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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.
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
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.
Would your lunch be 2% of your weight?
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.
My impression was that the object that is to lose weight does not spin, only the superconductive, levitated disk spins.
I've also got a stupid joke:
Future hard drive technology may allow super-lightweight Linux distributions.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
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!
"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)
will finally get their flying car, perhaps from the german scientist? http://www.viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html
internet like monkeys'
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'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.
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
"less gravity is good for fat people"
I had the same reaction to this comment that I did when an 80 year old man was found dead on an airplane the other day. There was some debate as to whether or not he died before he got on the plane, or after.
One of the officials said "I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have allowed a dead man to board a plane." (true story)
In any case, lower gravity would help obese people move around more, but in the long term it wouldn't be such a good idea. The problem is that it'd make their condition worse as they'd be burning less energy trying to walk.
I realize you were probably just being silly, but it got me thinking. Lets say one day we had gravity reduction devices in our home to make us more comfy. Would that lead to a weaker speices down the road? Some would see the mass production of cars to have had a similar effect on our species.
The thought of gravity reduction devices scares me a little, although their applicates would definitely change the world we live in.
"Derp de derp."
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!"
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.
I think the article was suggesting that the object placed on the spinning disk was above it, and therefore stationary. And that would make more sense, I think...
Evgeny Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese have posted one of their papers on the arXiv: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0108005
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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
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.
True....but, nuclear fuel is a lot more efficient for its weight than a rocket engine. A system based on this would use electricity probably from a onboard nuclear (maybe fusion someday) plant....drasticly more efficient if it can work.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Slashdot just had an article on those 2 days ago. They work. They rely on differences in electromagnetic fields. NASA has a patent on it. Lots of info on how it works. Check it out.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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 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.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
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).
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.
What's wrong with centerfugial force?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
Well, astronaughts in space have to maintain a vigorous excersice program to keep fit. So yes, if we managed to lower gravity in homes, we would be unfit if we tried to come back to normal gravity.
But if the entire continent/earth whatever had this same gravity reduction, then youre fit in the same sense you are today.
This
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
In a nutshell, this is the theory behind this:
If photons are absorbed by matter to cast a shadow proportional to the absorption rate, then gravity must as well under the right circumstances. Problem is: matter generates gravity, hence a fancy way to mask gravitons (which by the way have never been detected) is needed to cast a weight reducing shadow.
If their claims are correct, the weight of an object will be reduced, but the mass itself will remain unchanged since that is a property of the object itself.
They beleive the cooper pairs in the superconductor are somehow responsible for this absorption, though I have a hard time believing this is true since amorphous superconductors have been spun up and exposed to large RF pumping with no effect.
My idea is it is more likely an effect brought about by the alternating conductive and insulating layers of the composit superconductor that might produce the effect, creating a pseudo cassimer barrier with a negative net energy ballance which could attenuate gravitational flux.
By the way: any attempt to measure the mass will not find any mass reduction, though the weight will decrease due to the gravitational shadow being cast by the device. I imagine that the 2% reduction is optimistic at best, since the umbra and penumbra of any gravitaional shadow would be rather acute, due to an inability to mask the gravitation coming from mass off-center to the device.
Then again it could be another cold fusion episode, though NASA lends it more credibility, though Pod could held and give them the real scoop.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
Or...
4. Gravitational mass is no longer tied to inertial mass.
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.
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.
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!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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."
One consequence of that would be an evolution towards truly spherical people.
Maybe, too, we'd start to develop tentacle like tethering arms.
Also, perhaps, without the usual gravitational based means for propulsion (legs, walking) we'd develop more general means, such as high powered flatulence.
Ah, but this is /., so you're probably way ahead of me on this one...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
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.
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.
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
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
In perfect freefall, you would weigh zero (you would still have mass, but no weight, at least not weight due to gravity of the planet). Yes, you would have a weight caused by the gravity being generated by the ship you are in, but if the ship if pretty uniform, that gravity would cancel itself out.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
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//
its a difference within the foil, the top edge is rounded over the support, the bottom is sharp
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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 .
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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.
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.