"Beam Me Up Scotty" Anti-gravity: Fact or Fiction?

Dearborn Highschool press release ^ | Russ Gibb

[ASA Vet]

"Beam Me Up Scotty" Anti-gravity: Fact or Fiction?

Dearborn High video/computer students are the first high school
students in the world to build an "antigravity???" machine for
2002-2003 Metro-Detroit Science Fair.

Yes, you can say impossible. Yes, you can say it defies Newton's
3rd law of gravity. Yes, you can say it's done with smoke and
mirrors. Nevertheless three teenage Dearborn High students,
Luke Duncan, 16, Ethan Rein, 17, and Jim Bergren, 16, built and flew
an "antigravity???" aircraft last Sunday in the school video/computer studio.

It has no fans, no jets, and no engines. It makes no sound, and
yet it flies. In fact the first time that the students flew the
craft it went up so fast and high that in future flights the
craft had to be tethered or it just kept going up and up.
The only power that is supplied to the beam ship is a thin electrical
conducting wire that connects to the fuselage of the
balsa wood and aluminum foil craft.

At first the students thought that it was working on a theory
called the ion wind, whereby electrons fly through the air
displacing air molecules thereby creating a small wind effect.
Yet recently a similar craft was built at Purdue University and
put in a vacuum chamber but it still flew. Oops, there goes
another theory.

The students have been working via phone and internet with
physicists and inventors all over the world to help them with
their project including the Russian physicist Dr. Podkletnov who
now lives in Finnland, The French Inventor Jean-Louis Naudin,
American inventor Russell Anderson, President of Applied Electrogravitics,
American Antigravity's Tim Ventura, their teacher Mr. Russ Gibb,
Michigan Technology Teacher of the Year 2000,
as well as many other people who have been building and working on lifters for years.
Please note, that many respected investigators of the antigravity phenomenon dispute that
beamship/lifter technology is an antigravity phenomen and say outright that it is not antigravity.
Students Luke, Jim, and Ethan say
"We don't know for sure what causes the craft to fly
and are simply investigated the different theories."

Interestingly, this year is the 100-year anniversary of the
Wright brothers first flight and also in the early 1900s, Nikola
Tesla, the electrical genius, and physicist George S. Piggot
were doing experiments on anti-gravity.

If you would like to see the craft take off and fly visit www.wdhsvideo.org

[ASA Vet]

Thanks, that's an interesting site.

[PatrickHenry]

There's a simple test to see whether the device is producing a downward thrust or not.

The article doesn't mention thrust. It's not powered at all, apparently. So if it works, it's something else. I'd put it near a mass detector to see if it's doing something really odd. (Note: In doing a Google for a reference to that device, I discovered that Robert Forward died in September, 2002. I hadn't known that. Good guy.)

[Saturnalia]

Ha, anyone can do this.
All you need to do is reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.

[neuron2]

>I'm all ears/eyes.

http://gcgordy.crosswinds.net/blainelev1.html

[Vinnie]

The first time I saw the trick I told my wife he had the soles of his sneakers cut out and was going up on his toes. The second time the trick was shown the camera was a street level and I could see under his feet. Of course editing could account for the illusion.
In any case, his card tricks alone are worth the price of admission.

BTW.. have you ever seen Michael Moshen? His manipulations using his hands are truly amazing.

[Gary Boldwater]

I don't think gravity does propagate at superluminal velocities. All action at a distance (EM, gravity, light) propagates through the same medium, the ether. If gravity was a summation of waves travelling in both directions (as in standing waves) then it (as a disturbance) could propagate at superluminal velocities. But if you take into account the time it takes to set up a standing wave pattern, it's not superluminal.

[Gary Boldwater]

The vertical vector of the earth's magnetic field is very small compared to the horizontal vectors. This would tend to drive the device sideways or in a circular path (remember charge must be in motion to react against a magnetic field). The earth does have a radial electric field of about 2mV/m (Handbook of Atmospheric Electrodynamics, CRC Press, Volland) and it could be reacting against this. But then is only one wire going to the device and is the other polarity grounded? Sounds similar John Galts atmospheric electricity motor.

[Physicist]

The vertical vector of the earth's magnetic field is very small compared to the horizontal vectors. This would tend to drive the device sideways or in a circular path

Forces from magnetic fields go as a cross product with the field direction, which is perpendicular to the field direction. But for the record, I don't think that's what's going on here.

[Physicist]

BTW, did you formerly have the screen name "Barry Goldwater"?

[Gary Boldwater]

The force is a cross product of velocity and field direction. You can't have a cross product of a field alone.

[Gary Boldwater]

Did you get the book?

[Physicist]

You can't have a cross product of a field alone.

I know. The point is that the cross product of the field and anything--the direction of your shoelaces, if you like--is going to be perpendicular to the field, so it can't be used to travel along the field.

Did you get the book?

Yes! Thank you very kindly. It was a thoughtful gesture, and much appreciated. I sent a Freep note of thanks to your old screen name, as I didn't know you'd changed. It looks pretty dense, but I'll try to work at least the first chapter into my hopelessly long reading list.

