Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I was promised flying cars.
A variant on this story comes up every year or so, but there is never any evidence substantiating Dr. Podkletnov's claims...
First NASA, now Boeing. Rubbish, I'm inclined to believe.
:wq
It's a conspiracy against "overweight" people. If we're shielded from gravity, we'll all simply be known as fat.
So Boeing spends a few million, finds the guys research is bunk and discards the project? No problem, they're a multi-billion dollar company.
But... if on the off chance that it really works and could be used in commercial projects and could bring billions (trillions?) in sales and licensing royalties...
Seems like a worthwhile risk to me.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Please keep this number in mind. This is not a guy that tries to make SF happen. Zero-G would have a huge impact on the future of humanity.
Does -2% G too?
Johan.
But I must be off now. I've got a YBa_2Cu_3O_{7-x} widget factory to get off the ground. :B
I'm sure alot of you will first respond by saying thats impossible. But you're wrong. There are no laws of physics that say its is impossible to block gravity. At this point we no so litle about gravity that it is difficult to make any conclusions about it.
Some elementary electromagnetism courses will teach you about faraday cages, which block electromagnetic radiation. Pretty much everyone has experienced this. Ever walk into a concrete building and lose cell phone reception? This is because the concrete is reinforced with steel bars which form a kind of metalic cage around you, this is a faraday cage.
Now like electromagnetism, gravity is one of the four fundamental forces. If we can create a shield to block one of them why not block gravity?
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
You're not fat, you're big boned.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
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
The Podkletnov Effect
Search engine Google relates this guy to the alternative science section...
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?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
And for the current knowledge space, Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies" may well show how silly we've been to date with respect to anti-gravity research.
Generally speaking, though, research into whether something might yet be possible is not a bad thing if the potential positive payoffs are large to huge.
At one point we believed we couldn't fly.
At one point we believed we couldn't set foot on the moon.
Even further back than that, look at how many tries it took to get just the right combination of metals in the right proportions for a working element in a light bulb.
Admittedly, a lot of this research will end up at dead ends - such is the nature of research, but it is still valuable, since it lets us know what options don't work and thus eliminates unknowns. We learn.
Yes, there will also be a percentage of research that is poorly planned, poorly executed, or is simply snake oil designed to rake in budged dollars. The solution is to ensure processes are in place to critically analyze and audit the scientific process itself, any experiments, and results. This is a good idea anyway to ensure that all methods and procedures are within the parameters of the law where the research is being carried out.
My alma mater has a monument to this forthcoming breakthrough, placed by Roger W Babson (of Babson College). It's called the Gravity Stone and it's "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents" Kinda kooky stuff, check the link.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
There is also this Slashdot story.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
erconductors today are like electricity was in the 1800s. Back then, we understood little about how magnatism and electricity worked. It had a mystique about it that led to gypsies and sayonces (sp?) trying to contact the dead. Commonly, they used this new 'electricity' to contact lost relatives, loved onces, ect. Of course, they were debunked.
Superconductivity is today's mystery phenomenon. We see things float in air, we see electricity move sans resistance, and other principal physics phenomena simply discarded. It's something new, and not as well known. With this mystique, people can claim to have done wonderous things, and have at least a portion of the general population go along with it. Or invest in it.
Also, have you seen the Russian economy? How the brilliant scientists are treated? There's no money for them, they live in near poverty. I don't blame a Russian scientist if he tries to make money this way, legitimate or not. Personally, i find it much preferrable than him selling old USSR equipment (uranium, nukes, hot material, ect) to the highest bidder, in order to feed his family. If you don't think so, that's your problem.
He pointed to the fact that an Irish university (sorry - don't remember which) had spent quite some time reproducing the experiment, and that this re-running of the experiment had failed to verify a single claim.
I'd love this to be true. Sadly however, at this moment I'd have to put myself in the non-believer camp.
Cheers,
Ian
It's often said that IBM poured money into Josephson's work even though they didn't have any expectation of it succeeding because it would force their competitors to spend money on it - which they couldn't afford as well as IBM. Maybe Boeing are trying the same thing.
