Slashdot Mirror
Those Amazing Antigravity Machines?
surfimp writes "Wired is running an interesting article about 'lifters', hovering UFO-looking vehicles that have no moving parts, no onboard power supply, and are capable of levitating simply through the application of high amounts of electrical current. Enthusiasts claim their vehicles are examples of a nascent antigravity technology, while more traditional scientists - including some funded by NASA - view them as nothing more than contraptions harnessing ionic winds."
After reading the whole long thing do you finally find out that its not antigravity at all, but an ion engine. It requires an atmosphere to work and is fully directional. Cool stuff, but not antigravity.
Flying without moving parts! Why couldn't someone come up with this sooner?
blimps... hot air balloons...
I can see the media's interpretation already:
So, to lose weight, apply massive amounts of electrical current
check out americanantigravity.com
This is a site run by this guy I used to work with...pretty interesting stuff.
I think it messed with his head a little though.
Those Amazing Antigravity Machines
Joke completed.
The coolest voice ever.
You mean the ones that deal with facts, and actual forces of nature?
If you read to the end of the wired article, he talks about a controlled nasa experiment that showed that the effect doesn't work in vacuum.
Also, it's not high amounts of electrical current as stated in the headline, it's high voltage. A high voltage (~20kV) wire on top ionizes air molecules which are accelerated downward toward an oppositely charged wire. Action, reaction, upward force.
No anti gravity here. But maybe enough voltage to kill yourself. Maybe soon we will get a darwin award for an anti gravity attempt that never actually leaves the ground...
Muerte
Does this mean all US citizens can now use it? Since NASA develops its things with public money I seem to recall that they become available to everyone.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
nothing new. this is not anti-gravity. the concept of propelling by ionic wind has been around for a while.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
A guide to building your own "lifter", sort of
Perhaps you should build your own? Antigravity?Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. A cool toy? You bet.
UFO-looking vehicles that have no moving parts, no onboard power supply, and are capable of levitating simply through the application of high amounts of electrical current.
The summary of the article provides a very unimaginatively redundent comment. No Power Supply? No moving parts, but has high ammounts of current? That's quite conflictual. Electrons flowing from catheon to anion constitute moving parts, as well as a power supply. Still, I think a perpetual-motion machine would be more intuitive than an anti-gravity machine, for the short term. Anti-gravity machines are too dangerous in a non-contained environment as we have today. Perhaps they should launch a shuttle into outer space and construct a research base on Planet Phobos or Deimos for that matter; that way anything bad happening would happen over there and not here.
Maybe we'll be in track to make hoverboards after all. Here I was all disappointed because I was promised flying cars by the year 2000.
Now, can someone help Dr. Brown with that Flux Capacitor project already? Thanks.
Everything is bigger than cold fusion.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What? A Geocities site taking the full brunt of slashdot? Not likely.
The concept of "defying gravity" by generating an upward force larger than the force of gravity pulling the object down is indeed very exciting.
May I interest you in a Boeing 747?
a grassroots movement of antigravity fans
Damn, man, just say geeks.
The coolest voice ever.
We can levitate almost a pound using an ion wind created by 120,000 volts. Strikes me that you could send a pound half-way around the earth using 120,000 volts and a rail gun.
:)
Anyone else think Wired authors get paid by the word, with no maximum?
Sorry for the lame reply, I was trying to think of something witty just so I'd get modded up and the right person would read my sig.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
The thing with testing lifters and their operation is this problem, if i understand right:
the easiest way to verify if the lifter lifts via ionic wind is by using the lifter in a vaccum, but while the lifters work ok in normal atmospheric pressures, when you begin to decrease the pressure of where the lifter operate (putting the contraption in a pumped area, say) would eventually cause too much corona discharge to happen and do a lot of bad things (lower dielectric constant for vaccum compared to air?).
so, in any case - ion wind or not, this technology is still not quite suitable for space just yet. (i mean, besides the fact that you need a relatively heavy powersupply for this to get going)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
There's always HerrGoogleCache
Anyone look at the power/pound? .54 Watt. .54 W/ .003 lb = 180 W/lb..
Let's see.. 27000 V, 20 microamp, for 3 millipound.. think that works out to something like
Anyone know how this compares to say
"normal" engines?
Seems to be a really good battery, unless you have a tether (or beamed power).
My physics teacher in high school had a high voltage generator called "sparky". He could crank out 100,000 volts with that thing. Then he passed electrodes around and allowed us to experience 100,000 volts firsthand :) The reason this didn't kill anyone is that volts are not necessarily dangerous; amps do. The amount of current flowing through your body determines whether electricity is harmful.
Case in point: in the US power mains run at 120 volts. Yet this is enough to kill you. The reason is that there are tens of amps available at the wall.
Hasn't anybody tried to put this into a vacuum chamber to see if it still works? I think that would pretty much settle it.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
I think I would probably cover my netherregions with something like this also.
The missing link between gravity and electricity, that sounds very interesting! Anyone having links to more information on that work please post it here.
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
Yeah.. I am SO sick of these pesky engineers always *claiming* to have developed power-independent hovercraft-like levitating vehicles with no moving parts, when all they're doing is harnessing the power of ionic winds! Sheesh!
Hats off to NASA for stopping this ridiculous claim and setting the truth straight!
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Remember, you can't spell GEEK without "EE"!
Is there anyway that one could buy one of these, or could one build it his or herself?
RTFA. That's what they did. It doesn't work in a vacuum. It's ion wind.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
A good article, but there is a very good reason why most physicists tend to be extremely skeptical about claims like this. The voltages used by lifters may be large, but don't push the limits of modern technology in any way, shape or form. If strange anti-gravity phenomena happened for 10's of kV, we'd have seen the phenomena in a number of different places. Physical laws, as best we can tell, are universal, and they have many, MANY situations where they apply. It is extremely unlikely that these contraptions encounter high voltage antigrav phenomena, and no other high voltage machine we know of does. BTW, I know Rai Weiss, and he is certainly kinetic, but hyperkinetic might be a bit of a stretch. Definitely a world-class physicist, too, one whose calculations you should generally take seriously.
Someone needs to tell the writer of the article that UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. I'm fairly sure that even someone from Wired should have been able to identify each one.
Of course, interviewing the guy who built it would be a dead giveaway for almost anyone else.
Last month there were 7 stories from the magazine. How many are going to be this month?
