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First Steps Toward Artificial Gravity
CompaniaHill writes "Have scientists been able to artificially generate a gravitational field? Researchers at the European Space Agency believe so.
"Small acceleration sensors placed at different locations close to the spinning superconductor, which has to be accelerated for the effect to be noticeable, recorded an acceleration field outside the superconductor that appears to be produced by gravitomagnetism. This experiment is the gravitational analogue of Faraday's electromagnetic induction experiment in 1831."
The effect is very small, so don't expect to see it used in spacecraft any time soon. But the effect is still many times larger than the predictions of Einstein's theories.
"If confirmed, this would be a major breakthrough," says [Austrian researcher Martin] Tajmar. "It opens up a new means of investigating general relativity and it consequences in the quantum world.""
How about creating foam metals in a low gravity field?
meh
Its one small step for man, one slightly more difficult giant leap for mankind.
but a "gravitomagnetic one", which is a field that moving objects with "gravitational charge" (i.e., anything that produces gravitational force) make. it acts to repel or attract other gravitational charges. Still a huge discovery if true, could lead to inventions like (non-electromagnetic) "artificial gravity" or "force fields" or "levitation fields"
Because it seems to me that the only way they could be certain it was gravitational influence and not some other phenomenon is if they also saw an apparent increase in the mass of the system.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Maybe there is something to all of those internet kooks afterall? This is hardly the first time I've seen talk of creating (or nullifying) gravity by spinning superconductors around, sometimes with electromagnetic charge and sometimes without.
The problem usually comes when someone wants to see the experiment replicated. For some reason the effect always seems to go away when other people are looking. Or worse, other people notice things like "you've got a lot of evaporating liquid nitrogen flying past your mass sensor, isn't that going to affect the readings?
Still, effective anti-grav in my lifetime would be quite a breakthough.
I read the internet for the articles.
Artificial gravity has been dangled in front of our noses for years, by alien nuts, pseudo-scientist, and garage engineers. Like cold fusion and zero-point energy, it's always much-adu-about-nothing. Ya know what, just park a starship in orbit before you tell us about another "break-through" in artificial gravity.
"It opens up a new means of investigating general relativity and it consequences in the quantum world."
but i'm running scared
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
I just want a hovercart for when i get old...just like McFly's Dad owned...
I've been doing research on this too, but from a different angle. Instead of using spinning superconductors, I've found that by collecting a large amount of mass together in one place, I can create a gravitational field. My current experiment has collected 7.2×10^15 kg of material in one place and there is definitely an effect.
I am working on a larger test with 5.9736×10^24 kg of mass that seems to give gravitational field strengths that are roughly the same as we are used to.
hoa, i knew i will witness time manchine.
Oh, that's easy.
It's called science fiction for a reason.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
This sounds like the work of Yevgeny Podkletnov He claimed to have countered the effects of gravity in an experiment at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland in 1992 using a spinning super conducting ceramic ring.
From what I have studied, if they pull this off, we could have people safely living on the moon, and astronauts may not lose bone density with prolonged life in space. And to the post that had something about "force fields," the Federation may be upon us soon...
42. 'Nuff said.
Oh, that's easy.
It's called science fiction for a reason.
Exactly. It is called science fiction for a reason.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
As my grandfather always used to say:
"Gravity? We've got plenty of that already! Now, make me some anti-gravity, and I'll say you've got something!"
I want them to explain why the smallest weapon fire causes the ships to shake like crazy, but inertial dampeners have no problems with faster-than-light jumps.
While this technology is still in development, make sure it can withstand Romulan disruptor fire!
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
The claims are disputed and have not been verified by similar experiments.
The paper was released March 9, if it were as important as it would seem at first glance it would have made a huge impact in the physics community. It hasn't.
Nasa paper on alternate propulsion
Similar experiment that disputes results of this one.
Not saying it's not a find of some kind, but you might want to hold off on purchasing that hoverboard.
Can anyone explain what exactly gravity is, how mass creates it and how an object exerts a force on other objects through gravity? Ive always been under the impression that while we know gravity *exists* and that there is a direct strength linkage to the mass of an object, we dont actually know much about it at all unlike magnetism etc. Am I under a false impression?
It seems to me if you can take some manner of electricity, and produce some manner of a magnetic feild, and generate some amount of gravity... then doesn't it seem that there should follow a mathmatical equation that, sort of, unifies these observations in a grand and quantifiable way?
"IF" this is a real first step to artificial gravity (big if), then this is the natural progression to warp drive. Artificial Gravity - Gravity Shielding - Anti Gravity - Continuum Distortion - Warp Drive. My own scale.
You haven't been keeping up on your Trek manuals, have you? The Inertial Dampening System predicts the adjustments it has to make when the command to jump to warp is issued. With weapons impacts, those are not predicted. The system can only REACT, therefore you get the shaking and jolting...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
[...] the measured field is a surprising one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein's General Relativity predicts.
It's been a while since I took a math class but I believe one hundred million trillion is roughly equal to a gajillion.
"It opens up a new means of investigating general relativity and it consequences in the quantum world."
Who cares about that, where's my flying car?!
They seem to be popping up in Australia all the time. Maybe they are too sophisticated for the American market?
First hover car seen in Perth, Australia
Second hover car spotted in Perth Australia"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The faster than light jump is planned and executed by the ship's computers, so it can let the dampeners know what's going to be happening. The effects of a jump are presumably also predictable.
Weapons fire, on the other hand, isn't so predictable.
That's how I'd explain it, at least.
Why is this called Artificial Gravity? They seem to have found a way to stimulate the generation of a gravitational field. But its still gravity. A radio transmitter stimulates the creation of an electric field (and the associated magnetic field) but we don't call that artificial electricity.
Nevertheless, this is a very interesting discovery. Anyone have any other links?
Now to just reverse the polarity and we've got anti-gravity, which I see as far more useful.
Alan Ralsky's house bombed with rotten oranges, pictures at 11
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They won't be able to leap as far with it turned on though...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
I'm overweight! I need an antigravity field!
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
... but the caption is a bit sensationalistic.
