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NASA Still Trying to Verify Anti-Gravity Claims
uncoda writes "The L.A. Times has an article about NASA research into a phenomenon in which the effect of gravity is supposedly reduced. It sounds like cold fusion or polywater to me, but who knows?" We've posted two previous stories about Podkletnov's research: one from a couple of years ago and another more recently.
I think this would be great if it's proven true... although spinning at 5000 RPM to lose 2% of my wieght will definitely make me dizzy and hurl my lunch :(
Think about the potential this has for revolutionizing small part manufacturing. The precision that was till now only achieved in a LEO or better could be accomplished right here in EveryTown, USA. Well, probably not based on what I read in the article. But it's one of the few practical applications that I could think of (small scale, limited effect). That is assuming this doesn't turn out to be another "Free Energy" type hoax.
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
Hey,maybe now the fattest guy in the world could actually support his weight. Now to get a motor strong enough to get him spinning that at 5000 RPM.
It's not really that the effect of gravity is reduced... rather, that the effects are transferred to the outside of the closed environment. Remember... Newton's law of conservation. 'das all.
i swear to god that cat's must have these things in them.
which brings up a point in itself, the age old open-faced peanut butter sandwhich on the back of a cat argument.
Cogito Eggo Sum, I think therefore I'm a waffle
Wired had a good article about this guy a couple of years back.
This has been going on for a while. See the most recent note on this subject from Bob Park's "What's New." He refers to an earlier $2M that got dropped on this crackpottery.
How is it that the next revolution in science always has to do with some disc that's rotating?
We're still stuck on that stupid UFO from the 50's. HELLO? That's so old. pff.
There will be a whole new rush of 'effortless weight loss' products on the market. (Not mass loss.)
If the experiments succeed it may give us some insite into gravity but don't look to this device to free us from the bonds of Earth.
A super cooled, electrically charged, rapidly spinning super conducting disc that reduces the gravity field above the disc is interesting. However, taken as a whole, the entire system would still crash to earth.
Sort of like putting a sail on one end of a skateboard and a fan blowing air on it on the other end. It still isn't going anywhere.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
why didn't someone tell me it was this easy to get money from NASA?
oldest quack scheme in the book. claime something extraordinary, then claime that it's not reproducable by anyone else because they're not doing it exactly right, or don't have your special equipment. that's the same line that quack used who tried to say plants responded to your tone of voice.
... to get someone to let them make a superconducting magnetic flying disk machine.
I am totally a sucker for this in that I really believe understanding the field of gravity better would be a major accomplishment, and so likely to occur as to be a good place to expect a revolution in science.
But this guy is not really a scientist. His contribution is not open, and that is a part of science. Modern science came from hobbyists in science that shared information openly. That where the idea of free and open projects comes from.
-pyrrho
"James Cox, editor of AntiGravity News, lists no less than seven major classifications of anti-gravity devices, from those based on superconductivity, to those that exploit properties of gyroscopes and purported anomalies in nuclear physics or quantum mechanics. Cox himself is working on an anti-gravity backpack that he claims is nearing the patent stage. He is currently seeking funding to develop a commercially viable prototype."
I love how the web has made every Kook with a website an "Editor"--and a reasonable source for story on a scientific topic.
The government is turning welfare moms into prostitutes!
tcd004
(Editor, Lostbrain.com)
Upon verification of the theory, Podkletnov (with the help of NASA) promises to personally visit all those who publicly doubted him, and laugh mockingly at them, while waving handfuls of money in their faces.
slashdot!=valid HTML
so... this is gonna be some kinca gyrochopter or something?
This message was brought to you by the death of 30 brain cells.
will finally get their flying car, perhaps from the german scientist? http://www.viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html
internet like monkeys'
I power my antigrav device with collapsing water bubbles. I'm hovering as I type this!
This could finally be some competition to Viagra.
Yeah, like when my instruments aren't calibrated because the Russian government won't pay me, and it just *looks* like a 2% decrease in gravity.
"The Podkletnov effect suggests it may be possible to effectively reduce the mass of the ship, thereby reducing the overall energy needed for acceleration."
But once the spacecraft is some distance away from the device, the device will probably not have much effect. Sounds like a waste of money making a cryogenic chamber large enough to house this device which would have very little effect on a rocket.
"Cox himself is working on an anti-gravity backpack that he claims is nearing the patent stage"
I wonder what the pricetag will be on that. This is sure to join the ranks of famous humorous patents.
I'm not saying this won't work, but a lot of it sounds sketchy. The only credible part about it is that NASA is working on it. Wait a minute NASA...credibility...that doesn't sound right...I guess I was thinking about a different organization. If it does work, this device should theoretically be able to create gravity as well...sort of by conservation of gravity I guess.
Popular Mechanics ran something to this effect sometime ago. It can be found online here.
I can just imagine it now, getting spam that reads: "Do you weigh over 200lbs? Well we have the solution for you! Loose over 4lbs INSTANTLY! Thats right, INSTANTLY! NO gimmicks, NO drugs, just pure science! Only $600,000! Act Now!"
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Is this effect similar to that of the levitating frogs? [I dont have a link handy... anyone care to help?]
If so, could the rotating simply be acting to create a focus point of magnetic energy at some point on the axis of rotation, above the superconducting disc? If the object being tested has any magnetic substace in it at all, then a strong magnetic field could cause it to seem less weighted, right?
I also question the use of the Cavandish balance to measure the mass of the item above the spinning disk. We're dealing with a superconductor in a magnetic and electric field... What is preventing this device from causing some strange magnetic effect. What about ionization of the air around this device?
These are just my inital reactions to the article, and I'm no Physics expert. What are your thoughts, friends?
...that I wont need to get up to grab a beer anymore?
Well, considering gravity modifies the force of an object and force is 'weight', this has nothing to do with the topic. a 1000kg object under normal gravity (9.8m/s^2) will have a "weight" of 9800N (N -> Newtons).
I think I noticed that even in the article, they confused 'mass' and 'weight'. Mass is constant. Weight is dependent on gravity.
I know this may be a tad offtopic (PLEASE DO NOT MODERATE AT ALL), but there is an interesting funny "flying car" video here. It is written by Kevin Smith (Mallrats, Clerks, etc.) and it features the guys from Clerks.
As I recall, there was an issue (last year?) of Scientific American that had a contraption similar to this in discussion, but it was in the lab of an extremely well-respected scientist. I can't remember the name or any specifics, but from what I remember, it doesn't have anything to do with gravity at all. Actually, it works on the electromagnetic (I think...sounds close to right) properties of matter to actually _repel_ objects. There were some calculations about the size of a spinning disk of superconducting material and power requirements. Sounds awfully like the story. Again, this doesn't violate any laws of physics because the energy put into the system is greater than the energy required to "push" the object up. In short, it can negate gravity in about the same way that a rocket negates gravity. Just a little more convenient and probably more efficient. Don't be shocked if it works...but it's not "revolutionary" either. Anyone want to help on the SciAm article? I can't remember details for the life of me...
that's the same line that quack used who tried to say plants responded to your tone of voice
Tone of voice, no. CO2 yes. Sweet-talk a plant for a few minutes and you give it a strong shot of a relatively rare gas that it requires for its metabolism.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
All the space probes we can measure are slowing down. The ones where the effect is most oticed are teh GPS sats since they have real good clocks and we know where they are and the long distance Pioneer and Voyagers. NASA isn't sure why this is happening. They know its going on and need to find out why.
