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Can Superconductors Block Gravitational Fields?
jswitte writes "Raymond Chiao, of the University of California at Berkel, believes that superconductors can convert electromagnetic radiation into gravitational radiation. His full paper can be found here. His theory is based on the idea that superconductors might be able to block the so-called 'gravitomagnetic' field just as they block the electomagnetic field in the famous Meissner effect allowing superconductors to levitate in magnetic fields. He claims that when he 'adds the gravitomagnetic field to the standard quantum equations for superconductivity, he confirms not only the gravitational Meissner-like effect but also a coupling between the two breeds of magnetic field. An ordinary magnetic field sets electrons in motion near the surface of a superconductor. Those electrons carry mass, and so their motion generates a gravitomagnetic field.'"
If it doesn't happen then that's also fine, it means that a hypothesis was shown to be not an accurate model of how the universe works.
The method described is science in action, the way it is supposed to work.
Of course if this does work then they are going to have some surprises when they enable those underground superconductive power cables in, IIRC, downtown Chicago. (Detroit? Somebody help me out here, please?)
-C
All he is exccluding are gravity-waves. These are different then the basic curvature of space that generates gravity itself. Basically they are little ripples that float on top of the curvature. So blocking them won't levitate us.
Isn't this just a new take on the Podkletnov effect?
Firstly, Fuel cells ARE 8th grade chem, they are just 2H + O = H2O. Secondly, astrophysicists have been theorizing antigravitation as a solution to the "dark matter" problem for quite sometime. Don't get me wrong, I am all for a healthy dose of cynicism, but in order to progress we need to take an open mind. This is not that far out of the realm of possibility. Point to the error in the theory if you feel this person is wrong. Then your point will stand on it's own.
Note that the Scientific American article is very cautious: they state the implications if it's true. While, if true, this is a breakthrough on the level of relativity or quantum mechanics, one should take this with a large grain of salt. Plenty of other "revolutionary" theories haven't managed to pan out.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
No doubt that the symmetry between Maxwell's equations and Einstein's equations is stark, but does this also mean that they are equivalent in meaning and applicability?
If superstring theory is correct, then they've been known to be equivalent since the 1920s. The Kaluza-Klein equations show that in a 5-dimensional space-time (4xspace + 1xtime) or higher, Einstein's equations and Maxwell's equations both come out. See Kaku's Hyperspace for more info.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Nobel prize material if it works. Footnote in Physical Review Letters if it doesn't.
Time to start getting my skills up so I can enter the F-Zero or Wipeout leagues. This innovation will bring about nothing but high speed, heavily armed hover craft racing.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Bread!
Apples!
Very small rocks
Cider
Mud
Churches!
Lead Lead!
A Duck!
I had a friend who was working on this for a while. He kept building larger and larger metal units, cooling them down more and more, trying to get a rotating disk to speed up in a very, very, strong (par. magnetic field). If it sped up, then this was a reduction in the moment of inertia, and a decreased effective mass.
After two years of working on it, he gave up. He did get a measurable increase, but it was too little to be more than measurement error.
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Chiao has published the paper describing the theory, complete with mathematical arguments that "seem to be correct." Now, he's moving on to perform the experiments that will either verify or refute the theory. This is the way it's done! Black Holes were nothing more than a theory with mathematical arguments that "seem(ed) to be correct", until CHANDRA started supplying experimental evidence. General Relativity was a theory with mathermatical aruments that "seem(ed) to be correct", until we managed to observe light bending around the mass of the sun. There's nothing wrong with publishing a theory that has yet to be proven; many theoretical physiscists never participate in experimentation. They publish theories.
Ordinary gravitational attraction is dominated by "gravito-electric" force, or in normal language the force generated by stationary masses. In everyday concerns the Earth is the only mass that matters and it is stationary to a good approximation for nearly everything humans do.
The paper talks solely in terms of affecting "gravito-magnetic" forces, which are those exhibited by moving masses (and generally only significant among masses moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light). Simply put there just isn't enough gravito-magnetic force in every day life to notice any change. If there were an appreciable gravito-magnetic force in ordinary everyday gravity then yes you could test it, though I'm not clear how to expect it to react.
To put things another way, Newton described gravity purely in gravito-electric terms and most of us will never notice the more complex gravitiational interactions that Einstein discovered and this physicist cares about.
Thus, the superconductor is not affecting the gravitational field. It is in a sense becoming a magnet itself, producing an exact-opposite magnetic field. This new field simply repels the magnet, producing levitation. By far the coolest effect was spinning/flipping the magnet over the superconductor and having it remain levitated, as the superconductor's magnetic field was always a mirror of the magnet's.
