Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle#Tests_of...
Every experiment anyone has ever tried has come up empty. The equivalence principle is a postulate (Einstein's "happiest idea") that underlies General Relativity, making it essential to test.
(Source: This is literally what I do for a living.)
It is extremely difficult for modifications of gravity to simultaneously fit the cosmic microwave background, big-bang nucleosynthesis, galactic rotation curves, and the Bullet Cluster. The safe bet these days is on some sort of non-baryonic dark particle (which is why so many people are looking for them). Most other loopholes are closed or in the process of being closed.
The coming decade or two should have something significant to say about dark matter. We will either discover its nature or severely constrain its properties through a plethora of varied experiments and searches.
Of course you are risking that he eventually proves your hover board is impossible.
It's a bit like exploding an apple and measuring all the bits that fly of and missing some bits. Whilst we do not know what the apple looked like initially, we are from our measurements, trying to reconstruct that apple.
How convinced are we that their is dark matter and not a case of how we have measured things so far. Hence, differences in results based upon how we measure are evident, whilst many are close to the same, they just don't exactly match up - hence - dark matter theory.
How likely is it that dark matter as we know it - does exist?
To a high degree of approximation, Einstein's predictions are very, very correct. We are trying to look very carefully at Nature because we don't think we have the whole story.
It is possible that Einstein is exactly right. If so, we would never be able to describe the four forces of Nature with one unified theory. Today, we need two theories to describe everything we see -- the quantum-mechanical/particle-physics description of the Standard Model and gravity. There is no quantum-mechanical fuzziness in the mathematics of gravity, and there is no hint of the differential geometry of gravity in the mathematics of the Standard Model. The aspiration of almost every fundamental-physics physicist is to find a way to either simplify the Standard Model or connect it with gravity.
If the return on investment seems insufficent, know, too, that the technology we develop to push the boundaries of knowledge has important spin-offs. GPS is impossible without corrections from both special relativity and general relativity. The instrumentation we develop to make gravitational experiments possible on earth requires the development of new classes of seismometer [1] that may open new understanding of Earth's dynamics and allow better chip-fabrication instrumentation. The instrumentation developed to test gravity in space is also being used to measure the movement of mass (i.e. ice and water) on Earth's surface [2].
Even more important is the training we provide to students. Just as athletes train in the gym to get stronger, confrontation with the hardest known technical problems provides an efficient path for students and young faculty to become proficient at the entire range of modern measurement science. Alumni from our group have not only gone on to fancy academic positions, but also helped to redefine the kilogram, designed upgraded digital calipers used by tens of thousands of people worldwide, built key components of a major quantum-computing company's infrastructure, and more.
The people who work on these kinds of experiments are making a fraction of what they could make in industry. We are doing it for love, not money, and the returns to society are myriad.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03084 [2] https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/
Personally, particle physics irritates me because I don't believe in particles... It's all vibrations, man :)
It's the industry that's keeping talented people out by giving them mundane or bullshit jobs, and not leaving any space for long-term research and vision.
Yeah, instead of understanding the universe and core applications we could have more BS gadgets...
I am sorry to hear that - it will be a loss for Eöt-Wash.
By "financialization," I mean deciding which research projects get funding based on their expected measurable results, i.e., based on some rate of return that can be estimated today. If a research project can lead to more citations soon, or slightly better products soon, or lower costs soon, etc., it will get funding. Otherwise, it will not.
As a consequence, research projects with uncertain payoff but potentially transformational long-term benefits are... neglected.
:-(
It's all right to decry financialization of research, but it is a very difficult problem to solve.
People who have dedicated their life to science should get more than 20%. Say, 50%: "Spend 50% of money/time/people on the funded project, 50% however you want."
I think my 50/50 idea would work quite well. Scientists still would have to demonstrate and justify the value of near-term projects to get funding, but would also get the resources they need to fund long-term projects with impossible-to-estimate present value.