If I do an experiment where I can show gravity doesn't work like its expected to, they will look into it. Most of the time the result is that somone put an Acme magnet in the wrong place. NASA doesn't care what the experimentor's (or crackpot's) theory is, they want to duplicate the experiment and try to find out the real reason for the change in mass. If your respected enough to do an expirment, its worth their time to look into it even if your theory is the disk weighs less because of the magic elves.
The bit about potentially using it to reduce the mass of ships to make propulsion more efficient seems a bit dodgy to say the least.
Sure, you might one day find some amazing new principal that allows you to manipulate gravity, but the energy required to do it puts you right back at square one. You need to carry fuel to power the anti-grav unit so you need less fuel.
Hmmmm.
as always, extraordinary results require extraordinary proof
as much as id love to see this kind of stuff a reality, this particular claim seems off to me. It happens way too often in the physics community that someone claims to have made some breakthrough, be it in superluminal light pulses, or cold fusion and really they are just full of it.
it seems most often that theyve put so much of their life and time into their work that when they dont get anything meaningfull they either fudge the results or "see" what they want to.
unfortunately that is probably the case here..a dead giveaway is Mr P's (i cant spell his name) initial secrecy, that always kind of says something about the authenticity of the claim...it also doesnt help that his hosting university throws him out and noone else can reproduce his claim...on the grounds that its too complicated to set up properly. bs
but im always the skeptic...even if im hopeful
good for nasa though in actually staking out the claim...and if they need to killing the hype
id like to know how Mr P measured his weight change too...if he use similiar ballances to nasa or something else he cooked up
admit defeat, live in decline, be the victim of our own design
Quote: "Gravity has NOTHING to do with mass, anyone who took high school physics should be able to tell you that."
Actually, gravity depends on three things,
1) The mass of the object that is being attracted
2) The mass of the object 1) is attracted to(typically much greater than the mass of 1))
3) The distance separating the two.
This relationship is called Newton's law of gravitation:
F(gravity) = G*(mass(small)*mass(big))/(distance)^2
The article states "The Podkletnov effect suggests it may be possible to effectively reduce the mass of the ship, thereby reducing the overall energy needed for acceleration."
Now as every semi-educated idiot knows, Mass and Weight are two different measures. Mass is an immutable constant, while weight is strictly based on the strength of the gravational field.
In other words wieght can vary, but mass will never.
I did a Google search on this "paranoid" scientist and I couldn't find anything negative.
---------------
I sig, therefore I was.
Not exatly, let's say the amount of energy needed to keep the disk spinning up and down and float the piston up (out of the gravity well) happens to be more than the energy that is gained by dropping the ball, then energy is conserved.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Huh? F = ma, yo. Gravity provides a and is therefore pretty much constant. If you can vary m, you therefore can vary F, which means you can vary the amount of energy needed to counteract a. That's his whole point.
Crap, that was in my high school physics course.
Anybody know of any beginners guides to physics, preferably on the web I can start reading?
I read 'The Physics of Star Trek' recently, and found that to have a very fascinating insight into how likely some of the fictional technology is. The author did a good job of explaining some of the more complex stuff in terms I could understand. Now I hunger for more. Anybody have a site or a book they could point me to?
"Derp de derp."
Yes, in space your weight will be reduced by 2% by this device. Since you "weigh" zero, and 2% of zero is also zero, it won't seem like much...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Gravity has NOTHING to do with mass, anyone who took high school physics should be able to tell you that.
Check your high school physics notes again. Gravity has everything to do with mass. Gravity is the attraction of objects to each other because of their mass. Every object posessing mass has a gravitational field. The strength of that field is proportional to the amount of... wait for it... mass.
If you witness/measure less gravitational force in a system, you can conclude at least one of three things, according to the high school physics you speak of:
1. The universal gravitational constant has been reduced.
2. One or more masses in the system have been reduced.
3. The distance between the masses has been increased.
Good point but you completely missed the one big reason it won't work.
If you use this device to reduce the mass of a ship it would also reduce the potential energy of everything in the ship, including the fuel.
Rocket engines are basically a more complicated manner of throwing mass the other direction. If the fuel has less mass it will cause less forward motion as it moves away, this is simple highschool physics.
The person who wrote the article probably thought of this himself but just couldn't think it all the way through with his 4th grade education.less it will
----- 70% of all statistics are completely made up.
Evgeny Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese have posted one of their papers on the arXiv: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0108005
Created by odd people, which is why Art Bell has their footage on his goofy site, but check out this link and look for the levitation videos, which are actually at the following (links directly to movies on art bell's site):
Movie 1
Movie 2
I think these were made by the guys who published that paper on stove top fusion a few years back... these are actual, though goofy, movies of alleged (and highly dubious) levitation.
Silly? You bet. Also on that art bell page are links to movies with David Blain street magic levitation tricks. Anti-gravity-like stuff.
This "research" has all the signs of pseudo-science. The results are alledgedly reproducible, but only when conditions are "exactly right" which they never seem to be when other people try to repeat the tests independently. The researcher himself won't help other people or publish more than vague information because, so he says, he's afraid of being ripped off. As a result, he's has been thrown out of the academic institution where he used to work. No plausible theoretical underpinning for the effect, and plenty of scope in the test setup outlined in what little has been published for other effects to be present which might be confused with the result that's claimed, especially by someone who - to put it charitably - may find it difficult to maintain full scientific objectivity when considering the results.
NASA must have contracted a bad dose of the "but they said Einstein was wrong" meme to even consider getting involved in this quackery.
Gravity acts on mass, so it has something to do with it. But you're right, if Podkletnov's hypothesis is correct and he's blocking gravity, it's not much use for moving a starship, except maybe to launch from a gravity well.
However, I can't see that mass reduction has been ruled out. From the old Wired article:
As far as I can tell, they measured the weight of the object. Weight is derived from mass and gravity. The effect, if it really happens, might be a result of blocked gravitational interaction between the object and Earth OR reduced mass of the object. I have no idea what's been done beyond this, so Podkletnov and his team may have investigated this further, but going on what I can figure out from the articles, either is possible. Though, between the two, I'd sooner believe gravity is blocked than mass disappears and reappears.
Jake96
So what you're saying is that NASA have spent $2.6M trying to disprove this "crackpottery" and haven't yet managed to do it?
Going by the law of conservation of energy if this does reduce the effect of gravity I strongly suspect the amount of energy needed to maintain the effect will be at least equal to or greater than the potential energy difference of the material affected.
I actually did cover that situation in the post. Basically what I'm saying is that you WON'T be able to use this device to cheat in getting out of orbit unless you break conservation of energy.
I stole this Sig
The main bogus part about the claim is that there is no theory to back up the supposed effect. Thus, what we have is an effect; however say that it is anti-gravity is presumptive. There are many things that could cause effects claimed by the so-called evidence, such as a jet stream of particles. Of course, this effect has never been replicated by any reputable scientist, thus we are left with a claim of some effect who's discoverer in the very least jumped to the conclusion of anti-gravity, yet more probably just made it all up.
