Artificial Gravity?

[YankeyMCC]

Found this on slashdot
(snip)
owards a new test of general relativity?

23 March 2006
Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity.
(snip)

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html

[central scrutinizer]

1. Bushco has already done artificial gravitas

doesn't that count for priority?

[Emperor_Norton_II]

7. You fail at humor

HTH, HAND. :D

[trotsky]

2. Sweet.

We'll have Star Trek spaceships yet.

[simonm]

6. Lifters - scale model

http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/liftout.htm

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Thanks for the link. I've heard this effect mentioned before, but no refs.

[NNadir]

10. A friend brought one of these over. It was amazing.

There was a detectable odor of ozone when it operated.

We couldn't explain its operation.

[benburch]

15. Lifters appear to be an ion breeze effect.

NASA says they don't work at all in a hard vacuum.

[rman]

13. It's not anti-gravity though,

it's no more an anti-gravity device than for instance a helicopter is.

[drm604]

17. Lifters aren't anti-gravity.

A lifter ionizes air creating an "ion wind". By ionizing the air it pushes that air in one direction thus pushing itself in the other in an equal but opposite reaction. They're no more anti-gravity then a helicopter prop is. They won't work in a vacuum.

See here: NASA VACUUM TEST ON LIFTERS

What matters to me is that Campbell promises to do an all-important vacuum test. It's a delicate affair, he notes. Anyone can pump air out of a bell jar, he tells me, but creating a true "deep vacuum" costs tens of thousands of dollars.

<snip>

Then, in December, they finished tweaking their vacuum. They were able to get the pressure inside the bell jar down to the equivalent of low-Earth orbit - 10-7 torrs, to be precise. They put the device inside and hit the juice.

Nothing happened. It wouldn't budge an inch. They jammed the voltage up to 50,000 volts, and still nothing. They repeated the tests several times but didn't dare use higher voltage. "We had lightning coming out the back of it," says Andy Finchum, Campbell's assistant, pointing to a set of plastic guards he set up after nearly frying himself.

<snip>

To check if it was an equipment error, they brought the bell jar back to sea-level pressure - and the rotor started spinning again. The device itself wasn't malfunctioning.

[BlueJazz]

3. (Playing the part of a Freeper).......What's the big deal?

I have something that will create "Artificial Gravity"..It's called a Magnet.

[mainegreen]

4. "one hundred million trillion times larger ...

than Einstein’s General Relativity predicts"

Wow. That's way off.

[pocket]

5. this will be a horrible weapon

just ask larry niven or jerry pournelle. I'm sure they're gleeful about it.

[Phoonzang]

9. They're big right-wingers...aren't they?

Damn shame because I love the Larry Niven's books.

[Dead_Parrot]

12. Pournelle is, not sure about Niven

But they can both write, so I'll let either of them get away with it...

[benburch]

14. Larry Niven is hard to pin down.

He certainly is the only one of the two I would care to sit down with.

Once, at the Worldcon in Chicago in the 82, Pournelle called me an "Adolf Eichmann" because I would not overrule the door person and let him into the con suite without his damned badge. (I also did not like the fact that he appeared to be carrying a badly concealed sidearm at the time, either.) He kept going on and on about "Do you KNOW Who I Am???" His dispute went up the chain of command to the co-chair of the convention, who really had better things to do at the time than change Jerry Pournelle's diapers. He was told that he HAD to have his badge. So, after throwing a hissy-fit, he went back to his suite, got the badges of everybody in his party, and showed up wearing all of them, which we then confiscated since you are not allowed to loan out your badge to anybody for any reason. He also had some really unkind things to say about SF fans at that time, and I resolved to never spend a dime on anything he was connected with henceforth.

[Phoonzang]

16. Wow...

A personal encounter with Pournelle...yeah that pretty much confirms the impression I had of him.

Just as well, I couldn't ever make it through anything he wrote by himself without moving to something else out of boredom. :boring:

[benburch]

11. Oh my god.

If you could even create a means of accelerating a spacecraft at a thousandth of a gee, you would have the keys to the universe.

And if a really strong effect could be created you could use it as a perfect spring; Your sprung mass floats on a field probe which pushes into a portion of the generated field that has a large negative vector. Pushing down on the spring is the equivalent of raising the mass of the field probe against gravity, and you get all that gravitational potential energy back.

I imagine you could also use it to bottle up gravitational potential energy in the form of a projectile that is pushed into a field that has a stable point in the interior using a hydraulic press. When you destroy the field loop for one side of the cage, the pellet flies out that side at orbital velocity. Likely this would be used as part of a penetrating warhead rather than deal with all of the atmospheric heating flying to the target at that speed would entail.