Someone discovered convinient way to fill in the slow days I presume.
You can find a better picture of the antigravity machine here!
while more traditional scientists - including some funded by NASA - view them as nothing more than contraptions harnessing ionic winds.
Yes, and airplanes are nothing more than contraptions harnessing aerodynamic lift, and the people who designed them originally also didn't fully understand the physics involved. If "ionic wind engines" can be made practical and acceptably efficient, they might give rise to a new class of airborn vehicles.
And perhaps there are other uses as well. For example, electric fields and magnetic currents might be useful for shaping and redirecting the hot air that occurs during reentry from space. Or, the same technology might find uses not for pushing around large amounts of air for propulsion, but instead for changing the properties of the thin layer of air right above the surface of a traditional plane or vehicle--this could perhaps be used to reduce turbulences and improve performance.
Why would you post this? You know how many
James Randi, the famous skeptic, has this to say about this subject (http://www.randi.org/jr/060702.html):
"Go take a look at http://www.americanantigravity.com/index.html and see very interesting videos of what the supporters seem to believe is a breakthrough in science. If this device is "antigravity," then a pogo stick and a crow are both antigravity items, as well.
I saw a similar demo at the University of Toronto back in 1946. That demo used a flat circular coil of wire; I believe this is the same thing, but a triangular form leads one away from the "induction" conclusion. It's a matter of high-voltage electrical fields generated by something that you don't see in the videos; there's always a source of high voltage present, a CRT (computer monitor or TV receiver) or a HV power supply, just out of camera view. What's also not obvious here is that the triangular frame -- which weighs only a few grams -- is tethered down by very fine invisible threads, a fact which when known, makes the apparent "maneuvering" appearance less mysterious by far."
Lifters are antigravity devices. I am convinced of this. How do I know this, you may ask? Well, I could cite the numerous experiments carried out by other crackpots that show how lifters do not require an atmosphere. I won't do that, though. I know that lifters are real antigravity devices because the UFO that abducted me was powered by lifters.
Communists beat YOU at chess!
Oh wait...
Photos,instructions and experiment results from lifters all around the world
When my friend first showed me the site, I thought it was a hoax. He bitched about it enough that we decided to build some at school. We opened up some monitors to use as 25,000 volt power supplies, and wired one up using very thin wire and balsa wood. The damn thing flew alright. Power-to-weight ratio sucked, though. The thing was hooked up to a monitor (don't know much it was actually dissipating) but could only lift about its body weight (2 or 3 grams for our model). The nifty thing about it is that while we were working on it, we left it in the robotics lab labeled "Anti-gravity machine, do not touch!"
:)
PS> If you try this at home, remember, high voltages arc very easily! One of the times we tried it, there was a class in the lab at the time. One guy was so fascinated that the electric charge in the wires made the hair on his arm stand on end that he got a little too close
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The real missing experiment is the one where we see what happens when you bother to read the article first.
Once equipped with the fantastic knowledge that they did, in fact, perform that experiment, I anticipate great things from you! Your blinding grasp of the obvious and your brave decision to criticize something you didn't read suggest that there are many exciting truths just waiting to pounce from your mouth!
...or, as it is known in most border towns in Texas...."fffrrrriiipppp!!! Damn, Roy...that was SOME good chili!!
And we also know how those sparky engines on the Logos and the Neb, and the hovercars and nuclear/dark storm bombers in the second renaisannce work.
Pretty neat. All you need is an abundant source of energy.
You only need to test it for a few seconds, so heat shouldn't be a real issue. Inflate the thing if you need to keep the edges away from the HV.
Why hasn't anyone tried it?!?!?!
--Mike--
Im goign to slap who ever says it...
By "no on borde power" they meen these
divices are hocked up to either batterys
that weight in excess of 100 magnites times
there own weight or the mains power supply!!
ive seen these flyers used as a "law of thermo
is brakeable" way too many times..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
I've even heard slashdot mentioned in wired. Are they just united in technolibertarianism or something? Or like owned by the same company? Does a single month go by without a wired magazine story ending up on /.?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Remember, you can't spell sex with EE.
Haven't you tried reading the article to see if they answered this? I think that would pretty much settle it.
Hey it's in the article:
no onboard fuel
And it's in the slashdot blurb:
no onboard power supply
What they don't say is that this sucker is electrical.....so to make this thing fly 2.6 million light years, you need 2.6 million light years of extension cord.
Oh yeah, you need atmosphere too.
Nifty, but useless.
-ted
I remember reading about this technology in Popular Science oh - back in the late 60's or 70's? It was clearly pitched as Ionic at the time - and the problem at the time seemed to have been how to carry the power supply around.
Source:
http://www.msu.edu/~couilla3/ninja/ninja2.htm
Also, they put me on these stairs, only I didn't have to do anything to climb them. Instead, the TOP came down to ME.
Truely amazing.
Later, they must have dropped me off in the mall because I woke up in the bathroom next to the Orange Julius.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
"Bill: "If you concentrate on the gallstones, they get fixed in existence, and it's harder for them to wink out. It makes them easier to operate on." Doug: "Wow!")"
Have cancer?
Just stop thinking about it!
How did it get there in the first place when you didn't know about it and were not thinking about it?
I call conspiracy!
And while you're at it, stop fixing my extra 10 pounds in existence: how insensitive!
Just try to electrocute your hear with it... tell us if you die or not... oh wait...
Hmmm... Pie...
Have you seen those awesome hovercrafts in Matrix? Recall all the lightning around them? These must be it: "Nebukadnezar - powered by ionic wind!"
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
Seems to me no matter what you call it, its still floating. Why shouldn't I be interested in this technology? Is it somehow impracticle? Why cant planes use it?
;)
I'd love to change my Truck from 2500Lbs to ~1000Lbs. That would save me a TON of gas
Ouch, that was harsh, funny as hell but harsh. Mod this man/woman/it up!
If you take some time to read, its not antigravity, its got a more rational theories of how they work, dealing mainly with ion flow.
Its also an old story.. been posted several times in the past.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Translation: You were really good .. now you really suck, you are the weakest link, goodbye!
Just beacuse they dont work in a vaccum doesnt mean it should be dismissed...
How many 'flying things' work in air.. pretty much everything..
The concept has promise for earthbound flight.
