Anti-Gravity.What's the truth?

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Justforfun000
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Anti-Gravity.What's the truth?

Post by Justforfun000 »

I know this story isn't exactly new, but I came across it in relation to other things and I would like some opinions. I find it interesting that the suggestion of a "scientific conspiracy" could actually have validity when it involves challenges to certain established theories that would upset the applecart so radically.

Obviously this is research that has not been disproved or completely confirmed yet, and that in itself is very interesting....

Comments?

http://www.enterprisemission.com/anti-grav.htm
NASA Finally Admits to Anti-Gravity Research --
Are They Trying to Prove it, or Kill it?

Some four years after the story first broke publicly about anti-gravity research being conducted by NASA, the space agency has finally admitted that the research has indeed taken place. In a space.com article that appeared in late September of this year, the nature and character of the research carried out since 1996 was revealed. As we first reported to you at that time, September of 1996, the research centers around the claims of a Finnish physicist, Dr Eugene Podkletnov, at Tampere University of Technology in Finland. While working on experiments on superconducting materials, Podkletnov and a colleague discovered what appeared to be a slight drop in the weight of objects suspended above the experiment cell. The cell, which consisted of a rapidly spinning disc of superconducting ceramic suspended in the magnetic field of three electric coils, was then tested with a variety of materials and objects suspended above it, with measurable and consistent effects. In each case, the objects suspended above the rotating magnetic fields lightened by from 0.5 percent to 2 percent, the latter achieved when a second counter rotating magnetic field was placed above the first. The team found that even the air pressure vertically above the device dropped slightly, with the effect detectable directly above the device on every floor of the laboratory.



Podkletnov and his team promptly submitted their work to one of the leading physics journals in the world, the Holland Journal of Physics, called Physica C. The paper not only survived the scrutiny of peer review, but was published back in 1992. In 1995, the Max Planck Institute of Physics did a follow up study, and was able to confirm the results. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, both the initial research and the Planck Institute confirmation were virtually ignored by the media in the United States.

And this is where things start to get interesting.

Podkletnov was then forced to withdraw a follow up paper submitted to the British Journal of Physics-D: Applied Physics, published by Britain's Institute of Physics. While the paper had passed all scrutiny and peer review, one of Podkletnov's co-author's suddenly and inexplicably withdrew his name from the paper without explanation. He then subsequently denied having done any of the research at all. A follow on investigation showed that he had indeed participated in the work, but for some reason lost his nerve at the last minute.

Given the significance of such a discovery, it is initially curious that a scientist would seek to be removed from receiving credit for it.
Yet in the context of what had happened to Pons and Fleischmann over "cold fusion" just a few years before, it makes more sense. Pons and Fleischmann were vilified by the scientific community and the press when it was reported by M.I.T. (the leading recipient of Federal funding for "Hot Fusion" research that they had failed to reproduce the results reported by the two University of Utah chemists. This finding by M.I.T. has been used as the basis for denying all attempts to patent a "cold fusion" device in the United States. What was never reported was that Dr. Eugene Mallove of M.I.T. had subsequently discovered that the data presented in M.I.T.'s response had been edited, and that the M.I.T. device had indeed produced more energy than had been put into it. M.I.T. had simply made sure that no one in the United States would take "cold fusion" seriously, thereby guaranteeing their steady supply of "hot fusion" funding. Like "cold fusion" and "extraterrestrial artifacts," "anti-gravity" is a so-called "third rail" of science. One of those subjects you just don't touch if you want to have a career.

To most modern scientists and institutions, the notion that gravity can be cancelled out, especially to the tune of 2%, is extremely threatening. Einstein argued that gravity is essentially geometry, a bending of space-time, rather than a force that can be counteracted. What Podkletnov's experiments and the Planck confirmation show is that Einstein was wrong, and that gravity can be significantly reduced. To face such a concept, that the so-called "laws of physics" are not "laws" at all, throws the whole set of assumptions of modern day physics into disarray. This has led to a rather severe backlash from the few scientists who have even heard of the work of Podkletnov or the NASA team.

"The theory of gravity is fairly well established, and I don't see it reversing itself," said Francis Slakey, a professor of physics at Georgetown University. The NASA project is "wasted money that could have been used to do legitimate space science," he added.

Even so, NASA quietly assembled a team at the University of Alabama and funded by the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville to confirm the results. Ron Koczor, assistant director for science and technology at the Space Science Laboratory in NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, put together a team led by Ning Li, a Chinese physicist. They attempted to build a machine of their own and reproduce Podkletnov's results. We had received reports from the inside that they had in fact accomplished a positive result -- that they had confirmed Podkletnov's results, but apparently this is not the case. When they failed to do so, the whole project fell apart. Li was accused by Koczor of spending more effort on proving her theories about how the effect was created rather than producing a working device. She then left for her native China, presumably to carry on her work for the communist government there. Podkletnov quickly distanced himself from the work, saying that the machine had not been built to his specifications. One observer, the university's Larry Smalley, a physics professor, implied that whole project was doomed from the outset and and says NASA simply failed to assemble a competent team of scientists who could give the project a serious chance. The events "amused me, stunned me and upset me," said Smalley. "It made me feel like they wasted time, a lot of money and a really golden opportunity to do something."