Ok i'll probably be modded down...but i gotta know!!! whats insightful about that post?? eh?? help me here please... hell the insightful moderation is funnier than the post!
The basis of science today is in testing phenomena and reproducing results. Podkletnov refuses to submit to this basic tenet of scientific society. He claims that people will steal his ideas and take his credit - yet if he's well known enough that NASA, let alone the LA Times, has heard of him, such intellectual thievery ought to be very difficult. In addition, by publishing a paper with all his procedures and results, he would not only prove that such "gravity shielding" phenomena do exist, he'd be able to defend himself against future intellectual thievery, and he would allow other scientists to build off of - note, not steal - his work.
However, Podkletnov chooses not to publish his actual procedures. This makes his experiments functionally untestable. This is fortuitous for him if he is a fraud. That way, if NASA does manage to discover "gravity shielding", he can claim that their procedure was his, and cash in on their prestige and fame. If NASA fails, as they are likely to do, he can simply claim that they didn't do it quite right, and continue to refuse to release his results. Given that he's kept the chemical composition of some of the components of his apparatus, namely, the spinning disk, secret, it's hard to see how NASA would succeed even if his claims were valid. Finally, if, as Podkletnov claims, "dozens of people" have matched his results, we could expect at least one of them to have come forward by now. Certainly, they can't all be hiding their data for fear of thievery - are we to suppose that not one of "dozens" of scientists has the bravery, initiative, far-sightedness, or even plain greed to publish these results, which could have such an impact on the world if verified? That seems highly unlikely...
It's somewhat disheartening to see an institution like NASA following pseudoscience like Podkletnov's "gravity shielding". With current budget cuts, NASA would be much better off spending its diminishing money on developing technology that already exists, rather than chasing implausible alternatives. Everyone would profit off of an alchemist's ability to turn lead to gold, or a perpetual motion machine, or cold fusion, but, because those have been shown to be so implausible, for various reasons, we don't see serious research institutions researching them. "Anti-gravity", at least of Podkletnov's variety, should be placed in the same category, at least until the 'scientist' is willing to back up his claims with some real, verifiable, and repeatable procedures and data.
Local woman sues scale-maker for discrepencies regarding her wieght. Claimants say that the scale is intentionally misconstruing actual wieght by use of a spinning disk, consisting of an unspecified superconducting material.
Defendents neither confirmed or denied the allegations, as they claim the superconducting materials in question, are currently undergoing a patent application and do not wish to disclose information for fear of competitors stealing the idea.
I sig, therefore I was.
> it has more time to react in the air
That's not the point. Even if you had all time you wanted to react in the air, you wouldn't land on your feet because there are no handles in the air you would need to turn around. But the cat has a very flexible backbone so she can bend her body into a U shape and then she doesn't need a handle to turn her back from the outside of the U to the inside.
To see the differenc take a piece of string between your fingers, stretch it and turn it around its axis. You will see that you would need a grip in the air to acheive that movement.
Then move your hands togeher, so that the string bends down in a U. When you turn it now you can see that all you need for this movement is some muscles in the bow of the U.
Just an observation.
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
Yes everybody I did make a little booboo in there, I origionally ment to differentiate between mass and weight, weight being what this machine is supposed effect. The effect of gravity on an object ins't dependent solely on the object, it's dependent on the mass of the object creating the gravitational field and the radius squared and a constant yadda,yadda,yadda, ie 98.1N on a 10 Kg object, say we use this device to reduce the weight to 8 N, it's still 10 Kg but we STILL need 500 J to accelerate this object to 10 m/s (perpendicular to the gravitational field of course). The only suggestion of the device reducing mass, not gravity, appears to be the writers own conjecture.
I stole this Sig
this article many years ago, and people at that time almost believe that an object will lose weight when it spins fast enough. Some even started to think that there's a gigantic core spinning inside a round shape UFO, ensure its anti-gravitational movement without using any combustion engine at all.
:/
It's until now I realized none has yet confirmed yet. Oh I shouldn't have read all these damn UFO-science books.
Well, there is no reason why you couldn't break out of orbit, just so long as the machine part is on earth. There is no reason why this couldn't be used to hurl things into space, assuming it's real.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I think the disk size and speed play the part in how much it will change the affect of gravity of something. Since Gravity is according to mass then even if we obtain 100% of earth then another larger plaent would be less than 100% but a 50% reduction her on earth would be greater in or on somewhere like the moon. I have though if you spong a hollow disk at hight speeds and then after obtaining that speed if you sping it around you it will force you as the center of gravity and you would hover. Well guess we will have to see on that one if we ever live to see that day comeing. Hey who knows it might be sooner than anyone thinks if they prove this.
As previous posters have noted mass and gravity are intimately related.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
From the article:
...
The law of gravity is one of science's most sacrosanct principles; any breaching of its walls would represent a major threat to the current theoretical framework.
Really? One of the few things I can remember from my Physics courses at school is that noone understands why gravitation mass is the same as intertial mass. The closest anyone's got to an explanation is Einstein with his Equivalence Principle, but even this seems a bit woolly (only works in a uniform gravitational field). So there are still aspects of mass (and so gravity) that are not fully understood.
Of course, this experiment sounds rather dodgy, and it's unclear from the article what they're measuring. Got me wondering though
My setup is by far much simpler. A desk fan rotating at about 1000 RPM blowing air upwards at room temperature. A polystyrene ball of diameter aproximately 2 cm placed over it will lose weight by at least 50 %. And guess what, it costs about 0% of $600K to setup but it actually works. And you don't need very precise conditions.
Where is my Nobel prize!
--Real inovations in science make things easier to understand not more complicated
well we still have 12.8 more years before the events of Back to the Future Part II take place.
i'm more conserned about the Pan Am space liner to the moon that didn't happen last year...
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
While I think it's unlikely the phenomenon is real, Bob Park's commentary on it is an unwarranted and unfounded attack. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the effect would violate the "First Law"--the energy might come from the disk or the field.
The food in Finland is an excellent way to lose mass! I lost a great deal of weight from being immersed in a repulsive Finnish Electro-herring Field for two weeks. I was then subjected to a four hour experiment involving approximately 1.5 liters of vodka and a sauna. I spun around, vomited profusely and eventually lost more than 2% of my body mass! Finland rocks!
Antigravity is a lot older than 1992 kids. That's just when it became fashionable to be an antigravity crackpot again. Here's an idea, rather than wasting your time trying to make antigravity devices to power some future space ship, why dont you spend your time trying to make a gravity device that we can put on our existing space ships and space stations? A decent gravity simulator is desperately needed for the human mission to mars (which may never happen in this economic climate) and other long term space projects, and frankly, if you cant make a gravity device, what chance do you have of making an antigravity device?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Actually my wife found a handy little dial on the bottom of her scale that lets her reduce the apparent mass at will. It's especially effective after parties the night before.
shouldn't this belong in the "outrageous vendor lies" thread.
still, i won't have to worry about my diet...
