NASA Developing Antigravity Device

Cosmiverse ^ | March 26, 2002 08:20 CST

[Texaggie79]

Dude, my science ping list sucks.......

[Focault's Pendulum]

With my luck...New Jersey DMV will find a way to pass strict emission tests that will interfere with my right to float.

[snowfox]

Sure. They defund the Supercollider, but then they pay for this pie-in-the-sky crap. What next? Cold fusion? I guess that one has already been tried. And to think that there are those who wonder why, when we have already made it to the moon, we are still stuck in earth orbit. It's because we are wasting our dollars on this Star Trek crap.

/end rant

[Texaggie79]

I remember as a kid, I thought that NASA had anti-gravity rooms that astronauts trained in.

I think that it is imperative that we make some. There has GOT to be a way. I mean, gravity is ultimately magnetism, in technical terms, so... I think using magnets is a logical step to dealing with it.

[snowfox]

I mean, gravity is ultimately magnetism, in technical terms, so...

I don't mean to nitpick on you, but that is common misconception. Gravity is one of the four fundemental atomic forces, the others being the weak/strong nuclear force, and electromagnetism. The problem with anti-gravity is that if it is possible, then most of what we know about sub-atomic nuclear interaction is wrong. I am not a physicist, but I have read quite a bit on this, and if my understanding is correct, it is that gravity is a fundamental force, weak but omnipresent. The thing with gravity, unlike the other forces is that it can't be overcome or separated from, because it is everywhere, and everything exerts a little gravity. Some good reading on this specific subject is the revised edition of Stephen Hawkings' A Breif History Of Time. The added chapters specifically address gravity and black holes, which Proffessor Hawking was the first to theorize.

[Texaggie79]

I'm not anything close to a physicist, however I do understand the concept of all mass attracting each other. Thus, the more mass something has, the more it attracts.

What I don't get is if this devise is trying to simply block the gravitational pull by setting up a shield, or does it, in essence, reduce the mass of the object in question, thus reducing it's pull?

[Physicist]

Since his paper appeared a decade ago, Podkletnov told the LA Times that many people have successfully replicated his results. But they all have yet to report them in a peer-reviewed journal.

All those who have published have failed to detect any clear results.

Not much I can add to that. Until and unless somebody does detect a clear result and submit it for scrutiny, it really doesn't belong in the newspapers.

[snowfox]

If you can reduce the mass of an object without changing the actual object, then forget anti-gravity, because that is the golden key to achieving light-speed. I however, would be very skeptical, to say the least.

I was studying to become a (astronomical) physicist many years ago at University of Arizona, before I had the epiphany of getting my first computer. I quickly switched majors.

[Physicist]

I think that it is imperative that we make some. There has GOT to be a way.

I'm not sure why you say that. You can cancel out electromagnetic fields because electromagnetism is a vector force. There are positive and negative charges with which you can make dipoles. Gravity, on the other hand, is a tensor force. There are only positive charges and the mathematical structure of the field does not permit a non-zero dipole moment (which is what you need for antigravity).

I mean, gravity is ultimately magnetism, in technical terms, so...

Well, no, it's not.

[snowfox]

Physicist is dead right on this. If no one else can repeat the experiment, it's not science, it's magic and we shouldn't be wasting our tax dollars on it.

[Ditto]

Remember this from the labs of good old Diet Smith?

[CougarGA7]

Another thing to consider is that magnetism only occurs in metals (Iron and Cobalt are the only two I can think of that are magnetic). This means that if gravity was basically magnetism, an asteroid that had a large mass but no iron or cobalt traces in them would have no gravitaional attractions exerted by it or on it. Thats not what happens.

[freedom9]

does antimatter produce antigravity?

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Will the device reduce taxes?

[Physicist]

does antimatter produce antigravity?

No, antimatter has a positive mass that acts just the same as in ordinary matter.

In actual fact, gravity isn't coupled to mass per se, but to energy density. (In practice, it works out to just about the same thing, because the energy of a macroscopic object is going to be overwhelmingly dominated by the rest mass energy, E=mc²). There's only one kind of energy, and while it might be configured into matter, antimatter or free energy, it's still the same stuff, and it generates gravity the same way.

[Texaggie79]

Did you check out that New type of matter thread?

[Physicist]

I did, thanks for the ping.

[Texaggie79]

Seriously? Cause I can stop. It's just that you the only scientist I can think of on FR. You are my entire science ping list.

[parsifal]

I have found a new type of "thread" here on FR. (I'm lost). PS- Have I missed anything the last few weeks. Been to busy to get on net much. I finally did and WHAM!!! - everything here has changed. I have been trying to self search and mrs.parsifal threw a bucket of cold-water on me. parsifal.