Slashdot Mirror
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.
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--
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."
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.
...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
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.
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>...
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/
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.
"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. :)
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.."
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!
Does Alex Chiu know about this yet?! :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
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.
(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
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
It's called a subwoofer.
Big woop, so now it's superconducting.
</bad joke>
Yes, every editor is Taco. Especially that fascist Michael.
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.
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.
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.
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--
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