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Donnie B.
Skeptic Friend
417 Posts |
 Posted - 08/14/2002 : 18:42:44
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Today's "Fresh Air" program on National Public Radio (USA) featured a discussion with a British chap who's written a book called "The Search For the Zero Point", about efforts to find a workable anti-gravity machine. He claims that this goes back to pre- and during-WWII, that it was fairly big news in the 1950s, then faded away until recently.
The fellow sounded unbelievably credulous. He threw out vague references to Nazi secret projects, whose records and commanding officer vanished at the end of the war. He hinted that the '50s research may have succeeded but the results were somehow suppressed. He gave vague descriptions of machines that supposedly reduced gravity (he seemed to think that "spinning" was a key to the technique, though what was spinning, and how that reduced gravity, were pretty foggy).
And he threw out the name of one Dr. Puthoff as some sort of authority in the field. I wonder if this is the same Puthoff of the Puthoff and Targ ESP experiments?
Anyhow, I thought it was a pretty sad hour for NPR. (By the way, the host today was a substitute, not Terri Gross.)
-- Donnie B.
Brian: "No, no! You have to think for yourselves!" Crowd: "Yes! We have to think for ourselves!"
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 08/14/2002 : 21:18:29 [Permalink]
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quote:
He threw out vague references to Nazi secret projects, whose records and commanding officer vanished at the end of the war.
Because the Allies never thought to look at the ceiling.
quote:
Anyhow, I thought it was a pretty sad hour for NPR. (By the way, the host today was a substitute, not Terri Gross.)
Wonder if it was Daniel Pinkwater? He'd really like to reduce his own gravity.
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My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. ---Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860 |
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Cosmic string
New Member
USA
37 Posts |
Posted - 08/14/2002 : 21:26:57 [Permalink]
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I've been seeing the news media gobbling up this antigravity garbage. According to several news sources, Boeing and BAe are working on this impossibility. I think its just that crackpots have taken a valid project and twisted it around to promote their delusions. I believe they are actually working on coronal discharge propulsion. It's a long way from being useful, though; the biggest functional model I've seen is about 2 meters across and is made of balsa wood, mylar or aluminum foil, and the coronal discharge circuitry. They still need to be tied down to keep them from flying away uncontrolably. Here's a link to the (apparently credible) "Lifters" page:
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lifters.htm
As for the writer of "The Hunt for Zero Point"... His name is Nick Cook. He was an analyst for Jane's Defense Weekly for about a decade. He's been delusionally obsessing about Nazi antigravity stolen by the US for years. There is a very good critique (or should I say demolition) of his claims at Salon.com. Here's the link:
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/08/05/zero_gravity/
It mentioned in there that a Finnish scientist (unnamed) claimed he could "shield" objects from gravity using spinning superconductors (I think the claim was that the disc of superconductor lost weight when spinning quickly). No one could replicate the results, though some already antigravity nuts claimed they could (but refused to provide evidence). It claims that because of this, NASA is "interested enough that they are trying to replicate the results." Wrong. Congress snuck a small bill through demanding that almost $100,000,000 be devoted to "getting to the bottom of this antigravity thing." It included legislation requiring NASA to 'study' it. As for the superconductor stuff, I'm keen to point out that a rapidly spinning, huge superconductor is exactly what a pulsar is. So if the gravity of a spinning superconductor is reduced, then the mass of a pulsar should be reduced as it spins faster. But some neutron stars (including pulsars) are just more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit. So these pulsars should lose mass to the point that they can no longer gravitationally hold themselves so compact. So, if spinning semiconductors produce antigravity, then we should see pulsars either exploding or alternately violently expanding and violently contracting. We don't see this, so I must conslude that this doesn't cause antigravity.
Antigravity goes against many well-grounded and wildly successful (not to mention important) laws of physics. It would require negative mass and negative energy on macroscopic scales. That would make time loops possible. That would violate causality. If there were negative mass, that would make tachyons real, which aren't. It would go against everything we know about gravity and electromagnetism for a spinning superconducting disc to produce antigravity.
I thought this quote would be especially relavent to this topic:
"The first warning sign of voodoo science is that it's pitched directly to the media. Second, details of how it works are withheld. Third, a powerful establishment is said to be attempting to suppress it." --Robert L. Park |
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The SollyLama
Skeptic Friend
USA
234 Posts |
Posted - 08/27/2002 : 10:47:23 [Permalink]
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I did see some Discovery channel thing where researchers were using enormously powerful magnets to achieve anti-gravity for small objects, including a living frog. They did indeed float within the confines of the magnets. But I don't know if that's really anti-gravity.
For it to be anti-anything, wouldn't it have to work on the same principal, only in reverse? Flying an airplane isn't anti-gravity. Wouldn't you have to reverse the warp in space-time to achieve true anti-gravity?
And nothing really rocks, And nothing really rolls. And nothing's ever worth the cost. |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 08/27/2002 : 12:36:30 [Permalink]
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Wouldn't you have to reverse the warp in space-time to achieve true anti-gravity?
Sort of like those suction cup c clamp thingies they sell on infomercials to take little dings out of your fender.
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My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. ---Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860 |
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PhDreamer
SFN Regular
USA
925 Posts |
Posted - 08/27/2002 : 15:16:19 [Permalink]
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For it to be anti-anything, wouldn't it have to work on the same principal, only in reverse? Flying an airplane isn't anti-gravity. Wouldn't you have to reverse the warp in space-time to achieve true anti-gravity?
If relativity is accurate, I think you're right. If, however, quantum gravity is correct, it would take some kind of wholesale repelling of gravitons in order to escape their effects.
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
-D. Hume |
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