The voltage can be safely contained as well.. Not all devices using the techniques are 'open' like a lifter, some are sealed.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wendy, I haven't been able to get in touch with Vel to get your number. Give me a call, 2) 632-8782. Bryon
Individual tries to impose his fascist views onto others. Please help the Foundation for Freedoom of Speech on Slashdot (FFSS). Think of what your founding fathers would do. They would not sit idly by.
Thank you.
Segway that *hovers* instead...
C|N>K
Can we make our own Ionic Breeze® machine out of one of these?
This space available.
I made one of these things a while ago.
website here
My website has picture too! Even of my high tech power supply apparatus! And my super HV safety encolsure!
Even got some video (which unfortunatly isn't on my website yet, can't find the tape) of it's final crash. You can definitely feel the ionic wind underneath the thing. It was a lot of fun making it though. Only burned a couple hole in the carpet (the cement under the carpet is plenty conductive), a floormat (I repeat, the cement is conductive), and some paper (got in the way of the cement), and lots of grass from when I used it outside (ground is conductive too, duh). At least my lifter went out in a flaming ball of glory, when it proceded to fly into a metallic doorframe, causing huge arcs and fire (which happens to be what I got on video:) after I cut one of the teathers (Muahhaha!).
Some think it is forces cause by the electrical field lines going from plates that are perpendicular. This is interesting, but i don't think this is how it works. If you look at the design, there is no stable capacitor. Since you do not ground the foil, you are not making a plate that will stay at a substantial potential that is less than the wire, because of ionized air and sparks that tend to sometime fly to it. And, the capacitance would be sooo low, that 25kv most likely wouldn't be enough to lift it even if those forces did exist. Also, looking at the construction, I can't see and perpendicular plates.
I also saw an experiment, cant find it though, of someone who put one in a bag that was wrapped around it. It didn't fly...which proves it. And, someone told me that if you monitor the current (didn't have or make a HV current meter at the time) there is a HUGD power draw that would be plenty to lift the lifter.
http://www.amasci.com/emotor/emot1.html
You can use a TV screen as your high voltage source.
I had a variation of this spinning on my office PC a few years back.
Nothing says geek quite like a monitor powered ion motor on your desk.
No! /.ers that might actually believe you.
Well, if you want to Darwin yourself, go ahead, but this is for the benefit of other
120 VAC conducted through relatively dry skin and with no other bodily paths to ground for a short enough time might not be so bad. Even at 240 VAC too.
Now if you've just come out of the shower, and your feet are touching a nice wet grounded contact, or say one of your hands is touching the bathtub spigot, while you touch the hot lead of 120 VAC, say bye-bye. Actually, you won't be able to say it, your muscles will just quiver at 60 Hz (really at 120 Hz [I think] because you'll get two quivers for each cycle) until your heart fibrillates.
If that still sounds relatively tame, you can take two thumbtacks, press them deep into your thumbs, and connect them across the 120 VAC. You might get a nice scent of roasting meat for a few seconds too. To bad you'll be cooking and electrocuting yourself and unable to autocanabalise yourself instead.
I do not know the current, but I do know it won't kill you,
Ohm's Law. Well, sort of. The resistance of the human body is non-linear, and also non-homogeneous. As you lower the resistance through any means, you'll have more current flow. If that current flows through your heart, it can be more likely to give your heart fibrillations. Translation - 120 VAC can kill you.
make world, not war
http://www.cpsc.gov/library/foia/foia03/os/GFCIs.p df
Two hundred a year dead in residential electrocutions, four a year just from do-it-yourself microwave oven repairs.
Many people have survived 120V shocks, but then many people have survived unprotected sex in Haiti.
This Thomas Townsend Brown site has everything from his family history to research documents and patents.
Is this any different from what these guys did? Actually, this link seemed fake to me when I first saw it on slashdot. They claim to use DIAMAGNETIC LEVITATION, not anti-gravity. I'm still waiting for the home model.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
How much voltage is it gonna take to raise SCO's stock after the dive it's gonna take when IBM stomps them into the dirt? :-D
/hear/ my karma burning . . .
Ouch. I can
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Just for fun, I will suggest another way.
Set your frog on the counter.
Roll steel BB's to it in such a way to fool the frog into thinking they are flies.
After tricking your frog into swallowing a bunch of steel BB's, load your frog into a rail gun made with length of PVC pipe.
Launch the frog through your neighbor's window next time they are having noisy sex.
It may take several tries before you get their full attention but it will result in some interesting talk going around the neighborhood.
I've often wondered where the UFO mythology came from. Academics talk about cold war paranoia and the semiotics of the space age. Being of a more prosaic turn of mind, I've always assumed that stories about the AvroCar grew in the telling. But now it just turns out that a bunch of nitwits can't distinguish ozone from antigravity. Yep, the truth's out there all right, but I'm too tired to look for it!
Always use you right arm since te path to ground has a better chance of being away from your heart. NEVER use both at the same time. Keep your left in your pocket. Unless you are right hearted of course?
;) This is also why you never see black plastic being used on things in Anechoic chambers, the EM waves will reflect off of it.
Never use black plastic for an insulator or gloves unless they are specifically designed for HV. There are high amounts of carbon in black plastic, so it will conduct. Believe me
Make sure the TV, power supply, or whatever, is turned off when handling the wire. *BUT* don't even consider trusting that. Unplug it after every use. Better to be safe than dead.
I know it's fun to zap things with the TV power supply, but they aren't made to handle the high currents that useually are related. It WILL burn out eventually if you let it sit there for too long (like more than a second or so). You will most likely first see smoke comming from the electronics in the back of the TV. It can last quite a long time after this if you don't do it too much more, and if the TV I designed badly (considering what would happen if it were you between the wire).
NEVER EVER do it alone. Make sure there is someone that is capable of unplugging the TV and performing CPR (seriously). If they can't do that, digging a large hole is the only skill required.
Always be afraid.
Don't do it at all.
If you should break any of these rules, natural selection will strike down one more dummy.
Ionic wind farts smell worse than when my wife's dog eats a mostly rotten skunk.
I guess the search anti-grav continues. They better hurry it's almost 2015, I want my hovercraft by then.
"contraptions harnessing ionic winds" still sounds pretty damn cool to me.
I broke ionic wind once...spent a week in the hospital. Damn Doctor wanted to write a paper...no thanks.
A couple of wires wrapped around the little guy and a jillion volts, who needs viagra anymore?