Now, in this I am not talking about the article or paper (I just started reading it). I'm simply talking about the magnetic field that is induced in a superconductor by magnets. My only experience and knowledge of the subject was the experiment in high school.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Maybe they'll go back and rename the school correctly. Berkel. It is to laugh!
;-)
;-) But my scientific intuition is not satisfied by the embarrassing worldwide failure to integrate General Relativity with the Standard Model of Quantum Theory. It's an intellectual debacle that the so-called "best minds" of science haven't been able to work this out for going on a century here. It's also a shame that kids aren't going into science. Can we rehabilitate the Red Menace to get our politicians and educators back in gear here? That worked real well in the 50s and 60s, but raghead terrorists won't cut it.
Surely. Isn't it properly spelled "Berzerkely?"
As for the theory, it doesn't seem plausible, but physics is full of implausible concepts that work out in real life.
True enough. Yet the more implausible they seem, the more I suspect them of being over-convoluted theories that just _happen_ to match the results. Some things that seem implausible from a macro (visible, Newtonian) point of view are believable, but a lot of the quantum-level theories are just guesswork, as far as I'm concerned. Physicists must publish _something_ to keep their jobs, and that's what I think drives too much of the recent scientific theorizing. Publish something! That's their bread and butter. And they can write up for grants to pursue Big Physics research... and jobs. For example, fusion research is all simply a massive boondoggle.
Since gravity is a manifestation of a warpage of space-time, does this also mean that he is claiming superconductors are equivalent to gravity wells?
Another interpretation is that the space-time warp of gravity is a big illusion... that gravity isn't about mass but about energy (and mass and energy are related, thus the illusion). Thus the photons which have no mass _do_ have its analog... energy, and thats what gravity acts upon to bend the path. There _must_ be a consistent explanation for both macro and quantum level interactions, and until we find it, we'll not be intellectually fit to travel into the cosmos. We've got time (depending on when the next major comet intersects Earth's orbit at the wrong moment), but we do really need to figure everything out before our time runs out for us here.
No doubt that the symmetry between Maxwell's equations and Einstein's equations is stark, but does this also mean that they are equivalent in meaning and applicability?
My intuition tells me that such mathematical symmetries are trying to tell us something, but we just haven't figured it all out well enough - yet. We need free thinkers in the physical sciences, but... the entire structure of academia is built to enforce conformity. Some few people survive it and think "outside the box" as it were (Feynmann comes to mind), but the majority are just buried in conformity. The best thing the politicians could do to advance science would be to grant all science graduate students Associate level pay with no obligations to serve their tenured colleagues, but maintaining their freedom to consult and even collaborate with them whenever they find it helpful. This would accelerate big science in a way that would make the last decades seem a backwater.
Though the article puts a dig into superstring theory at the end, isn't it exactly this type of theory that is needed to unify such disparate theories as gravity and electromagnetism? If there is a symmetry there, wouldn't it make sense that the two equations would derive from a common principle?
Yes. Superstring theories (there are several that are trying to agree, convolutedly) are all so very complex that they're ultimately not very credible. Sorry! (To a generation of theoretical physicists.) The Universe _must_ have some simple rules (Einstein would agree with this, I am sure), but you haven't figured them out, so far. Complex systems are the products of insufficient mentality in both science and large-scale software systems. The bottom line for me is that I'm not convinced that they're not just playing with irrelevant and really fantastic math that will never work right. When they go outside five dimensions (3 space, 1 time, 1 energy), I lose interest. Or maybe six (vector/spin). But you maybe will get my drift... ten, twelve, fourteen dimensions? Give it up already!
My elementary physics is no match for the mathematics in the paper.
Mine too.
Just because a theory sounds nice and fits well with other known theories (electro magnetism) does not mean it is true.
There is plenty of moving mass in the universe. Has anyone measured a gravitomagnetic effect?
i havent heard of it.
Personally, I think both are crackpots. But if crackpots publish scientific papers, they still should follow the rules of academic conduct, because the rules of academic conduct ultimately are what helps us sort out the real crackpots from the forward thinkers.
Dr. Podkletnov was discounted as a hoax by many sources (cited that rising gases from the coolant, air flow from spinning or magnetism influenced his results), his university ejected him and now he has retreated to a hermetic existence.
Here is a story on Wired for your reading pleasure.
Much more to look if you search Google.
pronoblem
I've just finished my own version of the experiment.
I took a tin pie tray and stuck it in the freezer for a couple of hours.
Then I rummaged through the attic and found that old turntable that used to scratch all my Barry Manilow LPs back in the '70s.
After running an extension lead from the socket on the kitchen bench over to the freezer, I stuck the plate on the turntable, set it to 78RPMs and let her rip.
The inital results were somewhat disappointing. Several spiders and a rodent that was either a very large mouse or a small rat ran out the back of the turntable and disappeared into a bag of frozen mince -- but the pie tray didn't lift up an inch.