Or maybe BAe are trying it, and have succeeded with Boeing...
I wouldn't be surprised if the block-and-tackle industry buys the patents and kills the technology.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Wouldn't an easier way to get a 2% reduction in weight be to remove it from the passengers. Set a weight limit for plane passengers and weight everyone at check-in. Anyone over the limit gets immediate liposuction.
Never have to sit next to a fat person on a plane again.
HH
--
They call it "Pascal's Gamble" in one of the articles. It is a breakthrough technology; revolutionary. Revolutions require faith and gambles.
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
Since we all know that
1. Cats always land on their feet, and
2. A buttered slice of bread will undoubtedly land on the carpet butter side down,
we could strap said buttered slice of bread onto the cats back, then drop the whole thing to the floor.
Will work for bandwidth
I always thought that two objects with mass always have gravitational attraction. I also thought that two objects can never get far enough appart to have their gravatational attraction go to zero.
F = G * m1 * m2 / d^2
This equation shows that the gravitational attraction can never go to zero.
That said, does anyone have any idea how this guy got two objects with mass to not have any gravitational attraction? It seems impossible.
-ted
Hmm, although I agree it's difficult to say that shielding against gravity is impossible, the above is not exactly sound logic. You need to look at the origin of the forces in question to see why.
The general relativistic model of gravity as the effect of warped spacetime would seem to indicate that blocking gravity could be a fundamentally different problem than blocking electromagnetic radiation.
Electromagnetic radiation travels through spacetime, i.e. it follows the curvature of spacetime. Blocking it is simply a matter of constructing the right kind of interfering device, such as a faraday cage, to prevent electromagnetic photons/wave packets from penetrating.
OTOH, according to GR, gravity as we perceive it is essentially a secondary effect due to the curvature of spacetime. To "block" it, you would have to be able to uncurve spacetime in the vicinity you wish to block. This is a little different from blocking photons. The only thing we've ever discovered that's capable of warping spacetime is "mass". So sure, we can counter the effects of gravity, there's no mystery about it: simply use a mass as large as the mass of the object whose gravitational effects you want to counter.
Unfortunately, in the case of gravity, this doesn't really work the way we want. 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 (please no goatse jokes) of approximately 1G (adjust masses to achieve appropriate effect outside the Schwarzchild radius, etc.) So if I hang the black hole from my ceiling, I could create a micro-gravity environment in my basement, with the force upward cancelling the force downward.
Astute readers have by now noticed a slight problem with this scenario. Despite my well-equipped basement, I don't happen to possess a means for suspending an Earth-mass object a few feet above another Earth-mass object (i.e. the Earth itself). 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 and a momentum that would require numbers with "E" in them to describe. (I had better not be standing beneath it, if I want to avoid rather nasty tidal effects as the black hole travels through my body - that killed a guy on Mars once.)
Because of the nature of gravity, "shielding" against its effects may not even be meaningful. Even if it is possible, it's highly doubtful that we will stumble across the solution by random experimentation with e.g. spinning disks. Spinning disks might confuse researchers, but they don't confuse the universe.
I went to the Farnborough airshow at the weekend and there were some serious hardware which appeared to defeat gravity.
With the aid of a few thousand pounds of thrust, yes.
I learned this in quake:
Step 1: Lower gravity to 0
Step 2: Wait for enemies to accelerate upwards.
Step 3: Increase gravity to 255, watch enemies splatter all over the ground.
This would be the advanced ward that a Tremere can cast upon any weapon providing lethal damage to anything affected by gravity. This differs from ward vs kindred in that instead of use of blood the caster spends 45 minutes rubbing magnets all over the weapon.
The WHO is trying to extend the research of Chinese scientist Dr. Alex Chiu to develop a device to make its owner never perish. The Ch*r*h of **ientology announced a similar program in 2000. One step closer to human immortality or just more sci-fi jive?
if i had the proof id be killed the prototypes are top secret
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
One step closer to cheap space travel or just more sci-fi jive?"