I appreciate your comments in general, but I feel that this point needs to be tempered. Yes there are corrections due to SR and GR effects in GNSS, but they tend to get lost in the morass of the least squares residuals compared to all the other much bigger effects, like clock errors, orbital errors, ionosphere delays, etc, etc.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
"There is an interesting story about this frequency offset. At the time of launch of the NTS-2 satellite (23 June 1977), which contained the first Cesium atomic clock to be placed in orbit, it was recognized that orbiting clocks would require a relativistic correction, but there was uncertainty as to its magnitude as well as its sign. Indeed, there were some who doubted that relativistic effects were truths that would need to be incorporated [5]! A frequency synthesizer was built into the satellite clock system so that after launch, if in fact the rate of the clock in its final orbit was that predicted by general relativity, then the synthesizer could be turned on, bringing the clock to the coordinate rate necessary for operation. After the Cesium clock was turned on in NTS-2, it was operated for about 20 days to measure its clock rate before turning on the synthesizer [11]. The frequency measured during that interval was +442.5 parts in 10^12 compared to clocks on the ground, while general relativity predicted +446.5 parts in 10^12. The difference was well within the accuracy capabilities of the orbiting clock. This then gave about a 1% verification of the combined second-order Doppler and gravitational frequency shift effects for a clock at 4.2 earth radii."
It makes sense that offset corrections can be handled by a lumped model, as any relativistic corrections on timescales longer than an orbit will be constants of the satellite orbit. Making sub-orbit-duration corrections might require a model that captures more of the relevant physics.
The problem is researchers are far more likely to express their interested in X to the public - quite right - since that must be their passion for the significant focus required to follow that path. This is what the public find so unintuitive, we need to focus on X to benefit from Y, although we don't know what Y is, but it has the potential to be far more useful than anything more direct.
Reminds me of the more literal explanation in a letter by Ernst Stuhlinger at NASA in response to a similar question:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/10/26/even...
For two important reasons:
1. as a species we must maintain technical capability to perform certain types of experiments - only way to 100% be sure we do this is by re-doing those experiments periodically
2. the fact that the "laws" of physics are fixed in any sense of the word, or that there even are such things as "laws of nature" is at its core a very very likely but UNPROVEN ASSUMPTION... we should always be open to the possibility that we live in a much stranger universe than we imagine and that the laws of physics themselves could vary and that we mush have capability to re-discover the new/changed laws, or to poke deeper at meta-laws
Also (2) is not as much lunacy as it sounds considering that the most likely (in the sense of "mathematically probable" considering the math of probability and information, not in "what we can determine experimentally with our primitive capabilities") setup from our universe models is more like we're in an N-th level "simulation" (a simulation in a simulation ... etc.) maybe running on a something like a "Boltzmann brain" in hell knows what soup of multiverses...
We may live insignificantly short lives and be practically meaningless on a grander scale, but if we dare the play the game of "guessing the laws of the universe" on a large scale, we shouldn't have the arrogance to assume that what we measure and deduce on an insignificantly small space-time volume in our ant-farm corner of the universe actually holds up directly through longer stretches of time and space!
Otherwise we're not really doing science, we're adherents to the religion called scientism, and we're not truly honestly rational, but merely praying in the church of rationalism! These are very very different things!
Just look what humanity was able to do in the Space Race with "computers" less powerful than an ordinary standard wristwatch of today: going to the moon, surviving there and coming back. Today? If it were not for SpaceX, the US would not have a path to access to its own manned transfer capability.
If we do not use abilities, we lose them. Knowledge gets forgotten, data bit-rots, machinery rusts apart.
This is more of a statement of how little computing power is needed for rudimentary space travel. The technology itself was quite advanced, just in other aspects than raw computing power.
General relativity should be tested and verified in energies and conditions where it has no been tested yet, because it's likely that there is crack there somewhere.
Many those military research projects mentioned in the article are pure crackpot science. They search where it easy to search and reasons to do so are usually based on misunderstandings of existing theory.
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426
PS: you need to understand how gravity is derived to manipulate it's propagation. Since the mechanisms are very stable due various reasons, only a very good understanding of many processes will allow you to design an experiment that works. I have adopted a very fringe physics model that is unified and explains more using less assumptions. From this perspective I can tell you that contemporary physics is so far from understanding, that most likely we will not see anything in this direction, before we fully trashed our planet.
