be quite high handed.
The poster obviously knows little physics beyond the level of intro college courses. For him to make airy, disparaging statements about the human race's knowledge of physics is more arrogant than my (admittedly abrasive) post was.
you have _NO_ idea how Gravity works. Perhaps you are confusing being able to write a formula to describe something, as knowing how it works.
If you can write down the equations for gravity, you know how gravity behaves. Contrary to the poster's insinuation that we know hardly anything about gravity, GR works very well, across a huge range of validity.
I'm sure the 20 second rule will be satisfied. The message will also consume more space in the database. And this is desired why, exactly?
:o)
SO you can post a maxiumum of:
* 3 comments per minute
* 180 comments per hour
* 4320 commments a day
* 1537920 comments per year, expect a leap year then you can post 1581120 comments.
That's cleary a cap
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
(Note: I am not a "REAL physicist")
Thought experiment #2
You have two buckets, set up so water flows out of one, into the other via gravity. You set up the Average Household Water Transfer Device (aka a pump) so that it forces water from the lower bucket into the higher one. Instant perpetual motion machine and violation of thermodynamic law! Except...
Entropy increase applies to a closed system. No part of thermodynamics is violated by a localized decrease in entropy so long as the total entropy of the system increases.
Your mistake is in treating the buckets plus the Average Household Gravity Manipulation Device(tm) as a closed system, when it is not. The AHGMD, just like the pump, would require energy from the outside in order to continue operating. Without that energy, the AHGMD shuts down, the gravitiational "shielding" stops, and so does your "perpetual" motion device.
So, even with gravitational repulsion, in this house, we still obey the laws of thermodynamics.
(Actually, I think I can come up with an explanation that doesn't require a powered AHGMD, but I'm not quite so certain as to its validity.)
But then again, I could be wrong.
That is because your light has a to small wavelength.
But Morton used no superconductor, and this was in 1966.
Apparantly any hobbyist with a VDG machine can reproduce this effect. (Mine is dead right now, guess it's time to go fix it.)
Also, some of Morton's observations were verified at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, by Klaus Schlecht in 1985. For info, see the hobbyist mag for electric propulsion experiments, ESJ (below.)
I guess Podkletnov will have to change his theory if this phenomenon can be produced without any macro quantum electron coherence.
See:
If the experiment is this easy, curious geeks should see whether Morton and Podkletnov are just fooling themselves. Maybe even the scoffers would be tempted to go out to the garage lab and fire up the old VDG machine.((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))
SCIENCE HOBBYIST amasci.com
>
> As you all know, the first application of the fundamentel research, would be a prototype which causes clothes to jump eighteen inches away from the girl wearing them, thus breaking the ice at parties...
Well, I've done the first half of that. Every time I talk to a girl at a party, not only can I get her clothes to jump 18 inches away, the rest of the girl jumps away with her!
(And better yet, I can do it with a probability approaching p=1.0. No improbability drive required, all I have to do is say "Did you see that physics article on Slashdot the other day?")
When I observed that, in response to this question, girls at parties tended to run away from me at speeds which induced relativistic red shifts, and that this wasn't generally in line with the "typical female" desire to maintain a low body weight, I said "Hey! Running away from me at 0.99c makes you thinner to someone looking at you from the side, but you still add lots of mass!"
Funny, I don't seem to get invited to those sorts of parties anymore...
There's the original paper, written in 1992.
There's the Wired article by Charles Platt which goes into detail exactly what happened after he published the first paper.
And finally there's a web site on Gravity called Quantum Cavorite. It seems to be rational, although somewhat optimistic. The main lanl.gov site also has some great material on the two big approaches to G: spin foams & loops (general relativity guys) and noncommutative string geometry (particle physics guys).
What I find really strange about this paper is that after being ignored for years, not having anyone being able to repeat his results reliably and refusing to help out NASA in verifying his methods, the guy is not only back for more, but he's proposing a theory which he says invalidates General Relativity. This looks as suicidal as <obSlash>a startup company proposing to wipe out Microsoft</obSlash>...
I know that
But what percentage of the gas in Sol is involved in fusion at any given nanosecond? This candle's been lit for billions of years and still has a lot more to go. The popular theory, as I understood it, is that the sun is primarily composed of superheated gases. The plasma is involved only in the fusion reaction which powers it; beyond that, it's gas, which remains affected by its own gravity.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It was probably windy that day
"I see. The fact that you...`can't explain'.. explains everything."
This is insightful?
We used to barely understand magnetism, but now we manipulate it all the time.
ergo:
We now barely understand gravity, but in the future we will manipulate it all the time.
Uh, no. Perhaps the law of gravity can be defied near black holes or in some other bizarre frame of reference. This does not mean that we will ever be able to do it. There is no "probably" about it. We might just as probably discover the true nature of gravity and find that it is completely impossible to defy.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I'm sorry, but if the above claim is made by the paper, then it's obvious crap. If the effect isn't related to distance then why don't all pendulums in the world move by this amount when he turns on his machine? -Steve
But would not a device which can manipulate gravity and create a gravitational shielding effect, necissarily violate thermodynamic law?
:o]
Thought experiment #1:
Imagine a setup in which the claimed charged/superconductor disc setup is activated, manipulating gravity and producing a area above the device where earths' gravity is "shielded". Now, rig a device (weighted buckets on a string for example), one side of which is exposed to normal gravity and the other side of which is suspended above your Average Household Gravity Manipulation Device(tm). The apparatus on the side of normal gravity would be in constant frefall while the side above the shielded area "flows" up. Instant perpetual motion machine and violation of thermodynamic law.
IANAP but it would appear that this is inescapable and would prove gravity manipulation impossible. Any REAL physicists here please feel free to humiliate me mercilessly if I am wrong.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Mostly aluminium, of course they have some amount of magnetic metals in them too, and could probably be dropped with magnet powerful enough, but the energy requirements of such idiocy would be quite huge.
Ever heard of missiles? Or flak guns? Those things can be used if one wants to drop airplane, and best of all, they don't require half of Earths electric energy for one shot.
Actually the paper does. It says on page 9 of the PDF file:
From Table 1 on page 8 of the paper he gives experimental error as:
Often, one adds a remark stating to which journal it has been submitted. That is usually the only way to judge preprints on their relevance. If the author does not mention anything about where he/she will try to get it published, the layout of the article will usually tell you something about the intent. If revtex was used, it's probably some Physical Review magazine. If it's only four pages, it's probably written as a Physical Review Letter. These are the thing you can go on.
-- Please put this in your sig if you think
Let's not forget that these results are highly disputed among physicists. Just because someone reports they're seeing something doesn't mean that is, what in fact, they are seeing.
Hear hear.
The experimental setup involves an enormous fixed magnetic field and enormous pulsed electric and magnetic fields. Shielding against the resulting electro/magnetic/weak-force pulses and all the pathological things they can do to the atoms in your test mass is a real bitch.
So of course they're going to be very careful about any claims and make very elaborate descriptions of the test set up so other people can try to reproduce the effect and determine if it's real.
But a way to modulate gravity - with or without an electro-gravatic unification - would be a tremendous discovery! Cross your fingers.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What's the big deal about 10KA? A large strobe light can take a surge of about 1KA at 500V.
You are entirely correct. Unfortunately, this is almost always the case in the world of science, and it's a fact that many people forget. For the most part, we don't know why anything works the way it does. We perform an experiment, make an observation, and then try to come up with a model (ie, equation) that describes behavior and allows us to predict behavior in the future. Then, based on that model, we form an hypothesis, and set up another experiment to test it. If the hypothesis is correct, we assume our model to be correct (as best we can), and wait for another experiment to come along that defies our model. If our experiment proves our hypothesis to be incorrect, we adjust our model. Repeat ad infinitum.
A typical example of this process is "classical" physics vs relativity. Classical physics worked fine at relatively low speeds, but at high speeds it falls apart. Relativity applies adjustments to classical physics to compensate for the inconsistencies. Can you solve classical physics problems with relativity? Sure you can. But most people wouldn't bother with the added complexity to determine the velocity of a projectile fired from a cannon and the distance it will travel.
This is the scientific method. I'm not sure we'll ever understand why anything works like it does. We'll just be able to predict what will happen, and thus use such knowledge to manipulate these forces. If anybody doesn't believe this, take a simple physics topic, and play the children's "why" game. Believe me, you'll get tired of the game long before you finish coming up with "why" questions.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
First, magnetostatic attraction drops off as distance cubed.
Second, you can actually do a lot better than that, because planes conduct electricity. Thus, with appropriate dynamic fields, you can set up circulating currents in the skin or frame, which you can then couple to with other fields. We're talking big antenna arrays here, but it might just be possible.
Third, any such attempt is likely to melt the plane via inductive heating before you actually "tractor beam" it to the ground.
Finally, for the energy you're expending, a laser or rail/coil-gun setup is vastly more likely to work. And cooler, too.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
The paper said that one of the targets that apparently was affected was 150 m from the "generator".. Would be pretty nifty vibrations that caused a target 150m away in another building to move 14cm sideways...
excuse me, I'm not native english speaker, but ...
it seems to me that knowing how something behave has not the same meaning than knowing how it works, the latter implying, for me, a notion of why it behave this way.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
For myself, I surely understand how those forces behave, but not why.
(and I don't accept explanations such as: cause the equations tell us it must behave this way.
One experiment never proves anything. If the result agrees with theory, then sometimes followup experiments never get done. But they need to be done, particularly when the results are weird. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
But this new experimental design looks much better. The target is far from the generating machinery (tens of meters), and heavy shielding is between them. The effect observed is non-statistical and large.
This is encouraging. It's not experimental error. Either this is a major result, or it's fake. Now others have to try to reproduce the effect.
Actually, MRI machines do up to 2 or 3 tesla, and some devices are designed to provide 5 tesla to a fairly small space. I must be missing something though, because that current at that voltage would suggest 100 ohm resistance, but a superconductor has very very close to zero (theoretical limit being zero, but due to practical considerations, theres a very fast exponential decay near the critical temperature) I guess in this case its a limit of their HV generator. Perhaps they should try a different technique, since they they could get larger currents, though at lower voltages. If the problem is getting the discharge, they can use argon to increase the spark length.
:)
Also, their method of detecting pendulum deflection is VERY crude. Its not hard to set up something with a small mirror hanging on the pendulum's thread, such that when the pendulum moves, it causes the deflection of a beam of laser light. This is how they measure deflections in the Cavendish apparatus, which essentially measures the gravitational attraction between two balls of lead (an ammount which is exceedingly small).
The other thing I'd like to see is how much force the 'emitter' device device experiences with different targets, or with under a variety of circumstances. If its behaving like a coherent beam emitter, it should be pushed away even when there isn't a target present.
Still, given all of the things they haven't tried, and all of the things they've yet to do, I think this is a bit early for them to go into the involved set of theories they've discussed in the paper. I think they need to do some narrowing down first
NichG
If you had read the paper you would haave known that they say that the target is hung from cotton strings..
I can't wait until my end users know WTF an 'icon' is, let alone a fucking tachyon pulse, inverse or otherwise..
I wouldn't say the story was "hushed up" for further research. Until the further research is done, there just isn't much to tell beyond what you learned before starting the further research. After a couple of months, you get tired repeating the same old stuff over and over again...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
SpaceTime physics defines a static world. Since our world is constantly changing SpaceTime physics is prolly wrong. http://home1.gte.net/res02khr/crackpots/notorious. htm
I don't know if I hold with everything at the above link but it is certainly something to think about.
I am pro-lifechoice.
What get's me it that a massive electrical field will effect objects within it's close proximity. You get basically a corona field around it that will repulse non-conductive objects. (Granted not heavy ones) I have seen 72000 Volt electrical switches have dust patters that show where the "field" was around uninsulated connections or breaks in insulation. And anyone that has worked inside a television knows that you can locate a crack on a flyback transformer's high voltage side by looking for the dust... (On really old sets that had the problem for a while)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why will the superconductor vaporize? Heat is generated when current passes through a conductor due to resistance. Superconductors have such small resistances that the heat generated will be small.
Consider that, to my knowledge, we've still got no higher understanding of why two positively charged ions repel, or why a positively charged ion attracts a negatively charged ion.
Please refrain from the royal "we" in an area in which you obviously lack expertise. "Higher understanding" and "why" are loaded words; but some of us have a pretty good idea of how gravity and electromagnetism work, thank you very much.
j_w_dougherty
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
10^4 Amps and 1 MegaVolt. That's a lot of power. Watts = Amps times Volts. 10000A times 1000000V equals 10000000000 Watts. 10 GW in a fraction of a second. In the text h mentions vaporization of the superconducting coating. I bet.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
If you read into the test parameters, 10^4 A - (that's 10,000 AMPS folks!) If you pump that much current into any superconductor, for the brief moment before it vaporizes, it will radiate all up and down the spectrum from DC to Cosmic Rays, and will probably emit some freq's we havent discovered (observed) yet, including ones that act like gravity(ons). That's more or less what the Star Wars (Reagan's, not Lucas's!) X-Ray pulse laser was all about (but it used a nuke for an energy pulse instead of 10KA).
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
You must be talking about H2 gas. It couldn't possibly leak that much liquid H2. According to this, the hydrogen tank holds 1,500,000 litres of H2, meaning that it would be entirely depleted in 1.5 hours.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I think it's a one-man institute.
3 years ago observations on distant supernova showed that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, a discovery that was utterly unexpected and could only be explained by some previously unknown repulsive force. eg here
Surprisingly little fuss was made about this considering it meant that the most fundamental prediction physics has made about the nature of the universe is wrong. It seemed strange to me that they could be this wrong and yet still claim to know exactly what happened in the first few microseconds of the universe. Imagine walking along with someone in the wilderness, who says we are 5 hours, 3 minutes and 32 seconds from our destination. Later you find out that you're on a different continent to the one he said you were on. Yet still he insists he knows your time of arrival to the precise second. A modicum of doubt would seem appropriate.