Table-ized A.I.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
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Given the dangerous levels of electricity the use seems limited. Also I wonder how well these could be kept over the generators? Wouldn't they fly right off their power source? How effecient is it to 'beam' power to fly a load compared to just putting the power source in the flyer itself and flying in a traditional way? Sounds cool but seems it'll need a lot of work to be useful.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This was covered in an article a year and a half ago...
2 2/2359231&mode=thread&tid=159
v iew.jhtml?pid=175300
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/
Here's the best "practical" use of this "technology"...
http://www.sharperimage.com/us/en/catalog/product
I've got your sig, right here.
you're wrong. the parent post was correct. amps kill you, not volts. what's important is not only the terminal voltage of whatever you're hooking up to yourself and the resistance of what you hook it up to, but also the internal resistance. for example, if you hooked a battery up to a light bulb, the current would depend on the voltage of the battery, the resistance of he light bulb, AND the internal resistance *through* the battery.
transformers can convert a normal voltage into a very high one, but at the cost of a lower amperage(because of energy conservation (new amps times new volts can't be more than old amps times old volts)). so, even at 10,000,000 you can be safe, since there is a very high internal resistance between the two terminals. you could hook 10,000,000 volts up directly to your heart and be fine, as long as the current is low. conversely, you could hook up 120 volts going in one arm and out the other and die, if many amps are allowed to go through (as in a wall outlet).
it's current, not voltage. don't talk about stuff you don't know.
if anyone's still looking through this discussion - i've been able to find and mirror the construction guide.
I saw a UFO once, man. It just floated there in the air. Then it said I was going to have a good year.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
"(It has) no moving parts, no onboard power supply..." That's the key. This thing isn't wireless, and the power supply this guy used was huge. Now how useful would a car be without an onboard power supply?
- these things are basically aluminum foil and balsa wood. and some wires with some pretty high voltage.
- they are tethered down with fishing line so that the don't go shattering themselves, crashinfg high voltage lines into the operators. Otherwise there would be no control whatsoever.
- The fishing line is usually not visible
- the actual power supplies are kept out of sight, and are good old fashioned heavy as S*** high voltage generators with a plug to the wall. think a ten or twenty pound unit punching HV into a 2 or 3 oz "lifter"
Until they can overcome this need to have an external power unit that outweighs the "lifter" by a factor of at least a couple of hundred to one, this will not be a practical technology. Never mind the need for invisible tether strings for navigational control.Lets face it, you throw enough voltage into something, and you can make almost anything flip.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i think you would need the testing guide too.
Tritium & Deuterium; small
Electron; Actually, this is much smaller
"And if you come across something, don't tell me about it - go straight to Oslo and the Nobel Committee."
Oslo? What does he want with the Nobel peace price?
Go to Stockholm and claim the physics price instead...
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
I haven't read the Wired article yet, but I would guess it's not just an ion machine. It works in a vacuum also if it's what I think it is. (I'll read the Wired article later). I think a guy name Townsend Brown was working on it before he died. Lots of people claimed WITH GREAT AUTHORITY that it was an ion machine. He had his detractors, too. remins me of a guy I worked with. He was the software lead with a EE background. He told me that leds would not provide a voltage when light was applied. I proved him wrong. He also tried to tell me (I'm just a dumb software engineer) that if you bent an optical fiber the light would be constant at the receiving end. I proved to him that light escapes the more you bend the fiber. The thing is with pedantic people that they KNOW the truth until it bites them in the ass. Betcha you learned a lot in college and believed every word of it.
Yea, illegal in several states. Damn those consumer protection laws!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Aren't the hovercraft vehicles in the Matrix powered by this ionic drive theory? With the sparking discs all around them?
I can see several possible markets for this type of lifting, even though it may not be the most cost-effective. Some points:
1: It doesn't pollute (where the lifting occurs).
2: It is quiet. Dead quiet.
3: It has incredibly quick -- near instantaneous -- startup time, as there is no need to "rev up" a motor.
4: It doesn't require an anchor / leverage point, except for holding the power cable.
5: It can be designed to fit in specific spaces or shafts.
6: It has no moving parts, and should require minimal maintenance (dusting?)
I can definitely see a future with
7: Marketing
8: Profit!!
Regards,
--
*Art
Shocking yourself with 120 V through one hand feels like a nice hand massage.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
is there any REAL work being done on REAL anti-gravity, not this electro-magnetic force crap?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
"so, in any case - ion wind or not, this technology is still not quite suitable for space just yet."
It is already in use in satalites (with some success and some problems). Nasa is using it to make cheap satallites. How do they do it? They carry some gas (Xenon) with them to use to make the ion wind. No it isn't the same design, but it is the same concept (ionized propellant).
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
We each ring one of the combination of numbers and pretend to be called wendy.
Who's up for it?
It's an equilateral triangle, 8 inches per side, composed of thin sticks of balsa wood. There's a ring of copper wire from RadioShack strung around the top and a strip of Reynolds Wrap held down with Krazy Glue around the bottom. When I throw the switch, 20,000 volts will course through this bundle of sticks and foil - and it will levitate.
Didn't he mean DEFLAGRATE ?
Hey, this tech looks like what the nebuchanezzar from the matrix uses for levitation/control. Any thoughts?
It isn't anti-gravity, but if they can do something useful with it, a flying Segway would be cool. (Otherwise, STFU.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This sort of reminds me of the 1979 John Hutchinson experiment, Cant wait to get zapped when i put this baby together.
Lets face it, you throw enough voltage into something, and you can make almost anything flip.
What if we consume an entire day's worth of electricity for the city of New York in electricuting a death row inmate? Would it turn out to be an uplifting experience after all?
.unsigged
The part that the article doesn't seem to mention but should have is that you make lots of ozone with these things and ozone isn't particularly good for you. I remember "the smell of ozone" in the morning -- it smells like sick-sweet roses.
Anyways, cute, particularly that you can get a job at NASA doing this high school stuff... but far from revelatory...
on who the inmate is
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
No wonder NASA is interested.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The guy who posted this story does not remember his physics very well. This thing uses extremely high voltages not current. The current is actually quite small.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
http://www.americanantigravity.com/hutchison.html
Lifters are well and good, but that reeks of large-scale BS.
webpage
So f**king what. Floatey Floatey is pretty damn cool however you pull it off.
weighs about 1/2 lb and flies for 4 minutes using a 35 watt motor and a 18 volt battery
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Here
Interesting, shows the airflow.. but they also do an insulator that shows lift WITHOUT airflow.
meh
I thought it funny that when I read the description of the devices, these ships from the Matrix movies came to mind. (Recall those big, arcing plates on the ships). I wonder if that's in fact what the writers had in mind?