Never could have come up with such a brilliant theory, took me a year to understand it. Now I understand 137 ^^
``In those days, one of the theories proposed was that the planets went around because behind them were invisible angels, beating their wings and driving the planets forward. You will see that this theory is now modified! It turns out that in order to keep the planets going around, the invisible angels must fly in a different direction and they have no wings. Otherwise, it is a somewhat similar theory!``
The point is that, still today, we have no idea why mass attracts mass. We observe it. We measure it. We model it. We predict it. But, we do not understands its mechanism. At that time, it was making people crazy to think that an object could remotely affect another one. Now, people just accept it. But, when you think about it, it really sounds magic.
Astrology?
Einstein was pretty close in his spacetime bending explanation, but this still doesn't explain dark matter or the recent gravity experiments with fast rotating magnets in strong supra conductors. There are better gravity field theories out there, but they are lacking experimental verification. Some experiments are cheap, but most are cosmic scale, beyond simple galaxies.
This army guy came up with nice and cheap experiments, similar to Tajmar's experiments. We will see what will come out of it. Tajmar is also holding an old patent of an Anti-Gravity device, which nobody built so far. The army device with two rotating fields seems to be much better.
The analogy doesn’t help, even ignoring that what we experience day-to-day is more like an electric field and there is a different gravitational analogy for magnetism, AKA gravitomagetism. It’s harder to notice than gravitational time dilation.
> easy via fields
Only for people who find non-Euclidian geometry that mixes time and space and is defined by a bunch of 4x4 tensors to be “easy”.
> [particles bad fields good]
“Particle” is a convenient human-scale name for things, but everything’s fields these days anyway. Even the Higgs.
In fact, GR is field-only — it’s QM which says “by the way, those things you call particles are a certain type of excitation in a field” and “if the gravity field has a particle it must be a massless spin-2 boson, also every massless spin-2 field is indistinguishable from gravity”.
> doesn’t explain dark matter
Doesn’t need to. It says there’s something to look for. GR is “stuff does X”, the observation is “X”, so there must be stuff. We’re can’t see stuff, but GR doesn’t say we have to be able to see it.
> fast rotating magnets
I don’t know what you’re referring to, the closest pattern I am matching your words to is Podkletnov whose work was never reproducible by third parties, and you can bet SpaceX will have tried.
> better gravity field theories out there, but they are lacking experimental verification
Science doesn’t use verification, it uses falsification. When an hypothesis can’t be falsified even in principle it isn’t science; when it can but only in principle, it’s a hypothesis; when it has been tested and the attempt to falsify it results in evidence that persistently doesn’t falsify it to a standard of statistical significance, then it gets published and perhaps elevated to the level of “theory”.
But magnets, how do they work? (C)
Certain Atoms or combinations cause their sourounding CL nodes to be in paramagnetic mode. (They are dislocated from groundstate to the left part of the diagram). If you heat the material under external magnetic field, the atoms and grains order to the external field. Once the matter is cold enough, the external Electron bindings hold the atoms in place that one large magnetic field is created. Everything is basically a phase looked loop oscillator and stabilizes its frequency to neighboring nodes.
Since you most likely only had contact with the standard model, giving enough explanation for you to understand the mechanics behind it would definitely be to long.
Dr. Stoyan Sargs - Basic Structures of Matter Supergravitation unified Theory, Chapter 2, 3, 6 and partially 12 (Planet magnetic field) should answer your question :)
The explanation of how gravity is applied is easy via fields.
Not why gravity attracts and what causes that...
What kind of answer could you get for that kind of question?
Seems to me that "Why?" Is the question you can ask endlessly of any answer.
Often I think a "why?" questions is just a request for a compelling narrative... Maybe that is literaly what "why?" means?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA
Indeed, questions of why are often metaphysical and can't truly be answered within the framework of physics.
Do people (read physisicts) accept this. My understanding is that, while unconfirmed, the graviton is still a respectable hypothesis.
Richard Hamming, You and Your Research
https://www.sciencealert.com/thermodynamics-arrow-of-time-re...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/scientists-reverse-arr...
Etc..
The MATH allows it.
Time travel to the past in a parallel universe at least doesn't cause any logical problems ('paradoxes') to arise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#Interacting_many-w...
Max Tegmark calculated out that parallel universes are probablistically present around 10^21 an 10^23 light years out from us, if matter's about as dense and as randomly distributed as in our universe.
"They are not important problems because we do not have an attack."
That said, closed time like curves are not excluded as possible by General Relativity.