Anyway, I wonder if this could be the missing force ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
that's an excellent point. how would the beam "know" to affect only the pendulum ball and not the intervening matter? this insight in itself indicates a major flaw in the design of this experiment as presented.
What I'd like to know, was there any corresponding force on the apparatus? Did the superconductor experience any load, or did the cooling apparatus?
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
Only sorta, if I recall correctly...something about how while you can have simultaneous knowledge of the states, you can't actually transmit information (since the linkage is broken once they're known/collapsed).
1) The royal "we" is a substitution of "I". As the poster obviously meant "the human race" when he said "w", you appear to be quite high handed. 2) Unless you are some super-genius who has yet to publish your amazing findings about gravity, electro-magnetism and the G.U.T you have _NO_ idea how Gravity works. Perhaps you are confusing being able to write a formula to describe something, as knowing how it works. Just because you can calculate the miles per gallon doesnt mean you know the intricate workings of a modern car. Stop being so full of yourself you pretentious gobshite.
no clothes getting all twisted
I've never had that problem, and I don't have an anti-grav bed.
Sleep nude, it's amazingly comfortable!
Mod me back down! I was kidding for crying out loud! It was a joke about how every crackpot in the world appears to have chosen Tesla as their "patron saint", in spite of his actually being a very serious scientist who had an immeasurable impact on the world.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
He's talking about a field effect that's moving masses stored in a vacuum, right? Okay, so his force is supposedly capable of moving all types of masses, not requiring them to be magnetic.
Enter the common-sense equation: Wouldn't this noticeably affect a hell of a lot of other masses around the device too? Air? The walls of the structure? Windows, walls, etc.
Having them in a vacuum shouldn't noticeably affect the observational measurements, if he's moving these massed six inches. That takes a fair bit of energy.
Any notation in there of a sudden burst of overpressure in the room containing the device, or of severe air disturbances?
Bahumat, from the mouth of n00bs...
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
This is a superconductor that the Physics community spent allot of time examining in the late 80's. Funny how it is being used in such strange experiments. Does anyone remember how a chunk of Yittrium Berium, Copper Oxide could repell glass? Does ANYONE remember the floating chit from the late 80's?
I haven't read his most recent paper, and IANAP, but I do remember researching this guy and his 'discovery' a few years back. The phenomenon he observed could just as well be explained by blocking gravity. Essentially, if you can stop gravity, then anything between an object and the largest gravity producer we know (the Earth), will ge lighter. If you could stop ALL of the Earths gravity with... say... a big enough surface, all the objects above it would get lifted out into space by the gravitational pull of all the objects on the other side. And I want to echo someone elses post in here: Bell didn't understand the physics of electricity (nobody REALLY did) when he invented the telephone, same of Tesla and the radio. All we as a civilization need to understand is the behavior of a phenomenon before we can integrate it into our technology. If this is real and this guy is really onto something, the next half-century could be even more fast-paced than the last 200 years combined.
Blancmange
But what percentage of the gas in Sol is involved in fusion at any given nanosecond? This candle's been lit for billions of years and still has a lot more to go. The popular theory, as I understood it, is that the sun is primarily composed of superheated gases. The plasma is involved only in the fusion reaction which powers it; beyond that, it's gas, which remains affected by its own gravity. An atom of a gas ionizes (loses its electrons and becomes a plasma) at a few ten thousand degrees centigrade. The interior of the sun is heated to something like 20 million degrees. If gas ionizes at, say, 20,000 degrees, all the material from the center of the sun to the point where the sun's temperature drops to 20,000 is a plasma, whether the plasma is fusing or not. Also, surrounding the sun is an extremely low density plasma cloud called the corona, heated to millions of degrees by the sun's magnetic field. No fusion takes place there. The plasma cloud is attracted to the sun by gravity (except for the particles that are flung outward by the field, called the solar wind). In short, plasma is affected by gravity.
You mean the superscript 1 at the end of this question?
J
Try ¹.
No, but i'm sick of people being unable to spell a simple acronym such as DMCA.
Moron.
Oh, good, so we have a device which affects pendulum string no matter what material is in the pendulum....
The paper said that one of the targets that apparently was affected was 150 m from the "generator".. Would be pretty nifty vibrations that caused a target 150m away in another building to move 14cm sideways...
A single, sharp impulse might do it, and IMO that's more likely than a gravity beam.
However, looking over the links other posters have supplied, I suspect fraud is the most likely explanation.
Sure you get a parodox, but it is possible that in 100 yrs there will be some genious capable of breaking the parodox. Time will be the only judge whether something is possible or impossible - to be truly impossible, it must not have been proved possible by the time the universe ends.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
You're total and complete nimcompoop.
Experimental evidence shows that gravity travels at not less than 2x10^10 times the speed of light. See The Speed of Gravity - what Experiments Say.
Here's the abstract:
Abstract
Standard experimental techniques exist to determine the propagation speed of forces. When we apply these techniques to gravity, they all yield propagation speeds too great to measure, substantially faster than lightspeed. This is because gravity, in contrast to light, has no detectable aberration or propagation delay for its action, even for cases (such as binary pulsars) where sources of gravity accelerate significantly during the light time from source to target By contrast, the finite propagation speed of light causes radiation pressure forces to have a non-radial component causing orbits to decay (the "Poynting-Robertson effect"); but gravity has no counterpart force proportional to v/c to first order. General relativity (GR) explains these features by suggesting that gravitation (unlike electromagnetic forces) is a pure geometric effect of curved space-time, not a force of nature that propagates. Gravitational radiation, which surely does propagate at lightspeed but is a fifth order effect in v/c, is too small to play a role in explaining this difference in behavior between gravity and ordinary forces of nature. Problems with the causality principle also exist for GR in this connection, such as explaining how the external fields between binary black holes manage to continually update without benefit of communication with the masses hidden behind event horizons. These causality problems would be solved without any change to the mathematical formalism of GR, but only to its interpretation, if gravity is once again taken to be a propagating force of nature in flat spacetime with the propagation speed indicated by observational evidence and experiments: not less than 2 x 10^10 c. Such a change of perspective requires no change in the assumed character of gravitational radiation or its lightspeed propagation. Although faster-than-light force propagation speeds do violate Einstein special relativity (SR), they are in accord with Lorentzian relativity, which has never been experimentally distinguished from SR-at least, not if favor of SR. Indeed, far from upsetting much of current physics, the main changes induced by this new perspective are beneficial to areas where physics has been struggling, such as explaining experimental evidence for non-locality in quantum physics, the dark matter issue in cosmology, and the possible unification of forces. Recognition of a faster-than-lightspeed propagation of gravity, as indicated by all existing experimental evidence, may be the key to taking conventional physics to the next plateau.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
read the source, duh :)
/. veteran. Tell me what you find so worthy of honoring with karma burn...(although you're still at 2 as of this post's timestamp...)
Okay, I'll tell ya'. "something" reads "something". That's the secret. (I show you the first version without having it interpretted as html by actually replacing the ampersand with its meta-character --I just wrote two amp's in a row to show you the word before the dash, can you see why?).
There are other ampersand-character-semicolon combinations, but I only know lt (less-than, to show an opening angle bracket for an HTML tag) and gt (to show a closing angle bracket for a tag).
I'm curious, however, as to why you love my post so much. As user #458, you're a respectable
You haiku nazi.
It really doesn't matter,
I will shut up now.
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
Wow you're an uberbitchy liberal
Don't quantum entagled particles also violate relativity and suppossed speed of light limitations?
I wonder how many people actually tried to read the paper. I read it and I don't see anything that directly contradicts General Relativity. It mentions that PERHAPS the effect is related to Torsion theory or others that seem to violate certain principles of GR, but from what I gather these theories don't contradict GR. There is a difference. Quantum Theory often violates GR - or APPEARS to do so, given our incomplete understanding of the universe. And so what if GR is not quite perfect? There is room to learn.
Also, there is no way that this is sending out bursts of electricity or magnetic force the way Taco describes. The experiment used apparatus to shield against electro-magnetism. If it is EM, then it is still very odd behaviour in that it can do something no other EM force previously observed can do.
The reaction of most people on this list is that he has just made a EM field - come on ... obviously it's not. Read the paper and you will see that the radiation emitted is proportional to the mass of the target objects, and that it is not in any way slowed down nor does it alter it's course through material that 'normal' radiation is at least effected by. If his results are correct, this is not electromagnetism.
I am not saying that this guy has discovered what he suspects: I don't know. But it's pretty damn interesting, and of course other people should try to duplicate the results.
Go read this story - besides being a damn good shortstory, it's pretty much explains why anti gravity is impossible.
TC - My Photos..
I love this guy- he has been having fun with superconducters for more than 10 years now, and if nothing else, keeps the scientific community openminded. It doesn't matter -really- if he is right or wrong; it will be many more years before any practical 'household' application of his ideas will be used, IF he is right. But even if he is wrong, he inspires others to get out their lab kits, and have a go for themselves. Institutional science has it's merits, but anyone who has read Kuhn also knows of its demerits. We need the sole, 'whacky' experimenter. P. withdrew his 1992 paper, but it still got NASA to have a look (and you should see how the institution screwed that one up). Let's see how long it takes before he withdraws this one. All references availiable using Google and the appropriate keywords. Gravity helps.
That's not a haiku.
You must count your syllables
More closely next time.
Little girls wouldn't run away screaming if you'd stop offering them candy from your car, man...
I'm sure it would if you took out the batteries and hooked it up to a multiple terawatt power source of some kind. Of course the bulb might not last all that long.....
Why? Do you keep your pendulums in a vacuum chamber?
Ok. Whatever. You can have faith in science. But magnetism was obviously directly manipulateable from the moment anyone picked up the lodestone. Every examination of gravity has shown us that there is no way whatsoever that it can be manipulated.
No, not some of the best minds are working on this. The best minds have moved on. They might be examining the nature of gravity, but not necesarily in the hopes of it's manipulation.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
2500 years ago Demicritus developed an idea for a theory of atoms. After being submited to peers like Aristotle... man didn't develop chemistry for 2300 years.
If you submit ideas to your peers to predigest for you .You will get the same results,shit.
So how strongly a body causes others to react is a different/independent quantity than how strongly it reacts to others... This doesn't sound like it sits very well with Newton's third law. How does that work? URLs?
The question of the behavior of different materials in this experiment seems of paramount importance. It seems odd that the paper has so little actual data--no precise description of the materials used, no separate measurements for different materials, no error bars, no statistical analysis.
F = (G * m1 * m2) / r^2
Don't be so silly. To compensate the for the increase in r^2, you just square G. If Q can do it, so can you.
This page contains a lot of links generally rebutting a lot of "fringe" claims on physics topics. He has A Whole Section devoted to Mr. van Flander's paper, in which he links to rebuttals by gravitational physicists of Mr. van Flander's ideas. The short answer from them seems to be "Tom van Flanders doesn't understand relativity very well."
probably the most interesting post i have ever read on /.
mod this up!!
My cat's breath smells like cat food.--R. Wiggums
"It cannot be understood in the framework of general relativity."
If this isn't bogus, it means that there's a great big hole in Einstein's view of gravity in particular and possibly the universe in general. The question is how big the hole is.
When you're talking about faster-than-light travel in the realm of special relativity, you have three choices:
1.) Causality - event A causes event B, such as "I push key on keyboard, then letter appears on screen.
2.) FTL - moving faster than 3E8 m/s.
3.) Relativity - No matter how fast you go, light is always measured to be going 3E8 m/s in relation to you. Space-time itself is altered to make this so.
Of those three, you can only have two. If you move faster than light under relativity, you begin to move backwards in time. Even worse, causality goes out the window. Using the example of my keyboard again, all observers moving slower than the speed of light see that I press the key BEFORE it appears on the screen (but they disagree on how long before), so I essentially cause it to happen. Photons see everything as simultaneous (literally. A photon considers my typing to be simultaneous to the big bang). A person moving faster than light, though, will instead see that the letters appearing on my screen before I type, meaning that the words are causing me to press the keys. Under relativity, it looks this way because it IS that way, because all observations (in an inertial frame of reference, blah blah blah) are by definition right under relativity. This means nothing really causes anything, since it can be proved that both A caused B and B caused A. The universe runs entirely on coincidence if this is the case.
This also leaves the door open for headache-inducing paradoxes (give two duelers tachyon pistols and they will both shoot each other before the other fires), but that's another long story.
If we can find holes in relativity, though, it may be the one of those three options we throw out. This will let us get to the next star system in a reasonable amount of time while still being able to prove that we invented warp drive, not the other way around. :)
Doesn't the absence of negative gravity rather preclude the possibily of gravity existing at all ?
No, not really. In some versions of the attempt at a Grand Unified Theory, the spin of the mediating particle becomes an exponent of sorts in the equation. The photon that mediates electromagnetism is a spin-1 particle, while the graviton is a spin-2 particle. Gravity is then considered always an attractive force because the square of a number is always positive.
Grossly oversimplified, anyway. But yes, in some theories, gravity is always an attractive force for good reasons.
-- Bryan Feir
So what happened to the first guy who got a result stateing that: For any point not on a line there exist A) One and only one line through the point that does not intersect the line B) An infinite number of line through the point that do not intersect the line C) No lines through the point that do not intersect the line? He dismised the result because it was obvious nonsence, and now no one remembers his name. On the other hand everyone knows who Gauss and Riemann where!
> Please refrain from the royal "we" in an area
> in which you obviously lack expertise. "Higher
> uderstanding" and "why" are loaded words; but
> some of us have a pretty good idea of how
> gravity and electromagnetism work, thank you
> very much.
No you don't. You're just judging yourself on
the scale of what people know, which only ranges
from 0 to 0.000001
uh... greater mass == greater trace amounts of iron. no?
sorry, what am I missing here?
Look, who has time to reproduce well-established results? You don't get published (i.e., get ahead in science) for "I did the same thing that he did six months ago, and the results pretty much agreed." You have to do something new enough to be worth publishing. Which means once you read something in a quality journal, you cross it off your list of things to do. If you were working on a very similar project, you say "We got scooped, let's move on" or you figure out some way in which your experiment improves on the result, or that your results look different, in which case you start a controversy.
