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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
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
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.