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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
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.
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!
On a note related to your cat-sandiwch complex: As kids, we wanted to see what would happen if you placed a slinky on an escalator. We reckoned that the slinky would fall forever, if it fell in synch with the escalator. One day we tried it out. We went to the mall, slinky in hand, and we dropped the slinky on the escalator and retreated to watch from the floor above. Our slinky stopped working a few seconds later and before we could reach it, got caught in the top of the escalator.
"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'
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?
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.
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.
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I sig, therefore I was.
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.
Evgeny Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese have posted one of their papers on the arXiv: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0108005
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.
Just an observation.
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
So can a bow-flex! Heh =)
"Derp de derp."
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//