Both this suggestion and a lot of comments fail to take into account one thing.
Although some device might shield against gravity, the shield itself will be affacted by gravity. So, even if there is zero gravity inside some sphere, the sphere itself vill rest firmly on earth.
Thus, no cheap space travel, but a lot of uses, none the less..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
If the effects of gravity are shielded, how about the inertial mass of the object? If local spacetime is "decurved", would this allow the object to accelerate past the speed of light, or at least decrease the dilation effect?
I can't see how you could do one without the other...while anti-gravity seems really cool, if there's an effect on inertia, this is potentially far greater, IMHO.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Why do you think they are asking Slashdot users for ideas?
There is always coral castle.......
So we have GMm/r^2 = GHm/s^2. The G and m cancel out, leaving M/r^2 = H/s^2. Using an Earth mass of 5.9736 x 10^24 kg, and a radius of 6370000m, and assuming s=1m, my calculations show that the black hole would need a mass of 1.472 x 10^11 kg (147 billion kilograms) to create a micro-gravity environment in my basement - however localized, and however briefly. That's hundredths of trillionths of the mass of the Earth - quite a lot lighter, as Rhombus guessed.
Actually,
There is a group in the scientific community that believes that gravity has a particle called a graviton. Unfortunately though, the amount of energy needed in a particle accelerator to create a graviton is immense (Aproximately 5 light-years in radius particle accelerator is needed. I believe.).
If I remember correctly an article in Scientific American (A Unified Physics by 2050?; December 1999; by Weinberg) discusses this concept in more detail.
~ kjrose
For those who are interested, Pascal's Wager actually involves something far more significant.
Got Wisdom?
Oh, come on. We all noticed this one, right? UFO With Fighter Escort Over DC! ...News at Eleven. On a side note, of course Boing and NASA are sinking money into this; Just like several well known companies sank money into the Internet via Powerlines scam. If it pans out, your looking at a real society changing event, not some auto-balacing scooter hype. If not, they'll try to sue the guy's butt, legs and arms off and walk away with their tail between their legs. Life goes on. Further, you won't see this in civilian applications anytime soon if it is the real anti-gravity McCoy. Ever see Evangelion? Notice how they were always (until the later eps) attatched to a giant extention cord? I suspect your power-hungery anti-gravity unit is either going to be teathered to one of these or have it's own mini S2 nuclear plant. At least until we develop Mr. Fission, that is.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
After the initial press conference, there quickly came a lot of early confirmations from various respected laboratories. There were also a large number of "early drafts" of papers from teoreticians for teories that should explain the finding.
However, as far as I knew none of it made it through the review process. I guess most of it was withdrawn as more well-planed experiments failed to reproduce the results.
I suspect the real lesson is not the peer-reviewed system itself, but the problems that come when you go around it by publishing through the press, instead of waiting for the system.
A Graviton is a spinning cylinder, not a spinning disk. When you get inside, it starts to spin, and you slide across the floor and stick to the inside wall of the cylinder. Then they drop the floor and friction holds you to the wall. But it gets boring pretty quickly.
I once snuck a tennis ball inside and tried to throw it to my buddy on the far side of the cylinder, but it didn't travel in a straight line. Spooky.
Except that the wager is flawed. It's impossible to determine any course of action from the wager.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
At the very least, it will be fun to see the catastrophe of a wormhole opening much larger than it should and transporting an entire neighborhood or factory. You can bet that this would be killed by legislation because most people fear what they don't understand. Another scenario (much more short term) is that we create fixed wormhole "tunnels" in the sky for air transportation.
Hammer of Truth
How often do you hear of something being made top secret when its a failure?
Well I can give you one good example. Missile defense.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
'cause it assumes only one choice - the Catholic God or no God. When you throw in all the other religions, your chance of picking the "right" one falls off to about 0.