Now that said, most physicists are convinced that time travel cannot be possible, because if it were then paradoxical situations could be constructed--e.g. going back in time and killing yourself (the earlier you) before you entered the machine, or killing your grandfather before your father was born, etc. There are as many theorized rules preventing or limiting time travel as there are physicists that have looked at it, but critically they are all ADDITIONAL rules, postulated not to explain observable phenomenon but purely to think up a way time travel paradoxes might be avoided. Physics, as currently understood from available experimental evidence, 100% allows time travel to the past, paradoxes included.
Can't the paradox be resolved by considering it as a fork/branching of a new reality/timeline where the grandfather is killed, kind of similar to many world interpretation in QM. I'd speculate that using model of lazy fork it may be possible to get some ballpark estimates on energy requirements/etc. below the typical "all the energy in the Universe". Such forks/perturbations possibly also dissipate, like a small wave in the pond, and the forked reality gets naturally merged into the mainline ( i think this is how QM's many world while possibly true is still compatible with "realistic" situation of limited number, may be even just 1, Universe mainlines)
Only if you make use of exotic matter, which nobody has ever observed and which there are good reasons to think cannot exist.
General Relativity, which is where the term "closed timelike curve" is used, does not allow paradoxes. A spacetime with closed timelike curves in it (for example, the Godel universe) still has only one thing happening at each event.
The real problem conceptually with such solutions is that they appear to contradict free will: since only one thing can happen at each event, if you experience visiting that event multiple times, you cannot freely choose what to do at that event.
That depends on which layman you talk to and which theory of physics you are using.
If I decide to raise my right hand, I raise it. Don't get pedantic in regards to disabled people. It doesn't matter if the universe is completely deterministic, that doesn't mean that I'm not the entity that decided to raise my right hand. The deterministic universe may have produced me, but the software I'm running is me. The reason I raised my hand is because of me. Sure there are an infinite number of factors that have fed into the circumstances of my birth, and everything that's happened to me, but everything that I do is specifically as a consequence of my free will. I am the software, deterministic or not.
But that's already the case. It could be my free will to walk on the ceiling, but the laws of physics won't let me.
But that still does not mean they look the same to us, intuitively speaking. For example, the laws of physics won't let you walk on the ceiling at all, whether your worldline is a closed timelike curve or not. But if your worldline is not a closed timelike curve, then, intuitively, it seems like the laws of physics will let you choose which direction you want to walk on the floor. However, if your worldline is a closed timelike curve, and you come around again to the event in spacetime where you chose to walk to the left last time around, the laws of physics will not let you choose to walk to the right this time; they constrain you to walk to the left again, since from the standpoint of the laws of physics you are at the same event in spacetime and that event can only happen one way. To many people that seems like a much stronger constraint than the constraint that you can't choose to walk on the ceiling.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_I'll_Wake_Up_and_Scal...
the universe itself doesn't care, but physics, that is, our math based theories, certainly they do, in fact they require it.
If ( N + 10 = 20 ) then eat(last_bagel)
My wife comes home and is cross with me for eating the last_bagel. So, I hop in my handy time machine, travel back to before the time where I access the oracle, and alter it to only produce a random number from 1-9.
If I succeed, my wife is no longer cross with me. But, if she is no longer cross with me, then why would I alter past events? Likely, I would have no cause to travel back in time in this scenario, so the oracle remains programmed to produce up to 10.
Now my wife is cross with me again.
Which one happens?
For all we know in actual implementation you would simply eat the bagel, time travel back and bias the oracle, but your conscious experience only ever consists of finding that your oracle was modified and has your fingerprints on it somehow.
Anyhow, the message was about how paradoxes make reasoning hard, not about how we can wave away the uncertainties. Next time I'll just skip all the time machine nonesense and head to the nearest rectory.
Hawking 1982 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.46.603 has an excellent argument based on gravitational backreaction about the implausibility of CTCs (and closed null curves) in any finite spacetime, including expanding spacetimes in which there are cosmic horizons at finite distances. In our standard cosmology you'd need extremely exotic matter.