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
I'm not sure what this anti-gravity thing has to do with having hot chicks in space.
I also have doubts if this could be used to help propel a ship out of the atmosphere.
I strongly suspect the amount of energy needed to maintain the effect will be at least equal to or greater than the potential energy difference of the material affected.
I would submit that it's unimportant how much more energy is required than the energy difference created by reducing the effects of gravity. Within some reason of course, I imagine NASA would be overjoyed if it could safetly propel a projectile into space at a 100-1 energy differential, as long as the energy is expended at a stationary ground base.
By not having to carry fuel, a space vehicle is many-fold more efficient. And by using more efficient energy generation techniques on the ground, it's made more efficient (and cheaper) still.
While I certainly agree that there is little chance this will produce any meaningful results, I think it would be absolutely revolutionary were it to be true.
I have yet to see ANYBODY in this field tie the Pokletnov claims to the mainstream theory of gravity believed by most particle physicists, which is that it is caused by a particle called the Higgs Boson. What's interesting is that these mainstream physicists share many traits with Pokletnov to the untrained eye - they haven't really found the Higgs particle yet, they just think it's there because it ought to be, and without understanding of some really DEEP math the Higgs at first blush seems to be just as much handwaving as anti-gravity. Some of the best public-consumption stuff on the Higgs is to be found here, something about the (so far unsuccessful) search here, and an audio discussion with the inventor of the whole concept, Dr. Higgs himself, here. If you want to get into the serious math of the Higgs (good luck) one place to start is the bottom of the web page here.
Consider a localised column around the earth in which gravity is lessened. This means that the potential energy is higher in this area... here on earth we have very negative energy, and out to infinity we define zero energy. The area of lesser gravity has a higher potential energy.
The upshot of this is that it requires a force to "push" something into this area of microgravity. Why? because otherwise you could have two stairwells, one for going up in the microgravity area, and one for going down (normal gravity). You could get energy for free.
So, if your missile, or what ever, has sufficient energy to make it into the microgravity column, it slows, and then comes out the other side, at its original velocity. If it doesnt have this critical velocity (let's call it escape velocity), it bounces back. At its original speed. Ouch. Most notably, if you put your arm in there, your heart can't pump the blood with enough pressure to keep the blood in your arm. Bugger.
I think it is kinda interesting, not only because it is fundamentally a cool thing, but all the cooky side effects that could come about from it.
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distance.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! Slashdot crowds are the greatest crowds in the world! Be sure to tip your waitresses. I'll be here all week!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This guy did a presentation of his work at sheffield university (UK). The major problem seemed to be his measurements relied on a weight loss. He used liquid nitorogen to cool his superconductors down and spinning something at several 1000 rpm tends to heat stuff up. Some of the liquid nitrogen evaporated away as it was not sealed in properly. Virtually everyone there felt this explained the weight loss.
Plus his error analysis was crap and also had graphs consisting of a number of smiley faces IIRC.
Also for a year, some RA was hired by Sheffield uni to try and recreate his results. Yes there was a weight loss effect once (out of many many attempts at the experiment) but the guy who did the experiment did some proper error analysis and concluded it was an error. In the end, they could not recreate his experiments.
Thats not to mention the anecdotes he used to explain his accidental discovery of the effect. One of his colleagues was smoking his pipe on the floor above when the smoke hit an invisible column and rose (or something similar to that).
Do you know your weight in finland is more than on the equator.
But then to complete this myth:
Do you know a drain flushes the other way round 10 meters from the other way of the equator. (if you do not beleive me ask bart simpson)
I'm sorry, run that by me again? If they succeed at reducing the gravitational mass of an object but it requires expenditure of energy, you'd consider that a "null result"? I suppose next thing you are going to tell me is that electrostatic repulsion doesn't exist because moving the charges to measure it requires expenditure of energy.
2.6 Million bucks is a lot of money. It can fund many, many, many more real projects. Instead, it gone thrown into an unsubstantiated, non-peer-reviewed crackpottery by a guy who refuses to reveal the details of his so-called experiment.
Frankly, given the kind of uninspired, peer-reviewed, publicity-hungry junk I come across daily, I'm glad to see that some people are still spending money on long-shots and crackpots. If science were exclusively done by what one's peers think useful or interesting, we'd still be living in the stone age. I think this particular experiment is a long-shot, and after $2.6M it may really be time to start looking elsewhere. But, then, I think it's much less of a long-shot than the kind of nonsense theorists have been engaging in.
And it's not like the idea that there is something funny going on with gravity were completely unfounded. We know that Einstein's theory disagrees grossly with what we observe. It's not a question of if we can replicate this experimentally but how.
so it's not an anti-gravity device is it?
it's just a mass-reduction device, or anything you'd call it. If it just reduces the mass, then gravity is still 9.8ms^(-2).
Of course practically it does reduce the force required to propell the ship to space though.
Don't quote me on this.
What's wrong with centerfugial force?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
However the effect described does not constitute a reduction in mass, merely the reduction of the effect of gravity upon mass.
There is also a fourth possibility to add to your list.
4. The device is able to locally reduce the curvature of space-time which Einstein theorised was responsible for the force we call gravity.
Mass is defined as a materials inertia, ie is resistance to motion. Thus a heavy object in a zero g enviroment (such as orbit) is still difficult to get moving.
What would be interesting would be if this effect go break the principle of equivalence which states that it is impossible to tell the difference between gravity and an accelerating frame of reference.
As for applications, if it works; well a great one would be launch vehicles. By externalising the power source for getting something into orbit you greatly reduce the cost. for example, want to get some food up to the ISS? put it on an anti-g pad and literally fire it up there. No need for a rocket or anything much else.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
NASA spends $2.6M on a hammer.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The latest theory to come from the boffins is that the entire universe is single membrane (hence M-theory)in a 11-dimensional "multiverse". According to this theory gravity is an effect caused by the proximity of another universe just millimeters away in this multiverse.
Also according to this theory the big bang was caused by a collision between these two universes and there are 10 spatial dimensions and one temporal one.
All good stuff eh, even if it is beyond my tiny little mind.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Leaving aside the trivial counterexamples some others have offered (F=GM1M2/R^2), this is actually 100% wrong, as would be known if you consulted anything higher than a high school physics textbook. Even if you want (as the post seems later to imply) to disavow a connection between gravity and inertia, you'd be wrong. Gravitational mass is the same as inertial mass. This has been both empirically validated for 350 years and theoretically established by the Equivalence Principle in General Relativity. Gravity and inertia are one and the same, in ways we don't entirely understand.
So if you could actually reduce G, which is what these guys basically claim, you would indeed be reducing the inertial mass as well. Of course other weird effects would have to propagate, as well.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
This is what passes for insightful around here? In case you slept through Science 101, the onus is on the discoverer to provide proof in the form of a repeatable experiment. As this has never happened, there's nothing there to disprove. $2.6 million is pocket lint to NASA, this is just someone scraping together the spare change from other projects, not a serious attempt to prove or disprove anything.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Not to mention that 2.6 million in the world of science and research is a drop in the bucket.
The president spends more than this much on fuel in his jet just running around the country during a typical term in office.