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Evgenij Barsoukov has a page with a pretty convincing theory of lifters here. His equasions predict the thrust and efficiency of models built by many experimenters with fairly good accuracy.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I have a balloon floating around my room right now at about 5 ft. altitude above the floor. I assure you it has a grand total of one part, which could not be defined as moving.
I have a number of small hot air balloons (small meaning under 10 ft. diameter) with one nonmoving part.
God only knows how many solid fuel rockets with no moving parts I've launched at great velocity into the sky.
I've made kites. No moving parts.
Oh, and a hang glider. The only way this thing could be considered to have a moving "part" is if you think I am a "part."
If you consider a flap of cloth a "moving part" than your radio dials sure as hell are too. I can't even begin to tell you how much time I've wasted over the past 30 years dealing with wonky pots. I gaurun-damn-tee you my flap of balloon cloth is more reliable than your radio dials.
One of my kites ( you know, the kind with a bit of string tied to it) has lifted a man clear off the ground, and didn't require a single volt of electricity to do it. Just a bit of naturally occuring wind. ( Ok, it was a biiiig frikkin kite. I misspent my youth on such endeavors).
How much weight has your dangerous high voltage bit of oven wrap lifted so far?
I'm waiting.
In the meantime there's a helium ( a safe and inert gas) filled bladder over in the corner of my room just hanging in mid air. It should be able to do so for days.
No energy source required.
And no moving parts.
KFG
Here is another guy who thinks that his patented propulsion method will let you fly to the moon. Basically it's a totally closed box where spinning disks generate lift. He seems to think that he doesn't need to push on anything to produce lift. Oh, and by the way ... last I heard,
he's still looking for investors!.
It's not as wacky as NATURE'S HARMONIC SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE, but it's definately out there.
What the author of the Wired article failed to mention, unfortunately, was that an experimenter by the name of Jean-Louis Naudin has been experimenting with Lifters for some time now, and has done a number of experiments which prove that Lifters do not use ion wind for their propulsion.
The experiments he conducted include one where the aluminum and copper wire were unlinked from each other and the copper wire is placed in a sealed vacuum tube, then once the power is switched on a propulsive force is seen.
And another experiment has the aluminum portion of the lifter fully enclosed in a cardboard box and the unlinked copper wire is then lowered near the box and an upward motion is still seen when the device is powered up.
Then yet another experiment shows that the lifter device can still generate an upward propulsive force even when fully enclosed in a plastic bag.
I should hope that based on the evidence presented here one can come to the conclusion that this matter is far from settled and that Lifters depend on something else entirely different from Ion Wind for their propulsion.
Ohm's Law is a very simple thing, it is:
Voltage = Current * Resistance
So unless you lower your resistance (say, by standing out in the rain or sweating a lot), you can't have high current without high voltage, and high voltage will almost always result in high current.
So yes, it is the current, but the voltage generates the current.
"And then other times, he proves himself to be just as blind and arrogant as the people he seeks to debunk when he makes snap statements and dismisses without properly investigating first."
What in the above account provided by Randi is inaccurate? It's very possible that I have missed something.
If you are only complaining in general about Randi, can you please provide examples of him exhibiting this behavior?
It is not enough to "claim" or "say" that you can "communicate with the dead", "read peoples' minds". Anyone, all day long, can create hype and spout psuedo-science, and many, many, many people do.
Not only this, but so many of these claims have been encountered many times before and in many variations, and they have been shown again and again to be frauds, lies, nonsense and jibberish, 'cons', delusions, and ignorance.
If you are serious about your claims, and if you are serious about arranging for proper scientific testing to verify and document your claims, then stop the hype, stop the press-releases, stop the propagandizing on your website, stop whining about "bad vibes", stop ranting and raving to your followers about Randi and the "conspiracy to suppress the 'truth'", stop the bull, and stop the crap, because he has seen it all before.
Contact the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) and work with them to arrange the proper scientific testing and documentation of your claims on terms that you are involved in specifying and agree to.
Unless your "psychic hotline" is already quite profitable, surely you won't pass up the opportunity to come and claim your $1million USD? Donate it to a charity if you like.
And if your abilities and claims are just the sorts of things that a proper scientific test can not be arrange for, or can not be conducted in the presence of "bad vibes", then what, precisely, do you expect us to do? If you are the one making the claim, and you are the one with the ability, then there is absolutely nothing we can do until you prove it to us.
Is Randi "Arrogant"? Maybe.
Is Randi "Blind"? If he is, then prove it to him and prove it to all of us. Contact the JREF and work with them to arrange a proper scientific test of your abilities on terms that you are involved in specifying and agree to, and claim your $1million USD.
I, for one, am waiting.
Me and a few friends built some of these at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for our engineering open house. They were a big hit, winning us several awards.
:)
These things are basically asymmetric capacitors: a thin wire loop is one plate, foil on balsa wood beneath the wire is the second plate.
For a power source, we took apart a CRT monitor. Gotta love those flyback transformers.
Anyways, here's our website with nifty pictures. We plan to do this project again next year and hopefully win more awards.
http://dilbert.cen.uiuc.edu/soc/psiphi/lifters/
It sounds as though you believe it too!
As somebody who has seen the "impossible", knows "impossible" people, has done the "impossible", and who knows several people who have been shot and/or hospitalized as a direct result of being "impossible", I can assure you that both you and James Randi are babes in the wood.
Particularly in these times, anybody dumb enough to try to prove anything to an ignorant and undeserving public, (for money, no less!), is pretty much demanding to get shot at. And if that isn't enough to keep the real thing away in droves, then Randi's brand of witch-hunt, kangaroo-court science is sufficiently ridiculous to do the rest of the job.
If you need examples of his 'professionality', try doing some reading about Randi outside the temple dogma. And no, I'm not going to provide that for you either. It's out there. Go look for it. Seeing is a choice which can only be made by you, and unless you are willing to start the search on your own, your mind will forever be closed. You are entirely free to remain as ignorant as you choose. And guess what? In the end, nobody else cares because you are the only one who has to carry the weight of your own self-imposed disability. Despite what society teaches, the gold stars handed out for defending one's lack of knowledge under the banner of 'skepticism' aren't worth a damn.