If one has to reproduce every experiment one reads about to make sure it actually was done right, then one would never get anything done.
As far as knowing whether the experiment is "true" or not, I can guess pretty easily that this guy was ignoring some ordinary effect which disturbed his apparatus. Who knows what it is? In a peer-reviewed journal, somebody experienced in GR experimentation would look at the paper, and ask the pointed questions "discuss the vibration isolation of your experimental apparatus...include results for intermediate distances" he or she felt were necessary to answer before the article would be published in the journal.
But without peer review, nobody can require him to pin down essential details of the work. So the paper is useless. You can't even figure out what he probably did wrong.
The point of a journal like Physical Review is that I can look back over the last 20 years to determine what work has been done, and have confidence that it maybe wasn't complete crap, without having to actually repeat all of the experiments.
Don't you know... we make our planes out of plastic now.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
it's because you're a taxman *nods*
Bah not the marse face again .... Unfortunally I don't have it handy, but there was a picture of a mountain having a human taking on EARTH. Ooops suddendly it looses all mystery if a human face formed mountain stands on earth. Actually the face comes only to see if viewed from a specific angel. But on the mars it wasn't any different.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
yeah, but what about a beowulf cluster of these and connected to a cluster of 3Com Kumafluthcies?
Electomagnetic effects, more likely. This guy is passing "in excess of 10^4 A" at "in excess of 1MV" - that's over 10,000 Amperes current with more than 1 Million Volts applied (stand well back, folks - don't try this at home). How can Russia afford his power bill?
At these electrical energies, things will move simply by electromagnetic effects, which are stronger than gravity (much stronger).
Just another cheap Russian charlatan, nothing to see here, move along please. (How did this get posted here, it's a load of crap!)
all aspects of science can be manipulated. consider what you do with electricity and circuitry. what you do with a bunch of pulleys and levels exploiting mechanics. EVERYTHING in science all discoveries can be and will be manipulated.
When doing science it is almost impossible to prove something is impossible. The fact that you think it is impossible is probably because you haven't tried the 'right' approach and that the necessary technology or understanding is not yet in place. For example, while I don't personally believe in time-travel, there is no way I can prove it is impossible.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
About time. Now give me my flying car!
I like your sig, if I could I would probably have extended sig's that rotated daily to keep them interesting.
:)
End of comment beginning of extended sig
To her Bene Gesserit eye, the people of Ix were always recognizable no matter the disguises. Basic structure of their society colored its individuals. Ixians displayed a Hogbenesque attitude toward their science: that political and economic requirements determined permissible research. That said the innocent naivete of Ixian social dreams had become the reality of bureaucratic centralism -- a new aristocracy. So they were headed into a decline that would not be stopped by whatever accommodation this Ixian party made with Honored Matres.
Despite a growing sense of doom, Lucilla forced herself to practice Bene Gesserit naivete as she reviewed her encounter with the Rabbi. Her Proctors had called this "the innocence that goes naturally with inexperience, a condition often confused with ignorance." Into this naivete all things flowed. It was close to Mentat performance. Information entered without prejudgment. "You are a mirror upon which the universe is reflected. That reflection is all you experience. Images bounce from your senses. Hypotheses arise. Important even when wrong. Here is the exceptional case where more than one wrong can produce dependable decisions."
- Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune.
Dammit. I hope nobody assasinates me for this
A -5 point starting credit.
1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment.
5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).
5 points for each mention of "Einstien", "Hawkins" or "Feynmann".
10 points for each claim that quantum mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for pointing out that you have gone to school, as if this were evidence of sanity.
10 points for beginning the description of your theory by saying how long you have been working on it.
10 points for mailing your theory to someone you don't know personally and asking them not to tell anyone else about it, for fear that your ideas will be stolen.
10 points for offering prize money to anyone who proves and/or finds any flaws in your theory.
10 points for each statement along the lines of "I'm not good at math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone to express it in terms of equations".
10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.
10 points for arguing that while a current well-established theory predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or fails to provide a "mechanism".
10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Einstein, or claim that special or general relativity are fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".
20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.
20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim that classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).
20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact.
20 points for defending yourself by bringing up (real or imagined) ridicule accorded to your past theories.
20 points for each use of the phrase "hidebound reactionary".
20 points for each use of the phrase "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".
30 points for suggesting that a famous figure secretly disbelieved in a theory which he or she publicly supported. (E.g., that Feynman was a closet opponent of special relativity, as deduced by reading between the lines in his freshman physics textbooks.)
30 points for suggesting that Einstein, in his later years, was groping his way towards the ideas you now advocate.
30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).
40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.
40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.
40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.
40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. (30 more points for fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mocked your theories will be forced to recant.)
50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Matter and energy are equivalent. Hitting an aircraft with a missile is actually the delivery of a huge amount of energy which happens to be in a form which machine tools can manipulate. Of course, using an explosive chemical warhead is trivial compared to what would happen if one could convert all of the missile's matter back to energy when it was in the vicinity of the aircraft (well, actually "vicinity" would be anywhere on the same continent).
A) The testing procedures ruled out normal electromagnetic effects. The weights were suspended up to 150 feet away with multiple layers of various materials between the electromagnetic field and the weight.
B) The repulsive force was equivalent at all ranges, implying a force that does not follow normal inverse square laws.
C) The objects were made of a variety of non conducting, non magnetic materials that all reacted in a similar manner.
A + B + C = you didn't read the article before posting your flame.
However, do understand that the article also:
D) Lacks proper quantitative and statistical analysis of the results.
E) Discusses many difficulties and inconsistencies in the quality of the materials and environment of the test.
F) Makes flagrant claims unsupported by the evidence.
So A + B + C + D + E + F = Nobody knows. Until the experiment is duplicated, don't believe it. But if it is duplicated, it seems likely to be a significant discovery.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
So, it means that i don't need to be the Chosen One to repulse bullets ?
People who like this sort of sig will find this the sort of sig they like.
Once you do read the paper, you'll notice that the effect is said to be highly focused.
The Earth is a (rough) sphere. A directionally focuses "beam" would stay near the surface for only a short time and would exit into space.
If you don't understand why every pendulum on the planet wasn't affected, just try to illuminate the entire surface of a basketball with a laser pointer.
(Not that I'm convinced the research is legit, but if you're going to debunk it, then even the "every pendulum on the planet" argument doesn't hold water.)
I would like to introduce to you, Dr. Gravity
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
A couple of weeks ago while I was out at a wrecking yard digging up parts for one of my cool old cars, I watched an electromagnet lifting cars. That's a lot of iron filings.
That gives me an idea. What are aircraft made out of? Could they be attracted by a giant electomagnet? If so, when is [insert any mischevious dictator here] going to use them to bring down U.S. planes? =) Yow -- I shouldn't give them any ideas. Or maybe I should -- maybe they'll spend a lot of time creating the world's largest electomagnet, for no good reason. Buahahahaha!
Yes, kookiness has been around for 50+ years!
extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof
I've always hated this smug little aphorism of Sagan's. Which is not to say that I don't understand the thrust of it, but it sets up an arbitrary and unquantifiable standard of evidence required for any claim, the "extraordinary" nature of which is also an arbitrary valuation.
Claims demand evidence. Simple as that. If the experiment is repeatable and is not demonstrably an artifact of well-understood processes, then the effect must tentatively be considered genuine. The ferreting out of causes is another matter altogether, of course, but is subject to the same simple criterion.
I saw a television show on (I think) The Learning Channel at least a year ago, and the show was demonstrating a similar effect. They had a very powerful magnet, and they were able to "levitate" a number of various objects, LIVING and non-living. IIRC, they levitated a tarantula in the magnetic field. I hate to say it, but maybe our understanding of very strong magnetic fields is a little lacking. Remember the Philadelphia experiment?
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Its the second triad of magnetism. Instead of Iron+, it uses Rhodium+.
Now we can get around to developing humanoid robots to serve and protect humanity...
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Whether this guy is right or wrong, the vast majority of us won't be involved in that determination. Mostly, we're not scientists. And so we debate back and forth on the merits of this paper, but without reaching any conclusions.
If you feel SO strongly about this paper, for or against, then get yourself into a lab.
Because you aren't helping us and you aren't helping yourself with empty claims of insanity or genius on the part of this researcher.
Try to keep in mind a few points: First, that in nearly every case of claims of fundamental breakthroughs, it does not pan out.
Second, try to wrap your mind around the fact that our knowledge of the universe is woefully incomplete, will probably always be so, and that any totally new discovery MAY seem impossible in light of current understanding.. because current understanding is wrong.
There is no armchair way to determine the truth or falsehood of this guys claims, you HAVE to test.
I almost am of the opinion that anyone claiming a sufficiently strange new theory should build a device which demonstrates this new knowledge as an obvious effect. In other words, if you claim to have discovered a storage effect for "life-force" (whatever that is), then you had better go on and build a battery. Because no one will believe you. And usually, they'll be right. But not always.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
If you are familiar with quantam mechanics (and I suggest you all read up on it... fascinating subject), you would know that there are (currently) 6 quarks, 6 leptons, and a number of "force carrying" particles. I forgot how many of those. As of now, we have most of these identified and independantly observed (please don't argue about semantics on independant quarks). One particle, however, stands out: the graviton. Although predicted, it has never been observed. Now hold that thought... Particle physics theorists tend to come up with some pretty wild ideas about how all of that mumbo-jumbo is related. One such theory is GUTs: the Grand Unification Theories. It states that to every particle, there is a "cousin" particle. A few examples= top quark : photon :: top squark : photino. Could this experiment have found the gravitino before having found the graviton?
And what about anti-particles... We can produce anti-quarks. Not many of them, but we know they exist. Merging that idea with gravitons / anti-gravitons is a bit trickier. It would take a bit of hand-waving to predict anti-force carriers. NOTE: an anti-particle is not the same as the "cousin" particle described above. Just a thought. Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
But on the other hand, we can be fairly certain that the fundamental forces of nature occur on a subatomic level.
Which, unfortunately, blows a hole in your claim that gravity will one day be manipulated the way the electromagnetic force is today. The gravitational force between two protons is on the order of 10^-36 times the electrical force. That's what people mean when they say that gravity is weak.
And, while [plasma]'s clearly affected by magnetism and electrostatic forces, it also seems to be unaffected by gravity.
Bollocks. The fact that the Sun is a sphere, and not a cloud of atoms evenly dissipated across the universe, is pretty strong evidence that plasma is affected by gravity.
©
1
pokémon wheee...
This anti-gravity substance was used to propel space
travel in H.G. Wells "First Men in the Moon" (1919),
Wonderful how you forgotten that gravity also gets weaker with distance. It follows the same relationship as magnetic fields. The k/x^2 relationship.
So people stop craping about things you don't know let the guys with too much brain deal with it.
If you take Elecrostatic as fundamental than Magnetism explains from it. It's actually the same base force. Magentism is Elecrostatic in combination with the special relativity theory. It just the electrons thrusting around will see the world around a little "compressed" when now on a parallel cable electrons thrust at the same speed in the same direction they are not compressed, however the atomic cores who stand still are viewed compressed by the electrons. So what does an electron see on the paralallel cable? More positive atomic cores than electrons, so what it does? It attracts to it, in an electrostatic view. But actually it are two currents in cables which attract each other something we specify as magnetism.
However yes gravity is still a big mistery. It's connection to other forces are not yet revealed if it exists at all.
Why is gravitation mass and inertia mass always the same? Is it -always- the same? Seems so, but there is no proof. In an univeral gravity theory inertia must be included somehow.
What about anti-matter? Does it repulse or attract by gravity to normal matter? Nobody knows, we didn't yet have enough anti-matter to investigate, and from the particle accelerators you can't tell, since all the other forces are so much stronger you can't see gravity in these experiments.
Gravity waves? Do they exist, can they exist? (Just like electro magnetic waves in combination with the electro/magnetism force) We didn't yet meassure any but more is not known.
And there is a personal question, electro/magnetic field hold energy right? Now from E=mc^2 they also have an equivalent matter associated, which does have gravitity. So somehow they connect or?
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
I'd also like to see only the positive results of a few things...mind control, seances, telepathy, polywater, magnetic medicine, the Democratic Party...
Most governments have their own mints and printing press to do the work of making money.
So they don't pay companies but pay employees like most other employers via direct payments with no actual cash involved or cheques.
About a year ago, I read a short article in Popular Mechanics about something like this... It involves spinning ions in a lattice within a superconductor to produce a "gravity like" force, althrough it isn't actually gravity. Also, this effect is supposed to agree with relativity. A device has already been built, and the researchers are turning down inverstors so they can keep the discovery open. I found the article online.
--WH--
If you read the article further, the author states that a variety of materials were used.
Page 7:
"Various materials were used as spheres in the pendulum: metal, glass, ceramics, wood, rubber, plastic."
Next time bother to read the paper.
I don't know what kind of flashlight you have, but mine doesn't go through brick walls...
This was a joke, no? if I remeber correctly I believe Nature just published an article stating this very Theory. Something along the lines that the Universe is expanding exponentially rather than slowing down. I believe as well it has been proven by two or three different labs across the world, which the article quoted.
It takes 100mA for a second to stop your heart.
Plus or minus an order of magnitude, at least, depending on frequency and conduction path through the body, and a whole hell of a lot of luck of either variety. The human body looks like a very nonlinear device.
Also, high-current AC circuits can pack some nasty surprises. A wedding ring or metal watch band makes a nifty one-turn transformer winding, for instance.
It doesn't pay to get too complacent with either high voltage levels, high current levels, or both.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
If you've got a strong enough magnetic field (many Tesla -- don't remember exact numbers), you can affect any non-ferrous material. I wish I could find a reference, but I've seen one clip where some researchers floated organic (frogs, spiders), and inorganic material inside the torus of a superconducting magnet. The fact that this guy used non-ferrous materials, glass tubes, etc., doesn't mean a thing -- any material with a moving charge (oh, say, electrons orbitting a nucleus, or protons oscillating in a nucleus) will have a magnetic dipole.
