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
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'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.
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
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?!
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?
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" -
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.
... 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.
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
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.
Have you watched any Hollywood movies lately?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
My guess is that it was a perspective trick - like you sometimes get in funhouses, you know? The slope was steeper than it looked, and your brain interpreted the conflicting information from your eyes and your inner ear as a horizontal force.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
All good points.
Now, would you care to comment on the likelihood that the scientists conducting this research thought of these same factors, and accounted for them in their experimental methodology?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Don't you think that's a bit trivial? The impact of the ability to manipulate gravity is enormous. Your comment reminds me of the guy who posted that he was looking forward to teleportation reducing his commute time.
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.
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 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.
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?
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
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.
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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!
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.
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I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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.
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.
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.