From the article, if I understand correctly, they are committing to the possible observation of a gravitomagnetic field as the explanation for discrepancies between expected and actual mass values. According to the article, all masses produce gravitomagnetic fields, so this artificial induction of one is no different from what anyone does when one moves mass around, right? It's just in this instance, the amount was so great as to be measurable in experiment.
This is amazing, right? Isn't it that so much of gravity is known theoretically but not observationally? If we can directly gauge and measure gravitational fields, then we have taken the first critical step to manipulating them, right?
Pardon any shoddy physics, but I was a chem guy, and only undergrad.
un burrito me trampeó.
Does not accurately predict this effect.
great, so GR is not the end all be all.... perhaps that other theory that is the basis for the hyper drive the DoD is funding will explain this better.
Back in my day we had *real* gravity. Morning, noon, and night, always pulling a brother down.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Before realising it was coming from ESA - European Space Agency I thought it was another article about McDonalds.
I grew up on the Eastern Canadian shoreline. There was a crator location which was operated as a tour site. You would walk around these cabins which had been set up all around this fairly large crator. The really interesting thing was the gravity (or a force of some kind) would pull you towards the crator.
It would pull you so strongly towards the crator that you could lean opposite to the force (crator) at an almost 45 degree angle and you would not fall.
I tried to locate the site using google but i'm on a 15 minute break and wasn't able to find it. Can anyone locate the site or explain the phenomenon?
Communications may be a more important application than spacecraft. If it is hard but possible to detect artificial gravity sources fluctuating at a particular frequency, we would have a transmitter/receiver pair that is (a) hard to detect; (b) not blocked by much of anything, e.g. usable by submarines, deep-shaft miners, and networks that don't want to either lay cable or launch satellites.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Oh come on, you can see it form up (beam weapon) any computer worth its salt could predict where it's going to fire and the torpedos have a trajectory it could predict the impact point precisely.
Shadus
some bottled water swilling, cell-phone fearing, earth hugging idiot will be complaining that it's not as good as *real* gravity, or worse, that AG causes some vague and unspecific health problems that only *they* can perceive and can never be reproduced in the lab and yet they'll have enough collective political pull to keep it an ongoing issue and complete waste of time in the public discourse.
Hmmmpf.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Artificial gravity is not the real exitement around this experiment. The really important part is, you know, experimental evidence that may provide insight into the unification of relativity and quantum mechanics.
... or we could talk about some artificial gravity field thingy that will make crackpots and sci-fi fans excited. Well, it looks pretty obvious. Defer to the crackpots."
I wonder what the editors were thinking:
"Well, we can talk about the really exciting implications of this experiment that will be relevant to respectable physics
How long before some crackpot on the threads says: "Well, if you just spin the disk backward, logically it should follow that the artificial gravity will turn into anti-gravity! I have made the greatest scientific discovery since Einstein! Wait... I better be quiet about this before the oil companies and government agencies try to sabotage me, just like they did with my zero-point energy machine and my perpetual engine (I'm still working on getting the lubricant working correctly...)"
Nice job, guys.
the jump to warp isn't a speed thing, it's a dimensional thing. Hence the term "warp". It's warping space.
And it's why big turns at impulse speed create actual intertia.
I can see it now, yes yes yes.
A large spinning disc, made of superconductive metal, with a crew compartment in the middle - saucer shaped if you will.......
God help us if the UFO geeks postulate this.
Have you watched any Hollywood movies lately?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
So, we just install a few million of these tiny spinning superconductors under the floorboards of a spaceship, and eureka! artificial gravity.
So what would the gyroscopic effects of millions of tiny spinning masses be on the spaceship? Would these effects be bigger or smaller than the gyroscopic effects of a large spinning habitation module creating artificial gravity through centripital means?
What would happen if we spun all the little buggers the other way? Would they go from suck to blow?
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Oh christ, not Podkletnov again.
Hi, i found the paper at the Los Almos pre-print archive.
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0603033
Actually, i think i believe the experiment, but i don't
think i believe the interpretion, as the article and
the above paper state, this effect is 10^30 times stronger
than the gravitation force you'd expect from too small
chunks of matter. I think they've discovered a new force
all together.
We want to see flying saucers!
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
I remember reading about this in Wired magazine a long time ago, some Russian guy claimed to have done it, and everyone dismissed him as a crackpot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...and still working there. Here's the article from 2002
.
Still, it is good news that his published experiment, or one similar to it, can be reproduced!
You win again, gravity!
Why reverse polarity?
Just generate a counterbalancing gravitational force that opposes the natural gravitational force. Instant anti-gravity!
It may not be able to do everything you want (like lift something into space) but it would sure make doing low-G or zero-G work a whole lot cheaper.
The tachyon reverse polarity quantum flux adds a degree of unpredictability to the energy output, dumbass. Though the heizenburg compensator is at full pelt, you aren't going to get the compensatory power fluctuation to work perfectly.
Any energineer worth his brains would recognize that nanites would provide this kind of appropriate, precise energy output readout, but of course, deployment of such self-aware entities increases chances of a artificial intelligence takeover, which would suck.
IS it just me, or has the notion that rapidly rotating superconducters can be used to generate/repel gravity cropped up in numerous "conspiracy theories" about UFOs etc? Do these predate general science?
Bob Lazar claimed this, IIRC, as did a number of other 'crackpots' who tell of reverse-engineered alien tech.
Weird, is all...
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Relativistic mass is gravitational mass (a body approaching speed of light gains mass instead of speed + the heavier a body is, the stronger its gravity -> the faster the body moves the stronger its gravity). The movement doesn't have to be in a straight line, it can be equally well a circular trajectory. So if you get something to spin fast enough that material on the outer edges reaches linear speed near to c, it gets heavier and as result its gravity increases. By pumping arbitrary amounts of energy into rotation you're arbitrarily increasing the mass and as result creating a small body that isn't travelling in space but has arbitrarily high gravity. Slow it down and its gravity drops.
Now theory hits practice and centrifugal forces break it apart long before it nears c. But if you managed to get a piece of material hard enough not to break and withstand the forces, you can quite easily make it into a controllable gravitational mass.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Slashdot had an article on a "hyperdrive" paper which is based upon Heim Theory. Heim theory postulates EM-gravity coupling via the gravito-photon, and the experiment the Heim researchers recommended to produce gravito-photons, and thus produce gravitational effects, sounds similar to what this article is describing.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Isn't that 1/10,000th? Why say 100 millionths?
