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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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
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 ----
Okay, let's work this out. He uses a 50kV at 4 milli-amp power supply. That's 200 W power supply. With that he creates approximately a pound of upward thrust.
You want to create 1500 lbs upward thrust. You'll need 300 kilowatts of power. Let's say you want to run it for one hour. You've used 300 kilowatt-hours (1.08 gigajoules) of energy.
According to here, you've actually used 8.19 gallons of automotive gasoline to power your device.
On the other hand, if your truck now weighs only 1000 lbs... you might be on to something!!
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
That's probably a reference to the Grand Unified Field Theory, the Holy Grail of particle physics where all forces are reduced to various aspects of one force.
;-)
Once upon a time, electricity and magnetism were thought to be different forces. Now we know they are two aspects of the same thing. Later it was found at high energy states the nuclear weak force and electromagentism were also two aspects of the same "electroweak" force. I'm not a physicist but IIRC they've also shown how the nuclear strong force (holds atoms together) is the same.
The force that refuses to be unified is gravity. It still remains a seperate term in all theories. It is hoped that by pushing particle accelerators to higher and higher energy states, enough clues will be given to piece together the relationships once and for all.
However, the link will not be found at room temperature and mere thousands of volts; we're talking millions of degrees, you know, the kinds of temperatures where us mere mortals stop caring which scale it's being measured in, and densities that would make a neutron star green with envy. Basically, barring Extraordinary Evidence, the line that so intrigued you is indicative of the ignorance of the writer, not an interesting phenomenon.
However, if you find this interesting I would encourage you to go ahead and learn about real particle physics; it boggles my mind why people enjoy various tin-hat conspiracy-type theories about physics when the real thing is so much richer and more fascinating then any man-made fiction could ever be. Like I said, I'm not a physicist but I enjoy laymen-level particle physics and cosmology and would love to learn more about it sometime in a context where nobody was forcing me to turn in homework
By the way, on the topic of the GUT, go here and grab this sound file... it won't be much more informative overall then this post but it will be much more fun.
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.
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.
- 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"
"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.
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
http://www.americanantigravity.com/hutchison.html
Lifters are well and good, but that reeks of large-scale BS.
webpage
Jeez, you mean we've been listening to these stupid UFO stories for 50 years now, and it's all because all these crackpots didn't notice a slight breeze????
I'm going to GUESS that anybody who noticed it would assume that the "gravity field" was responsible for moving the air. It wasn't mentioned in this article, although it's mentioned plenty of other places, that the folks who buy into this stuff believe that anything that's inside the field (i.e. between the + and - plates) is subject to the "gravitic force"... and that would include air, which would be moved around as a result.
And NOT that I believe in this stuff, but it would have been interesting for the author to have pursued the B-2 angle. They may not be using this stuff for gravitic propulsion, but they're using it FOR SOMETHING, i.e. the B-2 has a + charge on the leading edge of the wing and a - charge on the trailing edge (or vice versa and who cares anyway). It's classified, so it must be interesting, no?
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
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.
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/
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.
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'.
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