A side from that, it's the long shots that usually have the biggest pay offs.
To be fair, most things that NASA does are crackpottery, until they work.
But in this case, they really are pushing the boundaries of credibility.
A (crack)potted history of Podkletnov goes something like this. Podkletnov throws together a bunch of superconducting junk that he has lying around his lab, and spins it up. He then waves some instruments at it, decides that he's seeing a 2% reduction in weight, and ascribes that to a reduction in gravitic mass (he can't test inertial mass, as he can't move the mass).
So far, so good. Stranger things have happened through serendipity. Podkletnov has no theory to explain it, but that's incidental. All he needs to do to obtain credibility is to publish all details of his experiment so that it can be replicated.
He fails to do this.
Instead, he publishes a vague description of the apparatus, and continues to make the claims. He refuses to disclose further details, or to let anyone examine his apparatus. Eventually, his university becomes so tired of his antics that they terminate his employment.
Various people with more money than sense try to replicate the experiment. Nobody who claims to have seen the weight loss will publish their details. Sound familiar? To anyone who reports that they cannot replicate the result, Podkletnov replies that they have the details wrong, but he still won't tell them what the details are.
Enter NASA. With some input from Podkletnov, NASA spends $1 million and thinks it maybe kinda might be seeing a 2e-6 reduction, sorta. Podkletnov suggests a few changes, but he still won't just give them his details, and NASA spend another $1 million, at the end of which, they stop claiming that they even might be seeing an effect.
And so here we are again. Someone's scraped together the spare change from other projects, and they've maybe, kinda, sorta got some details out of Podkletnov now. Or not. Who knows? Probably not NASA, and almost certainly not Podkletnov.
Podkletnov is a poor scientist, but a great publicist. Maybe that's what gets funding in NASA these days. It certainly gets publicity, as this discussion proves.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The Pan Am spaceliner didn't go all the way to the moon. It just went to the Stanford torus space station that is supposed to be up there now. Why doesn't ISS have a Stanford torus? They are always complaining about the lack of gravity having all sorts of negative health effects. Let it spin baby! Let it spin!
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
... 'cuz, if I'd see my monopoly on space flights threatened, I guess, I'd try to, er, "innovate", and, why not, "embrace & extend"...
You're saying that there are observations in the real world that grossly disagree with relativity, but that you cannot replicate them experimentally.
Barring what goes on with the very small (quantum effects), what on earth are you talking about? I've never heard of any non-quantum contradictions to relativity. Of course quantum stuff works in the lab; could you please give references to such gross disagreements?
Note that the rapidly-spinning NASA antigravity is hardly claimed to be quantum, so those contradictions don't really help the NASA claimants, either.
2 dashes and a space, or just 2 dashes?
Mercury's orbit doesn't agree with GR all that phenomenally well. How's that for starters?
:) )
OK, disclaimer here: Note that I said "GR", not "Newtonian" gravity - yes, I know that every textbook on the planet says that GR agrees with Mercury's orbit "phenomenally well" - but it's not really true. If you check out a decent astrophysics textbook (I -think- it's in Carroll & Ostlie) there were findings in the early 90s (I think... I'll try to look it up, but I figured I'd post this first so more people'll look around) that the discrepancies in Mercury's orbit could be mostly explained away due to non-sphericity of the Sun. When you take that into account, GR doesn't agree quite so well (unless someone's cleaned this up recently, which is possible. No one seems to care, actually).
That said, that wasn't what the poster was talking about - my guess is that the original poster was talking about stuff like continuous spacetime vs. quantum spacetime, but again, that's quantum effects.
I'm still of the opinion that the anomalous mass changes above a superconductor COULD be real (and could be quantum, keep in mind that superconductors produce weird quantum states of electrons) - after all, before people knew about the Casimir effect, no one would ever have thought to claim that sticking two pieces of metal very very close to each other would cause them to be strongly attracted to each other by anything except gravity.
That being said, I think it's probably experimental error, and I REALLY don't appreciate the way the original scientist handled it. The fact that he hid his experimental setup (or the complete details of it) out of fear of someone stealing his idea is such crap. Personally, if it had been me, I wouldn't've cared. If it does work, it's such a revolutionary breakthrough that I wouldn't've even cared about the economic benefits to me - the scientific benefits are too massive (besides, SOMEONE would've named the effect after me - or me and someone else - and that's all I really care about
What this guy says he has done is to create some sort of field (with this whole setup) that changes the properties of the matter inside it. Is this not a warp field?
Let us not forget the episode of ST:TNG where Q loses his powers and they have to move a moon or some shit and they make a warp field and then change some God awful law of nature allowing the tractor beam to move the moon. We can do that now, right?
Scientists have established an undetectable force that pushes the universe apart faster and faster.
Mysterious particles that appear in empty space and push matter.
What if gravity is a pushing force, not a pulling force? Maybe from the same pushing force seen in the accelerated expansion of the universe. Maybe from another pushing force.
Gravity is a pushing force, pushing you to the earth from your the direction of your head. The pushing power is diminished by the earth because it's particles somehow "filter out" the pushing forces.
In other words, the pushing force is all around us, but the earth is shielding us from the push coming from our feet.
I probably won't be the first with this theory and there's probably some simple way to disprove this theory but I wanted to put this on Slashdot before the topic cooled.
Can anybody please tell me how brilliant I am or tell me how this theory got disproven in some experiment?
Thanks.
- -- Truth addict for life.
Or...
4. Gravitational mass is no longer tied to inertial mass.
At most govt. labs a staff research costs on the order of $300,000 per year (for wages and a typically huge lab overhead - the wages are usually not bad, but not great either). That doesn't include any equipment costs.
So for 2.6mil, you'd get a $600K machine, plus 3 full time staff members for two years.
/..sig file not found - permission denied.
Everyone thinks this would provide perpetual motion, but I have experimentally verified that it does not. I plan to publish my results as soon as the lacerations heal.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Wow, this "MARGARET WERTHEIM" is a total idiot. Anybody who even took an "intro to philosophy" course and didn't sleep through it would know that any talk about "breaking the laws of nature" is complete nonsense. If this experiment turns out to be right, the consequence will not be that the laws of nature were broken, but that they are different from what we were expecting. Maybe this MARGARET WERTHEIM learned in journalism school to generate interest through cliches and conceptual nonsense, and maybe that's good enough to fool LA Times editors, but I can tell you, this doesn't reaffirm my faith in American journalism.
One point that belatedly struck me about this guy's claim: the apparatus that shows (alledgedly) this effect uses a spinning rotor, and spinning rotors seem to have an amazing ability to attract pseudo-science.
Maybe they somehow generate some sort of bogosity field;) Or perhaps it's just because so many people have at one time or another personally encountered the bafflingly counter-intuitive behavior of a toy gyroscope when you try to alter the axis around which it is spinning, and it tries to move off in an approximately 90-degree offset direction. There was a time when I was studying physics at university when I could write down the relevant equations and calculate what would happen, but even then I never intuitively understood the "cause" or where this unexpected force "came from". Quantum theory and relativity seemed transparently obvious in contrast.
Magnetic Levitation Train.