If it's 1/10,000th, what the hell are they using "only" for! That's really powerful!
They said the ring was rotating at 6500 rpm's. I wonder how the rotation speed, the acceletation rate, and the mass all relate to the amount of gravity produced?
Whatever the relation, if we only need to make it 100 or 10 times faster, and string together 100 or 1000 of them to counter the earth's gravity, well, that doesn't seem that hard at all!
Please excuse me if I'm asking something stupid, but does this relate with the Heim theory? I recently a very interesting paper about its possible use in space propulsion, but I can't tell if this article is about the same thing, not being much of a physicist. :)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I have a copy of the Star Trek Technical Manual and it says that this is the exact way that they generate their artificial gravity: spinning superconductors. Is that too much of a coincidence?
http://pinopsida.com
Just reverse the polarity :)
but a "gravitomagnetic one", which is a field that moving objects with "gravitational charge" (i.e., anything that produces gravitational force) make. it acts to repel or attract other gravitational charges.
Gravitational charge is called "mass". The force carrier (analog to the photon in EM) is the Higgs boson. No one yet has linked EM, or the nuclear forces to gravitation. Smart theorists like Ed Witten are trying like heck through M Theory. It is very unlikely that the solution to the problem would come from ESA. More likely from CERN or one of the large universities. This article is complete junk. You posting is completely incoherent.
an ill wind that blows no good
Maybe the faster than light speed drive accelerates all mass that is connected to it equally. This would make more sense in my mind because the entire starship moves instead of the incredible forces that would be exerted on the structure itself from the engine nacelles.
Well even if it could predict where it would be fired that doesn't mean it can tell how strong or weak the impact will be.
If it over corrects it would damage the crew inside, who knows, maybe it is correcting and the shaking and such isn't as bad as it would be otherwise.
It's not clear that it's relevant to the experiment described in the article but magnetic levitation is already possible.
Any physicists care to comment on this explanation? I thought supercoductors where explained by superfluidity...
It may well be true, but the experimental setup does not disprove purely magnetic efects. An accelereometer/sensor has metal and/or wires in it, presumably, and if you move those in a magnetic field (such as the one around a powerfull spinning coil) you are very likely to get induced (eddie current) fields that oppose the movement - hence "acceleration field". Besides, a strong magnet would interact with the Earths own magnetic field and produce a net force in some direction that can seem to make it lighter on one side. And if its a spinning coil then the force ends up being along the axis - there are older experiments of this kind measuring the weight of the gyro itself. Good news, but if we are talking about fractions of percents compared to expectations than unfortunately this can be esily shot down by nitpicking at the setup.
Questions I'd like to see explained:
It states that the acceleration is 100 millionths that of Earth's gravity. How was that measured? Against what constant?
What was the effect on nearby matter placed in the field?
If the type of matter was capable of it, was the matter polarized (possible indication that it's a electromagnetic field).
And most importantly, what happens to radio waves as you fire them across the gravitational field? Cassini-Hyugen's experiment demonstrated that waves propagating at C will behave according to GR (spacetime bending) when shot across gravity fields. This behavior is different from electromagnetic influences, so it seems like a great validation test.
This is fantastic news and I hope it turns out to be a valid gravitational effect. Studying this phenomenon could open up new doors in physics.
Give us more details! I'm curious!
This is the reason why it should not be dismissed. This is serious. Many people are now going to try to replicate the experiment. If there is a flaw, it will appear soon enough. If there is no flaw, this is a theoretical physics breakthrough.
As far as the article indicates, this is science, not delusional wishful thinking.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Unless they turn it upside down...
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Could this just be a paramegnetic effect they are picking up?
My tin foil hat started floating off my head the other day - now I know why...
but of course, deployment of such self-aware entities increases chances of a artificial intelligence takeover, which would suck.
You must have missed several episodes.
All you need to do is ask it to do something impossible, like calculating the last digit of pi, find an intelligent actor, or correctly fill out a tax form, and it will self-destruct.
Be sure to stay far away when it does, because it usually makes a large mess. You do know that computers are always built out of explosives, don't you?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I think they've discovered more than they're letting on, as you can clearly see in this picture, they have to hold the testing apparatus down with sandbags to keep the antigravity from floating it away. Don't forget to pay your gravity bill.
No need to reverse-engineer flying saucers when you can white room the Greys by doing pure research! ;^)
Say hello to my little sig.
You owe me a new keyboard.
Imagine the space is some sort of rubber blanket and you put a golf ball on it, can you see hoy the blanket deforms? now put a soccer ball next to the baseball and you can see how the golf ball moves towards the soccer ball, imagine these balls are planets.
that discovered that Mars has gravity?
found it: http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/gsp/Experimental _Detection.pdf
both seem to be the case, and/or not adressed - the accelerometers do have metal on them (it does mention wires), and the setup is in a faradey cage (which does not eliminate the Earths magnetic field..um..off course nothing would anyway)
whatever happened to simulating gravity by having the spaceship rotate. Seems like it would be a lot easier. Reminds me of the pen/pencil space story.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
...I'm waiting for artificial anti-gravity.
Wake me when it gets here.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I you were building superstructures in space, yes. If you are trying to build something the size of the space shuttle, or even the ISS, spinning is not going to work. Besides, space travel is not the only place that artificial gravity would be useful. How about gyms. How about if being able to create artificial gravity leads to advances in deflecting or shielding of gravity. What if it leads to figuring out a way to make a repulsion as opposed to the normal attraction.
While spinning is still probably a good idea for space superstructures, there are lots of uses for artificial gravity, and even on a spinning space superstructure, you might want to even out the gravity close to the center with that at the rim.
This is due to the effect of Quantum Mechanics as applied to the Real World. This accounts for Un-Reproducable results.
Of course, the paradoxical effect of the observer in quantum mechanics could be a result of some sort of sub-quantum phenomena, something like sub-space. yeh that's the ticket, sub-space and sub-time phenomena, account for sub quantum mechanics and the apparency of paradox.