Just one point, for most of the world, God!=honest!=truth.
This is incorrect. It has been experimentally verified many times over that antimatter behaves exactly like matter in a gravitational field.
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
You KNOW that somewhere the US gov't is chuckling...."bahahaha, we were doing THAT thirty years ago !!"
For example.
Why do two electrons repel? Because they they have the same charge and same charges repel.
WHy to same charges repel? Because Maxwells equations tell us they do.
Why are Maxwell's equations the way they are? Because nature demands local phase invarience, so we have to gauge the electron field.
Why does nature demand local phase invarience? I dunno, because its pretty?
42
-> Ron Legere I can never think of anything clever to put here.
I am not aware of all the uses for superconductors, but I am aware of one specific one... I cannot give out specifics but I can certainly explain the principles behind it.
One writer discusses that power through conductors creates magnetic fields. That's true. We all knew that. High amounts of power through conductors creates large magnetic fields. That only stands to reason. High amounts of power also creates high amounts of heat in the conductor causing the conductor to burn out like a filament in a lightbulb. Enter superconductors.
Now we can create (very) large magnetic fields that can be sustained. But why? Well, look at your hard drive. See that voice coil? See how quickly and accurately it moves? Imagine a vehicle fitted with a superconducting "voice coil system" that can literally surf on the Earth's magnetic field. This technology has existed secretly for quite some time.
I've always been kind of excited by the technology. It's very cool when you think about it. Now imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
You are a buffon!.... since when does "gravity not decrease with distance"... an absolute buffon... the only thing that is interesting in there is that it is independent of material composition and only related to mass...
That's exactly my point. Once you do find an answer for that, you'll get another why. Ah, but the endless questions and answers are what make science so fun!!
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
The class of gravity theory you're describing is known as "LeSage gravity" (actually that's one specific theory of it). It's probably the most re-invented gravity theory of all time among laymen. Nobody has ever gotten the idea to work (mostly because it generally leads to various dissipative and velocity-dependent effects that aren't observed). Gravitons could also be thought of as "gravity particles in a sense", but they don't work the way you describe (with a "shadow" and pressure effect and such to account for attractive forces). See here for how they do work: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/virtual_ particles.html
Anyway, nobody knows if gravitons exist.
did you even bother reading the information contained on either of the links that were provided?
if you truly read and absorbed all the information on both sites, i doubt you would be as sure of yourself that this person is full of shit... and if you did read that info and still think that he is full of shit, why is that? you failed to mention why there is no possibility of intelligent life outside of earth... to my way of thinking, the statistics alone make it something worth considering, i mean come on, how many planets are there out there?
i tend to think that the proof of the existence of intelligent non-earth based life lies in the ridiculous science that NASA tries to throw at the public because "hell, they won't know that we are pulling this out of our ass" NASA thinks that by posting an official 'scientific' statement about something defines it as Bible truth, and the public never thinks to say "hey, maybe NASA has their science screwed up, we should double check this stuff to make sure that they know what they are talking about"
take for example the most recent 'face on mars' pictures... somehow, in some crazy alternate realm, NASA thinks that the MOLA imaging system can somehow possibly give concrete evidence that the face is nothing more than a natural lump of rock when MOLA's ability to capture details of landforms is a factor of 100 or more times WORSE than the Mars Global Surveyor's camera's, not to mention that its resolution is only about 3x better than the original Viking pictures of the face (which by the way are 30 years old!!)
i really do wonder who is smoking what kind of 'cigarette'...
anyhow, here's the science to backup my claims - Goldin is full of crap
I'm not the original 'i love you' poster, but I can tell you, that joke made me laugh out loud, a great way to start the morning.
BTW, when you reach karma cap (having a low id), it's pretty hard to get rid of the stuff, unless you're a compulsive troll.
There is a very good article in Wired (1998) about Podkletnov. Check out:v it y.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.03/antigra
It states that his first article had passed peer-review and was about to be published in British Journal of Physics-D, when things started to happen...
The way he was threated explains why this new article is not peer-reviewed..
I don't take it to be a standard as much as a simple statement of fact: this is what you need to do to convince others.
actually, my middle name is Jenny, but my parents refuse to call me that. my first name is actually Kathyrine, but no one calls me that (with the obvious exception of my parents).
My name isn't really Jenny....
Thought you might be interested... there was an article in a recent New Scientist titled 'Utterly Repulsive'
"THREE years ago we discovered that the Universe is expanding at a faster and faster rate. Now physicists say this might mean the Universe is littered with invisible "anti black holes" that repel any matter that comes close."
by Hazel Muir
From New Scientist magazine, vol 171 issue 2298, 07/07/2001, page 7
See also the paper, "Interplay Between Gravity and Quintessence: A Set of New GR Solutions"
Authors: Arthur D. Chernin, David I. Santiago, Alexander S. Silbergleit
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0106144
I've not read this link, but you might like to.
Kaluza-Klein theory was real, but it didn't work! It was a classical theory, and couldn't be adapted to a quantum description. Moreover, it couldn't account for the other interactions (besides gravity and electromagnetism). People still tried for many years until Witten finally put the nail in its coffin by showing that no Kaluza-Klein theory could accomodate chirality. Then most K-K people moved over to string theory.
Theres two you have to keep in mind:
My take on this whole thing is that it is either the experiment is somehow at fault, or we getting one stepping the coveted unified field theory. I really have not basis for that statement, but this whole reverse gravitation powered by electromagnetic force just seems to imply it.
Oh, and it has to be said:
"Homer, I don't know whats more dissapointing. My failure to formulate a unified field theory, or you." -- Stephen Hawking
-- Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people. Guns just make bullets go really, really fast.
Wrong, bozo. Only testable phenomena have any relevance to science. The real world is full of untestable phenomena. Don't confused the map with the terrain. That really is short-sighted.
Let's not forget that these results are highly disputed among physicists. Just because someone reports they're seeing something doesn't mean that is, what in fact, they are seeing.
max
Does Alex Chiu know about this yet?! :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So what does the government use to PAY the company that PRINTS the money?
The workers and contractors of the mints are paid with _actual_ money. What they produce is just fancy paper until it is sprinkled with the Royal Penguin Piss.
Yup, the CEO traveled to alternative Earths. I saw a documentry about it on some cable station.
The travelers are called slipsters....or slid...something...
I think he got eaten by a dino.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Publishing a paper is enabling peer-review.
No, I'm sorry. The concept of peer review is that peer review happens *before* publication. That way, when you read a serious journal, you know that at least a couple scientists familiar with the specialty read the paper, and any objections they had were dealt with to their satisfaction. Essentially, it's probably good enough to serve as the basis for further work.
It might still be wrong, in the end, when further work finds some hidden or subtle error, or that the experts in the fields were still confused at the time, but for now, its worth considering to be tenatively true.
Without peer review, you have to rely on your own gut feeling to tell whether something published is totally bogus, questionable, or likely to contain basic errors. In your own subfield, you might trust your gut, as well as your impression of the authors based on their previous work or on your having met them. Outside your field, it becomes much harder to tell.
The problem with "publishing is enabling peer review" is that any review that happens afterward doesn't get attached, so you can't find out from the original document what other people thought about it. This is even a problem in peer-reviewed journals; lots of theoretical papers have typos or errors, and some of them even get published in later comments or errata, but who has the time to look for errata for every journal article that you look up?
Therefore it has no resistance. No resistance, no heat. No "vaporized". This is how superconductors can maintain a current for YEARS with no leaks. Technically forever, at least until it is radiated away by other means.
Well, it could have some resistance, but its so low as to be considered zero. (e.g. 10^-38 Ohms or whatever) Wee, 10^-34 watts of heat, oh my!!! lol
I once saw a recording of a wrench accidentally dropped from a platform above to connect two very large capacitors. The lightshow was quite nice, and afterwards there was no more wrench. Exspensive fireworks though, blew all the equipment.
While it may 'explain' why anti-gravity is imposible from Asimov's understanding, it is entirely possible that he was wrong. After all, newton was wrong to...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Finally, a tool for removing tobacco smoke!
Troll?? Informative?? It was a JOKE!
jeez!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
I think the "floating animal" experiment you're thinking of was the magnetically levitating frog. It wasn't antigravity.
aha! What's making the mass "slide"?
I try to access it and then I get...
Access Denied
Sadly, your client "Nutscrape/1.0 (Multix; 8-bit)" violates the automated access guidelines posted at arXiv.org, and is consequently excluded.
If you believe this determination to be in error, see http://arXiv.org/denied.html for additional information.
Why is it that in order for me to see a 'scientific' research paper my privacy has to be violated?
There are two possibilities:
(a) He has fudged his data or left out some important part of his apparatus.
(b) He has discovered something important.
As Don Lancaster says, first make sure it's not really bad lab work! see http://www.tinaja.com/glib/bashpseu.pdf
My mistake for replying to a reply, rather than taking a quick glance at the article. Since this is being presented on xxx.lanl.gov, that means that he's basically putting out a preprint. I don't see it mentioned anywhere, but it may actually have been submitted for review somewhere.
I guess that the original poster (who made the remark about not submitting to peer review) is unfamiliar with the way that physicists do things these days. They now put articles that are still under review (or even very preliminary results that aren't ready for formal review yet) on preprint servers like xxx.lanl.gov so that people can read them ASAP with the understanding that they're still preliminary. The authors aren't avoiding review; they're just getting the news out quickly through normal channels.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
karma-burn, in honor.
{how'd you do that nifty '1' thing?}
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Among the few intelligent comments are a bunch of wack-job arm chair physicists questioning a preliminary draft of a paper. Just because you read the expansion of the universe is unexplained does not justify linking this research to it. Not to mention the inncesant references to flying cars! Honestly, flying cars? Why does every article about subatomic particles/ forces require invocation of some futuristic fantasy?
And one last rant, referring Popular Science in the context of a legitimate scientific paper, that's a paddlin'.
You can tell its a science by the -ology at the endI agree and doubt that there is FTL info. Bell however did initially agree with EPR and came up with an experiment to show them correct, but in doing so he showed the opposite. I don't think that Bell's experiment shows that FTL exists but rather agrees with Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation in that the act of observation collapses the state vector of Shrodenger's equation. I don't think many people grasp how important this is. It shows that reality is dependent upon the observer, Bohr knew that this happened but never answered how, no one has. I think that this it is important to ask this and answer this. I think that Bell's experiment shakes the foundation of the popular belief of reality and how we ineract with the world.
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
No. No information is propagated FTL. There are non-local correlations between particles (and this is not forbidden by relativity), but they can't be used to transmit information because quantum mechanics ensures that any information you try to get out of it will be randomized.
(a) No one else works there.
or
(b) He is the only one there that ever publishes.
I wanna be a crackpot and make my own institute! Then NASA will know where to send the grant money...
My point was simply that peer review is usaully a gateway to acceptance to scientific journals, but to publish your results independently shouldn't be an automatic indication that the science is flawed. Just that the paper hasn't been formally peer reviewed to get to that point.
Often, I find that some of the peer reviewed stuff can be pretty clumsy itself. But these authors go into great detail as to how they conducted their experiment. I think it could be fairly simple to reproduce the experiment given some time, space and some cost for materials. That doesn't mean that what they are observing is what they think they are observing, but hopefully people can reproduce the effect and see for themselves.
As far as xxx goes, when I was a physics undergrad, I was tasked with downloading preprints from xxx.lanl.gov, so I know that these things get looked at by the physics community. Well, sometimes they do eventually.
So, Peer Review, as defined by the publishing process should be considered seperately from an open scientific process. Which goes both to the quality of the paper itself and what other information the authors make available to other experimentors.
"Gravity is different though: there are no 'negative' gravity particle which could cancel out the normal positive gravity, or at least there are none known today."
Exactly...how do you KNOW for sure? Could we not be in the same situation now with gravity as we were 200 years ago with electromagnetism? Perhaps what this guy has discovered IS a negative force of gravity that is normally invisible due to it cancelling out normal gravity.
OK, so I'm playing Devil's Advocate a bit here, as electromagnets have been known to have two poles for a lonnnggg time, and gravity hasn't, but even so, it makes you think... :-)
That would rock. Tho maybe I should be a subject of study. I'm kinda like a repulsor beam to0.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Sure, that's easy to say now, but not 200 years ago. 200 years ago, a lodestone was *the* magnet. It was a piece of rock that attracted iron filings.
Consider that even that poor old lodestone is outpulling the Entire Earth when it picks up it's iron filings.
How much does a Space Shuttle booster tank cost to fill?
How much would that amount of energy in batteries to power a hypothetical anti-gravity drive weigh?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Also, no one is claiming this is more powerful than magnetism. It won't lift a train or anything. As for your "star wars" devices, why can't you just use ordinary electromagnets? The repulsorlift could have a coil, etc.
(that is, the device creates a gravitational push away from it), or in Trekkie terms, a repulsor beam.
When did star trek ever refer to anything called a "repulsor" beam? Is it similar to the enterprise's death ray gun?
Anyone ever notice that the source of many of these really off-the-wall "scientific papers" are published in Italy?
He didn't publish a paper, he made an announcement of his "findings"
You're total and complete nimcompoop.
Hey, have you patched your trusty IIS servers yet?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Yeah, and if you've seen "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" you're aware that enough training in mysterious martial arts will let you fly.
*shrug*
Hmm could you for me rip the sun into two halfs pull them some miles appart and then join them again?
Unfortunally as standing object on the earth, my molucles "know" that they are rotating around there earth, there is no information in change when the rotation continues
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
It's exactly zero. Messier effect and QH shielding...
I want to patent anti-gravity. Then I can sue everyone later on. Anybody taking apart space ships will be thrown in jail under the DMCA and I will be richer than Bill Gates! By the way.... ART BELL said, XP is VaporWare MUahahahahaha
Of course the post lost credibility from there with references to aliens, government conspiracies, unexplained electronic jamming, patterns in the nearly infinite number of features on the surface of mars, etc. Why don't you worry about the important cover-ups? Like movie and record companies blatanly fixing prices across the globe? Or pharmecuetical companies charging outrageous prices for life-saving drugs? Or the current losing status of fair-use rights on copyrighted material?