So why bother to do the research at all? Maybe because NASA knows that the failure of their project would have the same chilling effect (pun intended) on anti-gravity research in this country that M.I.T.'s "failure" had on cold fusion research.

But wouldn't NASA want to have a working anti-gravity device? Wouldn't that make their job so much easier?

Maybe. But it would also open the door to the one non-mainstream theory that predicts the exact anti-gravity effect that Podkletnov seems to have discovered: Richard C. Hoagland's Hyperdimensional physics. As Hoagland has discussed on many occasions, Dr. Bruce Depalma conducted numerous experiments on the effect of rotation and rotational magnetic fields on gravity. These experiments fit quite nicely within Hoagland's models of Hyperdimensional force, and Podkletnov's experiments would seem to be a confirmation of those earlier Depalma experiments. Obviously, Hoagland is the last person NASA would want to benefit from the discovery of a gravity shielding effect.

Fortunately, NASA has decided to fund another round of research and has contracted an Ohio firm to build a machine to Podkletnov's specifications. Hopefully this time around the space agency will commit the necessary resources to properly test what Podkletnov and the Planck Institute have already confirmed.

We assure you, we will step lightly around this issue, and watch the unfolding of this potentially revolutionary discovery very closely.
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Post by GrandMasterTerwynn »

The Enterprise Mission is run by Richard C. Hoagland, the same crackpot who believes the Evil Government is running a conspiracy to deny that there were ancient alien civilizations on Mars and the Moon. He's a staple among the same reason-deprived UFO tinfoil hat freaks who listened to Art Bell late at night. He's been discredited repeatedly by the skeptical and scientific communities. This sounds like him attempting to fit backfit legitimate exploratory research into his deluded view of the world.
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Post by Count Dooku »

That as it may be, what is the future of anti-gravity? Is it plausible (beyond mag-lev style cars and trains), or is it something that will be left to science fiction?
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Post by FSTargetDrone »

In 2003 at a hobby show I attended, there was a vendor called Applied Electrogravitics which was demonstrating "consumer antigravity" in its booth.

They were displaying several triangular models of a "beamship," one of which was floating in the booth. It was tethered to a stool, but there were no supporting wires or the like anywhere above it or anything behind it, holding it up. Barely visible in the last 2 pictures linked below are the tethers keeping it in the booth. It sort of drifited a bit, like a balloon tied to a weight, but didn't move around very much.

From the website:
Three strings and two hair-thin stainless-steel wires are all that keep the model from climbing skyward, rapidly!

This model only requires 24-30 Watts-DC to maintain a stable hover.
The website hasn't been updated since 2003 and there's a whiff of conspiracy theory (UFOs, etc.) there if you look through it all.

Some larger pictures:

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Floating 1

Floating 2 (one of the the tether lines can be seen coming off of the center white ball under the model)

Floating 3

Floating 4

Table Model
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Post by FSTargetDrone »

Sorry, that should be, "Barely visible in the first 3 pictures..."
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Post by Duckie »

The effect that causes balsa wood and tinfoil "kites" to float is well known and explained by modern science. I can't exactly remember the name so I can't get it, but I hope somebody else can.
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Post by FSTargetDrone »

MRDOD wrote:The effect that causes balsa wood and tinfoil "kites" to float is well known and explained by modern science. I can't exactly remember the name so I can't get it, but I hope somebody else can.
It's the Biefeld-Brown effect which I neglected to insert in my post.

So it's useful if you want to build flying toys, I suppose. :)
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Post by Guardsman Bass »

I remember reading a lot of articles about Podkletnov's research a long time back. The main problem, as I remember it, was that nobody else could duplicate the effects with the same experiment.
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Post by SirNitram »

Count Dooku wrote:That as it may be, what is the future of anti-gravity? Is it plausible (beyond mag-lev style cars and trains), or is it something that will be left to science fiction?
Oh, it exists.

There's one itty, bitty, teeny, tiny problem.

To get noticable effects and influence of it you need scales roughly half the universe's diameter.
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Post by Count Dooku »

SirNitram wrote:Oh, it exists.

There's one itty, bitty, teeny, tiny problem.

To get noticable effects and influence of it you need scales roughly half the universe's diameter.
What does that mean for anti-gravity's future? From your statement, I can only infer that we'll never see helicopters replaced by vehicles equipped with an anti-gravity generator.
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Post by SirNitram »

Count Dooku wrote:
SirNitram wrote:Oh, it exists.