No, Really. ;)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
On the flip-side, relativity has been pretty safe the last hundred years and there is no reason to start by assuming it has fallen now. given a choice between a flaw in the experiment (or observation) and a flaw in relativity, the odds are stacked heavily in favour of relativity coming out shining.
This doesn't prove the experiment is flawed, it merely requires that the experiment is carefully proven to do what it's supposed to, then repeated by others independently to show that the data actually is valid. If (and only if) we see some independent confirmation does this really mean anything at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think it is for several reasons. First, The principle investator has done work in this area. Second, the expermental setup looks the same, Thrid, HQT is the only unified theory that is accessable with current technology
To me this doesn't seem like a breakthrough.... yet.
Couldn't you take a ring of ANY material and spin it to cause this effect? Since things gain mass as you approach the speed of light, they'd also have a higher gravitational pull as a result of the change in mass. To get more of a gravitional pull, spin the ring faster, assuming it won't fly apart under the stress.
The only way this could be considered a breakthrough is if a superconducting coil is the only material or one of many materials to somehow enhance this effect above and beyond the expected result according to the Theory of Relativity. Either that or the Theory of Relativity is wrong or needs to be tweaked to match the experimental result.
Anti-gravity, would most likely be a function of placing yourself in the center of the ring as it rotates around you, but you'll have the problem of "your feet being heavier than your head" if you assume that your head is perfectly centered. So the anti-gravity effect may not be useful under certain conditions.
--
If you want "gravity" on your trip to Mars in the short-term, just build the damn ship with a ring system so you can spin it. How hard is that?
From a really bad movie. Almost as bad as Sphere. Good ideas or books left in the hands of fools that don't understand the science and you end up with crap like this. It was like they were trying to use science to explain and recreate Hellraiser. Don't try to sell me on a sci-fi movie and then turn it into a bad horror flick with a highly questionable premise. Let's just have Jason mysteriously appear on a space station and start slashing everyone.
Blech. I just saw Hellraiser IV: Bloodline and it was done better than Event Horizon. I wanna know when we can have Freddy vs. Pinhead, Predator vs. Pinhead, or Freddy vs. Predator or Alien. I wanna know who wins. I think it was Scary Movie 3 that had Freddy and Jason sit down to a nice game of chess.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
"It opens up a new means of investigating general relativity and it consequences in the quantum world."
... I'm even more scared!
well
No word on whether the device occasionally goes quiet only to explode in a "metal fork on chalkboard / screaming woman" sound everytime something "exciting" happens. Fortunately, scientists have been wearing their goggles to avoid potential overplayed eye-gouging events.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"You do know that computers are always built out of explosives, don't you?"
It's true! The G4 is made of C4!
google for the Los Alamos e-print server. Enter the names of the 2 documents referenced at the bottom of the article (gr-qc/0603032 and gr-qc/0603033). All the details you could ever want, including the faraday shielding to exclude electromagnetic effects (also that they montiored above, during and below critical transition temperature in the superconductors they used. More astounding is the physcially observed agreement to their treating of photon mass and graviton mass being proportional to local energy density, which gives ratio of dark to observed enegy, Higgs boson mass, etc.
Well, I know nothing at all about advanced physics since my background only includes the high-school level Newtonian physics. Still, from what I have been reading on Slashdot and similar sites, using EM fields to generate gravity fields seems to be linked to Burkhard Heim theory. Is this a correct assumption. Is this experiment an indication that his work is slowly being accepted in more conventional physics cirles? A clarification by a knowledgeable slashdotter might benefit everyone here.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/gsp/Experimental _Detection.pdf
It seems they were careful - thermally isolated, faraday cage to block electromagnetic affects, multiple versions of the superconducting ring with different materials.
You forgot launches. If launch vehicles were free from gravity (or at least experienced reduced downward acceleration), they could reach orbit on far less fuel. In theory, we could build Star Trek style shuttlecraft with such technology. (Don't get me started on the "Shuttle Pods", though. B&B had their heads up their rears when they dreamed those up. Then again, when aren't their heads up their rears?)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I've read this book, and wish I could get those hours of my life back. Nick Cook makes a pretense of being a hard-nose skeptic, and quickly abandons the pretense, drooling, fawning at any bizarre report from any crackpot or self-important "insider" he meets.
There's little to no science discussed in the book, and Cook's utter credulity at the most nonsensical of claims, his refusal to disbelieve the con-jobs he's shown mean that for a user with even a touch of rational skepticism, the book promises insights into "research" it can't possibly deliver - as there is precious little actual reasearch covered in the book.
There's a sucker born every minute and here's evidence: Cook is suckered repeatedly in this tome, and I got suckered into buying it.
What you're asking is not stupid, but where you're asking it might be. It's highly doubtful that anyone here on Slashdot knows anything more about Heim theory than what the Wikipedia tells us. It's obscure and mostly understood by German speaking physics doctorates. (I challenge you small handful of physics experts on Slashdot who might have actually read his math and understood it to prove me wrong.) Fortunately, Germany is part of the ESA.
However, from what I've read on "teh intarweb" from laymen speculators about Heim theory, his theory does supposedly predict that a rotating magnetic field would have a gravitational effect.
Another physicist, Dröscher, has taken his theory further to say that in a similar setup -- a rotating ring above a superconducting coil -- could theoretically lift a 150-ton spaceship with a magnetic field of "only" 25 Tesla. He also claims that this might allow "hyperspace" travel where the speed of light changes, so I -- in my layman's knowledge of physics -- put Dröscher in the crank science box. You can read more about it in this New Scientist article. Take it with a good-sized chunk of rock salt.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There's one small problem with your mass-charge analogy: it's completely wrong. With electricity, things with opposite charges attract. The problem with talking about a mass-charge is that all mass (to the best of our knowledge) attracts all mass. We have yet to see any mass that repels other masses through gravitational effects.
Publish your evidence of a mass causing repulsion and explain how gravitomagnetic effects combined with this repulsion will repel or nullify gravity, and you will win a Nobel prize, get published in the journal of your choice, and be able to pay Bill Gates to shine your shoes with his tongue.
What will/could reaching this quantum theory of gravity lead to? What problems does it solve?
This is interesting. Aren't these inconsistent gravitational variations the kind of thing that ties in with Modified Newtonian Dynamics, one of the Dark Matter alternatives?
