Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.....
Short answer: go read about general (not special) relativity.
Slightly longer answer: gravity is essentially the warping of space-time by the mass of an object. You can think of it as being like putting a heavy object on to a trampoline - the surface is pulled down under it. If you put a ball on it near the object, it'll roll down the sheet towards it.
Gravity is a bit like that, but in three dimensions.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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.
Think of it like this: all objects "want" to move along the surface of the trampoline/table cloth/whatever. It would take "more energy" to make them move in any other way.
Expanding this to a three-dimensional space-time fabric, means that the smaller ball will roll toward the bigger ball because it's the path of least resistance: it doesn't take and extra energy. If more energy is supplied (rockets, whatever) you can force the smaller ball into a different path.
Neither. Apparently, you've been asleep since the beginning of the 20th century: Newton is WRONG.
Wow, someone feeling a little snarky this morning? I didn't say that I agreed with the grandparent in my previous post -- I do remember some high school physics. I was just attempting to do some justice to the thread that he started by helping to clarify his point. After all, his post (though scientifically outdated) raised a question that at least deserved a civil discussion.
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)
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").
Cities in flight or something like that was the name of the book. Instant association for me.
This doesn't require anything outside of general relativity. GR predicts that if you accelerate a mass you'll get a gravito-magnetic field just like if you accelerate a charge you get an electromagnetic one. Heim theory predicts that there is a linkage between electromagnetism and gravity, specifically that you can use one to create the other. That idea could potentially explain why they observed a greater force than expected from pure general relativity.
However, the scientists who measured this effect have another explanation for the extra force. The article mentions that if you assume the gravitons gain mass (as photons are assumed to do) in this superconductor experiment you can describe the increased strength of the field.
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.
actually, if you read the original paper (links posted by other people here), you will find they do refer to Podkletnov, but say that the results are different (but there setup is also a bit different, so...).