Actually, it wasnt a failure, it worked in a few tests, however its useless in real wars where there will be hundreds of dummy bombs launched with the real bomb
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Early theorys described gravity acting like a wind that would blow you towards the ground. It was later extended to include a wind from all directions blowing at the same time. Newtons gravity theorys were based on this concept and it was a problem that lead him to the idea of intergration. The integration of a pushing wind with the earth blocking it was much more difficult than the integration of just the earth sucking and the result was a bit of math seen in modern physics books.
The biggest problem with the gravity pushes theory was that things in space would slow down over time. Also as you speed up, you would need more energy to keep accelerating. Low orbit wouldn't be zero G, but zero differential G. Depending on how fast the gravity wind was and its strength, their would be no way to exceed its speed. The early attempts to quantify it thought there would be no way for the wind to go through the entire earth so the force you feel was considered its maxium which made it hard to explain higher gravity area like the sun and Saturn. There were a few other problems with the idea as well and it went away with the acceptance of the modern theory.
Just what we need. Fat, evil dictators floating around in their antigrav suits.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Wasn't the default gravity setting 800? :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
That Quake 1 had a hidden level called Ziggurat, which had 'moon gravity' ie, very low gravity. :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Actually, I was thinking that the wager is incomplete. The possibilities of action are only believe or don't believe, which is imcomplete.
Belief cannot be automatically assumed. Someone who tries hard to believe might actually fail to believe. And someone who tries hard not to believe might fail in that, and wind up believing anyway.
So accounting for that, we wind up with:
believe infinite gain
believe and fail infinite loss
not believe infinite loss
not believe and fail infinite gain
For either course that I could pick, the possible outcomes are either infinite gain or infinite loss. That's what I mean when I say that Pascal's wager does not offer any help in deciding the proper course to take.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
His latest paper came out last August - no more spinning superconductors, now he's playing with huge voltages on a fixed superconductor. It sounds interesting; I can't tell you if it's real or not, but maybe Boeing can figure something out. Here's a link to the more recent paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0108005
My excuse? It's morning.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
That was the movie. Which totally misunderstood the book. What can you say in favor of a movie that ends "And then the little girl fell out of bed and woke up."? I can't say anything favorable.
Movies may be more popular, but frequently their interpretation of what is important about a book is governed by production requirements. And this often causes them to get everything quite wrong.
To me, the Wizard of OZ was the most blatant example, but then it's bothered me ever since I was four. Another atrocious example was Dune, a magnificint book, and a movie that was so different it was a different story counterfeiting a semblance. And not very good.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Fall, and just miss the ground.
It's not that improbable that numerous teams would make the same mistake when attempting replication. More to the point, improbable or not, it's happened before.
... I think it was the J-particle, I don't know what the name morphed into, weighed a different amount in Europe and in the US. A reasonably substantial disagreement in weight as I remember.
And there was a period where the
And there was a chemistry reaction, I don't remember it's name, that only one professor in chemistry could do. And nobody including the professor knew why. Latest guess it that it was because he always had the habit of including glass marbles in the reaction vessel while he was stirring the solution, though that "shouldn't" have made any difference. (New theory says that when things bump into each other in solution the sometimes lend energy to the molecule combinations being created.) This is from a recent isssue of the New Scientist, where that new theory is the main focus of the arguement. Perhaps in a letter.
Etc.
Idiosyncratic research methods that "shouldn't" make any difference can cause idiosyncratic results to be quite difficult to track down.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This is already way OT, but hey...
:)
From my quick reading of the link to Pascal's gambit above, I would conclude that the 'many Gods' objection is actually more substantial than your meaning of incompleteness.
That webpage (near the end) and Pascal in his original writing both address your second choice: "believe and fail". You assume that the consequence of that is infinite loss. However, you can't actually make yourself believe. You can only cultivate belief by acting as if you believe. If by doing that, you actually end up believing, that's outcome #1. If you attempt to believe and fail, it is possible that a diety could recognize that as all you were capable of doing, and the outcome might still be infinite gain.