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
A lot of folks seem to be using centrifugal force and gravity interchangably. This is incorrect thinking and in this case they were seeing the effects being applied to sensors not directly attached to the disk. This is the same gravity produced by a large stationary mass.
Imagine all of the sweeeeet jumps you can do. Even on Pedro's bike.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
If true, this would be pretty much the biggest breakthrough since Einstein.
And what a breakthrough he was! I don't recall who invented him, but man, they don't build jews like that anymore...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
sure, mass is one form of gravitational charge
And others are?
What they have linked in this experiment is the very large photon mass
Holy smokes! Photons travel at the speed of light. By definition they *must* be massless. Are you refering to momentum? As for the rest of your post, I find intelligent design reasoning to be more compelling.
an ill wind that blows no good
Okay, now it's REALLY sounding like Heim theory.
This kind of experiment is rather famous for being hard to get the calculations right. There is a pretty good chance this whole story will just quietly evaporate as an error is found.
No conspiracy, just nobody wanting to publicize the embarrassing conclusion.
1) It is possible to create a negative gravitational field representing negative mass.
2) By creating a negative gravity field, you can use quantum mechanics to effectively move objects at speeds faster than light breaking the most famous of all laws.
The short article did not mention negative gravity, so I am betting it could not create negative
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I remember hearing about some of the early (Austrian?) spinning superconductor experiments which were largely dismissed many years ago, and I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a long time since I find it so fascinating, but as it's always dismissed as crackpottery, I don't really talk about it much.
But here is a nice opportunity to ask some simple questions for anyone out there who understands the physics described here a little better than me...
The effect in question is not gravitational per se, but rather gravitomagnetic, right? That is, it affects (and is produced by) moving masses in the same manner that an electromagnetic field affects and is produced by moving charges? It seems it would make perfect sense then, that one could create such a gravitomagnet via a rapidly spinning mass, just as spinning charges create electromagnets. I imagine that the reason we do not often notice such gravitomagnetic effects is because the force of gravity (or the amount of mass ordinary matter has, if you like) is so much less than the electomagnetic force. and thus much greater acceleration is needed to produce any noticable effect.
The point of my inquiry here, however, is whether this electromagnetic-gravitomagnetic similarity extends further. Namely, if one takes an electromagnet and moves it back and forth, an electromagnetic wave is produced. A lot of these waves together we call electromagnetic radiation. Would it make sense, then, that a rapidly spinning, oscillating mass would produce gravitomagnetic waves, or gravitomagnetic radiation?
I've been wondering if the Gravity Probe experiments that are described in lay news sources as trying to detect "gravity waves" from planets like Mercury were in fact measuring something like I described above. My question though, is what effect does / would a gravitomagnetic wave have? Would such a wave push or pull the object it collides with? My intuition says that, as photons push what they collide with, these gravtomagnetic 'particles' / waves would pull what they strike.
Is that what "gravitons" are supposed to be?
Someone with more knowledge of contemporary physics, please explain. Thank you.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
We're totally getting into la-la land here, but IF the computer was able to accurately predict where a weapon would strike, it should be able to focus all the shield energy into that one location, making the shields many orders of magnitude more effective.
On the GP: if you can create gravity pulling towards a specific location, you can place that location above the Earth (for example), and there will be a spot in between the two where the forces will cancel each other out, thus, "anti-gravity" of a sort.
On the P: For light and sound (both waves), you can feasably cancel them out by emitting a wave that's shifted half a phase over - noise-cancellation headphones already do this (as one of the other replies to you noted). Just knowing how to produce these waves doesn't immediately help us there, though, you're right. For heat, it's the motion of molecules that causes it, and we have heat pumps (refrigerators) to produce the opposite, but again, you're right in saying that knowing how to cause it didn't give us this ability.
One problem with the examples you listed, though, is that we figured out how we could cancel these things by understanding exactly how they worked. Anything that helps us figure out how gravity works could lead us to the same end. Another problem is that since gravity is a pulling force, we can create an opposing pulling force to cancel it out without dealing with understanding how it works (even if the cancellation only is effective for a point location).
If the GP was talking about this discovery leading directly to a machine that you could turn on and immediately cancel all gravitational effects within an area, I doubt it. However, it is another step towards such.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Actually spinning space ships has always hurt my head.
You see you get in to a spaceship and lets assume your in deep space and there is absolutely no other force acting on you at all.
Now you start to spin the space ship.
To get to the bit where my head starts to hurts. If you were measuring all the movement that was occuring from the bridge which is connected to the shaft that the rest is spinning around then the ship is rotating around it. If you are measuring movement from the rotating part the shaft and bridge are rotating. There is no distinction between them. So if spining a ship around a shaft causes an outwards force how would that be different to spinning the shaft and nothing else. How would that exert any force on you at all? If that doesnt exert any force then how, with no point of refrence, do you determine which part is spinning around or within the other?
I used to believe this was all a misconception probably spurred by the idea of centrifugal force (Which doesnt actually exist.) However a friend tried to make out that it was perfectly sound and I was never able to put across the flaws well enough for us to come to a conclusion.
This sort of thing is fairly common, and it is indeed a perceptual trick. It can be constructed intentionally by building a house on a slope, but it can occurs naturally if there is a hill where trees for some reason grow at an angle such that they are perpendicular to the sloped ground. The key to the effect is that the visual referent to the vertical and horizontal is misleading. Your brain unconsciously tries to adjust your stance so as to match the angle at which you stand to the "vertical" cues around you, but since they are actually at an angle, you can't do so without falling over. This is perceived as a mysterious sideways force. Even when you know what is really going on, the illusion is very convincing.
The other amusing illusion that arises out of this is that people seem to vary in height depending upon where they stand. Somebody standing (actually) uphill has their head at a higher level, and since your brain is unconsciously assuming the ground is level, that must mean that they are taller. Again, the illusion is extraordinarily convincing even if you understand it.
...that I can order my Jet-Pack now? I keep waiting for a Jet Pack to put in the trunk of my FLYING CAR for emergencies, but so far, nothing.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
This is going a bit off topic, and I gather you're right in the point you're making in your post, but your title is all off. Centrifugal force *is* gravity.