Given that "anything that can go wrong will go wrong", any attempt to prove this will fail horribly.
Thus the perpetual feline motion probably exists but the only evidence is, by definition, anecdotal.
A similar test was done by a class of school children a few years ago, where they buttered thousands of slices of toast and dropped them on the floor. Unfortunately they managed to reach the statistical result that toast mostly falls on its UN-buttered side, thus both proving and disproving Sods law at the same time.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Superconductors possess a very interesting phenomena. They are anti-magnetic. Several years ago I attended a physics day at a local university. In one of the exhibits a grad student was demonstrating this property. He place a small magnet on a superconductor and poured liquid nitrogen on the superconductor. The magnet rose and floated about an inch above the superconductor. I asked the grad student what would happen if he repeated the demostration and placed a supermagnet (a rare earth magnet) ontop the superconductor. He said he was game. We stole a supermagnet from another demostration and conducted the experiment. When the liquid nitrogen was poured on the superconductor, the supermagnet shot up in the air like a bullet, ricocheted off the ceiling and rattled around the room. The antimagnetic property of a superconductor is not polarity oriented. The effect will work no matter which pole is placed ontop the superconductor. It is a repulsive force not an attractive force.
Since superconductors already possess one unique attribute (anti-magnetism), it would be very intriguing if it might possess a second (anti-gravitiationl). The other passing thought is that the world has longed for an anti-gravitational engine, but maybe it was right in front of our noses all the time but it was called something else, an anti-magnetic engine. The Earth along with many planets and stars in the universe possess magnetic fields.
...for all those spams claiming to give you n lbs weight loss in just 24hrs - finally they'll be able to back up their claims with their new anti-grav fatscales.
Gravity holds all of our stuff down, so let's not be so negative about it. All kidding aside, from a physics point of view, anti-gravity is like de-accelleration - there is no such thing. There is accelleration with a reversed vector -- which has the same effect as so-called "deaccelleration." With gravity there is simply the Graviton. It is just a theoretical particle but it fits in well with Super String Theory and Quantum Gravity. I suppose it implies there is an Anti-Graviton, but the article in question doesn't suggest the manufacture of Anti-Gravitons.
--Peter
T( H)GSB Apr 21-27
In short, if we are serious about space travel, we need a quantum leap
Wow, I thought the quantum leap effect was restricted to time travel!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I invented an antigravity machine, but it floated away.
Back in 1991, I saw a high school student attempting to replicate a published result that looked very similar to the description in the article. The device was different, but the concept of very small weight loss of a spinning object was the same. In this variant, a high speed gyroscope was used. Turned out, the key was the electricity going through the wires to power the gyroscope and make it spin. The high schooler showed that if the electric current (going through wires) came from different perspectives, the "weight loss" could appear or disappear.
While I haven't read the extensive details, I do have to wonder if we might be seeing a similar concept here. What made me especially suspicious is the line that the effect only appears at several thousand RPMs. Turning up those RPMs means more current to the system, and more potential for side effects. Since the primary effect being looked for is very subtle, it could become significant.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
It obviously came from measuring the change in kenetic energy (.5mv^2). I'm not sure if this is a proper way of measuring this if G was reduced, but it should be obvious that the equation came from there! He meant that the object was accelerated from 0 to 10 m/s (assume that the object was moving 0 m/s in the observer's frame of reference to begin with.)
I am concerned that NASA is funding non-falsifiable research. It is certainly true that it would be mind-blowingly neat if this experiment happened to demonstrate something that we couldn't explain.
However, suppose the experiment fails to demonstrate the sought-after effect. This does not constitute a victory for the existing models, because Podkletnov just says, "Oh, you didn't use the right superconductor," or the right temperature, or something.
There is no way to disprove his theory. That's called "non-falsifiable". Non-falsifiable theories are generally unproductive because you can never stop trying to prove them; you're caught in an infinite loop. Eventually you just lose interest, or start to apply Occam's Razor.
It does not bother me that NASA should pursue research with a low likelihood of yield when the potential benefits are high. But whenever someone posits a non-falsifiable theory you must be suspicious, because it's the mark of somebody who is trying to get you to waste time and money.
Note that "falsifiable" is different from "not easily proveable". I can't really go out and check that those points in the sky are really massive hot balls of gas. But at least theoretically it's possible, just not convenient. And I can run other tests which could disprove my hypothesis. I can prove that they're not real close, for example, by sending up a rocket ship. I can check that they happen to produce light in the same fashion that really hot things do. If these tests fail, you know that my theory is wrong.
Inventing non-falsifiable theories is easy; you just leave a variable unbound. (That's the more general, and more useful, form of saying "you can't disprove a negative." You _can_ disprove a negative; I can prove that there's no elephant between me and my monitor right now.)
Because creating non-falsifiable theories is both easier and less productive than creating real scientific theories, but make it possible to fool people into believing something they want to believe, such theories must be treated with extreme suspicion, especially when somebody has something personal to gain out of it. The theory is not necessarily wrong, but the odds decrease drastically, to the point where the probability * cost is lower than the potential value.
The potential value may be very high here, but $2.6 million is non-trivial money, even for NASA, and the probability is vanishingly small.
I got several interesting suggestions, I'm going to look into each of them. Just wanted to thank everybody for their time! :)
"Derp de derp."
After reading most of these posts I have come to one conclusion. Most physisists make their career arguing with each other about how the universe works, where none of them know if they are right. Have any of you ever been to a phyics debate at a University? It almost gets to the point of fist fights sometimes.
Interesting? yes
Does it help the rest of us? no
This guy who invented the anti-gravity machine is obviously a crackpot. Sounds like the cobalt electricity producer and the perpetual motion machine.
Maybe we need Dick from 3rd rock to explain this to us. Wasn't he a physics teacher?
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
It's a revolution in portable computers! Think about it! All you need is an excellent cooling system and a really fast hard disk and there you have it! Laptops that move on their own!
Neutrons and Protons are both made up of 3 Quarks, or so we beleive. There is no way to yet tell if quarks in turn are made up of a smaller particle, or if electrons are either. But, the idea is, what if gravity is not inheritant to protons or neutrons themselves, or maybe not even to quarks, but to smaller subdivisions that remain unknown to us. Subdivisions that we can, in turn, effect by applying a force. The truth is, we do not now, and may never, know the exact makeup of 'matter' or the effects that we may be able to have on it. But, just because this seems unrealisitic, and it may well be, doesn't mean we should necessarily discard it so readily. Keep an open mind and we may discover amazing things, close it too soon and we'll stagnate.
In order to make Interstellar travel a reality, we need to make a revolutionary jump in technology. Since examining the known laws of physics isn't producing the answers we need, NASA is looking at the prospect that we may not understand the nature of the universe as well as we like to think we do. We need to remember that the "Laws" of physics are theorys that have merely been proposed based on experimentation and observation. Throughout scientific history there have been some discoveries that some things we though were proven absolute, were only true for the many different situations in which they had been tested. The ability to shield an object from the effects of gravity is pretty far fetched, but so is interstellar travel. NASA is going to have to spend a lot of money checking out some radical theories. In the end most of the research won't turn up anything useful. In some cases it will turn up usefull information but not prove what they are trying to prove. One of the important things to note here is that this kind of research needs to be funded by the government because private industries just aren't likely to invest money on concepts that are such longshots, and would take far too long to produce a return on investment. It's true that most of these ideas won't pan out, but through NASA, our government is making a long term investment in our futures. Maybe this isn't as important as some more short term needs like Welfare and Defense budgets, but that's why we spend billions on those things, and millions over years on ideas like this one.
