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Boeing Joins In Anti-Gravity Search
SimcoFrappe writes: "BBC News reports that Boeing is trying to extend the research of Russian scientist Dr. Yevgeny Podkletnov to develop a device to shield against gravity. The military branch of the British BAe Systems announced a similar program in 2000. One step closer to cheap space travel or just more sci-fi jive?"
The real problem with "research" like this is that it brings out the very worst in the peer review system which usually serves scientists so well. As soon as a journal dares to publish something so dubious, there is a huge backlash by the establishment, to the extent that real, innovative research can be stifled.
The best-known example of this phenomenon was the cold-fusion debacle of the late '80s. A group of researchers claimed (essentially) to have initiated nuclear fusion in a beaker using heavy water and palladium electrodes. No-one else was able to reproduce the experimental results. The result, however, was not just to discredit the report's authors, but to cause a scepticism so immense that no electro-chemist could publish a paper which mentioned a similar experiment. I can see the same happening to unsuspecting scientists working on superconductors now.
I would link to an interesting editorial in this month's NewScientist, which describes the phenomenon in considerable detail, but it would appear that they only put it in the print version. Shame, that.
These sigs are more interesting tha
What about artificial (sp?) gravity? Anti Gravity is usefull to get stuff into orbit and to help disabled people not to mention commercial use in general.
But what about artificial gravity? Once we get into space zero-gravity is a problem. Do you just rotate it to the left instead of right or vice-versa?
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The Moller Flying Car.
They call it "Pascal's Gamble" in one of the articles. It is a breakthrough technology; revolutionary. Revolutions require faith and gambles.
However, if his approach is correct, other guys should have already validated his claim. The experiment is so simple, only superconducting ceramic + strong magnet... Two percent in weight change is quite detecatable. Any university's physics dept can do that. If his experiment *still* works, it is his responisble for him to demostrate that to the commnunity. If it was due to experimental error, he should post a correction to say physics review letter. He has done neither; just after money.... As someone who is sort of belong to the science community, I suggest we should start questioning this guy's integrity.
People used to say that "extraordinary claim needs extraordinary proof". But, if you want to siphon money from the military-industry complex "extraordinary dubious claim makes you money".
Any research conducted in order to obtain a better understanding of gravity is a good thing IMO. This is an extremely large company with plenty of essets. If this project fails, it's nothing much off their backs. They may not find anything that gives them 0G, but some important discoveries may be made in the process.
- A real programmer uses $ cat > a.out
However, it may be that they did something wrong- perhaps some detail was performed incorrectly, or something. It does happen sometimes. As a similar, but not exact example, I once heard about a chemistry experiment that was reproducible, but only when you used unreactive plastic antibumping granules in the mix. The granules should not have interacted at all with experiment. It turns out that the way that the granules moved stirred up the mixture in a particular way, triggering the reaction. If that detail hadn't been realised by the original experimenter; then the experiment would have been nigh on impossible to replicate.
Still, many things bother me here- the effect that is claimed is small, only 2%; it turns out that weight reductions are often difficult to measure (a lot of machines produce vibrations that make most balances read either high or low- and you can get air currents, thermal effects, magnetic forces, electrostatic forces- all of which are nothing to do with gravity, all of which make weight readings high or low.) And the fact that so many labs cannot reproduce this- that is not a good thing.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"You had excellent comments. I'll just add a few notes.
... of approximately 1G ...
The only thing we've ever discovered that's capable of warping spacetime is "mass".
IANAP, but I've heard that, according to some current theories, it's actually energy that curves the space. Matter just happens to have a lots of it. I would think this would have radical cosmological implications as the mass (with respect to gravity) of the universe would be a constant. Or maybe it's just an urban legend.
Let's say I create a black hole with a similar mass to that of the Earth (I have a fairly well-equipped basement). In the vicinity of the black hole, I would feel a force towards the hole
Not quite, because the force is inverse square of distance. If the mass of the black hole is 1 earth, you'd have 1G at the distance of earth's radius, i.e., about 6300km. At one meter... have fuuunnnnnnnnn......!
There's not going to be a heck of a lot I can do about the fact that my black hole is going to shoot down towards the earth under a combined force of 2G
To be precise, the earth would pull the black hole towards it with 1G and the black hole would pull earth with 1G (on average). It would therefore accelerate just as much towards the earth as earth would accelerate towards it, if we look from somewhere else, say from Sun.
Even if it is possible, it's highly doubtful that we will stumble across the solution by random experimentation with e.g. spinning disks.
Assuming that it was random. I think I saw an argument a few years back that Einstein had mentioned about such a possibility.
It sounds more like gravity nullification. Antigravity would be a repulsive force.