Aside from the obvious bit about gravity = acceleration (as the "force" in centrifugal force is actually the centripetal force involved accelerating the object away from its inertial path) that inertial path itself is in fact caused by the effects of the gravity of the rest of the universe influencing the system in question. (I recently wrote a paper partly about this for a Philosophy of Space and Time class. It's online here [PDF] if you'd like to read it. For what it's worth, the paper got an A, and the professor was a physisicist. The bit about mass/inertia/gravity begins in the middle of page 6).
Thus the "centrifugal" force you experience pushing you against the walls (or the walls pushing on you) in the teacup ride at Disneyland is in every way the same thing as the effect you feel on your feet pushing you down on the ground (or the ground pushing back up on you). Both are electromagnetic forces interfering with your ability to follow a geodesic, and all geodesics are determined by the curvature of spacetime, i.e. gravity.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The gravity in the Physics building will be shut down tomorrow between 8:00am and noon for maintenance. Please take proper precautions with any fragile items prone to drifting.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
From you reply you clearly have a bias against the ESA, which appears to be derived from their view on global warming. You also don't mention that much of the research done by space agencies, including the ESA, is based on looking out at space. Cosmic background radiation, supernovas, etc... and observations of these phenomena have provided essential data for use in theoretical physics. I very much doubt that theoretical physicists would be as dismissive as you based on the source.
PS. Anomalous is spelled with an "a", dimwit.
To get to the bit where my head starts to hurts. If you were measuring all the movement that was occuring from the bridge which is connected to the shaft that the rest is spinning around then the ship is rotating around it. If you are measuring movement from the rotating part the shaft and bridge are rotating. There is no distinction between them. So if spining a ship around a shaft causes an outwards force how would that be different to spinning the shaft and nothing else. How would that exert any force on you at all? If that doesnt exert any force then how, with no point of refrence, do you determine which part is spinning around or within the other?
Type that out in English and I'll see if I can answer you.
You also forgot the limitless use's this could have in the fields of medical research, elderly care, physiotherapy, handicapped assistance...etc the list of use's for anti gravity goes on and on and on. suffice to say, being able to manipulate the flow of gravitons in your favour would quite simply be one of the most important discovery's in human history.
Speaking of which, anyone remember I-War? They had a shield concept similar to that.
ba-dum-da-tshhh.
Beta only seems to work for Google. Such a shame.
Gravity is mutual attraction. So if you put a ten pound device that creates 1 gravity of attraction above the object you want to lift (say a 100 lb computer monitor), you have 100 lbs of force pulling up on the monitor to counter the effect of gravity; however, you also have 100 lbs of force pulling down on the anti-grav device, which, in turn, you have to carry. The result is that, instead of carrying a 100 lb monitor, you now must carry a 110 lb. antigrav device and a zero net pound monitor.
The only way that something like that could work would be if the antigrav device were mounted on a machine designed to support the weight in question. If you're doing that, though, there's no real advantage over a simple gear-driven hoist.
The difference between inverting polarity and inverting position is basically the same as the difference between lifting a heavy magnet with another magnet and repelling that magnet upwards with the opposite pole of another magnet. In the attraction case, you lift both magnets. In the repulsion case, you don't lift either one. Note, however, that if you have to lift the lower magnet to move it, you end up lifting the suspended magnet as well, so this still assumes the lower magnet has wheels to allow you to move it.
However, with an antigrav below the object you want to carry, it has the added advantage of being able to push away from the earth with enough force to cancel all of the weight, so lifting it would, in theory, require near zero effort. (You'd want to leave a little mass to avoid it floating off into space.)
Of course, none of this gets you around inertia. Even if you zero out the effective attraction between an object and the earth, it can still take substantial energy to set it in motion....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Besides, space travel is not the only place that artificial gravity would be useful. How about gyms.
Really? No, really? Are gyms the best you can come up with? No foam metal, no ultra perfect crystals, no new drugs or other chemicals? I can assure you, no matter how cheap this tech becomes (if it is even real), it will still be way more expensive than adding and subtracting iron plates.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
This is where reference frames come into play. If you have a ferris wheel, then we say the wheel is spinning, but how do we know that the wheel isn't staying still, and the earth/structure-holding-it-up is rotating around the wheel. We always have to have a reference point when talking about motion. All you have to have for spinning to create a "force" (real or not) is for the object to be spinning relative to a stationary reference frame. The earth is stationary as far as the ferris wheel is concerned.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
From you [sic] reply you clearly have a bias against the ESA, which appears to be derived from their view on global warming.
Far from it. The Mars Express is a fine mission. They do good work and are getting better all the time. ESA is no worse than NASA when it comes to global warming. Both rely on spreading hysteria for funding.
You also don't mention that much of the research done by space agencies, including the ESA, is based on looking out at space. Cosmic background radiation, supernovas, etc... and observations of these phenomena have provided essential data for use in theoretical physics.
I know enough not to dismiss the factual dark matter/enery observations made in the last 10 years. These results are startling and *real*. It is the cranks trying to ride the coattails of the results that annoy me.
I very much doubt that theoretical physicists would be as dismissive as you based on the source.
I don't see any of them rushing to your defense.
PS. Anomalous is spelled with an "a", dimwit.
Since you dropped your drawers on every other point, I'll let you have the spelling flame to save face.
an ill wind that blows no good
Wow. Your pretty touchy on this subject. I certainly was not trying to make an exaustive list of uses, nor was I trying to come up with even one of the top 10 most important possible uses. I was just giving a simple example of where someone might find this kind of tech if it were to pan out as well as computer tech did. Keep in mind that while computers do some very amazing things on the high end, the vast majority of people associate their usefullness with sending a picture of little Billy to grandma on his birthday. This when just 50 years earlier, it would have been unthinkable to even have a computer in a home due to the huge cost. Who would have thougt 50 years ago that adding a computer to the house would be in the same price range as adding and subtracting iron plates.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I remember reading about some Russian scientist who claimed to have observed "gravity shielding" above a spinning superconductor several years ago. Maybe he's not a nut afterall.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
I just realized after getting halfway through the paper you linked that it's by Dröscher himself, and it's describing the very loop + torus device and hyperspace transition mentioned in the New Scientist article that I linked.