There's one itty, bitty, teeny, tiny problem.

To get noticable effects and influence of it you need scales roughly half the universe's diameter.
What does that mean for anti-gravity's future? From your statement, I can only infer that we'll never see helicopters replaced by vehicles equipped with an anti-gravity generator.
Completely unknowable. It's feasible we could find some way to replicate the effect much more easily, but it's also very likely we never will.
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Post by Jadeite »

What about the Hutchinson effect? There'd need to be better ways of controlling it obviously, giving its tendency to make things snap in half, catch fire, or merge together.

That could be a nasty accident.

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Post by Winston Blake »

To face such a concept, that the so-called "laws of physics" are not "laws" at all, throws the whole set of assumptions of modern day physics into disarray. This has led to a rather severe backlash from the few scientists who have even heard of the work of Podkletnov or the NASA team.
Hur, hur, hur, those silly ivory tower scientists with all their laws, they're just afraid of anything new.

I don't know for sure, but what i recall about Ning Li's project was that it was looking into gravitomagnetism, the same thing Gravity Probe B was all about and a well-known part of relativity. Instead of an Earth-mass spinning very slowly, they were studying ion-sized masses spinning extremely fast. AFAIK it wasn't some clandestine anti-gravity project fraught with intrigue.

NASA looks into a lot of stuff just to see if it's worth anything, they're like the Department of Defence. IIRC they went and studied the effect behind the 'ion wind' Lifters mentioned earlier and clearly showed that it didn't work in a decent vacuum and was fully accounted for by current physics.
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Post by Ariphaos »

Winston Blake wrote:NASA looks into a lot of stuff just to see if it's worth anything, they're like the Department of Defence. IIRC they went and studied the effect behind the 'ion wind' Lifters mentioned earlier and clearly showed that it didn't work in a decent vacuum and was fully accounted for by current physics.
But you'll have a hard time finding that out from the crackpots above. Hell, they don't even credit the Biefeld-Brown effect, for crying out loud.
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Post by Dooey Jo »

What's the truth about anti-gravity? Well that depends on how you define it. If it's simply a means for producing a force to counteract gravity, then there could be a billion different ways of doing that (like airplanes, for example).

But if it is some kind of reverse gravity or something that creates "anti-gravitons", then things start to get less probable (especially in the latter case as gravitons, if they even exist, might well be their own antiparticle). To create a field that repels objects gravitationally you'd need exotic matter, which may or may not even exist (AFAIK no currently used models predict particles with such properties).
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Post by kheegster »

I tend to be skeptical of people claiming wonderful, revolutionary discoveries when no one else seems to be able to replicate their results, whether it be cold fusion or anti-gravity.

Dooey Jo wrote:
But if it is some kind of reverse gravity or something that creates "anti-gravitons", then things start to get less probable (especially in the latter case as gravitons, if they even exist, might well be their own antiparticle). To create a field that repels objects gravitationally you'd need exotic matter, which may or may not even exist (AFAIK no currently used models predict particles with such properties).
There is only one useful model of particle physics at the moment, the Standard Model, and indeed it predicts no such exotic particles.
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Post by drachefly »

I was okay with this article until they veered off into nutso-land in paragraph 6.

Anti-gravity does not directly mean that Einstein was wrong. It can just mean that there are some situations which have unusal stress tensors, and thus abnormal gravity.

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Post by Darth Wong »

Whenever an article states or implies that "mainstream science" is actually afraid to acknowledge or investigate something, that should be considered a huge red flag for pseudoscientific bullshit. When they try to make it seem as if there's some "conspiracy of silence" on the part of the establishment, you can pretty much bet money that it's pure tinfoil-hat bullshit.

Usually if you investigate something like that, you find that a lot of their factual claims are simply untrue. I still remember one creationist E-mailing me about a physicist whose theories were somewhat controversial and who was "silenced" and driven out of the scientific community, when in fact the guy continues to have a highly respected position. Don't be afraid to question whether some of these stories of intimidation and censorship are either totally false or massively exaggerated.
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Post by Crown »

Darth Wong wrote:Whenever an article states or implies that "mainstream science" is actually afraid to acknowledge or investigate something, that should be considered a huge red flag for pseudoscientific bullshit. When they try to make it seem as if there's some "conspiracy of silence" on the part of the establishment, you can pretty much bet money that it's pure tinfoil-hat bullshit.
Especially when you have to wonder why for the love of Zeus' butthole 'mainstream science' would want to shut out anti-grav. This kind of tech (if it's cheap and easy) would blow the fucking socks off the space industry, and would be fucking hard currency to which ever university/company brings it to the table and patents it first.
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Post by Justforfun000 »

Darth Wong wrote:
Whenever an article states or implies that "mainstream science" is actually afraid to acknowledge or investigate something, that should be considered a huge red flag for pseudoscientific bullshit. When they try to make it seem as if there's some "conspiracy of silence" on the part of the establishment, you can pretty much bet money that it's pure tinfoil-hat bullshit.

