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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.
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.
It's the current (amps) that kill, not volts...
At least that's what my freshman physics teacher always said.
Only requirement for good karma: be pedantic as much and as often as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.