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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."
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
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
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 is no new physics here, but perhaps new technology. All propulsion technology is really rehashes of the same old laws of physics, but that doesn't mean we have even begun to scrape the surface of what can be done with it. Ion-wind "lifters" (working in atmosphere) could very well become useful, especially in conjunction with ion rockets (which work in space.)
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.
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 ----
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
Oh, and several thousand pounds of batteries, or maybe a engine running a generator...
- 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"
My Mitsubishi 3000GT's engine generates 179kW to push around a 3200 pound car, about 56 W/lb. Of course it doesn't fly (by design).
Bah, who needs devices and vehicles... We just need to focus our Ki energy and soar around like in Dragonball Z... Flying is the next step in human evolution, according to the World Champion, Mr. Satan!
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
The article mentioned the website American Antigravity as a source of information about this "electrogravitics" phenomenon. I clicked on the section about theHutchison Effect. It is said to be "...a very complex scalar-wave interaction between electromagnetic fields and matter." To me, it just proves that people without a solid background in science will believe almost anything they see.
Take, for example, the pictures in the document. This picture shows what looks like a butter knife embedded in some sort of metal. The metal looks pretty much like tin, lead, zinc, or some other metal with a low melting point. Maybe his scalar waves did this, or some idiot dropped a butter knife in a solder pot, let it cool, and cut it in half to reveal the knife. Who knows.
The best part comes from the videos at the bottom of the screen. Here, you see this little toy saucer take off and "magically" fly around the room. Video 3 shows the saucer resting on a wooden plank, with the camera close by aiming right at the little magic toy. Soon enough, it takes off and flutters about. Funny how all this energy in such a little space has no ill effects on the camera and its metal bits just inches away. The next 3 videos look remarkably alike, this time showing the craft at a distance. Notice how it lifts and flys, and something on the right hand side of the screen jingles around with similar movements. Again, there are metalic objects within very close distances (like the chains hanging nearby), but the "scalar waves of magic" (my quote) do not affect it. I bet that thing on the right is a fishing rod or a hollow tube with string in it used to manipulate the craft for the camera.
Alas, we will never know the truth, because unfortunatly, "...Hutchison's experiments have been exceeding difficult to replicate due to the extraordinarily complex arrangement of waveforms that is seemlingly required to generate the Hutchison effect."
Folks, take most of this stuff with a grain of salt. Sure, flyers fly (I've built one using a busted monitor as a power supply - it work, but according to my calculations, takes about 8000 Joules of energy for a 30 second flight, about the same energy as a family sedan going 7mph, which is quite inefficient), but they just work on well-known principals. Next time you see an "Ionic Breeze" air purifyer, put your hand next to it - you will feel the ion-induced wind blow against your hand. Same thing going on with the lifters, just with a bit more power and a different shape.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Electromagnetic fields can penetrate solid objects. You might not get a breeze through the mesh, but the air molecules on the other side of the barrier will repulse just as nicely as if the barrier wasn't there.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Pfft, Barsoukov's stuff is sophmotic. Note, for instance, that he doesn't consider entrainment of the surrounding medium as a working mass in his "what it's not" section.
ion wind + air pulled along with it = lots of airflow
Don't believe me? Check out back issues of PopMech from the late 1960's, they build a fan with no moving parts out of lifter parts.