I know my english grammar is bad, and tough you might not know, but I'm a german and the physics I studied were german too... So by judging someone by his grammar is like judging a book by it's cover. Yes I know, learning better grammar might do good, but for one in relation to the local average here my english is not too bad, and second 'til today I spend my time more by playing with equations and writing programs, sorry 'bout that but if you can give me an address in austria where I can learn the enlish grammar well without huge time/money expenses please tell me.
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
You have violated the spelling of the DMCA and will be jailed with the Village People.
Are they so poor in russia that their universities do not have their own domian presence?
For one, I don't appreciate this troll.
For two, this is some "research center", not a university.
For three, from what I know about the situation, Podkletnov was sacked from several research institutes in the past, and I am unaware of anything that is called "Moscow Chemical Scientific Research Centre" in Moscow, especially not at that address and zip code. If it's a respectful government research agency, then it happened to successfully elude most research institute listings in Moscow. If it's something private: it's their own damn problem if they can't get a domain (which costs pennies in the .ru zone, and you can always get a free .org.ru domain). Something is screwey here, if you ask me...
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
...poor sod never recovered from having his linear motor project cancelled...
Yes, it would be a huge surprise. That doesn't mean it's unlikely. Think, dammit [if you are capable].
Did you actually look at the paper? It's a paper. It's over 50 pages and they called it a paper.
The guys at Thiokol tell me that each solid rocket booster costs $20 million make (without fuel) and another $20 million to fill up with rocket fuel. Through in the fact that each launch uses two of them and the segments are only designed for about 20 uses, though I am told that they usually only last for 8-13 times.
Lasers Controlled Games!
First off, regardless of Bell, there is no FTL propagation of information in quantum theory, period, in the sense of any information that we can actually measure. (In a nonlocal theory there can be FTL propagation of "hidden variables", but we can't measure them so it doesn't matter as far as we're concerned.)
I think you may be slightly confusing the EPR paradox with the Bell inequalities. What Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen demonstrated was that quantum mechanics violated a certain view of reality that they held. (This view is sometimes called the "realist" view, but I don't like that term because in English it carries the connotation that any alternative is "unrealistic".) And Bohr simply responded by saying that there was another perfectly good view of reality that isn't violated by anything. Since quantum mechanics still appears to work after all these years, it seems that Bohr's view worked.
What Bell did was demonstrate that there weren't any local hidden-variable theories compatible with quantum mechanics.
Doesn't the absence of negative gravity rather preclude the possibily of gravity existing at all ?
Maybe the earth just sucks
If by "negative gravity" you mean gravitational repulsion, no. There's no reason why a force can't always be attractive.
Now try it with a ring of magnetized iron. Does the same thing happen?
Remember this guy tried it with both magnetic and non-magnetic objects. If it were a magnetic effect then the reaction of those objects would be different.
Also, the effect was the same regardless of the distance. Paramagnetic forces vary with difference.
I can't tell you how happy it makes me that someone who doesn't even know the name of the force he's talking about feels that he is qualified to call someone capable of building his own superconductors a '-NUT-'.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I suspect that we don't actually understand magnetism
Um, yes we do, to the level that we understand the electric field.
And, while it's clearly affected by magnetism and electrostatic forces, it also seems to be unaffected by gravity.
And where did you get this bit of "information"? Since gravity is a property of matter (and not state of matter), how do you reconcile this statement with your faith that the fundamental forces of nature occur on a subatomic level?
We THINK that gravity is weak. Everyone that studies it and even the greatest minds all agree that it doesn't make any sence that it acts the way it does. (I like the folded space theory myself...) we know so little about gravity it is very possible that when we discover a way to generate artifical gravity that it becomes stronger than expected. Maybe by generating it artifically the inverse log rule becomes a mute point...
The only thing that scares me is having an expieriment backfire and generate a massive gravity well in vacinity of the planet would be quite bad.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Oh wow, this is so cool, just like Star Trek and stuff!! I bet next thing you know, they'll be beaming people all over the place and making William Shatner actually not suck at acting! I'm sure glad to be living in the twenty-first century! Now if they can just find a way to keep my black jeans from fading after being washed three times.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
Pendulums 6 meters and 150 meters away in a different building, separated by brick walls and an inch of steel, showed identical effects
So why didn't every pendulum on the planet get screwed up? I'm sure somebody would have noticed that. Anyways, I'd better read the paper now :-)
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Would that actually work? (turn the objects away) If you have a fast moving small object coming towards you and you attempt to push it away what is to stop the shuttle from moving? I think the most likely scenario is that the shuttle would attempt to stop the object and as a result push itself all over the place, or perhaps rip the shuttle to pieces because it can't handle the stress.
oh if only I had mod points
Anybody who believes this data could be explained by a magnetic effect has to be on crack. Like magnetism would pass through a steel wall... sheesh!
there was an article in wired (dont laugh) about what happened to this guy when he posted his original piece. effectively he had performed experiments years ago that proved flaws in relativity, and had a paper prepared on the matter. he made the mistake of conducting an interview with a journalist, who later distorted the story to glorify it and attract readers. the distorted story led many people to say this guy was a crap scientist, and his paper ended up not being published (i think the magazine that was going to carry it declined after the prior incident). since then he's been working solely on solidifying his theories, and he (understandably so) lost a lot of faith in the "scientific community" which so briskly disregarded his theories. or, at least, that is what i remember from the article i read a while back.
:)
good to see that he is producing something. if i'm in the mood to feel stupid i'll try and understand his paper.
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
Wasn't that theory discredited when someone did the math and discovered that it didn't work out?
Does anyone have a link to an article talking about how in tracking V'ger and the other solar-system-exploring satellite thingies, they have discovered that they seem to be moving slightly slower than they're supposed to be?
I.e. they have not travelled to the point that logically, given gravity, initial speed, and acelleration hits would mathematically seem to say they would be at by now.
I saw this phenomenon, which could be something as simple as a minor undetected air leak, reported in several places, but cannot remember exactly where..
Um, see, heres the thing. Those formulas aren't just predictive tools. They're insights into that why you believe we have no grasp at. Let me put it this way: The physics of the universe as known by us can be expressed in a set of equations. Now, many of these equations have some arbitrary terms. Stuff like the speed of light, the relative strengths of forces, so forth. Something that increases our overall understanding maybe be something that just 'fixes' a bit of the equations, but whats really amazing is when you find that two 'constants' that seem unrelated to begin with are suddenly connected and dependant, thus you get rid of one more arbitrary factor. Eventually, the goal would be to get the number of arbitrary numbers (i.e. the stuff we don't understand why it is) down to zero, but so far we've done pretty well. Essentially all of the constants relating to materials in mechanics, for instance, come about because of electromagnetic interactions within the material (well, and some nuclear strong\nuclear weak to describe exactly what elements making these materials are stable). These are essentially emergent properties of the simpler set of equations of EM. Even the EM equations are fairly simple in concept, though they may look daunting. In fact, as was mentioned in an earlier thread, you can reduce 'EM' down to just 'E' if you look at it under relativity (which is a theory derived from logical backgrounds first, then tested with theoretical results. We know the 'why' of relativity. Relativity comes out of the idea that a fundamental constant of the universe should be constant everywhere and in any reference frame.)
The remaining bit describing the electric force simply comes out of treating it as sources and sinks of a field which propagates as a wave. Of course, you still have the 'like repel, opposite attract' bit, which probably has its own derivation for simple principles, but yet isn't within my reach yet (for all I know, its out there already). I'm not saying that we know EVERYTHING about EM, but we know a lot. There are of course things to fill in, not the least of which as relating it to the other forces.
As for gravity, thats a bit trickier and not understood as well, but it seems to behave along the same wave equations. The 1/r^2 dependance of both electric and gravitational fields is characteristic of a static source given the wave equation (its essentially distributing the field over the surface of a sphere in 3-space. Interestingly, there are studies (being?) done to verify the existance of more than 3 dimensions, and their 'size' (I don't really know how one would define this term in respect to dimensions... maybe if the dimensions are in a closed spherical or toroidial space)) based on the deviation from 1/r^2 for an electric field.
NichG
Do all electromagnetic fields vary strength with the distance? How about fields being bundled together as a ray? Like a point to point communication, yes it grows smaller due to losses but not r^2 as radial radiation do.
Think of a laser beam in example, it's strength will not reduce by distance. Satellites can communicate well with each other by laser beams, since the beam arrives nearly at the same strength as it was send away. Okay this is also not completly true, since the laser beam on arrival at the other satilite is aprox 1 meter in diamater, so it will only receive a part of the energy used to send. But actually the whole beam togehter would have still the same energy.
Do the other post 2 ones abouth, I don't want to make an extra reply. Just because a laser beam doesn't get weaker on distance doesn't mean suddendly the whole earth was flushed with light when turned on.
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Your mom is affected by gravity
Whose haikus earned many a bon mot.
But now 575
is no longer alive
I think he (she?) succumbed to bit rot.
(Sorry I screwed up the formatting, I'm a humanities major, OK?!)
He used an assload of current in a superconductor to create something that might not really exist. Man this boy had some expensive toys! 1MV and 10^4 A and 1 T mag field. Also all this at 40K. All i gotta says is shiznit. This guy doesn't exactly have the best rep, so we will see if he is full of shit or not in a little while, cause if the results aren't reproducible, then what the hell is the point.
There's a Karma cap?
:)
ah, that explains it...
Good post, btw
-= rei =-
*Kid Rock runs for Senate* Democrats: We must run Kid Scissors.
In fact they sometimes don't have money to pay their stuff (and this can be less than the charge for a new domain, ..., I think - I have not checked exchange rates lately).
(a) He has fudged his data or left out some important part of his apparatus.
(b) He has discovered something important.
Not having been published in a peer reviewed journal, and having no physical collaboration from independent observers (his co-author never actually participated in the experiment), I would have to lean toward choice (a).
His experimental apparatus is also very home grown. What does he mean that he couldn't "get a good enough vacuum to prevent condensation on the superconductor" ??? His home brew method to manufacture his SC coating looks EZ Bake style to me also.
However, if his experiment and results are God's honest truth, there are some interesting implications.
He says that he measured the force on pendulums of ceramic, wood, rubber, etc hanging from cotton strings seperated from his spark discharge machine by distances of SIX and ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY meters, including walls and steel plates. One must not that he does not publish the results for the 150m experiment. His primary results are from a rubber sphere, and he doesn't explicitly publish any other data. However, he claims to have imparted about 2 milliJoules of energy into the ball about 20 feet away. That's a 1/2 ounce ball on a 30 inch string given enough kick to swing 6 inches. If this is correct, it really is truly amazing.
His writing style and lack of clarity also lead me to believe that his results do not speak for themselves.
Once we get some replication of his setup, then we can see for ourselves. Nobel Prize - or Cold Fusion.
/Muerte
Forgot the linebreaks
It doesn't look like haiku,
But it meets the spec.
Somewhere, in the far back corner of the basement computer lab of some obscure university, Robert McElwaine is creaming his jeans.
Or more probably, students there don't read the assigned articles and just make shit up.
I believe both of them are demonstrably false. Each does extrememly well within its own problem domain but breaks down when applied to the other, i.e. relativity doesn't fare well in the subatomic, and quantum theory doesn't fare well on the large scale stuff. A general theory that unified them would not be either of them, thus both are false if a true unified theory exists. Of course, they're false in the same way Newton's theories were false, i.e. not entirely wrong, true to a point, etc. -- essential true except for that little thing they overlooked that makes no difference except in exceptional circumstances. I don't really consider them wrong, just incomplete (which is technically "wrong" but sounds nicer)...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Since someone else commented on your sig, I figured I would as well.
The government prints its own money.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The concept of peer-review is deeper than a bunch of scientists sitting on a journal or conference panel. It doesn't have to appear in a journal or in conference proceedings in order to be legitimate.
Time does
The example of the bowling ball curving the surface isn't good enough (but how do you provide a better one anyway ?) because it just curves space.
Mass curves space-time (or is said to anyway)
If you think about it in 2D, one for space and one for time, than imagine 2 orthogonal axes, x and y, y being for time.
you have all freedom you want on x, you can move left, you can stop, you can move right, blablabla
However, y only goes up. you move, you don't move, you do what you want, you are stiull drawing your line upward.
So if you are static on x, you will be drawing a vertical line, but if you start to move left or right, you will draw a curve to the left, to the right etc...
Now what happens if you insert mass in the game is, space-time is curved, so that your 2 axis aren't orthogonals anymore.
Let's say you y axis is having now a 45 degrees angl with the x axis.
Whatever you do, you are still moving upwards, because "time passes"
The thing is, now, just because you are "moving" in time, you ar also "moving" in space
No force involved
Anyway, I'm not a physicist so I could be wrong about this explanation, but that's how I understand "space-time curvature" plus the idea of gravity not being a force, yet inducing acceleration.
It almost sounds like a mind-game or a viewpoint, but it's not and that's wy it is so important to find out if indeed gravity is or is not a force because if it is not, than you can say byebye to any "anti-gravity device" there is no anti-graviton because there is just no graviton.
Anyway, we are talking a lot about gravity or anti-gravity effects, but for what I understand, the guy is not talking about gravity related forces.
He's just observing a force that seem to be proportional to mass of involved objects (just like gravity (if it's a force anyway)) But he also observes it is not affected by distance (not like gravity at all) which is I think the most interesting part (or the least credible or both) as I can't think of anything else like that.
Probably because he was using a browser that didn't word wrap the textbox. It's rather common in text-mode browsers. And if you bitch that he's using a text-mode browser, and can damn well upgrade, contact him so you can send him the money for the computer, the money for the bandwidth, and consider the possibility that he might be using text-mode due to a disability.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
How does this differ from those paramagnetic fields, which can levitate frogs?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
That is an excellent tune.
actually, I believe super conductors show no properties of magnetism. I know they aren't influcenced by emi no matter how large. So I would assume that means you can't make it magnetic. Other than that your state might be right. Although the link you have says most objects are diamagnetic. Which i assume is the same kinda thing as dipoles but with magnetic fields instead of charges.
