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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."
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.
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."
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).
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."
Levitation lives!
And yes, this one does work in a vacuum.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
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...
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'm curious where the lift comes from then in the cases where they've blocked the upper wires with straws, or placed a piece of cardboard between one of the upper wires and the lower section. I'm not saying this is antigravity, but it would seem strange that it could be ion wind with no wind.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
While these devices are only ion engines, I still think that it may be an interesting step towards discovering a true anti-gravity device. But I can't believe that electromagnatism and gravity can be unified at only a few kV of electricity. If that were the case, anti-gravity would have been discovered years ago. Besides, all voltage is is the difference in the number of electrons between two points. Perhaps at high enough voltages the gravitational attraction of the electrons at one point would cause some kind of anti-gravity effect at the opposite point, but I would assume that it would need to be a HUGE potential difference coupled with an extremely small device. Perhaps it isn't voltage at all that we need to look at to unify electromagnetism and gravity. If, that is, they can be unified at all.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
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.
I don't recall the exact number either (I know it's in a school book around here), but I do recall my teacher asking us once :
:
"Do you know how we know (N)mA kills ?"
Conjectures of theoretical resistance in a human body through the various organs etc. were supplied, but all dismissed for the supposed true answer
"The best way to find out is by experimentation. Mr. Mengele did just that. And now we know."
That was followed by the rest of the hour discussing the ethics of using this data knowing that it was obtained through such means, and whether the apparent blind acceptance by us to use these data would encourage other scientists (if one can call Mengelere that) to perform similar atrocities in future quests for knowledge.
The lack of control thing is really just because nobody bothers to try. It's like building a helicopter rotor and engine and just turning it on. It'll flip all the fuck over unless you tie it down or something. I'm guessing if you put little stablizer lifters on the sides of your big lifter you get lighting going in between them or other bad things, but if you did something like that, I can't see this being any more unstable than any other kind of propulsion.
BTW, if the Nebechunezzar runs on lifters, why does it need an EMP? Anything more conductive than a petrified Carrie-Anne Moss ought to be attracting ridiculous arcs by the time it gets within tense music distance, no?
I'm mostly in agreement, but then again, if the best we can do to conceptualize the force of gravity is a depression/curvature in space-time, maybe there's a way to create a bubbling out of space-time... kind of like a hernia in the fabric of space-time.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
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'.