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Build Your Own UFO
Are Belong To Us dept. writes "Guess where the billions of dollars in the super-secret
Air Force program are going? Build your own for $10 in parts. They're popularly called "Lifters" and they're flying (one
of many videos) without engines and can hover in
place. Admit it, it would have been cool to see a
UFO. Never mind if you didn't, because now you can
build your own (another, step-by-step
instruction, here), like lots
of people around the globe already have, for $10 in
parts. A number of patents surround the technology, some by
NASA. The best introduction
site to all of this is Jean-Louis Naudin's site. There goes your sleep - this is fascinating stuff. ;-)" Any website that uses the phrase "a simple 30KV power supply" is okay in my book.
I don't see anything in the text of the article about lifters, UFOs, or anything of the sort. All rather tenuous.
Can someone else see anything that has to do with homemade high voltage electricity toys?
Incidentally, this all reminds me of the high voltage stuff that came from science toys a while back: aluminium foil on your CRT linked to a polystyrene cup with foil on it making a motor out of simple office equipement.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
If it were a gravitational effect, the force would have a direction (i.e. always upwards).
I strongly doubt that it does.
As you can see from the other experiments on the authors pages, it also works horizontally so simply put, this asymmetrical capacitor just produces some mechanical thrust. In whatever direction I would assume !
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
Appeal to ignorance - Claiming that what has not been proved false must be true.
Observational selection - Enumeratioon of Favorable Circumstances -- aka you have pointed out the hits of the past but have not pointed out the failiurs.
Non sequitur -- you make points that are not realy related in any form other than they are in the same feild (aviation) but assume that because it happend one way in the past that it will happen again the same way in the future.
Ascii artist &
Did it ever occur to you that mass might not be very effective at distorting space, and that energy might be? Remember that we are talking about local distortions - not large ones like a planet causes. Once again the key questions are: "Does it work? Is it repeatable". If the answer to those questions are "Yes" nothing else matters. Theory has to be adjusted to fit reality - not the other way around.
It is said that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' I would say that a crude electrogravitic kite lifting an 18 gram payload is pretty extraordinary. If the experiment can be easily repeated and duplicated the argument is over. If you read the pages carefully some of the experimenters are professional scientists.
Sorry to respond to my own (once again typographically challenged) post.
However, thinking about it, assuming the lifter is using the AC from the horizontal monitor sweep, what you are probably seeing is an induced dipole effect.
This is nothing new. Take a balloon. Rub it against the carpet (charge it up statically). Stick it to the wall.
Why does the balloon stick?
The static electricity induceds dipoles in the wall. These dipoles attract the balloon.
In the case of the lifter, the + wire on top and the grounded foil forms a dipole. This dipole induces a mirror image dipole in the ground beneath it. However, if the AC is near at frequency that is in the general vicinity of the horizontal sweep frequency of the monitor, the induced dipole in the surroudings (table/ground/floor) will be out of phase with the regular dipole. This will cause a repulsive force.
As it stands though, the lifter is highly not optimized. The frequencies could be optimized which in turn would give you a stronger force (or conversely require a lower voltage power supply). The lifter layout could be redone to for a strong dpole moment or made out of studier materials (as the system currently is put together, the force would be very very weak).
Here is the difference between science and pseudo-science. The above is _testable_.
- The device should exhibit power supply frequency dependent characteristics. Notably there should be frequencies ranges exhibiting repulsive and attractive forces and these the ranges are dictated by the speed of light and the effective distance of the induced dipole.
- The device should be sensitive to the surroundings. i.e. it would have different operational characteristics if you operated it starting from a wooden table or a metal table.
No dubious "electrogravitics" required.
Kevin
You then have a bunch of slashdot-imposed link boxes [lanl.gov], etc., but no actual links.
The space.com article starts off with "NASA's Controversial Gravity Shield Experiment Fails to Produce" (my emphasis). They also comment "What has dogged the research, experts say, is that Podkletnov failed to adequately document his findings." This seems to be a bad habit of people proposing these sorts of exotic, revolutionary theories.
Ning Lee's proposal, which is not yet accepted anyway, isn't true antigravity. It's just another kind of motor. We can create "antigravity" by exclusion of magnetic field lines from a superconductor, in that this generates lift. Wait, wait, we can create "antigravity" by running air past a suitably shaped wing!