One does not need a PhD in physics to know basic facts about the limitations of scientific method. We know nothing about gravity, we just have a model of it which seems to work. If you don't know the conceptual difference between a model and reality you are not very intelligent. Jesus, talk about missing the point.
van Flandern is a crank who doesn't understand gravitational radiation, despite careful correction. (Though he has done some decent work in other areas.) This issue has been beat to death on Usenet. See, for instance, the FAQ, Carlip's correction of van Flandern, Hillman's archive of a Usenet discussion with van Flandern, etc.
Wasn't this guy already proven to be a crackpot in the past. I don't beleive a word he says precisely because it has not undergone any peer reviews. If it shows up in Physics Review or some other respectible publication then I will beleive that there may be some truth to his claims
I would love to see the targeting system on this thing. If they can shoot a pulse of antigravity through walls, but not through a ball on a string, that is quite amazing. Maybe they should get this targeting over to the Pentagon for our missle defense system.
Can anybody reasonably explain why this 'beam' would have no effect on anything it comes in contact with besides a spherical object? I honstely don't understand it.
Shoot a laser at a wall, the beam hits the wall.
Point a huge subwoofer at a wall, the wall shakes, and so does the next room.
Point an invisible pulse at a wall, it passes Through the wall and only hits spherical objects suspended from strings.
This seems sketchy to me.
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Haiku poetry is lines of five, seven, five. Not six, seven, five.
Well, as long as we're all getting technical, it's not exactly zero. From what I remember from experimental analyses of copper wires, as the temperature was lowered in .01 C increments, the conductance drops linearly (as expected) down to the critical temperature, then it drops by over a dozen orders of magnitude over a very small range (a few hundredths of a degree). The resistance doesn't drop to zero, it just drops to a very very very very small amount, which is "essentially" zero, but technically not "exactly" zero.
van Flandern understands relativity passably well. What he doesn't understand is how certain statements about retarded fields in the lowest-order approximation don't generalize to the full theory when you start getting the higher-order velocity-dependent cancellations and such. You're right, he does sound intelligent. And for the most part he is; he's published some useful work. But he's got a huge blind spot with respect to this speed of propagation issue despite having been rigorously proven wrong (by Carlip and others), and that makes him a crank in my book. Nobody said cranks had to be dumb or can't know some physics.
He's saying what he did, what happened, and what he thinks it is. Duh, it's a paper. That's what papers are for.
From the introduction of the paper:
The type of peer-review you're talking about are for submissions to a journal or a conference. The author explicitly states that the results could not be delayed. It sounds like he got bugged enough to write the paper. He probably didn't feel it was ready to be submitted to a journal or presented at a conference, since it is marked as preliminary. It could also be he didn't feel any of the existing journals or conferences addressed all the people interested in his work.And in any case, publishing a paper is the start of a peer-review process. It's not peer-review for the paper, but peer-review of the work. And that's the point, after all! He's done nothing wrong by making the paper available.
Deal.
I have read much of the content on www.enterprisemission.com concerning quaternian(SP!) physics. I know absolutely diddly about physics but all of the information concerning the subject is overwhelmingly intriguing. Disregard the poop about the Cydonian faces. Focus on the "anti-gravity" information. In a related note, wasn't there some Swedish experiment shown own TV years ago that had an animal or some sort floating inside an ant-gravity chamber (Very small chamber)? I haven't heard a darn thing about that since! Then again, the argument that having anti-gravity capabilities readily in the hands of everyone would be catastrophic seems very plausible. Who needs an ICBM when I can drop this warhead in your backyard using only this novelty flying disc and a superconducting bubble-gum wrapper? AC
Vehicles that can float about the ground and glide along?
QUICK! Someone invent the hovercraft!!
Oh, wait...
Ok I've got an idea.. someone get a hoover, a beach ball and firmly attach the hoover's nozzle in an upward pointing direction, flip it on and put the beach ball over it...
*points and screams* anti gravity! Anti gravity!
But seriously, why is this experiment any different to the beachball effect? Psure, you have particles able to travel through stuff, but its the same principle no?
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
Very much like Newtons mechanics, general relativity is valid only for a certain range of physical phenomena. In particular, it is not considered to describe correctly what happens at quantum scale (note that this has nothing to do with use of general relativitistic mathemetical constructs in quantum mechanics - they might start with formulas from g.r. but they end up with something rather different).
Having read only the abstract, I can say that there is nothing that says this can't be true - but, of course, the only way to be sure if a lot of people can reproduce this. (if you recall, in case of high-temporature superconductors it was not long before you could buy a school-project kits to try them out).
Electricity takes all paths and the ones with lower resistance get proportionally more of the electricty flowing through them. If electricity only ever took the path of least resistance then parallel circuits wouldn't work.
Was this phrase intended to mean that taking multiple paths of differing resistance in amounts inversely proportional to that resistance is The Path Of Least Resistance (And that electricity will find that and take it)?
Was this phrase intended to mean exactly what it said, but just not imply that it is the only path taken?
Either way, whoever thought the phrase up probably wants a refreasher course in communication
I find that if I stagger the letters of the English alphabet and feed them into a grid, I can find any word I want. I suppose it could be accidental, but I doubt it.
Well of course you can critique their procedures, but beyond that, you can't critique the results, and that is really what you want to judge.
Dude, most of the reason I'm discarding your meanderings as nonsense have nothing to do with whether or not they're likely. It's just that you haven't even bothered to learn to spell. I doubt you have the attention span to understand quantum physics if you can't put the basic effort into spelling your words correctly.
Bzzt. Columbus knew the earth was round. So did everyone else since the ancient Greeks. He just thought it was smaller than it is.
I'd like to know:
1) What were the dimensions of the beam at 6 m and at 150 m?
2) Is there a corresponding beam in the opposite direction?
3) An impulse strictly proportional to mass would violate conservation of energy, as the article notes. How big can the mass be before the impulse falls off?
4) What's his asking price for his emitter?
I want an anti-gravity bed.
This futon is killing me.
Just imagine how well you could sleep. No pressure points, no clothes getting all twisted, etc.
Just as long as you didn't float to the edge of the anti-grav pad.
WHUMP.
SIGFEH
It's the job of science to explain how things are. As for why the universe happens to work that way, this isn't really a scientific question...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I suppose a levitating force could actually be due to the apparatus pushing the Earth away from the "rising" object. To lift a bottle ten feet in ten seconds, you just have to accelerate the Earth away at 32 feet per second plus one foot per second for ten seconds.
The force is so small, I doubt it can slow down or significantly alter course of space junk because of the speeds that space junk teds to travel at relative to its "target".
Now, IANAP (but I *am* a biology/neuroscience grad student :) ) and it's been a while since I had my college physics corses, but I'll give a shot:
To begin with, most aircraft I know of have large amount of Alumininum and Titanium in their skin and frames (I don't know/remember if either will be affected by magnets). But that doesn't matter: most aircraft travel and such distances and high rates of speed that they would not be affected by a giant electromagnet - the magnetic/electric field drops of at the rate of the radius (distance from plane to magnet) either squared or cubed (phsyics major help please??). Not to mention the HUGE power drain that would be required by such a huge electromagnet - shooting crap that blows up (missiles) or stuff that impacts using good 'old kinetic energy (bullets & shells) is a MUCH more efficient and cost-effective method of downing aircraft.
Sincerely,
Kevin Christie
crispiewm@hotmail.com
Wow. $40M and that's without the gratuity! (This isn't so bad for the European Space Programme, since we tend to tip only 10%.)
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
Another glib, uninformed remark rated as Insightful -- two people who obviously didn't bother to read the article. Well that's the Internet for you.
To sum it up: They built this magic superconductor thingy in a vacuum chamber, charged it up and measured the effect at different distances on pendulums of various materials, weighing 10 to 50 grams, hung in a separate vacuum chamber see their rough drawing. When they fired up the superconductor, the pendulums swung away several inches.
The amount of movement varied with the mass of the pendulums, but not the distance or the materials (they mention metal, glass, ceramics, wood, rubber, plastic). Pendulums 6 meters and 150 meters away in a different building, separated by brick walls and an inch of steel, showed identical effects. Even with "trace amounts of iron" a magnetic effect would vary with the square of the distance. But what do I know?
Of course, perhaps I'm prejudiced against people who criticize research without bothering to read it (and moderators who hand out points like candy).
Perhaps this is the mysterious force that always pops up the next Kleenix!?!?
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
Huh? Gravity does not bind two protons together. Electric repulsion far outweighs gravitational attraction. You may be thinking of the strong nuclear force, which is what allows all the protons in a nucleus to remain bound together despite their electrical repulsion.
If the effect were caused by magnetism affecting trace amounts of iron in (supposedly) non-ferrous test articles, then a ferrous test article should show a hugely stronger reaction. According to the paper, the effects were independent of material, but related to the mass of the test article. They said that they used "metal" test articles, but did not seem to reference ferrous metal articles specifically. It may turn out not to be a gravity beam, but it doesn't sound like the effect will be trivial to explain away.
Shush. Yes, I know that, but he's supposed to look it up. Unless he doesn't check for prior research before doing it himself...
This silly pseudo-scientist has merely rediscovered paramagnetism: MANY materials are repulsed by a strong magnetic field. For example, some scrap yards sort out aluminum objects be repulsing them with a strong magnetic field. Sad so many people aren't taught this in school.
He did not say it contradicted general relativity, he said it could not be understood in the context of general relativity. There is a subtle but important difference in the words. It leaves open the possibility that our understanding of relativity will be enhanced or otherwise modified by study of this discovery or that the discovery itself will be understood better and later fit what will be our better understanding of relativity.
Relax. We can't throw out information that does not "fit the mold" . Our understanding of the information might just result in a better understanding of the true shape of that mold.
We used to barely understand Bruce Perens, but now we manipulate him all the time.
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
Well, you're absolutely correct, if by "solid", you mean "known to be invalid". General relativity is a classical theory, and is incompatible with newer, shiner theories such as quantum mechanics. It does not take in to account quantization of fields, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal, excetra. Newer theories such as the Standard Model attempt to unify the basics of General Relativity with the new discoveries in Quantum Mechanics.
Direct contradictions to General Relativity are quite common place in Quantum Mechanics, especially at the small scale. And not all of these effects are particularily estoric, electron tunneling is an example of a commonplace event that General Relativity does not allow for.
That said, I agree with you that the article is probably a crock, but standing behind General Relativity's "flawless perfection" is probably not the best way to point it out.
Do you know what I love about these stories? A bunch of other scientists will totally debunk his claims, and 20 years from now there will STILL be web sites detailing how this revolutionary new discovery was killed off by some conspiracy.
Ok, it's pedantic, but it's bothering me. Superconductors don't have a resistance very near zero, they have a resistance that's exactly zero.
Maybe ideally, but I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as absolutely zero resistance (you know, thermodynamics and all that).
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Paramagnetic repulsion can use a constant magnetic field, so EM shielding (faraday cages and the like) will not affect it. However, if this device has the same effect on ferromagnetic materials as on paramagnetic materials, then perhaps there is something to it after all.
So lets see if I have this straight: they shoved enormous amounts of electricity down a superconducting something through a massive magnetic field and some nearby stuff moved about? Q'uel surprise...
It in fact works the other way around: The Federal Reserve (FDR) pays the government to print money for it.
It is paid for with, you guessed it, money!
The FDR is privatly owned by several of the largest banks in the US (a few NY banks hold a controlling interest). It is not a part of the goverment.
The FDR pays the government for the ink and the paper. The government then turns the printed bills over the the FDR, which loans them to other banks in return for interest.
It gets really absurd when the GOVERNMENT needs money and borrows it from the FDR. The government now has to pay interest, which it does with tax money.
There are claims that about 40% of the income tax we pay is used to pay interest to the FDR. The owners of the FDR pockets this money. The FDR has never been audited, and its financials are not disclosed to the american people, nor to congress.
It is the only corporation in the US who has no obligation to pay taxes (except for propery tax).
While not entirely foolproof, one way to make something look crackpot is to a) make a claim that X contradicts a well accepted scientific principle and then b) stir in a lot of flummery mentioning newly discovered phenomena or relatively recent theories. The a) part gets attention (it's working) and the b) part makes it look like you're being scientific.
One of the more valuable experiences I had as a graduate student was to take several of the "crackpot" letters (all the professors I knew would get a few of these every year) and work out in some detail the explanation for what was wrong with the "innovation" being proposed. It was really practice for being a critical peer reviewer, though I didn't realize it until later. Finding the hidden flaw in "obviously" crackpot material was often extremely hard work.
I have a great fondness for people who earnestly try to find new perspectives from which to examine scientific problems. Richard Dawkins, in writing The Selfish Gene, created some stimulating currents in evolutionary thinking through just such a perspective change. I was fully convinced by at least one quantum mechanics revisionist, A. Lande, Quantum Mechanics in a New Key (1973) but I've never found anyone else who's looked at it.
Vacuum fluctuations make sense to me, even though I have little more than Hawking's popularizations to go on. Quantum gravity, I don't know what to think yet. Whether I believe in them or not makes no difference in the appearance of being crackpot -- they just look like trendy, misdirecting camouflage to dress up a minor mystery about some strange happenings when you collapse a strong magnetic field.
Of course, the trouble with this sort of crap detector is, even though it allows you to dismiss a lot of claptrap out of hand, it will likely cause you to incorrectly ignore, once in your lifetime, something that looked crackpot but eventually turned out to be important.
Superconductors have a resistance very near zero.
Ok, it's pedantic, but it's bothering me. Superconductors don't have a resistance very near zero, they have a resistance that's exactly zero.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Nit: Magnetic fields fall off as 1/r^3, not 1/r^2 like gravity and electric fields. This is because magnetic fields are, to lowest order known, dipolar.
