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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.
...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
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.
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/
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).
> 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.
I'd think using a non-ferrous target would be the first thing they'd think of, and the first thing any researcher trying to duplicate the results would do. Stay tuned!
Are you nuts?? Floating cars??
I'm all for future technology and endeavors, and the idea is cool...but we have enough morons driving on the ground. We don't need them careening around in the air!
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
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.
Just because a phenomenon is new doesn't mean that nobody except for its discoverer is qualified to look at it. There are plenty of people in the same general area of experimental physics who are fully qualified to judge whether he's adequately controlled for experimental variables, done proper experimental design, fully considered alternative explanations within currently accepted physical law, etc. Most of the time that somebody discovers something new it turns out that the real explanation is a flaw in their experimental controls, data analysis, etc. and not a genuinely novel phenomenon. Getting other people who know what they're doing to doublecheck your results is a good way of catching that kind of error. That's why peer review exists. Somebody who trumpets his discovery before having others double-check his methodology is doing something highly questionable.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Yep. Next thing you know, astronomers will start claiming there's some strange repulsive force making the expansion of the universe accelerate or something, that isn't accounted for by GR.
Poppycock. That is not an excellent point, just an observation that doesn't mean much. The beam doesn't have to "know" to affect or not affect anything. The paper says the amount of effect observed varies depending on the mass of the object. Thus, one assumes it does affect the air between the source and the target, but air not having much mass is not going to be affected much. Also, since the force observed is only sufficient to move a pendulam, not rip it off it's string, one would hardly expect it to bend steel walls or anything. Any effect on the intervening matter that is (a) gaseous, or (b) not suspended from a string, is likely to be extremely tiny. And if it wasn't, this would only provide further evidence for the effect. I fail to see how this is a "major flaw" in the design of the experiment.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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