> general relativity allows it
General Relativity requires neither the WEC nor the Lorentzian (1,3,0) metric signature (e.g. one can use a signature discontinuity on some hypersurface or atypical values for (virt,phys,rank)). You can describe low-entropy "objects" with all sorts of unaligned directions for their arrows-of-time that way, but good luck explaining the observations of the cosmic microwave background or recovering Special Relativity in a lab test. AWEC is there to give us large scale structure at all, not "purely to think up a way time travel paradoxes might be avoided".
> paradoxical situations could be constructed--e.g. going back in time and killing yourself
Start much more easily. Set up a worldtube containing the timelike and null paths for para-positronium in an anti-de Sitter_{3} space in 1+3 Minkowski space by tracing the worldtubes of the leptons and the photons as they loop around for some small multiple of the lifetime of para-positronium. You'll want the block universe view: at any given point on each closed there is a frozen configuration. Coarsely, at each point (t,x,y,z) on the loop of each CTC there is an electron, a positron, or neither; more technically the conjugate variables at each point on a closed curve are fixed. So you need a way to recover the para-positronium from the photons. There seems to be a lot fewer degrees of freedom than in the absence of the CTC!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positronium#States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-de_Sitter_space#Closed_ti...
You'll quickly find that thinking of a human being (radiating in the IR while metabolizing, shedding skin and hair, perspiring, and so on) "lucky" enough to be near a supersymmetric charged rotating black hole in AdS_{5} with microscopic parts on a large set of worldtubes some of which are closed (some closed and timelike, some closed and null) and some of which might not be, is so intractable that you can only make extremely wild guesses about interactions with a grandparent whose microscopic components are almost entirely not on closed curves.
> Physics, as currently understood from available experimental evidence, 100% allows time travel to the past
No time travellers showed up at Hawking's champagne party afaict, but maybe they were sneakily stealing socks out of his washing machine rather than trying to make small talk.
> paradoxes
Most of these vanish in a block universe view where everything is encoded in a nontrivial set of spacetime-filling fields. Lots of apparent paradoxes arise from incomplete values surfaces in initial values formulations. Lots of others relate to something similar to pareidolia where given a block universe people will insist that they see faces and cats and planets without admitting that they're imposing a particular time axis (and orientation) and using that as a basis for segmenting a huge bunch of worldtubes (that collectively they take as being a single object).
Not sure if that is time travel in a 'jump to a new time' sense but it effectively is. And I wonder how far you could push that with theoretical technology. 1 day for 1000 years type thing...
You're assuming that your readers are already familiar with quantum gravity, but need an introduction to general relativity?
hall effect thrusters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall-effect_thruster
totally compliant with conventional physics
> "remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents"
Decent way to get students thinking about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation#Mo...
Edit: Just realized this is mentioned in the article you linked.
It feels like absurd lore in Fallout, but probably actually happened.
>“We have some new things. We are not stagnating. What we are doing is updating ourselves, without advertising. There are some new programs, and there are certain things, some of them 20 or 30 years old, that are still breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about [because] other people don’t have them yet.”
and by throwing the quote at the end of a long series of anti-gravity/EM papers tries to give the impression that the military is hiding something wild like a secret anti-gravity device. It's very National Enquirer.
There are other examples of this. The discussion of the WEAV pulls the quote "no moving parts and assures near-instantaneous response time", which presumably is to hint that this explains those instantly-accelerating discs seen in various videos. That "near-instantaneous response time" refers to the ability to change thrust quickly and not velocity is, of course, obscured.
From what I have read up till now on thedrive, the whole outlet is terrible, all their articles seem to be drivel like this.
Disclaimer: I'm no expert, just parroting what I found in Wikipedia.
Which I assume means there should be a few gravity-deniers out there to give themselves a break from global heating denial. :)
That assumes, of course, that an instantaneous "path of movement" is something that is even worth considering, given that it ignores the time dimension and the fact that all those other objects aren't remaining in a static configuration around the object whose path we are considering.
I liked that discussion. Plenty of varying perspectives such as "Bob Lasar was proven right!" and "in an arms race, keep your enemy busy [with disinformation]".
Is there new info here?
The thing about gravitational energy is that it's the weakest of all fundamental forces. Nuclear energy is more about releasing the energy stored in the Strong/Weak Nuclear Interaction than it is about gravity.
How are these not restating "turn mass into energy"?
Both scenarios approximate: High Mass => Low Mass + Energy