The 10^4A figure will be the peak current in a current pulse and when you're pulsing that much current, inductance has much more effect than resistance does. A coiled conductor may have very little resistance compared to a human, but may have a much higher inductance and would therefore provide a less desirable current path than the human.
Also, I wonder how much current this could induce in any semi-conductive objects standing around (humans, for instance).
The repulsive effects he's seeing are probably due to the primary current inducing a secondary current and the two current's magnetic fields repelling.
Well, figure that you've got your hand on the thing when they throw the switch. At first, the current through the coil will be 0, which means that if we model you as a simple resistor, you'll get all the current (in this case, assume the human is 500kOhm, and 1MV results in 2 A of current, which is quite a lot). As the current through the coil starts to rise, the current through you will drop. Once the peak is reached, the current through you will be 0.
The question is how long does this transition take? 2A is a lot of current, and if it goes through your heart it will kill you fast. Then again, the current might well go mostly over your oily skin, and not hit anything important, resulting in just burns. Also, consider that people often survive lightning strikes because even though the current is large the duration is extremely brief.
But just like I try to avoid golfing in a thunderstorm, I'd probably avoid puting my hand on this thing. ^_^
The enemies of Democracy are
man, I laughd out loud at that one
This is only Void. Nothing we do or do not do changes this. I came from the Void and I will return to the Void it cannot be denied. The trivial existence between is of no meaning. Suffering, Hope, Fear, they pale in comparison.
You Have Been Warned.
i find it interesting that there is a code in the torah (that is the first five books of the bible in the original hebrew) in which the phrases :
:)
"Albert Einstein"
"Relativity Theory"
"Add a fifth..."
are all in close proximity (if not crossing, i don't have the data in front of me right now) in a (i believe) 25x25 letter grid
yeah i suppose it could be completely accidental..........but i doubt it
No, it would be fantasy. Gravitation does not travel intantaniously. The amount of evidence for this is huge, but the best is that someone would sell communications based on it. They don't.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9906007
Female Prison Rape in NY
Maybe it has something to do with magnetism though but this 'something' isn't just plain magnet attraction/repulsion. Anyways I think something new has been discovered.
That's his spam-catcher account.
I could really use a hand-held version of this (possible) technology. It'd help keep those damned Bumpus Hounds (you'll shoot your eye out!) next door at bay. My buddy could use one to repel those 14 year old chicks that keep hitting on him (he's 19). And will there be a car version? That'd be great for giving those "25 in a 55" senior citizens an extra push... Not that I'm anti Senior Citizen...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
This article already has massive interest.
Considering most articles on the place would be in RUSSIAN, there's little chance that a search gather much in terms of the center itself.
A co-worker of mine once declared that word didn't exist cause he couldn't find it at dictionary.com....
Insightful?
How much would that amount of energy in batteries to power a hypothetical anti-gravity drive weigh?
And it's this limitation, IMHO, that is going to be the stumbling block for major breakthroughs in the near future. We simply don't have access to the quantities of energy necessary (and corresponding storage/distribution methods) to experimentally test many of the theories that are out there, at least not at anything resembling a reasonable cost.
It's long been an instinctive belief of mine that once we get the hang of routinely producing anti-matter and using it for energy production, a great many mysteries will be solved in a relatively brief period of time.
We've learned a lot about how the world around us works. In order to learn significantly more, we need to expand our tool collection.
(And by "we", I mean the human race in general. I'm, of course, in no way trying to include myself amongst the elite group of the worlds' top physicists, just in case anyone was planning to rant about such grammatical trivialities.)
He believed that under an exteremtly intense magnetic field, objects that are not normally magnetic can be induced to emit a field
Wait a minute - how is that different from "Everything is magnetic, provided that it is influenced by another magnetic field?". It's been a while since I took physics in high school, but my caffeine-starved brain seems to recall that the force a magnetic field exerts follows an inverse square law. In essence, this means that everything is subject to a magnetic field, so the top quote boils down to "Everything IS magnetic". Possible, but not in lieu with current laws of physics (as my limited understanding goes). Or maybe the effect of very small magnetic fields on "non-magnetic" material is just too small to measure, leaving us to sub-divide matter into classes of "magneticity"?
If I'm talking through my butt here please correct me - don't flame.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
POSTED AS +4??? WHAT???
Is every person who modded this post in High School Physics or a Business Major?
Modern Physics, and a class I took as an engineer called Electromagnetic Fields or E&M, call tell you that we know a whole shitload about magnetic fields, magnetic field theory, magnetism (ferro, para, etc.), magnetic properties, the origin of magnetic force and its interrationship with atomic spin states, and how to induce magnetic fields in non-magentic substances. Just out of curiosity, do you have ANY idea how a TV or computer monitor work? Maybe you should grab yourself a 2nd year COLLEGE PHYSICS book and read up on it. A cathode tube happens to bend electron paths to aim them at the screen you see. That was back in the 1940's.
Go to college, take an actual intellectual course or two, such as...say, Calculus based College Physics II or E&M. Stop being so ignorant and stop spreading your ignorance with others.
At least you say "To the best of my knowldege" because at least I can take peace in the fact that you don't know shit about what you are talking about.
Do not spread ignorance as fact.
Hooked up to my computer is a device which shoots ions onto a curved piece of glass. When I stop passing electrons to this device, and place a piece paper on it, the paper is pulled to it. Like gravity. My new energy source. I have documented my ion device in more detail here.
Considering the kinds of involuntary muscle contractions that 50kV can cause, slamming into something could cause you as much physical damage as the current.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
There once was a poster on Slashdot Whose haikus earned many a bon mot. But now 575 is no longer alive I think he (she?) succumbed to bit rot.
Err, gravity does not and cannot hold two protons together. That's what strong nuclear force is for...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
> A couple of weeks ago while I was out at a wrecking yard digging up parts for one of my cool old cars, I watched an electromagnet lifting cars. That's a lot of iron filings.
> Similarly, 200 years ago, an ebony rod attracted grains of pepper. Now, we harness electrostatic attraction and replusion for all sorts of things, ranging from TV sets and computer monitors to Van de Graaf generators which power linear accelerators at nuclear research facilities.
Yes, but the important difference between weakness of magnetism 200 years ago, and weakness of gravity right now is the reason why such weakness was observed.
Your ebony rod is so weakly electified because although it comprises an impressive number of charges, most balance out (there are positive and negative charges which cancel each other's effect out). Net electric charge is only caused by an imbalance between positive and negative, and this imbalance is incredibly low: maybe only one electron per atom, and only on the surface. ALthough the mass of the object may be high, only a tiny part of that mass contributes to the effect. And during the last 200 years, we've just been getting better at augmenting the proportion of the mass that has an effect.
Magnetism involves movement of charges. In case of natural magnetism, this is the (non-cancelled) movement of electron around the atom's nucleus. In most materials, this cancels out because:
Today, the strongest magnets are, as you correctly pointed out, electromagnets. In those we have a macroscopic movement of charges (i.e. electric current), which we can theoretically make as high as we wish (as permitted by the electrical resistence of the material and electric power at our disposal...)
Gravity is different though: there are no "negative" gravity particle which could cancel out the normal positive gravity, or at least there are none known today. Weakness of gravity thus does not come from cancellation, but is rather inherent in the force itself! The active principle in gravity is mass, and the only way to get "better" gravity is indeed to augment the mass. Moreover, unlike magnetism, gravity is not tied to movement, thus we cannot manipulate it either by speeding up the objects (at least not until we reach relativistic speeds).
> Consider that, to my knowledge, we've still got no higher understanding of why two positively charged ions repel, or why a positively charged ion attracts a negatively charged ion. Nor do we really understand anything more about magnetism's lines of force than the pretty little lines of iron filings on the paper when we rest it over a bar magnet. Like gravity, they're fundamental forces. We know a little bit about how to use them - the variables involved. Mass, materials which maintain an electrostatic charge well, and ferrous metals. We know they're inter-related. But how do the forces themselves work?
We may not know the philosophical reason why magnetism and electricity exists at all, but we have a pretty detailed understanding however how they interact (Maxwell equations), why the electric/magnetic field is shaped the way it is, how those forces propagate, etc.
> With our present knowledge, we're at about the level of proficiency of a secretary who is good with Excel and yet still refers to her computer as a "hard drive". We can make two of these forces do the things we want them to do, but we don't have any higher knowledge of how they work.
Our knowledge of magnetism/electricity may not be complete enough to satisfy a philosopher, but it is certainly complete enough for an engineer, and well beyond that of your Windows toting secretary knowing nothing else than Excel.
actually...
Space is cold... very cold. As long as you
are not being hit by radiation from a star.
Our little objects we put in space are mainly
composed of shielding and cooling to combat
the massive radiation they're being hit with.
Well I can see how that would happen. They think they're starting to get to know Jenny, then all of a sudden, they realize it wasn't really Jenny at all...
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
can someone post a translation of that article into a language that someone who only took high school physics can understand?
Gravity is the weakest form of energy, it needs an incredible amount of mass to create a noticable amount of effect.
Magnetism, on the other hand, is super powerful. I suspect that independant verification attempts will not work when using non-ferrous target materials. Trace amounts of iron are probably a likely cause.
Of course, perhaps I'm prejudiced against people who don't submit to peer review....
This is excellent. Hopefully some (future) Nobel Prize winner will discover a material that will superconduct at higher temperatures.
Of course, we'd probably need a fusion reactor to generate enough electricity to both propell and levitate such a vehicle.
I am especially fond of the days my perception of the physical universe is dramatically altered in this type of way.
Hopefully he won't retract this paper.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
Quick, someone mirror the PDF Version before the whole site dies under our collective weight.
If no one manages to do so, here's his Abstract:
Abstract
The detection of apparent anomalous forces in the vicinity of high-Tc supercon-
ductors under non equilibrium conditions has stimulated an experimental research in
which the operating parameters of the experiment have been pushed to values higher
than those employed in previous attempts. The results conrm the existence of an
unexpected physical interaction. An apparatus has been constructed and tested in
which the superconductor is subjected to peak currents in excess of 10 4 A, surface
potentials in excess of 1 MV, trapped magnetic eld up to 1 T, and temperature
down to 40 K. In order to produce the required currents a high voltage discharge
technique has been employed. Discharges originating from a superconducting ceramic
electrode are accompanied by the emission of radiation which propagates in a focused
beam without noticeable attenuation through dierent materials and exerts a short
repulsive force on small movable objects along the propagation axis. Within the
measurement error (5 to 7 %) the impulse is proportional to the mass of the objects
and independent on their composition. It therefore resembles a gravitational impulse.
The observed phenomenon appears to be absolutely new and unprecedented in the
literature. It cannot be understood in the framework of general relativity. A theory
is proposed which combines a quantum gravity approach with anomalous vacuum
uctuations.
I think that last sentence says it all. I don't buy it.
Newsflash!
The Gravity Advocates Association (GAA) has announced plans to file suit against the "repulsor beam", claiming it "circumvents established gravitational force technology"
In other news, Podkletnov has been arrested by the FBI and is being held without bail on charges of "violating basic scientific laws"
I hope this means we'll be getting flying cars sooner.
"Gravitational Field." Hmph! This whole story is repulsive!
PK: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
sweeeeeeeeeeeeet :-) This can help build my super weapon to take over the world!
This violates everything we know...
at least at first look,
people have been talking about this
kind of thing for ever.
Basicly it leads to the idea that
gravity travels instantly
which violates relitivity
which in turn, up ends everything
all the way to string (super string) theory...
wasn't there some CEO who vanished after he started doing reasearch with some guy about this stuff?
Guttermouth is a really good band.
he has discovered "magnetism".
If I read that paper correctly, (and I may not have, simply because I only have 3 years of physics experience in a lab enviornment) the device that he has designed can manipulate magnetic fields to a point where it can force objects away. Similar to a magnet, although much more controlable, and able to be used on what would normally be considered "non-magnetic" The downside is that this is in an experimental stage at this point. Imagine haveing long distance satallites using this..(the vacumn of space has an ambient tempurature of around 3k.. just low enough for use of superconducting items in the liquid helium range.)
:) But it would be nice to simply turn those small objects away.
Many micrometeors have sizes smaller than a fraction of an inch, and we cannot accurately scan for them (it has been described almost as a life sized comparison to Heisenburg's Uncertainty Princible.) This would honestly help out small satellites, because a small micrometeors can disable or destroy those satallites with a single pass. With NASA now focusing on a "smaller, faster, cheaper" mantra, this may not be worked on as a viable option for quite some time. (I live in the states, and NASA is a seen as the world leader in Space... please don't flame me ESA members...)
An workable model formed on this approach could see itself attached later to the space station or even the shuttle (The shuttle has sensors, (and so does mission control) that scans constantly for items that could hit the shuttle and destroy it. Think the opening sequence to Armegeddon, (well, maybe not that bad...
This will be interesting to see how these finding develop.
Blah Blah Blah.
This part really gets me suspicious: Podkletnov claims that the results directly contradict general relativity. General relativity is pretty "solid" these days. To find a direct contradiction in it these days would be a huge suprise and is very unlikely.
But what's even more impressive is the unknown force coming out of my ass. It's enough to make my butt cheeks vibrate at 783 MHz. What kind of force can be responsible for that???
1) Get a sturdy pedestal 2) Attach a flashlight to the pedestal 3) Find the object you wish to repel 4) Aim the flashlight at the object mentioned in step 3. 5) Turn on the light Believe it or not, the light shining on that object is repelling it! Even more controversial: What is the "backforce" from doing this? Well, if your pedestal is FIRMLY attached to the Earth, it is altering the rotation of the Earth.
Well, as it was said in a previous post, the 'effect' could be due to ferrous contamination...
So- what is more contaminated with iron than the earth itself?!
I'm sure we all know about the "Repulsorlift" which is a common piece of technology in the Star Wars Universe.. Well, now we have it..
Vehicles that can float about the ground and glide along? Screw maglev rails..
The galaxy far far away has become just that much nearer.. And, what with cloning on the horizon, we're almost there! (although, if we do ever reach the Star Wars Universe, I feel that a pre-emptive strike to wipe out the entire Gungan species could be a good idea, for the sanity of the entire galaxy)
ìì!