In this case, the money spent on this project is rather small, in a NASA budget expense -- but even with a 2% chance of partial success, the amortized savings as a result of even a pointer in the right direction are enough to make the fool's rush more than worth it.
As was vaguely aluded to in the article, the possible PR cost to NASA's credibility was probably more of an impediment to funding this venture than the financial cost.
Think what would have happened if people had refused to fund semiconductor research? I mean, really! Electronics on silicon??? That stuf is almost an insulator!!!
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Cold fusion was practically proven to exist, unlike anti-gravity.
Hysteria surrounding cold fusion is generated by people who get
grants on doing multibillion dollar research on hotfusion.
Many know here cold fusion, but let me reiterate
advantages of it. It is clean, uses water with few
non-toxic low cost additives, it scales. It is
very very clean and cheap. Contrary to that, hot fusion reactors,
if there will be any working ones built, would be works of art, as they have to keep
trillion or particlulates contained in a magnetic
field. Hot fusion is based on controlling most volatile and unstable matter with not physical,
but magnetic barriers. It is isanely difficult to
do, for all we know it may be a hoax. There is no
real single point solution for hot fusion. It
requires us to push all the sciences to the limits
and there is not defined way to make it work.
The controvetial duo of scientists who went public
with their research were FORCED to go public
because competing hot fusion scientists were to
loose some money on research, and would look silly
if what they were doing could be replicated in
safe, cheap way, using most widely available matter on earth!
So please keep the facts straight - cold fusion was replicated in laboratories. But being barred from research in "respectable" sciences community,
cold fusion often used a reference to quasilogical, crackpot science.
As for peer-review journals - those are reviewed
by people who compete for research funds, many of whom depend strictly on funds raise for their living expenses. Don't you think there is a conflict
of interest?
I am disheartened with science community so far,
how it became a money consuming maching that
induces incremental gains on scientific knowlege
and never really approves real breakthrough ideas.
I suspect that the reason that gravitational mass and inertial mass are the same is that gravitational mass is derived from inertial mass via time dilation. I can't do the math, but remember that the deeper you are in a gravitational well, the slower time is. So an electron will (from the nucleus point of view) spend more time deeper in the well, which would result in the nucleus being pulled in that direction. From the electrons point of view (it's the one doing the dancing) it spends the same amount of time on both sides of the nucleus. So it has no net change in momentum.
This would obviously be a very weak effect, but then gravity is a very weak effect. And, as I said, I can't do the math, so it might be wrong. But that's the way it seems to me.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I might put out that there's a very easy way to lose weight (not mass) - just go down in a lift - losing mass as far as I know is impossible (short of radiation).
Video Game cheats, hints a
Don't take my word for it, there's an article here:
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/ 0,24330,3349719,00.html/
Deedrit -q6-
I wonder if this guy has tried measuring current draw, or the rpms of the spinning disk with an item being lightened. Thermodynamics would dictate that it should take some energy to make something lighter. If he could measure where it comes from, that might give some insight on how this all works, and lessen the chances that it was all due to air currents from evaporating liquid nitrogen. I doubt this highly, because if this guy truly had something he'd have patented it, and we'd see antigrav this and that all over the place by now.
Eat at Joe's.
regardless of where the onus is on someone proving their own scientific glory - the fact remains that it would be way uber cool if this stuff were real. It has the potential to change *everything*. It would be stupid to brush it aside based on some stubborn adherence to scientific dogma.
On the other hand, it's also stupid that we've wasted $2.6 million trying to prove it so far and have come up with nothing. Maybe we can sue him to provide the details of his experimental aparatus? Or at least torture him.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Coincendentally, I just finished reading Voodoo Science by Robert Park, which includes a few pages on this very case. It's written by the same Bob Park noted in the above aps.org link. The book is an entertaining non-technical read in itself.
Recently I visited Coral Castle in Homestead, FL. After seeing a special on TLC or one of those learning channels about it, I became so fascinated that I put it on my list of places to go before I die. It relates a lot to anti-gravity claims, mainly because the 5 foot 100 pound person that built it by hand was working with pieces of coral weighing in at over 30 tons.
There are plenty of places on the internet to read about Coral Castle, but here's the jist of it. Edward Leedskalnin, a small Latvian man, built Coral Castle by hand. It's pretty much a garden with many different celestial-style arrangements and setups built with carved coral. Many of the pieces are over 10 tons in weight, and the entire place was built by Ed entirely by hand and by himself. He worked only in private, but claimed to have found the secret to how the Egyptians built the Great Pyramids.
When I was at Coral Castle, I learned that when Ed died some people from the government came and seized some of Ed's things, claiming that they were a threat to national security. Judging by the experiments NASA is trying, I'm sure they're based partly on some of the things that Ed did with coral.
I gotta have more cowbell.
In contrast, gravity producing devices could let us do Dragonball Z style 'gravity training!' Instead of super weak, we get to be super strong!
;>
I can raise my power level!
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
Have you read Isaac Asimov's "The Billiard Ball"? The moral of that story is that even in space, you still weigh something -- albeit near zero, but not so close that 2% of it is zero. :)
Wasn't the sattelite slowdown due to the cumulative effects of the (very)minor density of extremely upper atmospheric particles?
Now the probes that are pointed out of our solar system, the reason those are slowing down is a mystery. That is the case where people think our ideas of gravity/space-time are maybe a bit off.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
OK, so I'm just a layman, but there's one simple statement in your posting which I don't quite understand. You say:
..."
"Mass (for some reason) creates curvature in spacetime
So my question is, why is there this other thing creating curvature, called "mass"? Why don't we just say that mass is just another name for the curvature itself?
My thoughts along these lines (once again, as a layman) are this: When I think of mass, I think of something I can push up against and find that it is hard. But all that really means is that there is a force pushing me back (not gravity, presumably the repulsive forces of same-charge particles). I can't really touch anything - I can get very close to its "center of mass" but the closer I get, the harder it pushes me away. So it's all just forces, centered around a singlar point in space; there is no "mass". There's nothing to touch, and nothing to be touched.
So my question is, why is mass considered to be something separate from the curvature of spacetime, which creates that curvature, and not just the curvature itself?
Im somewhat comfused with the findings. They say that this device can reduce the effect of gravity acting upon an object (decrease the weight), but then later in the article, they mention "The Podkletnov effect suggests it may be possible to effectively reduce the mass of the ship..." ....so what is the actual effect?
If it looses weight... it could simply be a shield from gravity... and it would not effect mass at all... but how exactly could this change the mass of an object?
