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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.
When we ran electricty into a conductor, and things get pushed away we called it:
GRAVITY
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.
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--
i heard that the main tank leaks about 1,000,000 litres of H2 an hour when it's full, pre-launch.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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."
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?
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.
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!"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>
> 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.
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!"
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:
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
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.
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
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."
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.
j_w_dougherty
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
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....
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/
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
You mean the superscript 1 at the end of this question?
J
Try ¹.
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.
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
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..
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.
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."
"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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Troll?? Informative?? It was a JOKE!
jeez!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
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. --
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*
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.
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
There's a Karma cap?
:)
ah, that explains it...
Good post, btw
-= rei =-
*Kid Rock runs for Senate* Democrats: We must run Kid Scissors.
(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
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
"Gravitational Field." Hmph! This whole story is repulsive!
PK: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
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.
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!
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.
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!
People have been telling me for years that my presence pushes people away, that my breath repels people. Now I know why.
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.
It's called a subwoofer.
Big woop, so now it's superconducting.
</bad joke>
Yes, every editor is Taco. Especially that fascist Michael.
The great thing about science is that one doesnt need to believe, they can KNOW. That isnt anymore unlikely at all.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
(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."
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.
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.
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.
Bringing up vacuum fluctuations and quantum gravity certainly makes it look like crackpot science.Huh? You don't believe in these? Are you stuck back at Maxwell's equations, or do you equate "recently discovered/theorized" with "crackpot"?
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.
I could be right, I could be wrong, 50% odds either way right now.
--Mike--
All objects (not just ferrous) are slightly magnetic. This article about flying frogs explains it well.
.mpg of the levitating frog.
direct link to the
...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.
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.
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--
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
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
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