Good luck out there.
-FL
----If that were the case, anti-gravity would have been discovered years ago.
You're only assuming that it wasn't actually discovered years ago, of course. We wouldn't necessarily know.
Reading into the work fo T. Townsend Brown will liekly set anyone on the right track in this area. Regardless of what is to be said about brown's work (and the subsequent work of Hutchinson) theres enough scientific bric-a-brac to show that a bit more is happening with electricity and gravity than we're applying our brains toward.
-shpoffo
... So saying that volts are safe and amps are dangerous is a bit stupid. What none of the posts in this thread have mentioned is that it is largely the internal resistance of the power source which determines how dangerous it is. This lies in serial with the resistance of your body. The sum of the 2 determines how much current flows, and if one is significantly higher than the other, then the majority of the power will be dissipated in the higher resistance (P=I^2*R).
Also important, is the path the current takes through the body, i.e. whether it passes through the heart or not. Sticking 2 fingers of one hand into a light bulb socket will not kill you (trust me on this ;-) ). Attaching mains connections 2 your testicals will also not kill you, but it will probably make you wish you were dead.
Hold the electrodes of a 12V dry cell battery, or solar cell array between your hands, and you won't feel anything. Hold 12V car battery electrodes between your arms and it will probably kill you. That is because the former have very high internal resistance, and the latter has approximately no internal resistance. Likewise, the mains supply has negligible internal resistance.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
If somebody, (obeying the laws of thermodynamics), managed to build an anti-gravity device, how long would the military hold on to that technology before allowing it into the realm of public industry? 5 years? 20 years?
Here's another question. .
Could somebody invent such a device, raise the capitol, hire the people, and create the industry required to bring the technology to market without the military finding out about it beforehand?
Yeah. That's what I figure as well.
And so finally. . . (And this is my problem with 95% of the tech-dreaming on Slashdot.)
Why do so many people bother getting excited at all by the comings and goings of publicaly accessible science and industrial advancement? --When all such advancement is not really advancement at all, but merely the controlled release of ancient technology which somebody already came up with fifty years ago and which the military sees no further need to keep under wraps?
Cuz, you see, any 'announcements' about any new developments which matter, are ALL 100% P.R. bullshit. Amazingly, everybody pretty much knows this, because the logical steps needed to reach that conclusion are painfully obvious. --And yet, most people quietly go along with the charade as though the U.S. military-industrial complex wasn't actually a multi-trillion dollar goliath which controls nearly every aspect of science and industry.
Most of the tech-geeks I've ever met are just a bunch of grown-up kids playing at pretend, wishing for a Star Fleet future while trying like hell to ignore the 10 ton gorilla in the living room.
-FL
The Nobel comittee is in Stockholm. The Nobel Peace Price comittee is in Oslo.
..... that this thing is just some kind of electromagnetic repulsion thing. Coils of wire? It looks like an electric motor flattened out. If you place a coil of good conducting material in a strong alternating field, the induced current will induce its own magnetic field, and the induced field will always repel the external magnetic field. If you have too much resistance in the coil, of course, the repulsion due to the induced field is likely to be weaker than the attraction due to gravity.
..... but it fooled plenty of non-scientists.
Talk of high voltage, high current and complex waveforms always impresses non-scientists. Even when it's a well-known phenomenon. Remember the "perpetual motion machine" {a lightly constructed wheel with elastic bands for spokes, set at an angle} that was actually a radiometer? It got its energy from the light bulb shining on it
BTW, the use of the word "inch" gives it straight away that this person is not a real scientist. Real scientists use SI units exclusively, even {especially?} when talking to non-scientists.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
John Hutchison's experiments have been exceeding difficult to replicate..
Well now theres a shocker.
'Last fall, they tested the contraption in regular air - shooting it with 27,000 volts at 20 microamps. Bingo: It generated 3 millipounds of force [...] "We're talking maybe even a pound of thrust out of one of these little devices the size of my thumb. We've got some promise here!"'
Millipounds? Pounds? What's that in bushels per hectare?
My god, no wonder they keep smashing things into Mars if their cutting edge research is done in pounds and by "rule of thumb".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Yep, it's V=IR The current (I) is dependent on the resistance (R) and the voltage (V). If your body has a healthy resistance (which it does to my knowledge) then you will not get electricuted unless you pump up the voltage.
I read in another comment that 50mA will kill you thus: V = IR
120 = 0.05R
R = 2400 Ohms
According to this site: Under dry conditions, the resistance offered by the human body may be as high as 100,000 Ohms
So you should be ok most of the time. Us in Europe with our 240V AC supplies have to offer more resistance, 4800 Ohms, although since in Britain we have earthing on all powered devices, elecution is far less likely.
People who get eletricuted must have less than 2400 Ohms resistance then - presumably - unless I've missed out some important theory..
- Popular Electronics
April Fools joke.Meddle thou not in the affairs of Dragons, for thou art crunchy and with most anything.
- If you had read the article you would have seen that it maintains a certain height because there are numerous tethers attaching it to the ground.
- If you _could_ turn off the effect of gravity on an object, it would _appear_ to fly off the earth as it travelled in a straight line. I did some rough calculations, (may be wrong, feel free to correct, assuming that your standing at the equator) and after 10 seconds the object would be about 9.3 ft in the air. after 20, 37 ft. after 30, 84 ft.
With all that said, it appears that the devices they are discussing are actually ion engines (also talked about in the article), so the above calculations are meaningless for this topic.
Dupe posts are
Somewhere I read once about the military developing transports that work like this. Probably read it on slashdot. Anyway... imagine a nuclear power plant in the heart of this thing generating the power for the ion lifter... Somebody in this discussion already figured the power at 180 W/lb. Let's say you want a craft that can carry 100 tons (200,000 lbs). That'd take 36MW. The nuclear reactors around here generate over 1000MW. Wonder how much they'd weigh scaled down to 36MW. Hmmm... that'd be one heck of a ship. Imagine how long (years) it could hover in the air without being refueled... until the reactor rods were spent...
