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First Steps Toward Artificial Gravity
Posted by
samzenpus
on Fri Mar 24, 2006 10:59 AM
from the stay-grounded dept.
from the stay-grounded dept.
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.""
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Forgot spaceships (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Forgot spaceships (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Forgot spaceships (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Forgot spaceships (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure about that. Consider the following analogies:
If you can create light, it should be easy to create antilight, i.e., darkness.
If you can create sound, it should be easy to create antisound, i.e., silence.
If you can create heat, it should be easy to creat antiheat, i.e., cold.
Parent
Re:Forgot spaceships (Score:5, Insightful)
Cold is defined as the absence of heat. There is no such thing as measuring how "cold" something is - heat is the intrinsic property, cold is just a lack of it.
Same thing with light.
A lack of gravity does not imply anti-gravity. It just means that spacetime is flat in that particular region (and of course we know it's never truly flat, there's always some deviation). Anti-gravity would be akin to emitting gravitons with a "negative gravitational charge" - it's possible in theory and that's about it as far as we've discovered.
Parent
Re:Forgot spaceships (Score:3, Interesting)
Noise-cancelling headsets. They create silence by inverting the external waveform. Effectively "antisound"
If you can create heat, it should be easy to creat antiheat, i.e., cold.
Refrigerator?
You have a point on the first one, however, and it's true that neither of those technologies are particularly "easy". Nevertheless, they're possible.
Re:Forgot spaceships (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Forgot spaceships (Score:5, Funny)
If you try to attach a shaft to the cat to transfer the rotational energy, the cat will stop trying to land on it's feet, and cling to the shaft. Thus no work is produced.
Attempts have been made to glue magnets to the cat, which is then suspended in a coil. However, it appears that the natural static charge produced by the cat seems to cancel out the expected induced current.
Experiments are continuing with *shaved* cats. I'm thinking about publishing some preliminary results, in hopes of winning an IgNoble.
Parent
Re:Forgot spaceships (Score:5, Funny)
Step one: Shave Shrodinger's cat with Occam's razor...
Parent
not a gravitational field (Score:5, Interesting)
Heim theory? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Supposedly, yes, Heim theory. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. [newscientistspace.com] Take it with a good-sized chunk of rock salt.
Parent
Not too much salt though (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:not a gravitational field (Score:3, Funny)
Did they detect an increase in mass? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Did they detect an increase in mass? (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe you misunderstood the parent of your post. If I understand that post correctly, he's referring to Newton's gravitational law. It states that the gravitational force between Object A and Object B is directly proportional to the product of the two masses.
So, in other words, your parent was asking: If we assume that the distance between two objects remains constant, as does the gravitational constant of the universe, shouldn't there be an increase in the mass of one of the objects to account for the gravitational force increasing?
Or, put more simply: Did the spinning superconductor experience an increase in mass (somehow?), or was it the universal gravitational constant that was (somehow?) affected by the spinning superconductor?
Parent
Re:Did they detect an increase in mass? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
More spinning superconductors (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:More spinning superconductors (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't it be funny if it turns out the scientists forgot that they were spinning their superconductors though Earth's magnetic field and thus generating a current which in turn caused their readings...
Re:More spinning superconductors (Score:3, Funny)
Of course! Don't you know that one of the basic tenets of quantum physics is that the observer always affects the experiment?
i don't know about you guys, (Score:5, Funny)
but i'm running scared [imdb.com]
Yevgeny Podkletnov (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yevgeny Podkletnov (Score:5, Interesting)
If you've read The Hunt for Zero Point by Nick Cook, Cook actually talks with Podkletnov about his "discovery". He then admits it wasn't a random experiment, but based off some Russian papers around WWII with some Nazi connections or something.
So really it's pseudoscience, and i'm sure the scientists mentioned in the article were both aware of Podkletnov's work and at the same time careful not to associate themselves with him. Just because it's pseudoscience doesn't mean nothing will come of it - it just means it's really unlikely. If you're interested in this sort of thing I recommend reading Cook's book, he worked for a military journal before deciding to explore the world of pseudoscience (the book almost has a mystery thriller aspect to it).
Podkletnov's Device: http://www.mufor.org/antigrav.html [mufor.org]
Parent
Hmm..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Path to Warp Drive (Score:3, Interesting)
Who cares? (Score:3, Funny)
Who cares about that, where's my flying car?!
What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevertheless, this is a very interesting discovery. Anyone have any other links?
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously that's because if they let on that it was artificial, elitist snobs would demand the real thing.
Like that time I got slapped for giving that lady artifical respiration..
Parent
I'm not that bright... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Slashdot misses the point again (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Orginal Paper Here (Score:5, Informative)
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0603033 [arxiv.org]
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.
Re:Orginal Paper Here (Score:5, Informative)
They measured accelerations with commercially available accelerometers. These were placed into steel boxes to act as Faraday cages and block EM radiation. They ran the experiment many times with non-superconductors and with the superconductors too warm to super-conduct, and found no effects.
There were no effects with high temperature superconductors, which their theory (a non-standard theory) predicted. There were also no effects when high-temp superconductors were lowered to liquid helium temperatures, which they also predicted.
The only effects they saw were with low-temp superconductors, niobium and lead. There were no effects above their superconducting temperatures.
They basically saw two effects. When accelerating a spinning superconducting ring, accelerometers located near a ring segment recorded an acceleration opposite to that experienced by the ring segment. So for example if this piece of the ring was spinning north, when they sped it up the accelerometers showed a southward force, and when they slowed it down the accelerometers showed a northward force.
The strongest reading was by an accelerometer inside the ring, but one located just above the ring was almost as strong. This was actually contrary to their (non-standard) theory, which predicted that the force should be mostly localized to the ring plane. But since their theory is completely blue-sky and non-standard, that perhaps doesn't mean too much.
The other effect they saw was with a constant spinning speed, lowering the temperature from non-superconducting to superconducting. As they passed through the critical temperature, the accelerometers again felt a force. It was noted that this force was in the opposite direction from the acceleration force, which I believe was also contrary to their (non-standard) theory.
They also briefly mentioned Podkletnov, but only to say their results were "very different" from his. They also said that they did not see any signs of the effects he reported, to the limits of their measurement. I would note that I think Podkletnov used a spinning disk while these guys used a spinning ring.
Overall it looks like a very careful experiment that did eliminate most sources of error. However the measured values were close to the noise limits of the accelerometers, which is always a little suspicious in science. The experiment definitely looks ready for replication. If it works it will turn gravitational theory on its head. There is no theory in existence that can account for these results. Not general relativity, not quantum gravity, and not even these guys' non-standard theory will work. Something completely new will be needed.
Parent
EM-Gravity coupling predicted by Heim Theory (Score:4, Informative)
Gravity? Or something else? (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:Small steps or large leaps (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Small steps or large leaps (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Small steps or large leaps (Score:3, Insightful)
While spinning is still probabl
Re:Not again! (Score:4, Interesting)
If true, this would be pretty much the biggest breakthrough since Einstein.
Parent
Who Invented the E-man? (Score:5, Funny)
And what a breakthrough he was! I don't recall who invented him, but man, they don't build jews like that anymore...
Parent
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Informative)
It's called science fiction for a reason.
Exactly. It is called science fiction for a reason.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Awesome (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Funny)
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?
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Funny)
Have you watched any Hollywood movies lately?
Re:What is gravity? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Can someone help explain? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Not quite. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:been arround since 1997, this stuff, google it (Score:3, Insightful)
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?