Ask RadioAstronomer, he's seen my backlog. :-)

[aruanan]

I don't think gravity does propagate at superluminal velocities.

Sure it does. This is why computations of orbits have to treat gravity as a more or less instantaneous force. If gravity propagated at the speed of light, nothing would stay in orbit around the sun for very long. So where you see the sun in the sky is 8.3 minutes behind where it actually is. However, the acceleration of the earth with respect to the visible sun is toward a point in the sky 8.3 minutes into the future, that is, toward where the sun actually is in the sky but is not seen to be because that light has only just left. Measurements put the speed of gravity at 2x10¹⁰ C, a bit faster than LaPlace's lower limit of 108 C.

You can see a more complete description of this here: 2. Gravity and light do not act in parallel directions.

There is no cause to doubt that photons arriving now from the Sun left 8.3 minutes ago, and arrive at Earth from the direction against the sky that the Sun occupied that long ago. But the analogous situation for gravity is less obvious, and we must always be careful not to mix in the consequences of light propagation delays. Another way (besides aberration) to represent what gravity is doing is to measure the acceleration vector for the Earth's motion, and ask if it is parallel to the direction of the arriving photons. If it is, that would argue that gravity propagated to Earth with the same speed as light; and conversely.

Such measurements of Earth's acceleration through space are now easy to make using precise timing data from stable pulsars in various directions on the sky. Any movement of the Earth in any direction is immediately reflected in a decreased delay in the time of arrival of pulses toward that direction, and an increased delay toward the opposite direction. In principle, Earth's orbit could be determined from pulsar timings alone. In practice, the orbit determined from planetary radar ranging data is checked with pulsar timing data and found consistent with it to very high precision.

How then does the direction of Earth's acceleration compare with the direction of the visible Sun? By direct calculation from geometric ephemerides fitted to such observations, such as those published by the U.S. Naval Observatory or the Development Ephemerides of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Earth accelerates toward a point 20 arc seconds in front of the visible Sun, where the Sun will appear to be in 8.3 minutes. In other words, the acceleration now is toward the true, instantaneous direction of the Sun now, and is not parallel to the direction of the arriving solar photons now. This is additional evidence that forces from electromagnetic radiation pressure and from gravity do not have the same propagation speed. [emphasis added]

[Swordmaker]

Patrick,

I built one of these lifters. They do indeed fly although they have to be tethered to their power source by the conductive wire that puts upwards of 20,000 volts on the top wire (you can see it in the videos). I used an old computer monitor and tapped off the charge on the CRT.

One theory of their flight is that electrons flowing from the charged wire "cathode" to the aluminum foil "anode" carry air molecules along with them and while the electrons are captured by the foil, the air continues in a downward motion. No one has provided any explanation of the air molecules' linkage to the frame of the lifter, though, to explain how this can be an opposite and equal reaction effect. The molecules were not part of the system being lifted... and the electrons are not either. The vacuum test reported by Purdue would seem to invalidate that theory.

Another theory is that there IS some electron leakage past the anode and the the electrons are constantly being replenished by the charging device. A closed system lifter would have problems as more and more electrons are ejected resulting in an ever growing positive charge on the lifter and ever increasing difficulty in throwing away more electrons. If this leakage (electrons being thrown downward providing thrust) exists, it should be detectable. I don't have the equipment to do it. Perhaps a lifter could be built inside a grounded lightweight faraday cage to completely capture all errant electrons and see if it will still "lift."

[PatrickHenry]

I built one of these lifters. They do indeed fly although they have to be tethered ...

Well, there's something else I wasn't aware of. That makes it about 10 billion things I don't know, and the list keeps growing. It seems like such "lifters" would make dandy desktop ornaments, etc. We should be seeing a lot of them around, if they consistently work.

[Swordmaker]

My problem is that the more I learn to reduce the list of things I don't know, the more they add to the list... about two to one... so for each thing I learn they add two more I don't. Damn, so much to know and so little brain...

As a desk ornament, the lifter would be a very dangerous thing... the voltage and amperage on the average CRT can kill you... at the very least it would knock you across the room.

[Brett66]

J Naudin just updated his website with a 5 meter lifter test, it's pretty impressive.

January 2003 : A 5 meters wide Lifter has been built and tested successfully by the Professor Saburo Yokokura and the students (Takayuki Muroi, Takanori Haraguchi) from the Meisei University of Japan. . This big Lifter has done a stable hovering at 15 meters above the ground. The voltage used during this experiment was 41 KV DC and the current 10.7 mA. The weight has not yet been measured due to the big size of this device.

A 5 meters wide Japanese Lifter

[Kevmo]

I built one of these lifters.

***I’m following up on some electrogravitics readings and was wondering if you have any published findings on what you built?

SubQuantum Kinetics, wide ranging unifying cosmology theory by Dr. Paul LaViolette

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1884938/posts
THE STARBURST FOUNDATION ^ | January 2007 | Dr. Paul LaViolette

[mad_as_he$$]

Doesn’t really matter Roddenberry rewrote all of Newton’s Laws!!! :-)