Okay, folks... don't flame me... just thinking out loud...
is that it stops you being stuck to the Earth's surface. Since the Earth is: a) rotating (at 1038mph at the equator) b) orbiting the sun (at 67,000mph) c) in a solar system orbiting the galaxy (at 558,000mph) that is itself in a galaxy drifing in our local group (at 669,600mph) anyone who stops being affected by gravity, even for a split second, would end up pretty far away. I believe it's called 'absolute rest'.
Can someone explain why this isn't an X-ray machine?
TV voltages have to be very carefully controlled or else they produce x-ray.
In retrospect, it seems that the people who designed the hovercrafts for The Matrix may have just been slightly ahead of their time.
Those machines are covered with lifter-type objects which produce lots of lightning bolts. And since they are hovercrafts, not spacecraft, we can assume that they do require an atmosphere.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
If gravity is caused by the presence of a mass, a sufficient amount of energy will duplicate the presence of mass, hence artificial gravity but not antigravity.
If gravity is caused by gravitons, shielding can be developed and a form of antigravity created but not artificial gravity.
My thinking is nodoubt too simplistic on these two topics. The two theories previously mentioned are mutally exclusive.
Can anyone see a method that the future of Jetsons can be realized?
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
That think geek should sell.
Add a little paint, and a nice dial with glowing lights, then price it at $200 per unit. They could make a fortune, and save a few geeks from the darwin awards. Heck, it might even be considered a public service.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Absolutely right!
.012 volts, if the amperage is high enough) can't kill should be held at least in part liable for anyone they mislead into performing an uncautious act that gets them hurt or killed.
People who disseminate the dangerous myth that 120 volts (or even
Like my loser ex-stepfather, who couldn't be bothered to get a switch fixed that he knew to be dangerous.
When I was a kid, we had an intermittent short in the switch to our garbage disposal. If one had their hand on the metal faucet (e.g. turning on the water) and threw the switch at the same time, one could get one hell of a shock. Indeed, I was unconscious from the time I threw the switch to the time I slammed against the wall on the far side of the kitchen. That was how I as a ten year old kid learned that we had a dangerous switch installed.
While 120 volts and tens of amps do not always kill (just as lighting does not always kill), it certainly can, and the question of whether I was unconscious for a second or two, or actually dead but lucky enough that my ten-year-old heart could restart itself (perhaps from the counter shock of having my back slam against a wall) is an interesting question, but either way it was certainly lights-out for a brief period of time.
OTOH I've had tens of thousands of volts pass through my body in one of those low amperage static electricity demonstrations, and other than having my hair stand up on end and a very slight tingle in my fingers all was perfectly well. So you are certainly correct, ohm's law applies and it is amerage (as well as frequency...60 Hz was a really lousy choice from a safety perspective, and 50 Hz is almost as bad), not voltage that defines the lethalness of an electrical jolt.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Unfortunately, I'm not inovative.
for lifter 4 he claims and shows pictures that it lifts a pound off of a 250 watt power supply dilivering around 100,000kv. Thats roughly 3 pounds of lift per 750 watts ( or about a horsepower ) and 4 per kw or 9.2 lbs of thrust (at least) for 2.3 kw. Why is this interesting ?
.02 lbs of thrust per 2.3kw.
DS-1 generates
I understand DS-1 generates its ions from an onboard fuel but it seems the process is far less efficient than ionizing plain old air. Seems like NASA could do better with some more voltage and a bottle of highly condensed air than they can with xeon.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
People already run these things off of a monitor power supply. Somewhere in here are the makings of a sweet case mod.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
Oh come on now, THE best site to go to for this stuff is:
http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm
He's a little kooky with his free-energy and UFO stuff, but you have to give him a hand with all the various experiments, videos, and analysis, designes, etc. that he's accomplished. I also love his Frenchy "This iz Jean Louis Naudin. I now turn ON zee lifterrr" in his real videos too.
A few friends of mine and I managed to build a working lifter using the usual balsa, foil, wire and an old monitor. We talked to a Physics Prof, and his conclusion was the best test to determine if it's ionic wind that's propeling the device or not (since vacuum will cause breakdown) is to test it inside a container of helium. The order of magnitude less of atomic weight should significantly reduce any effects of ionic wind, hence test if that's what causes it to fly.
-- Making computers see, hear, and think... http://www.componica.com/
"Mate, this bird wouldn't voom if you put four million volts through it!"
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Now who started reading the real boring technical paragraph, then switched to the children's version? :)
Was it Vonnegut who said that until a scientist can explain what they're doing to a child, they're really a charlatan?
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
Cool!! Antigrav works by using ionic wind. So where do I go to find a mod for SI Ionic Breeze to convert it antigrav device? I foresee a rapid increase in ionic breeze sales
I very seriously doubt any human would survive a hundred thousand volts DC at practically any current.
That's like saying "I doubt any human would survive the impact of a hundred thousand kilos at practically any speed". Yet I manage to survive somehow as the earth hits my feet when I walk.
-- Repeat with me: "There is no right to profits".
use dirigible technology to make it lighter than air, or even much lighter. Then, use the no-moving-parts-electro-motor to move it. Isn't the army working on something like this?
Depending on the application, you'd much rather have that extra 36MW for thrust than for just staying aloft. Then it's like a ship at sea.. always bouyant and in a safe state even if power fails.
To put this a bit in perspective, the engines of a Boeing 777 generate between 75 and 100k pounds of thrust. 2 of those equal your 36MW figure. A ship with the full 1000MW capability would have thrust equivalent to 27 777s. Not bad. Aircraft-carrier of the skies. I bet it already exists.
If there really is antigravity at work here once the ionic wind component is removed, wouldnt the pinwheel configuration in the vacuum test produce exactly the results witnessed by the author? The two "engines" would work against each other resulting in zero net movement. I can't believe a whole slew of NASA nerds could overlook this issue, which leads me to believe I'm missing something. Any thoughts?
And for the record, I most certainly do NOT believe this is antigravity. Some other form of electromagnetic propulsion maybe, but not antigravity.
This is definitely a government conspiracy or a hoax, since the whole idea is full of hole(s). It says no moving parts, but the whole thing moves, except the power source. SEE! I ask you, IF THEY'RE WILLING TO LIE ABOUT HAVING NO MOVING PARTS, WHAT ELSE WOULD THEY BE WILLING TO LIE ABOUT?!?!?! Maybe it not working at all, HMMMMMM??? Or maybe it really IS anti-gravity and the "vaccuum" test was all a coverup by NASA to keep us down! That's obviously the answer! AHA!
