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.

Comments

Re:translation?

[horse100]

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?

Yet more criticism

[TopherC]

Of course, this result looks a little fishy to me, too. First, like others I want to point out that this result is not "published", so the original post should be ammended. Anyone can put a paper up on xxx.lanl.gov. Second, the only reason I would guess this is not a complete hoax is that hoaxers don't usually go to this much effort. But I can't really tell.

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

Background on Podkletnov (blatant kw)

[Will Sargent]

This is not the first time Podkletnov has done experiments on Anti-Gravity.

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>...

Re:So I read the article...

[horse100]

Quote: One must not that he does not publish the results for the 150m experiment

Actually the paper does. It says on page 9 of the PDF file:

Measurements of the impulse taken at close distance (3-6 m) from the installation and at the distance of 150 m gave indentical results, within the experimental errors.

From Table 1 on page 8 of the paper he gives experimental error as:

Table 1: Emitter N. 1. Influence of high voltage discharges on the deflection of the pendulum. Experimental data are the average of 12 measurements. The standard deviation of the single data is between 5 and 7%

Re:translation?

[NichG]

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

Re:Magnetics?

[j_w_d]

I think that if you dig for it, there has been considerable discussion and experimentation since the effect was first noted. I ran across discussion and remarks on the net about additional experimentation several years ago. One of the issues was whether the effect might not be gravity but instead simply related to circulating gases. Even tiny gas motions would have effects on an analytic balance, and at that time the "effect" was detected as an apparent change in weight. The idea was that cold gas in the closed environment containing a spinning, superconducting disk warmed and circulated upward above the disk, creating a slight but measurable draw that could appear as an apparent reduction in weight. The authors were planing experiments designed to eliminate that possibility in what I read. Since that was years ago, this sounds like the newest round.

j_w_dougherty

The Billiard Ball By Asimov

[tcdk]

Go read this story - besides being a damn good shortstory, it's pretty much explains why anti gravity is impossible.

The state of belief these days.

[Fixer]

I have to get to work soon, but I think I must say this.

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.

Data tends to uphold 'Standard Model'

[carambola5]

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.

Re:Insightful my ass! Read the damn article

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Repulsive Black Holes

[Ictinus]

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.

Re:Magnetics?

[rgmoore]

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.

So I read the article...

[muerte24]

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.

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

Re:So I read the article...

[Compuser]

Well, it's more complicated than this. First of all the paper devotes most of its space to theoretical discussion which in the end shows no quantitative predictions. Being an experimentalist I do not care much for this kind of theory. YMMV.
Chucking theory, we are left with two experimental results: a rather plausible effect and an implausible one. The plausible result is his description of how the discharge evolves through T_c. Still, he gives no explanation of what T_c was and more importantly he never mentions transition width. His mention that in his first experiments the YBCO film degraded makes me think that his temprature control was highly questionable so he may have been still above T_c even with claims to the contrary. Still, he may be right when he says that his setup represents a new or at least unusual N-S junction.
The implausible result is his claims of a force beam and that his beam does not dissipate through walls, air and other things. He claims that his discharge has a side effect of producing a beam capable of significant mechanical effects. The sheer difference in scale between known gravitational effects and his measurements makes me wonder if the beam exists at all. The lack of dissipation combined with its strong effect on the balls leaves me wondering if conservation laws would be violated.
The paper is horridly written. Parts aren't proper English (which I am ready to excuse as he is not from an English speaking country), parts aren't proper physics (like when he claims that the electrons forming his discharge are coming from pair condensate without any justification to substantiate such an implausible scenario), parts aren't proper experimental procedure (e.g his vacuum quality, his lack of pictures to illustrate discharge dynamics, etc). His figures don't have captions and some have unlabeled axes. His theoretical discussion includes passages trying to say, in effect: people don't know where this comes from in high T_c so it may be related to our effect. Still, I would not judge a book by its cover. If only one of the effects he observed is real then he has made a contribution to science, though after reading his paper, I doubt there will be revolutionary advances coming from this.

paramagnetic?

[aozilla]

How does this differ from those paramagnetic fields, which can levitate frogs?

Re:paramagnetic?

[mattr]

That is an important question.

It was found that the force of the impact on pendulums made of different materials does not depend on the material but is only proportional to the mass of the sample. Pendulums of different mass demonstrated equal deflection at constant voltage. This was proved by a large number of measurements using spherical samples of different mass and diameter.

This seems to suggest either 1) antigravity etc or 2) paramagnetism. It would seem to rule out contamination with iron as someone else suggested. It would also be nice to know from some of the physicists around here whether or not there is a lot of experience with magnetic fields of this strength at this temperature.

Considering how deadly this kind of research must be to your career, you have to admire this scientist. It would seem obvious that if we began to understand it we would be able to control it in some way, that it would seem like a logical course of scientific inquiry.

Re:History Repeats Itself

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

That experiment was Galileo. Yes, they did reject his ideas for quite a while.

and when Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity

No. Einstein had already won the Nobel Prize for science by the time he published the Special Theory. People hung on every word he said.

So you publish as soon as you have something concrete

Or as soon as you come up with anything so as to avoid the harsh critique of peer review. It's easier to release to the public instead of the scientific community when you are the only researcher in your 'lab'.

You may even inspire further research into the field

In such fruitful fields as Cold Fusion and Sasquatch proving.

Most people don't read AC comments.

Now that, I can agree with.

That's crap. The default setting is to read at zero. "Most people" read just about everything except for loser comments 240-odd posts down the page.

A.C.

Trace amounts of iron

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Magnetics?

[Nephrite]

I think you should have read the original article. It says that the force is proportional to the mass of the target, which means that your explanation about 'trace amounts of iron' doesn't work.

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.

theory

[Cephas Keken]

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?

Re:Magnetics?

[Bob McCown]

Normally, the "Scientific Community" in general gets first crack at new theories, usually by publishing the paper independently, and waiting to see who pays attention. They laugh at them, poke them, prod them, and try and duplicate them.

I discovered repulsion many years ago!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:translation?

[ka9dgx]

They crammed a large amount of energy into a small amount of space and time, and got an interesting effect, which they suspect might be some sort of gravitational pulse. The pulse seems to be quite capable of going through electromagnetic shielding, and even 6 meters of wall and free air, with some steel along the way.

They have theories as to why it is, but they're not sure, and they want other people to try it too, which is why they spend so much time explaining EXACTLY what they did.

I'm very interested in seeing someone get a positive result replicating this, don't care much about negative results becuase it's probably fairly touchy, like semicondutors, superconductors, cold fusion, etc.

--Mike--