Page 15 gives a picture of the device, and sections 3.3 & 3.4 give the "vague description" of "hyperspace" travel that the article mentioned. It has to do with the absorption of positive gravitophotons (a Heim theory predicted particle for the interaction between gravity and EM forces). By the theory, if this happened, then the only possible result would be transitioning to another space-time system with a lower gravitional potential since going faster then c in is impossible, and reducing the gravitional constant is impossible. This "parallel space" would scale differently from ours but still obey the same laws within itself, and transitioning to and from it would allow objects to appear to travel faster than light from our perspective since c would seem to be higher in that space than ours.
I'm don't really buy it, but there's a lot of math there that I really don't understand well enough to attempt to debunk it. I'm going to probably be spending a lot time with books and the internet going over this paper trying to understand what he's getting at. It's a lot easier to read than I thought when I first glossed over it, but it's still too advanced for my C-in-Optics understanding.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why reverse polarity?
Because in Star Trek, reversing the polarity always works.
Do I really need to bring up the TNG episode where Wesley is trapped in a (warp?) bubble dimension that's shrinking?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Unless they turn it upside down...
Gravity is not the same as magnets. If you travel to the southern hemisphere of earth do you get repelled?
Bullish Machine Tzar
Cities in flight or something like that was the name of the book. Instant association for me.
I used to believe this was all a misconception probably spurred by the idea of centrifugal force (Which doesnt actually exist.) However a friend tried to make out that it was perfectly sound and I was never able to put across the flaws well enough for us to come to a conclusion.
What? Who told you that? Take the classic example: Put water in a bucket and spin around. Is it gravity that's pulling watter perpendicular to the normal pull of gravity? No.
I understand your problem with the spinning station though. The station 'ring' would have to be spinning pretty fast and be quite large to produce the right effect and you would have to be connected to it somehow(standing might work) while it accellerates. Essentially though, you could still disconnect from it(jump) and float but if you accellerated with the ring, you'll still be traveling with it.
Another example. You're in an airliner that's traveling around 500M/h. You throw a ball straight up into the air. Does it fly to the back of the plane? Nope. Since the ball accellerated with the plane, it's traveling at the same speed. However, if the plane goes into a quick altitude climb, the ball quick drops to the floor(fast).
Bullish Machine Tzar
Perhaps those are bad analogies. We can shield against, Light, Sound, and heat. If this proves to be an effective Gravity shield, then the effect is essentially "antigravity"
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I used to doodle spinning superconductor discs producing gravitational fields in my college notebooks in the 80's. My pick-up rap used to have a bit about the flying saucer I designed that used spinning superconductors for propulsion. I dunno why, but this effect always seemed obvious and intuitive to me. Are we really only now confiming it? Was this speculated in sci-fi or OMNI, because it seems awfully familiar for some reason.
Wouldn't this be similar to what is experienced from changes in acceleration from amusement park rides/orbiting the earth/riding elevators/etc?
Keep in mind that while computers do some very amazing things on the high end, the vast majority of people associate their usefullness with sending a picture of little Billy to grandma on his birthday.
I'll give you that. Sorry if I sounded touchy.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Gravity is not the same as magnets. If you travel to the southern hemisphere of earth do you get repelled?
Depends on which country I'm visiting. If you turn a joke upside down, is it still funny?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
from his website: Education 1999 PhD (Numerical Plasmaphysics) Vienna University of Technology, Austria 1998 MSS (Master of Space Studies) International Space University, France 1997 Dipl.-Ing. (Engineering Physics) Vienna University of Technology, Austria ///////////
ALL HIS DEGREES ARE IN PHYSICS
Doesn't anyone else here get tired of seeing these miserable little twerps just spout off endlessly.
damn, a BUNCH of these slashdot twerps desperately need a beatdown, don't they?
I mean, doesn't the endless torrent of selfsatisfied bilge from these twerps make anyone else sick?
'What? Who told you that? Take the classic example: Put water in a bucket and spin around. Is it gravity that's pulling watter perpendicular to the normal pull of gravity? No'
Yes I am aware of centrifugal force as a reactionary force to the centripetal force. Its just that as your comment goes on to explain youd have to actually be connected to the centripetal force in order to have the reactionary force. Centrifugal force in and of itself doesnt exist.
Your comment appears to point out the same issues that I came up with in my previous conversations that means that the idea wouldnt work with just casual walking around. Youd have to be strapped or magentised to the rotating surface at all times else float away from it and no longer have any artificial gravity effects.
It also clicked why spinning a central shaft isnt the same as spinning the rotating part as I completley ignored the force that causes it to spin in the first place. Though it still occaisionally fools my brain as if im looking at an optical illusion. Im guessing this was why I was bad at science.
This discovery has NOTHING to do with antigravity. if you look they spliced their own crud into the quotes from the article!!!! move on, nothing here but a waste of time (participating in someones fantasies - never ceases to amaze me how they can look forward to fantasy and let their local reality rot. perhaps making your own life better might be a better choice than hoping for some super invention that wont improve your life in a time frame that you would be alive to enjoy it).
The small change in gravity was recorded OUTSIDE the ring of superconducters. Nothing like this is found in "normal" conditions. One might also note that at 6500 revolutions per minute one would require a radius of approximately 440m in order to achieve just 1% of the speed of light. Not exactly achievable at the moment... Not that we can reach 1% of the speed of light anyway. (The speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s for those who don't remember their high school physics)
Of course reading the actual article would also induce further understanding...
Nobody addressed your last point:
It's going to be AWFULLY hard to notice light bending in a gravitational field that small. I don't believe we can detect it in Earth's gravity, which is, apparently, 100 million times stronger than their field. We can see it in star light that skims the sun, and I think I read once that measurements have been made using Jupiter's gravitation field.
Hm it does make me think, your remark. Imagine a drop of water splashes out of the bucket you are spinning. It would not follow the circular movement. It would just fly away. So if one jumps in this artif. gravity spaceship, where does one land? Not on the same spot one jumped from, I presume?
Says that the field detected was 10^-4 g... that's a wee bit more than the millionth of Earth's gravity, no? Did the article author make a boo boo? 10^-4 g is quite a bit more exciting than 10^-6 g. It's always those last few orders of magnitude that are the most heartbreaking!