(FL: See, that's a joke, son. You're supposed to laugh.)
Inside, the article is black and white (more or less - some shades of green as well). It was written by a Mr. Hans Fantel. The first line: "It was downright spooky." (I can't make this stuff up).
To be honest, the models shown flying in the article seem much more graceful than the ones I have seen at sites like JLN's - they use some form of charged grid, and they show them flying much higher (whether this is real or a photographic trick is unknown). All of the models (as well as the drawings, including the cover) seem to have strange "arrow" pointing "electrodes" sticking up from the top of the grid (so the "arrows" point upward). A diagram shows a simplified drawing of what is happenning - it reads:
"Ions rushing toward positively sharged grid collide with neutral air molecules and thrust air particles downward, ions stop at grid" and "Neutral air molecules, whacked downward by ions,pass through mesh of ion acceptor grid. Downwash of air keeps ionocraft aloft"
The grid is supposed to be the positive, and the downward pointing leg ends of the arrow are the negative (the legs, I suppose, are insulated parts of the craft structure).
The article says the craft is made of "about $5 worth of balsa and aluminum wire", and measures "only 1296 square inches" in area. The article mentions "ionocraft engineers" - which seems at the time of the writing, that more than one individual was playing with the things. The article further explains that "at present it takes 90 watts (30,000 volts at 3 milliamperes) to fly a two-ounce model. Translated into ordinary power-to-weight ratios, this works out to roughly .96 hp per pound, as compared with a typical .1hp per pound of helicopter or .065 hp for a pound of Piper Cub".
So, yeah - the problem was, and still is - the power supply. I wonder, though, if those numbers could be made better, and if a lightweight 12V lithium-ion was developed - if using an inverter (or something like it) for a CCFT (like the lightweight inverters used in today's laptops for the backlight) could be used as an "onboard" power source? If the numbers could be made better, then I bet it could be done (run-times would suck, but it would be a fun toy). Micro-miniature hobby helicopter building has shown that you can do a lot with very little - so I would think that creating an onboard supply for such a "craft" might be possible today...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Using anti-gravity does not necessarily mean you would have to instantly jump to zero (or negative) G.
One application for this would be to create an airplane-like vehicle that would initially reduce gravity, accelerate upward, slowly increase gravilty to slow its rate of ascent, then, would again reduce its gravity to a fraction of a G and glide to its destination descending very slowly the entire way.
Of course, a sudden jump to zero G would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, as this would complete "cut the teather" holding you to the earth's surface, causing you to be flung off the planet.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Sharper Image has these in their catalog. If look inside one the sharper image air cleaners (Ionic Breeze) you'll find something like a lifter -- a wire and some flat conductive plates. When running the air cleaner, you'll feel the breeze; it's slight but easily felt.
I bet this principle will not be first used for anything really interesting like flight. It will be used on the small scale for things like small switches, automotive brakes (like air breaks), places where a relatively small force is needed and no moving parts are a boon.
For fun, calculate how much DDT would be lethal for you!
These lifters just ionize air and direct the ions downwards with an electric field, generating upwards thrust. There's no anti-gravity involved at all. It's the same technology used in The Sharper Image's Ionic Breeze air purifiers.
My friend and I did some measurements of this effect, and with 23,000 Volts, 700 microamps, and 36 centimeters of foil and wire, it's possible to generate 2.7 grams of force. With balsa wood, it's certainly possible to build a support weighing less than that, and, voila! You have flight. Nothing magic.
For more details on our measurements, check out http://peng.dyndns.org/~dan/writings/phy210.pdf .
Daniel J. Peng
looks kinda cool to me.
+&x
Please see the line above
That and perhaps read what I said again because clearly you have no clue as to what I was talking about.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Everyone knows that anti-gravity is achieved by straping buttered toast to a cat's back, with the butter side up. Not sure how much thrust they generate, but the more the merrier!
IMO the best browser game ever http://wittyrpg.com
That's right.
Go back to sleep. Thinking is bad for you.
-FL
Yup, it's a troll.
Collect three (3) troll points and give yourself a cookie.
Next!
"Next?" --Like you're some sort of authority charged with processing a stream of ideas, which you enjoy doing with flip dismissal. How empowered you must feel! I'm glad you don't actually have any real authority, or surely innocent people would hang thanks to your thoughtlessly dispensed 'wisdom'.
What I find interesting is how carelessly posts are relegated to 'Troll' status these days. I'm not even entirely clear what a 'Troll' is. --I thought at one time that a Troll was an ego-deficient poster looking to deliberately draw negative responses from people because any attention was better than none at all. But it seems today that any posting which challenges the status quo is considered a 'Troll'.
I think people who cry 'Troll' are often just frightened of new ideas.
-FL
Ok, so they are not anit-gravity. But they look cool and would make great desktop toys. (Except for the High DC voltage running through them.)
The litmus test for me to determine whether this is some sort of antigravity technology comes down to the vacuum, since space flight is the ultimate goal here. This Wired article claims that NASA attempted to use this in a vacuum but failed. However there have been numerous reports from others over time, including the inventor of this, TT Brown, that it _does_ work in a vacuum. Is it possible that NASA didn't properly configure the device, or did TT Brown simply fudge his results in order to get more attention?
Even if it's not antigravity, the applications of a feasible derivative of this technology are quite amazing. However, as others have stated, until the lifter can lift its own power supply plus payload, and also have a suitable control system, it will remain the subject of test labs and back yards. Supposedly, though, JL Naudin at www.jlnlabs.org, pretty much the Internet publisher of the lifter technology program for the masses, has determined that the larger the size of the lifter is, the more weight it can carry with the same amount of voltage. So since the relationship between voltage and mass isn't linear, it's conceivable that enough cells could actually fly. Check out his site with information on the LifterCraft project.
I don't know if it's antigravity, but it's definitely fun to watch those things lift!
Of course, it ISN'T ion wind. Ion wind is 3 orders of magnitude too small to account for the forces on these lifters. Ion drift is in the right ballpark, but hasn't been verified as the cause.
http://www.arxiv.org/list/physics/0211
On the top of this list is 'Force on an Asymmetric Capacitor' conducted by United States Army Research Labs. It's highly technical reading, but even if you don't follow the math, you can read the conclusions and get a general picture for what's going on and what they're talking about.
And a vacuum test? I'll keep my eyes out for something legitimate.