But there is a way to reverse the effect. It's called wealth.
"Let's see if I can summarize"
/. editors suddenly nuclear physicists on top of being astute social historials and technological gurus?
You make a snide comment about a paper which you are not in any qualified to analyze - or are
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
I wouldn't exactly call it "new", but I gave off some sort of "force" that made flowers wilt, small children cry, and a nearby bird pass out. Guess I should stop eating at Taco Bell.
Let's see if I can summarize: the author claims that with a certain very cold superconductor transmitting a large quantity of electricity in an intense magnetic field, he has observed a "new" force which repulses objects. Ha ha, michael. You sure told that physicist!
Don't you just want to stick your tongue in there and swirl it around?
Ram your dick in there with the hot taste of ass on your breath? And then cum in her mouth?
Yeah, baby, hows your ass taste on my cock?
Oh yeah, we got you covered
Ass Empire
The Real Flavor of Porn
10^4Amps?!?! I don't know about you, but I would prefer not to be anywhere near that much current. I haven't read the paper, but what about arcing? I'm sure safety isn't too much of a consideration since it only takes a few milliamps for a short period of time to stop ones heart.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
People have been telling me for years that my presence pushes people away, that my breath repels people. Now I know why.
Evgeny Podkletnov 1
1 Moscow Chemical Scientific Research Centre
113452 Moscow - Russia
E-mail: epodkletnov@hotmail.com
Are they so poor in russia that their universities do not have their own domian presence?
It's called a subwoofer.
Big woop, so now it's superconducting.
</bad joke>
Yes, every editor is Taco. Especially that fascist Michael.
I already said something about the force of farting. After the first time, it isn't funny anymore. Just look up a few posts at the one about the vibrating ass cheeks.
As long as the effect is repeatable then we can have a scientific debate as to what is the cause. If this is like cold fusion, then we are going to have years of squabling.
I hope this doesn't hit the main stream press before we have independent labs trying to reproduce the effect and observing it.
I can just see the headlines "Man makes antigravity boots a real possibility" or "Overweight americans have hope now that gravity is a thing of the past".
(someone had to say it)
"Well aren't you going to take the bones out?!"
"If you took the bones out, it wouldn't be crunchy, would it?"
"Witty Phrase."
If someone 'discovers' a strange new theory of physics and posts details of an experiment to back it up, don't you think that other experiments will be performed to verify it one way or another?
/.?
How ridiculous would a crackpot theory have to be if it happened to fit into Star Trek episodes before it wouldn't get posted on
Post this kind of thing if it's a real story. A good time might be after it ever makes it past peer review.
Many years ago I realized that women were repulsed by me.
The effect is inversely proportional to distance.
It also seems to be inversely proportional to the mass of the woman.
Riiiiiiiiight!
Somebody open a window for that guy, he needs some fresh air. I'll believe it when I'm hoverboarding.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
I was hoping for some support for the theory of replusive gravity. That is, that things are being bombarded by some sort of gravity particle all the time, which tends to push them away. Normally the bombardment is balanced, in open space you feel little effect. However, the particles are absorbed a bit by mass, creating a gravitational shadow. As you near a dense object, more particles are shielded by that object, so you are pushed more strongly toward it by the particles still pushing you from the other side.
This has some obvious implications, such as what happens when all particles are shielded from one side. Much like adding light filters in front of a lamp, once you block all the light, adding more filters doesn't make the shadow any darker.
There is also a limit to the distance these particles will travel, and that simulations of this effect help to explain the structure and movement of galaxies. In the smale scale it behaves pretty much the same way as an attractive force would, but at large scales different effects become evident.
I wish I could find the link, there were some interesting points made, particularly in the simulations that helped to explain large structures.
...while reading old notebooks of Nikolas Tesla.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
All you have to do is strap buttered bread to the back of a cat.
For as long as I can remember, I have been able to repulse objects. When I step up to a woman, *bammo*, she starts moving in the opposite direction. At first I thought this was an explainable force having something to do with "my face" or "my bony frame." But recent tests seem to indicate that the force is of unknown origin, a force, that perhaps, runs contrary to all known laws of physics. Too bad I was unable to publish my paper before this bozo. Mine would have been a lot more entertaining.
It's curious. Once it gets witnessed and reproduced, it starts getting interesting. Until then, it could be a hoax, it could be self-deception, or any of a number of subtle mistakes. If it's real, it would be great, of course.
While I question the researchers' conclusions, if the effects they claim to observe occurred, it's probably worth trying to duplicate the experiment. If nothing else, it would teach us about how to properly shield and isolate discharge rigs to prevent spurious effects like they saw, and at best there might even be something new going on here.
My personal suspicion is that either their Faraday cage was flawed, or they neglected to put the capacitor bank in the cage (the whole discharge circuit loop will act as an induction coil), or that they neglected to put both the discharge rig (with bank) and the test jars on vibration isolation tables (send a current pulse through a loop of cabling, and the cabling will *vibrate*).
That, or the observations are false or embellished.
Either way, the experiment is easy to duplicate (they were very good about describing their apparatus and methods), and there are quite a few points where more thorough control would help pin down the nature of whatever's happening. It's cheap enough, so I can see a university's physics department doing it for a lark. This is exactly how science should work.
Gravity is the weakest form of energy, it needs an incredible amount of mass to create a noticable amount of effect.
Sure, that's easy to say now, but not 200 years ago. 200 years ago, a lodestone was *the* magnet. It was a piece of rock that attracted iron filings.
A couple of weeks ago while I was out at a wrecking yard digging up parts for one of my cool old cars, I watched an electromagnet lifting cars. That's a lot of iron filings.
Similarly, 200 years ago, an ebony rod attracted grains of pepper. Now, we harness electrostatic attraction and replusion for all sorts of things, ranging from TV sets and computer monitors to Van de Graaf generators which power linear accelerators at nuclear research facilities.
Consider that, to my knowledge, we've still got no higher understanding of why two positively charged ions repel, or why a positively charged ion attracts a negatively charged ion. Nor do we really understand anything more about magnetism's lines of force than the pretty little lines of iron filings on the paper when we rest it over a bar magnet. Like gravity, they're fundamental forces. We know a little bit about how to use them - the variables involved. Mass, materials which maintain an electrostatic charge well, and ferrous metals. We know they're inter-related. But how do the forces themselves work?
With our present knowledge, we're at about the level of proficiency of a secretary who is good with Excel and yet still refers to her computer as a "hard drive". We can make two of these forces do the things we want them to do, but we don't have any higher knowledge of how they work.
Gravity is, of course, the most difficult of the fundamental forces to research, because it would require either huge masses that you can manipulate at will or incredibly accurate measuring instruments. 200 years from now - maybe even sooner, who knows - we'll probably be able to manipulate gravity at will. Maybe not around the Earth, but maybe around a space ship which we wish to launch from the surface.
Certainly, there's a huge motivation to studying it, especially if it can be harnessed as easily as magnetism. How much does a Space Shuttle booster tank cost to fill?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
My name isn't really Jenny....
I could be right, I could be wrong, 50% odds either way right now.
--Mike--
Isn't this a little to advanced for the slashdot crowd?
This site is for people with no life, not for smart people, sheesh.
32 page paper and not once is Microsoft Sux0ring mentioned!
Also he failed mention that python r0x0rz and perl is l4m3.
This is kind of article has no place on Slashdot!
Quick i need some 15 year old who never coded more than hello world to remind that perl is for l00z3rz and that python is the bizn0mb, lest i forget.
http://theotherside.com/0108005.pdf
Copy Paste link
http://theotherside.com/0108005.pdf
...but someone has finally re-discovered the principle behinfd the repelatron!
Tom Swift Jr. invented all the cool stuff.
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
I apologize in advance if this post is not grammatically correct and if anything is not spelled properly, I wrote it in kind of a hurry..
This type of effect IS accounted for by physics, only not the physics that is taught in every school in the world....
I'll try to keep this short, for further info, read the entirety of the paper that I'm going to link to at the bottom of this post...
It turns out (i may be slightly wrong on some of my info here, but i think for the most part i got it right) that a guy by the name of Oliver Heaviside (and another guy named William Gibbs) hacked a massive chunk away from Maxwell's original equations that described electro-dynamic effects. (you don't believe me? go find an original (pre-1873) copy of Maxwell's 'Treatise' and surprise surprise, the four equations that are commonly known as 'Maxwell's Equations' will NOT be there....
Heaviside viewed quaternions as an 'abomination' and considered them 'too mystical' so he axed over 200 of them from Maxwell's original work, so it actually turns out that the four surviving 'classic' equations that have Maxwell's name on them are in all actuality 'Heaviside's Equations' as they NEVER appeared in any original paper by Maxwell.
Anyhow, in 1919 a guy by the name of Theodr Kaluza introduced a fifth (spatial) dimension to Einstein's theories, which unified Einstein's theory of gravity with Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic radiation (showing how gravity and light are fundamentally mathmatically unified)
Since Einstein used time as the fourth dimension, Kaluza's fifth was actually the same spacial dimension as 4-space designations used by Maxwell (and others) over 50 years earlier....
however, short-sighted scientists would not believe something that seemingly could never be experimentally proven (the reason for the lack of proof lies in the fact that this new dimension had somehow collapsed to the Planck length - 10^-33 cm)
sorry, this post has gone on longer than i intended it too, if you are interested in a much better explanation of this, check the paper at the following link...
http://www.enterprisemission.com/hyper1.html
the government knows full well of the existence of this effect, in fact they've been studying and experimenting with these theories ever since they first got their grubby little hands on alien technology way back at Roswell...
you need more proof that this is going on in the government? http://www.disclosureproject.org
that should be all the proof you need, assuming of course that you are open-minded enough to listen to what those people are saying...
I have a little theory about how this extra spatial dimension ties in with human consciousness, but i'll leave that for another post
I remember discussing this with my physics teacher at high school (i.e. my knowledge of physics is not perfect).
He believed that under an exteremtly intense magnetic field, objects that are not normally magnetic can be induced to emit a field. I guess by alternating this super-conductors field against the non-megnetic objects, they are repulsed?
So, line up if you want to discredit this theory!
Amusing idea but it doesn't hold up. Your flashlight would have to be non-attached to the Earth to make this work. Don't forget: you're standing on the Earth while holding the flashlight, so its pressure on you offsets the pressure on the pedestal pushing on the Earth.
The reason science works so well is that people are encouraged to try and break it, if this author has then kudo's to him. But without peer review nobody else get's a chance to break his theory. Hmm. .sigs theory - I tried and the bastards assimilated me :)
Heheh, go break my
Rather than conjuring images of the impossible (by our current paradigm) a more logical step would have been to assume the simpler explanation, as Occam would. Paramagnetism is not a new concept; non-ferrous materials can undergo coercion (heh, that's an interesting use of the word) by magnetic fields, although it's weak. From what the paper says, it seems far more likely that the high energy involved is manipulating a quirk of paramagnetism, as one would expect, rather than creating some 'new force'. Just my two bits 1/0.
the vacumn of space has an ambient tempurature of around 3k
I believe this is the temperature of the average background radiation. The temperature of space outside the Earth would be significantly hotter than this.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Or am I completely fucking nuts?
And now we know, it also blows!
Just mesure the speed of the force propagation. If its faster then the speed of light, it's probably a magnetic effect. If its instantanious, then its probably gravitational.
OTOH, the testing pendulums with diffrent materials should work to, and would be cheaper. But this test would certanly prove it was a gravitational effect
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
We know quite a bit about gravity, actually.
It's impossible at this point to tell which remark you were referring to. Whenever I get mod points, I do read the article in question before doing any modding. I browse at -1 (you never know) when modding. You'd be surprised how many pretty good AC comments are out there that mostly never get seen. Granted, they are at 0 and not -1, but anyways...
By way of contrast if I'm in a hurry I won't mod in the topic. So, just FYI, there's at least *one* moderator out here who does the legwork and tries to be fair.
And no, I didn't mod in this thread!
Since feeling all high-and-mighty when I posted that, I just saw in another thread that my near-first post that was rated +3 Funny about an hour ago has been modded to 1 Flamebait. Sheesh. Next time I get my mod points I won't be as altruistic as always. Friggin jerk, whoever it was.
I think he's just creating a larger version
of this:
http://www.sci.kun.nl/hfml/whyfrogs.html
This seems to suggest either 1) antigravity etc or 2) paramagnetism
Or 3) electromagnetic induction.
Normally 3) would require some conductivity. But if the magnetic field change was strong enough and/or of short enough duration it could generate free charge carriers within something normally an insulator or produce adequate eddy current to cause a detectable motion by moving bound charges without ionizing their atoms.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And what's worse: you have problems with commas.
Would it be desirable to smash a US plane carrying bombs into your own country and your huge, expensive electromagnet?
And yet you didn't read it in a serious journal. I'm sure you remember this aspect of your reading the article? That it was on a web site, and not in an actual journal of science?
Naturally, if you're going to speak about how wrong they were to publish it before peer review, you should look at where they published it. As it happens, xxx.lanl.gov is a place where research findings are posted in their incipient stages. Thus, your point about publishing (actually, and more dangerously, publicizing) findings before peer review are, while nice, moot.
Oh wise, benevolent, and most temporarily powerful moderators... Best analysis in this thread I've seen.
if they could manage to make a small enough generator and a grid of these things, we'd have policemen walking around with personal sheilds ala star trek. Of course this would also mean people would create them for tanks and fighter jets, and war would get worse, but it's an interesting idea. We could even use this for forcefields. Imagine oif a bankrobber occurs, someone turns on a generator, and everyone is knocked to the floor and held there by an invisible force till the police arrive.
On http://xxx.lanl.gov/RobotsBeware.html:
Click here to initiate automated "seek-and-destroy" against your site.
Uh, what exactly is that supposed to do???
Since the cat with buttered bread/toast strapped to its back will merely float above the ground, spinning, you can also hook up a rotor to it and generate free energy with a generator!