Stands to reason that a skript kiddie could hack into such a system, and turn the crew into a thin red paste (ie. make the system think the ship is jumping to warp, when it's not).
I want to see THAT episode.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
... does not reference Podkletnov's basic article from 1995 since this seems to be pretty much a reproduction and validation of what he described as an accidentally discovered "gravity shielding" effect when experementing with a rotating superconducting disk.
... from H. G. Wells.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
It's so the angels can stay on their clouds without flapping their wings, right?
Warp drive here we come!
just think if this thing works of ELC, we could stick a nuculear reactor and then "Make" gravity infront of our space ship so we would allways "Falling" twards the direction we want to go in, so it would be the most effisant(sorry i cant spell) way of transporting somthing in space because there would be no loss in the fuel, can anone say accelerate untill nuclear power sourse dies?
And hasn't been proven, so whether artifical gravity is possible or not is still up in the air.
Thank you,
The Kansas Board of Education
You probably know this but it would be more accurate to say "you're letting the heat out m*therf*cker!" since heat flows from hot to cold.
Alternatively, colder air has more pressure and density than hot air so opening the door would cause vapor pressure equalization by letting the cooler air flow in along the floor (which you will feel as a draft) while letting the hot air out along the ceiling (which you feel as general lowering of ambient temperature) until temperature is equalized.
is knowing which side your bread is buttered on!
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
100 million
10 thousand. Their field was 1/10,000 of a G.
Remember, every generally accepted scientific theory today started life as a fringe theory that the general consensus held was wrong. This is why groups like the NSA, DARPA, CIA etc continue to investigate "stupid" stuff like teleportation, mind control, hyperspace, gravity control, etc. 99% is probably BS, but there's a good bet that some fringe theory or phenomenon today will evolve into generally accepted wisdom within the next 50 years. If you're not looking at the edges of science you won't see where its reach is expanding.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Of course you can create anti-light, anti-sound, etc.
Haven't you heard about noise-cancelling headphones? That's your anti-sound for you.
Creating a wave that is exactly opposite and out of phase is basically your anti-light, anti-sound, etc.
But here they're talking about gravity as a force, not as a wave. To cancel that force, simply create an equal and opposite force - we've known that for a long time. The problem is that we've not known how to do it with gravity, as we have with electromagnetism.
You mean the spindizzy, don't you? Considering the technique used in this experiment, James Blish's term seems more relevant than it did when he first wrote those stories and novellas.
Figure about 100 years more and they can probably re-issue Boston's eponymous album with photographic cover art.
We are the 198 proof..
Yeah, when I read the preprint I noticed that. The article had it wrong (it said 100 million times weaker).
Still, 1/10,000 g and the field at the surface of the sun are a bit different. Not to mention the length scale -- across the lab vs. from the sun to Earth.
Consider this:-
You are standing inside the outer wall of the rotating ring, and both you and the ring are rotating at x rads/sec. It may help to think of this in terms of metres/sec, and as we know the circumference we work out you are travelling at (an arbitary) 2 metres/sec.
If you now jump 1 metre from the surface you are standing on you are still travelling at 2 metres/sec, and as there is no external force to slow you down (ignoring air resistance, assuming space suits were not required) you continue at this speed.
But at your new position, 1 metre nearer the centre than your old position, the circumference of the ring is less.
If the circumference is less, but the speed is the same, you will complete one revolution in less time. Or to put it another way, if the cicumference is less, but the speed is the same, in a given amount of time you will move further round the cicumference.
So if gravity is construed as a curvature of spacetime, then haven't these scientists, on a miniscule scale, made some kind of spatial anomaly relative to the mass of the object in question?
Using the Faraday analogy, we talk about electric field potentials measured in volts, and magnetic fields measured in Tesla. So what are the units for gravitomagnetism, and electrogravitic effects? Any proposed nomenclature?
It's in Perth (or at least it was. It tends to get around.)
"Rotating knives. Yes."
"Are you proposing to slaughter our tenants?"
"Does that not fit in with your plans?"
"No, it does not. We wanted a simple block of flats."
"Ahh, I see. I hadn't correctly divined your attitude towards your tenants."
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
That was perfectly good English. The sentences were just a little longer than the ones you're used to.
It was Beverley that got trapped in the warp bubble. Wesley warped her into it, and the Traveller had to get her out.
The inevitable conclusion: the Traveller has been playing tricks on the ESA scientists. Or else, Q has been playing around with the gravitational constant again.
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
Random capitalization of nouns is common among technical people who have been exposed to Microsoft documentation. The names of objects and properties are capitalized but not offset with special text (the Document object, the Input textbox, and so forth). People tend to follow the examples that they have been given, even if they have training in English grammar and spelling.
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
The idea that one could mount a gravity generator on "top" of a ship, and use the generator to pull the ship away from the ground is patently absurd. Not only would the ship be pulled toward the generator, but so would the ground. You would actually increase the attraction of the two masses (ship and ground). Also, this would simply increase the net mass of the ship with generator by the mass of the generator. Essentially, you'd just be making the ship act more massively, not less. Now, true antigravity wavicles would (and I believe this is what the article is addressing) potentially be usable to cancel out the nominal gravity in an area or for an object. Perhaps one could eventually discover/create an anti-gravitational force that would push masses apart instead of pulling them together. It is odd that the only fundamental force that seems to have no real-world negative counterpart is gravity. Oh well, what do I know anyway?
However, it doesn't quite work the same way. Light can be blocked by a solid object, but putting a wall between you and a gravity-generating object does not block gravity. Along the same lines, though, two gravity-generating bodies may in fact interfere with each other. Therefore, while it might not be possible to create something that blocks gravity, you could create something that creates a gravitational force in opposition to - say - the earth's gravity.
The trick would be in creating something that created such a gravitational force so that it was:
a) Done with a portable mass (i.e. a large moon/planet would create gravity, but such as large mass isn't easily creatable nor portable/useful)
b) Directional. The first use might be to create artificial gravity on, say, spacecraft. However, creating something that could be directed in opposition to celestial or planet-generated gravity would be something else.
c) In creation of such a device, stability would also be a somewhat unpredictable factor at first.