Monday, August 27, 2007

Gravity Generator

I'm reading a fairly technical paper that shows that rotating superconductors may affect gravity fields[pdf].

...a clear azimuthal acceleration, which could be associated with an anomalous gravitational field, directly proportional to the superconductive ring angular acceleration, and an angular velocity orthogonal to the ring’s equatorial plane, which could be associated with an anomalous gravitomagnetic field, have been measured in type-(1) and type-(2) experiments respectively...
This is pretty big if true. It means we will some day figure out how to make gravity generators. Or possibly even gravity nullifiers. At least on a small scale.

Very interesting.

6 comments:

Snake Oil Baron said...

While it is hard to know if there will be any technique for increasing the effect to the point where it could be technologically useful, the importance to science of such a verification would be great.

Cormac said...

Right if we know about the electro-weak force, and we know that's related to the strong nuclear force... this will show a link between the electromagnetic and gravitational forces. This would shake physics to it's core, that's like the "Theory of Everything", or whatever way the press spin it.

I had a quick look at this when it came up on reddit last week, the difference is so small that it's almost certainly a slight error in calculation or calibration. It's like looking for gravitons, the change is so small that it could be a crow landing ontop of the building the instruments are in (or something to that affect) :)

M. Simon said...

Cormac-Ballz,

Yes. Most likely experimental error.

I ran this by Lubos who had not seen it before and he was sceptical.

However, there was the non-gravitational effect (I forget which one) that hasn't been explained for 20 years and has been reproduced.

So the fact that they nailed that one with the same hypothesis is at least a little encouraging.

And yes again. A revolution.

Snake Oil Baron said...

I seem to remember that NASA or the JPL or some organization was going to try an experiment like this with a much bigger superconductive ring than had been tried before to see if the effect could be observed in a more definitive manner. I suspect that the complications of making a ring on a larger scale that could survive the experiment would make this a long project and I don't know how one would find out if the project did not show the hoped for effects. For all I know the project might never have gone forward. This is the same effect that that Finish researcher felt he noted and then retracted is it not? or am I confusing two experiments.

M. Simon said...

Baron,

I'm not familiar with the Finnish experiment.

I came across this while I was looking for something else and thought it was interesting. Lubos Motl thinks it is experimental error.

Possibly, except the explanation covers an anomaly known for 20 years.

Anonymous said...

I’ve read all of Tajmar and de Matos’ papers, and I was very impressed by the meticulous controls employed with their on-going ‘laboratory gravitomagnetism’ experiments. Most notably, the appearance of the acceleration field (~1mm/sec2, iirc) as the ring temp dropped into the superconducting range and the disappearance of the effect as the temperature was raised. That’s difficult to dismiss as experimental error. So is the absence of the effect with other substances, like high-T superconductors. Tajmar strikes me as a very thorough and skeptical experimentalist.

I was also impressed by the several years of first-rate papers which the researchers have published as they’ve explored the theoretical implications of the anomalous Cooper-pair masses which were first discovered during the R&D process for the Gravity Probe B gyroscopes, and reported by Tate, if memory serves. This is credible science by highly-accredited researchers, not some flash in the pan by some eccentric way out on the fringe (like the dubious Tampere experiment which previously claimed a gravitational shielding effect).

However, the Canterbury laser ring group recently attempted a replication of Tajmar’s reported effect (though under a rather different experimental set-up), and concluded that if there is some form of amplified Lense-Thirring effect, it’s at least 21 times smaller than Tajmar’s predicted value: http://www2.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~physrin/papers/SuperFrameDragging2007.pdf

I hope that this won’t kill further efforts to replicate Tajmar’s results, because I think that an effect this important warrants an actual replication, not simply a loose approximation of the initial experimental conditions.