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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
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.