Not to be discouraged, I figured that perhaps the reduced gravitational field only appeared above the pie tray -- so I grabbed the cat (which just happened to be passing by at the time) and pressed its warm little bottom onto the frozen pie tray.
I guess it was a little cold for him because he didn't half get excited -- or maybe I should have taken that spindle out of the center of the turntable first -- oh well.
Anyway, after a bit of hissing, growling and some bleeding (my blood not his), the cat eventually settled down enough for me to release him.
He sat their with a glazed look in his eyes and once again I flicked the switch to 78 RPMs.
Horray -- Success!
The cat lept several feet into the air, schrieking, hissing, wailing and spinning wildly at what I figured was probably 78RPMs.
But alas, the effect was short lived.
No sooner had this levitated feline lifted into the air than he crashed back down onto the rotating pie tray.
Ah, what the hell -- I slammed down the freezer lid and sat down in front of the TV with a beer.
I'll go back later and see whether he's settled down. Maybe tomorrow.
Anyway -- it looks as if there is some effect there but measuring it requires the use of protective garments and probably a more cooperative cat.
Now there's some guy called Schrodinger at the door asking whether the cat in my freezer is dead but telling me not to open the lid.
What the hell's going on there I wonder?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Perhaps that's a bit too harsh, but Scientific American has come down in the world quite a bit since the late eighties or early nineties. As I recall, they got a new editor many years ago and he was hell bent on dumbing the magazine down, fluffing it up with low-attention-theshold filler, and generally reducing it to a level of depth, insight, and relevance typical of USA Today or Omni Magazine. He suceeded, and many of the science professionals I knew cancelled their subscriptions shortly thereafter.
This subject strikes me as the researcher noting to himself "oh, hey...if I make some interesting assumptions, I get this cool effect popping out. And I might as well test it since it's so easy to test." Or an April Fools joke*. Which falls short of us dismissing the idea out of hand, but does suggest it doesn't deserve much media coverage -- at least until any positive results are verified. In other words, it was just sensationalist enough to get Scientific American's attention (they dig this kind of stuff), but not so far to the side of quackery that it has (yet) been featured in the Fortean Times.
* By the way, the paper missed April Fools day by four days; the date is stamped April 5, 2002. There's also a second date stamp of April 11, 2002. (A slightly earlier date stamp would have cleared things up pretty quickly!)
Yes, academic credentialism is driven by publishing. So? How does that translate into your assumption that all the 'recent theorizing' is bunk? Publishing is hard work. You don't just make up crap and watch is magically traverse the gauntlet of peer review.
Oh, right, because there's no such thing as fusion. That's why we know it's a boondoggle. Oh wait. It seems fusion is actually a common physical process! Maybe we should look into it. If, you know, that's all right with you. Work up the math, develop a consistent theory with provable axioms, then we'll talk. This isn't consultancy, s390, this is science. Golf, blowjobs, and 'intuition' won't cut it. Oh, and physics on LSD went out 20 years ago.Have you actually *read* the General Theory of Relativity? Go get Wheeler's "Gravitation". It deals with your confused theory, and much more besides, all coherently.
There are things to be said in favor of conformity. Science was created in a time of mystics and frauds. Actually having to prove what you claim was a big jump, and conformity is a natural side-effect of that. On the other hand, there is too much conformity in the university environment these days, but for that the blame can be laid at the doors of the administration. Nationwide, administration staff has doubled relative to student&faculty populations. All the bone-headed management theories that the private sector spent the last decade or two working through have trickled into the Uni, and all the 'free thinkers' fear for their jobs. Tenure, the great bulwark of high-performance original thinkers, is on the way out. Work through the math, get back to us. Perhaps if your 'scientific intuition' was better grounded in, say, math and science, then you wouldn't troll with this garbage. Oh, we broke the Standard Model 3 years ago. Better update your notes.What is that saying... copy one person and it's called plagarism.. copy 30 and it's called research.
This new learning amazes me... explain again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes...
rofl
I'll not pretend to grok the paper entirely, but a casual read remids me of a classic Far Side cartoon where a bunch of scientists are standing around a chalkboard. On the board is one of the scientist's Grand Unifid Theory. Smack dab in the middle of the equation is the phrase "And then a miracle happens".
This paper reads the same way... "When A is time-independent, this equation has the same form as the time independent Schrodinger equation for a particle (i.e., a Cooper pair) with mass m2eff and a charge e2 with an energy eigenvalue except that there is an extra nonlinear term whose coefcient is given by the coefcient x, which arises at a microscopic level from the Coulomb interactions between Cooper pairs [16]. The values of these two phenomenological parameters must be determined by experiment."
But then again, what do I know?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power