Crown Wrote:
Especially when you have to wonder why for the love of Zeus' butthole 'mainstream science' would want to shut out anti-grav. This kind of tech (if it's cheap and easy) would blow the fucking socks off the space industry, and would be fucking hard currency to which ever university/company brings it to the table and patents it first.
I understand this and normally this is exactly what I assume. I was a little unsure in this case because the actual science behind this seems to be sound, just neglected as to verification after apparently being shoddily recreated in the first attempt by NASA. It was the author of the article above who added his own assumption of potential 'conspiracy', not the originators. I just thought considering the entire circumstances that it might for once be a remote possibility due to the magnitude of the discovery. Or at least, the way that he is making it sound it would refute established theories.

Has anyone gone to the original Finnish scientists and read their story? I was particularly curious if anyone understood it and could dumb it down for me. It's way over my head with the technical terms as to what might be happening to gravity.
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Post by kheegster »

Justforfun000 wrote:[

I understand this and normally this is exactly what I assume. I was a little unsure in this case because the actual science behind this seems to be sound, just neglected as to verification after apparently being shoddily recreated in the first attempt by NASA. It was the author of the article above who added his own assumption of potential 'conspiracy', not the originators. I just thought considering the entire circumstances that it might for once be a remote possibility due to the magnitude of the discovery. Or at least, the way that he is making it sound it would refute established theories.

Has anyone gone to the original Finnish scientists and read their story? I was particularly curious if anyone understood it and could dumb it down for me. It's way over my head with the technical terms as to what might be happening to gravity.
Just because a paper has been accepted into a journal doesn't mean it is necessarily sound science. Russi Taleyarkhan's experiments on bubble fusion were published in no less a publication than Nature. yet it is hotly contested and has not yet been reproduced by other groups.

In this case, I think that this particular paper that's been published as a report of the experiment, regarding a curious aberration from the expected results. For all we know this phenomenon could be little more than an experimental factor which they failed to take into account. It takes a lot more than just a small paper like this to suggest the existence of anti-gravity: we'll need a variety of reproducible experiments based on different methods before the scientific community would accept something is really there.

A misconception many laypeople have is that a published scientific paper has to contain something groundbreaking. It doesn't necessarily have to be. A reasonably prolific scientist can pull off about a dozen papers a year (I'm referring to physicists...not to sure about the other sciences), and I know of scientists to average something like a paper a week.
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Post by drachefly »

Though to put that figure in perspective, a respectably busy physicist can also be in the position of putting out a paper every eight months.
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Post by Wyrm »

Justforfun000 wrote:I was a little unsure in this case because the actual science behind this seems to be sound, just neglected as to verification after apparently being shoddily recreated in the first attempt by NASA. It was the author of the article above who added his own assumption of potential 'conspiracy', not the originators. I just thought considering the entire circumstances that it might for once be a remote possibility due to the magnitude of the discovery. Or at least, the way that he is making it sound it would refute established theories.

Has anyone gone to the original Finnish scientists and read their story? I was particularly curious if anyone understood it and could dumb it down for me. It's way over my head with the technical terms as to what might be happening to gravity.
If they were claiming that spinning magnetic fields create antigravity. I would ask them, what about pulsars? Pulsars are the giggest, strongest, fastest-spinning magnets in the universe, with magnetic intensities on the order of of 1-1000 trillion gauss (compared to the Earth's puny 0.5-1 gauss, and a typical superconducting magnet's 90 kilogauss. The upper end of this scale are magnetars), and rotation rates on the order of 1000-1 million rps (compared to a few thousand rpm of for a hard drive disk, and superconductors tend to be brittle when they're cold enough to be in their superconducting state).

If puny little superconducting magnets rotating at puny rates of rotation can produce as much as a 2% reduction in gravity, then think about how much effect this would have in a typical pulsar! The effect should be enough to see some very interesting and obvious deviations in the predicted physical characteristics of neutron stars, which is related indirectly to their rates of rotation. (Pulsars have to be really damn small to rotate as fast as they do, and pretty damn massive to keep as good time as they do.)

Really, astrophysicists should've detected the effect first. This is why I'm more than a bit sceptical in the antigravity results if a rather weak, slowly spinning magnetic field is the cause.
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Post by Enola Straight »

Don't Pulsars and Quasars have jets of ejected material at each pole, material ejected at neat the speed of light?

Is some other force than "anti-gravity" pushing material away from such high gravity masses?
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