Unlike the majority of other commentors in this theread, I'm unconcerned with the validity of the research. I find something else interesting. Suppose that a gravity _shield_ of some form really could be made. Suppose, for example, that whatever field or particle effect that exists between two entities could be fully or partly interrupted. If that could be made to happen, what would the effects be on the two intervening masses assuming that all of the rest of our assumptions about the laws of physics would hold? In other words, what would be the _projected effect_ of a real gravitational shield?
There are, in my mind, many different questions:
1. Over what range would the shield have an effect?
2. Could the shield shield itself?
3. Is it bidirectional?
4. If particles in the umbra of the shield are no longer fully subject to gravitation, how would the effect of other forces be expected to perturb the particles?
4a. For example, how would ordinary air in the umbra of the shadow be expected to behave?
5. If an object in the umbra of the field was subject to reduced or near zero gravitational force, how would such an object be expected to behave in regards to angular momentum forces in effect on a rotating planetary body?
And so on.
It seems to me on superficial consideration that a "gravitational shield" would likely cause extraordinary and obvious side effects in even the most simple of circumstances. Living as we do in a heavy gravity zone, we take all of the effects of gravity for granted. An area of even limited exemption to gravity would likely have highly perturbing results in its domain of influence.
Anyone want to play this game?
C//
Bob Park is one of the worst things to ever happen to science. Read this.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Does anyone remember anything like this? I think the hill was in the South US, like Georgia or something, and it had a paved road going over it.
I have often wondered where this hill was and if it was real ( or did they drive a car up it slowly and replace the soundtrack? Bastards.)
Anyone remember?
I dread having to go home and listen to Matt Lauer, Stone Philips, Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings and the rest run a story about this. I dread all of the dumb comments I'm going to hear tonight. Becaues you know EVERY station will pick this up and burn 5 minutes .
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
No, $100 million is a lot to spend on space.com and $20 million is too much for a domain name - you can't seriously think that $2.6m is *too* much on a nasa long-shot that *could* change our world view.
I say spend as much as you want.
I bet your "many more real projects" include such groundbreaking work like "measuring the distance between the earth and the moon down to millimetre accuracy" or "documenting the amazing variety of grass", or probably more accurately "something cool so I can run off and patent it".
Get some perspective, and maybe some *daylight*.
Actually going down a lift you get more weight. You feel like you weigh less because you are falling. But you are getting closer to the Earth's surface and so the gravity is increasing slightly, so there is more force on you, hence your weight is larger. But then you could always go up in a lift and your weight would reduce - so you're still correct that you can lose weight easily, but not change mass easily.
But also I'd like to point out that the whole point of the article is that this person is claiming that he can reduce the effect of gravity - hence reduce the weight - the mass of the object would remain constant. But unlike moving up in a lift, the object would remain in the same place, and if it were not for the 'gravitational sheilding' the gravity at the point of the object wouldn't have changed.
At last! Now I can finally eat my peanut butter sandwiches and stick this damn thing to my cat's back.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
(* I think an anti-gravity machine might have a more profound impact on society than producing better spare parts. *)
Like gently flying over traffic jams.
Or getting to Mars without a jillion tons of chemical boom boom juice under your butt.
Table-ized A.I.
\ / \ / /
/|\ /|\
\ / \
V V
| |
o---|----o o---|----o
O O
"And they said it wouldn't work! Um, Bob, I can't
reach the 'off' switch."
Table-ized A.I.
I think I remember a serious discussion between two scientists, one who thinks that gravity reduces past the point of average landlass (weightless center), and one who thinks it increases toward the center. Or have I completely imagined that ? I could dig up the names of those guys if needed.
lonedfx.
But this sounds an awful lot like how a hard drive operates. The heads of a hard drive "float" above the platter from a cushion of air, not from antigravity. Maybe this guy is floating on a cushion of air too.
The fundamental question raised by the experiment is whether the equation does cover it all (I simplify from the tensors that describe General Relativity, the point is the same).
Also, the poster with the perpetual motion machine made a good point, but I suspect that the answer would be that the plate slows down even in the absence of friction, meaning that energy is needed to drive the plate, therefore no net gain is possible. On the other hand, the region that the plate shields must be quite small indeed, since it is a mathematical convenience to act as if gravity is a linear field radiating from the "center of the earth". It is, in fact, the sum of lots of little attractions that conveniently acts as if the mass of the earth were concentrated at the center, but this is a good approximation only when you get far enough away from the earth. That's why the gravity models used to manage LEO (low earth orbit) satellites have to account for higher order effects (beyond simple r*r stuff).
First I've heard about this claimed descrepency. It certain isn't in Carroll and Ostile, or any of my other astrophysics texts I have on my shelf. (Including Thorne's and Clifford Wills's books, the latter about tests of GR). All texts claim that GR agrees with the measured precession to a high accuracy. That GR would match this measurment that accurately when it was the higher moments of the Sun causing the orbital precessionis highly unlikely.
For that matter, so do the gravity wave based energy losses in pulsar PSR 1933+16, which netted Taylor and Hulse the Nobel prize in physics. The measurements of the pulsar continue to track the prediction very precisely (I've seen the yet-unpublished data: it's bang-on). These measurements actually go so far as to make GR the most precisely tested theory in physics, to something like one part in ten to the eleventh.
Strangely enough, each one of the situations you describe has different aspects, but they all generate the same thing (of course, this is Einstein's equivalence principle, but, you know).
Generating gravity via spacetime distortion: (the way mass does it) Other than the initial build-up cost of energy, this is the best way to do it, as it requires no maintenance and has no unexpected behavior.
Generating gravity via acceleration: This requires a constant energy drain, so after a while, you would've been better off setting up the gravity well yourself (a very LONG while, but anyway).
Generating gravity via rotation: Not good. There're many NASA papers out there which describe why spinning a ship is not the ideal way (or even a MODERATELY good way) of generating gravity - in fact, it sucks. Sucks a lot. Ship has to be huge in order to be useful, or the disorientation factor will cause problems worse than the problems with weightlessness! In addition, you're not QUITE right about not needing to maintain a spin - just close. Any ship which spins itself up to generate gravity is going to need to continually add energy to sustain the spin simply from energy drains from magnetic fields generating eddy currents, etc. Actually, any spinning metallic object will generate eddy currents from galactic/intergalactic/intrasolar magnetic fields, as small as they are. Those eddy currents will slow down the rotation by generating magnetic fields of their own to push against the magnetostatic field. Slow, yes, but there is going to be a slowdown effect.
Bottom line, though: gravity takes power, and lots of it. Science fiction loves to say "bah, humbug, just spin the thing" but spinning something to generate gravity is so ridiculously not good (coriolis effect, high pseudogravity gradient) that I don't think any civilization would really consider it.
I think I remember a serious discussion between two scientists, one who thinks that gravity reduces past the point of average landlass (weightless center), and one who thinks it increases toward the center. Or have I completely imagined that ?
No, that's interesting. Obviously gravitational attraction decreases exponentially with distance, but how about when you're moving into the earth? It's tricky because you can't conveniently model the earth as a point as you would in space.
I think the solution is that you call up the old image of the earth as a ball sitting in a depression on the fabric of space-time. If you trace the curve going into the depression, it's S-shaped....you go slow, then fast, then slow again. That's probably why these two dudes were able to argue about it - they were both assuming a linear solution.