Under that alternate assumption, the gambit actually more strongly favors belief. At worst it essentially reduces to the original form, I think. Of course, you know what they say about the word ass-u-me.
However, I can see we're getting into Occam's Razor territory, so I'll drop it...
Christopher
Mozilla
Mass change of 2% aren't that hard to measure. When the test mass is in a rapidly rotating magnetic field that's probably strong enough to lift a railroad locomotive, it might be a little hard to sort out the weight change from incidental electromagnetic forces. I assume the test mass would be a nonmagnetic, non conductive material (a rock, for example), but there are no materials that don't have a slight interaction with magnetic fields.
Under that alternate assumption, the gambit actually more strongly favors belief. At worst it essentially reduces to the original form, I think. Of course, you know what they say about the word ass-u-me.
I once worked with a person who was formerly a Catholic monk. He knew that I didn't believe, and we had many discussions about many things including religion. His viewpoint startled me, to be honest. He said flat out that atheism didn't preculde entry to heaven, according to his understanding. My "quest for truth" as he put it would surely count for *something* in the eyes of the Catholic god.
But anyway, the way to read these things is not to add up the numbers of possibilities one each side. In other words, it's not correct to say "there's three scenarios that lead to gain, but one that lead to loss, so pick one of the scenarios that lead to gain".
The way to use this thing is to pick the path that leads to maximum gain. In all cases, a possible outcome is equal: infinite gain.
I assume you're familiar with the standard "prisoneer's dilemma". In that scenario, the outcomes all have different values - 10 years vs. 5 years vs. 3 years, and so on.
Imagine that the dilemma was posed with the outcomes all having equal values - we couldn't choose what to do.
Example:
If nobody talks, 0 years for both.
If one person talks, 0 years for the talker, 10 for the one who didn't.
If both people talk, 10 years for both.
So, we've got the following possibilities:
I don't talk: 0 years, or 10 years.
I do talk: 0 years, or 10 years.
See? That's exactly how Pascal's wager is flawed. When all courses can lead to exactly the same gain, it cannot logically be used to make a decision.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Out of (quite a lot) of Catholics I know, none of them believe that.
or I'll be disappointed.
before you plonk a few million bucks into something, you should be better prepared to defend it in front of your peers. A few thousand heads is ALWAYS better than one. (Don't give me those Einstein=genius crap : several including Hilbert were close to what he was going after, and he did not do it in seclusion).
Of course, Our eminent Russian Scientist refuse to devulge his "secrets", which by the way, if true will win a few nobel prizes. not to mention violate a few fundamental physical principles.
But, this is just nuts. Give science a really bad name.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
4. Dr Podkletnov claims weight can be reduced by 2% (1kg=980g)
I hope that the 1kg=980g was the reporters interpretation and wasn't Dr Podkletnov's doing since that isn't a change in weight, it's a change in mass. A change in weight would be 981 N = 784.8 N.
I stole this Sig
Get a life, please. Nobody should rant this long over a sig/movie.
Wake me up when they can teleport me, so that I don't have to go on those planes in the first place!
Ok. So, this is rather exciting, if it turns out to be true. It would implicate that energy is what really warps time-space, and that the high energy of mass has hidden that from us, wouldn't it? E=MC^2 could hide that it really is E that warps timespace.
On another note, the lazy among us could make sex less physically challenging, by reducing the gravity field. This could also enable new, exciting positions, although I'm a bit too gravity-bound to figure out which..
Stop the brainwash
I wonder if this could help not just my car, but my Karma fly...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
To paraphrase Q, it's not that hard, just change the gravitational constant of the universe.
Geez.
When did I ever say Catholics believe Pascal's Wager? I've got plenty of Catholic friends too who can also see the logical error in the wager.
Ah, my apologies then :)
-- SIGFPE
Lol.
I think Pascal's wager is best limited to "should I believe?" Although a more complex variant is necessary...