On the other hand, true antigravity -- say, a shielding of gravity's effects -- requires a complete change in how we perceive the laws of nature. I'm all for that, but not until you show me the peer-reviewed, well-documented, empirical evidence. I don't buy into the bullcrap conspiracy theories that act like the physicists of the world would engage in sinister collaboration to suppress wild new results. The fact is, most physicists would love to hear about easily-accessible fundamentally new physics.
But first they need proof. And so do I.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
This certainly smacks of pseudoscience. It's not the fact that it claims a new effect (not previously accepted by mainstream science) that makes is pseudoscience. It's the fact that details are light, confirming independant work is non-existant, and primarly the fact that they jump to the most outlandish conclusion first. In real scientific work, you first rule out all the explainations based on previously understood phenomina before you claim you've found a new phenominon. Also, you don't try to present new, only marginally accepted (or completely unaccepted) theories as incontrivertable fact. This "build your own" site seems to give sketchy details about the science and experimental details and claims completely unaccepted theories as fact. That is why they are pseudoscientific. No reasonable effort has been made to rule out other explainations.
I'll also point out that no matter what crazy mechanism you claim for the drive, the idea of it being reactionless would violate conservation of momentum, something which NO other theory does and which goes against common sense; thus, it would require extraordinary proof, which is not provided. I mean, for one thing, they could simply have tested the thing in an air-tight enclosure set on a scale, measuring weight. If it was truely "reactionless", then when the device took off, its weight would be effectively gone and the system inside the enclosure would get lighter. They haven't shown this, and I have a good idea why. Sounds unreasonable, doesn't it?
In actuality, I think this is, as others have observed, an ion drive of a sort. The high potential between the foil and the wire on the device cause charge distribution on the foil, causing the part of the foil at the bottom of the craft to accumulate a bulk of negative charge. The fact that it's a sharp edge (thin foil), makes it easy disipate this charge by releasing ions there. There are many classroom science demos that demonstrate this with a high voltage applied to a sharp metal point. They claim it's amazing that it still works in vacuum, but it really isn't. As long as it's attached to an external power supply, the power supply feeds in charge which is used essentially as a propellant. Even without an external power supply, as long as ions of the opposite charge are also released, in order to avoid a net charge. Ion drives have been used for thrusters in space for a while now.
Now that explaination may be wrong. Explaining it isn't the point. The point is, I wouldn't beleive it's antigravity or anything similar until I'm satisfied that all mundane explainations have been ruled out. Jumping to that conclusion is just pseudoscience. Keep an open mind, but not so open that you let your brain fall out.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Of all places, I would have expected their to be some more objective people here on slashdot. Largely, what I've seen is a bunch of people with little or no scientific training calling this guy names and making light of his experiments. There was another time people did that, in the middle ages. Luckly, this thing called the Enlightenment happened and the scientific method allowed for the discovery of most of the luxuries the ignorant masses (of which I see nicely represented here) take for granted. There have already been lots of references to powered flight, but others, like electricity, AC vs. DC power, the automobile, etc all have examples through history.
I could justify you and I could stomach this crap if he was asking for investors or money. He's not. He has a genuinely interesting effect, he has indicated that here's how you do an INDEPENDANT VERIFICATION, and he has also proposed a number of experiments that can be done to see if there is something interesting here. Nowhere does he claim anything other than a interest in the science and experimentation with high voltage effects. Like you people do when you experiment with the kernel - after all, you're just a bunch of fools when there's tried-and-true existing kernels on the market, right? That's sarcasm, for the challenged.
I have actually built one of these things on a different design years ago. This is a well known ion-engine concept. The problem is the power suuplies needed to make it work in any kind of practical application. The effect I designed for was a air turbulence effect that used the high voltage to ionize air molecules and accllerate them downward. That is why I suspect that the devices have problems in humid situations. BUT YOU COULD EXPERIMENT AND PROPOSE THIS. There is an experiment that rules out an external field, the faraday cage one. You could try to reduce the air pressure and see if the effect drops linearly, or blow compressed air at it to try and reduce lift, or even put it in a vacuum chamber. BUT THOSE ARE EXPERIMENTS!
Calling this guy a crackpot without any attempt to verify his well laid out experiments is a disgrace. If you see a problem with his experiments or apparatus, tell us. Or if you care that much, replicate his experiment. If it fails, post your results. I might get bored and try some of this sometime. But the information is all there!
Kudos to this guy for showing the spirit of backyard experimentation, and shame on you mods for promoting the kind of crap that's in the parent.
..don't panic