Either:
- There are powerful creator(s) that have expressed how they desire us to act through religion
- There are powerful creators(s), but they have not expressed their desire for us to act through religion
- There are no powerful creator(s).
Our choice is either "believe", or "not believe." Finding out the exact state of what to believe can probably be accomplished by simple consultation with the established holy-men of the day, as all weight given by this gamble to religion is only in the "instruction book" value of religon.(1) has, obviously, infinite rewards and finite costs.
(2) has finite rewards and finite costs.
(3) has finite rewards and highly variable costs.
(If the powers-that-be wanted us to follow a set pattern, we can assume that they would communicate this to us.)
The costs of (1) and (2) are nothing more than the burdens of following a religion--which are much less today than they were in Pascal's day. They also have a guaranteed finite rewards, in the personal social and societal social benefits that religion grants.
(3) is a tricky one. Its rewards are nothing more than freedom from the costs of (1) and (2), while its costs range from simple loss of the finite benefits of (1) and (2) to possible loss of infinite reward and / or infinite punnishment.
The hole in this argument, of course, is the values of the cost of (1) and (2), waged against their finite benefits.
After all, it doesn't reverse or completely negate gravity per se, and there is no evidence that it negates gravity other than that within immediate influence of the superconductors involved... Shouldn't the term be "gravity dampening" instead?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Today, the same thing occurs between general relativity and quantum physics. A search for "bell inequality" in google returns more than 10 pages. Bell's inequality is a simple proof that general relativity and quantum physics can't both be right, and quantum physics is "less wrong" than GR, that is, a closer approximation to reality.
But, the important point is that a lot of scientists all over the world did check those cold-fusion claims, and demonstrated them wrong. Many experiments were performed, in many different places, using different methods, and all of them failed to produce cold fusion. Today, if you want to publish something in that area, you must present some very plausible evidence showing why is it that your experiment alone is right, and all those others are wrong.
The timing of this report is curious, as it comes about a month after this year's Joint Propulsion conference, where I gave a presentation on the paper "Evaluation of an Impulse Gravity Generator Based Beamed Propulsion Concept" (AIAA Paper 2002-4095) discussing aerospace propulsion applications of Dr. Podkletnov's latest work. Now Boeing leaks to Janes that they have a Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion project to investigate aerospace propulsion applications of Dr. Podkletnov's latest work (see http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,31500-120604 72,00.html ). Either they are rushing to get on the bandwagon, or they have some guys at Phantom Works who are p!$$ed off that they weren't permitted to publish their ideas first.
"does anyone have any insight as to what impact it would have purely on an engineering level?"
Yes. See AIAA Paper #2002-4095, "Evaluation of an Impulse Gravity Generator Based Beamed Propulsion Concept" from this year's Joint Propulsion Conference.
But... if on the off chance that it really works and could be used in commercial projects and could bring billions (trillions?) in sales and licensing royalties...
... just ... might ... work!
Seems like a worthwhile risk to me.
Exactly! Remember the alchemists of the 16-19th century kept on bonking their heads against the wall trying to find the Philosopher's Stone, and incidentally invented modern chemistry as a by-product. Nice little windfall, that!
It is to be hoped that some great science will be spun out of this (probably doomed) effort for anti-gravity.
And don't forget the Mad Scientist's Motto: It
Agreed! Science (especially MAD SCIENCE) is RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT. Something has to be thought of, tried, and proven or disproven and then a slightly different approach taken if the results seemed promising.
SCIENCE CANNOT PROGRESS WITHOUT A SCIENTIST - DOING SOMETHING The explaining how the something interesting happened comes later usually if the experiment isn't life endangering.
The second most important concept of science is PEER REVIEW. If nobody else can duplicate the experiment, then perhaps the initial assumption is faulty and needs to be rethought. Breakthrough science never got into existence without someone willing to try something crazy just to see if anything happens (again noting that experiments which have proven failed need not be repeated if the results are without conflict - ergo jumping out of high windows to attempt unaided flight even though all previous volunteer subjects have died outright).
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.