NASA Still Trying to Verify Anti-Gravity Claims 430
uncoda writes "The L.A. Times has an article about NASA research into a phenomenon in which the effect of gravity is supposedly reduced. It sounds like cold fusion or polywater to me, but who knows?" We've posted two previous stories about Podkletnov's research: one from a couple of years ago and another more recently.
Interesting but... (Score:3, Insightful)
A super cooled, electrically charged, rapidly spinning super conducting disc that reduces the gravity field above the disc is interesting. However, taken as a whole, the entire system would still crash to earth.
Sort of like putting a sail on one end of a skateboard and a fan blowing air on it on the other end. It still isn't going anywhere.
Poor Article Poor chances (Score:0, Insightful)
The Podkletnov effect suggests it may be possible to effectively reduce the mass of the ship, thereby reducing the overall energy needed for acceleration.
Gravity has NOTHING to do with mass, anyone who took high school physics should be able to tell you that. I also have doubts if this could be used to help propel a ship out of the atmosphere. If this really worked this could be used as the basis of a perpetual motion device. Piston floats up, falls down, infinite energy. Going by the law of conservation of energy if this does reduce the effect of gravity I strongly suspect the amount of energy needed to maintain the effect will be at least equal to or greater than the potential energy difference of the material affected. The writer is obviously ill informed and I wouldn't put too much veracity in this claim. Sorry people:(
PM Article. (Score:2, Insightful)
I can just imagine it now, getting spam that reads: "Do you weigh over 200lbs? Well we have the solution for you! Loose over 4lbs INSTANTLY! Thats right, INSTANTLY! NO gimmicks, NO drugs, just pure science! Only $600,000! Act Now!"
What about a rotating would make mass 'change'? (Score:3, Insightful)
If so, could the rotating simply be acting to create a focus point of magnetic energy at some point on the axis of rotation, above the superconducting disc? If the object being tested has any magnetic substace in it at all, then a strong magnetic field could cause it to seem less weighted, right?
I also question the use of the Cavandish balance to measure the mass of the item above the spinning disk. We're dealing with a superconductor in a magnetic and electric field... What is preventing this device from causing some strange magnetic effect. What about ionization of the air around this device?
These are just my inital reactions to the article, and I'm no Physics expert. What are your thoughts, friends?
why this got funded... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I do an experiment where I can show gravity doesn't work like its expected to, they will look into it. Most of the time the result is that somone put an Acme magnet in the wrong place. NASA doesn't care what the experimentor's (or crackpot's) theory is, they want to duplicate the experiment and try to find out the real reason for the change in mass. If your respected enough to do an expirment, its worth their time to look into it even if your theory is the disk weighs less because of the magic elves.
hmmm...seems fishy (Score:2, Insightful)
as much as id love to see this kind of stuff a reality, this particular claim seems off to me. It happens way too often in the physics community that someone claims to have made some breakthrough, be it in superluminal light pulses, or cold fusion and really they are just full of it.
it seems most often that theyve put so much of their life and time into their work that when they dont get anything meaningfull they either fudge the results or "see" what they want to.
unfortunately that is probably the case here..a dead giveaway is Mr P's (i cant spell his name) initial secrecy, that always kind of says something about the authenticity of the claim...it also doesnt help that his hosting university throws him out and noone else can reproduce his claim...on the grounds that its too complicated to set up properly. bs
but im always the skeptic...even if im hopeful
good for nasa though in actually staking out the claim...and if they need to killing the hype
id like to know how Mr P measured his weight change too...if he use similiar ballances to nasa or something else he cooked up
Pull the other one, it has bells on.... (Score:2, Insightful)
NASA must have contracted a bad dose of the "but they said Einstein was wrong" meme to even consider getting involved in this quackery.
Re:Not the first $600K NASA dumped down this ratho (Score:2, Insightful)
How the mighty have fallen... (Score:2, Insightful)
The basis of science today is in testing phenomena and reproducing results. Podkletnov refuses to submit to this basic tenet of scientific society. He claims that people will steal his ideas and take his credit - yet if he's well known enough that NASA, let alone the LA Times, has heard of him, such intellectual thievery ought to be very difficult. In addition, by publishing a paper with all his procedures and results, he would not only prove that such "gravity shielding" phenomena do exist, he'd be able to defend himself against future intellectual thievery, and he would allow other scientists to build off of - note, not steal - his work.
However, Podkletnov chooses not to publish his actual procedures. This makes his experiments functionally untestable. This is fortuitous for him if he is a fraud. That way, if NASA does manage to discover "gravity shielding", he can claim that their procedure was his, and cash in on their prestige and fame. If NASA fails, as they are likely to do, he can simply claim that they didn't do it quite right, and continue to refuse to release his results. Given that he's kept the chemical composition of some of the components of his apparatus, namely, the spinning disk, secret, it's hard to see how NASA would succeed even if his claims were valid. Finally, if, as Podkletnov claims, "dozens of people" have matched his results, we could expect at least one of them to have come forward by now. Certainly, they can't all be hiding their data for fear of thievery - are we to suppose that not one of "dozens" of scientists has the bravery, initiative, far-sightedness, or even plain greed to publish these results, which could have such an impact on the world if verified? That seems highly unlikely...
It's somewhat disheartening to see an institution like NASA following pseudoscience like Podkletnov's "gravity shielding". With current budget cuts, NASA would be much better off spending its diminishing money on developing technology that already exists, rather than chasing implausible alternatives. Everyone would profit off of an alchemist's ability to turn lead to gold, or a perpetual motion machine, or cold fusion, but, because those have been shown to be so implausible, for various reasons, we don't see serious research institutions researching them. "Anti-gravity", at least of Podkletnov's variety, should be placed in the same category, at least until the 'scientist' is willing to back up his claims with some real, verifiable, and repeatable procedures and data.
Why a cat always lands on her feet (Score:1, Insightful)
That's not the point. Even if you had all time you wanted to react in the air, you wouldn't land on your feet because there are no handles in the air you would need to turn around. But the cat has a very flexible backbone so she can bend her body into a U shape and then she doesn't need a handle to turn her back from the outside of the U to the inside.
To see the differenc take a piece of string between your fingers, stretch it and turn it around its axis. You will see that you would need a grip in the air to acheive that movement.
Then move your hands togeher, so that the string bends down in a U. When you turn it now you can see that all you need for this movement is some muscles in the bow of the U.
Re:If it is true... (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget Antigravity, how about a Gravity device? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Poor Article Poor chances (Score:3, Insightful)
Leaving aside the trivial counterexamples some others have offered (F=GM1M2/R^2), this is actually 100% wrong, as would be known if you consulted anything higher than a high school physics textbook. Even if you want (as the post seems later to imply) to disavow a connection between gravity and inertia, you'd be wrong. Gravitational mass is the same as inertial mass. This has been both empirically validated for 350 years and theoretically established by the Equivalence Principle in General Relativity. Gravity and inertia are one and the same, in ways we don't entirely understand.
So if you could actually reduce G, which is what these guys basically claim, you would indeed be reducing the inertial mass as well. Of course other weird effects would have to propagate, as well.
Re:Not the first $600K NASA dumped down this ratho (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, most things that NASA does are crackpottery, until they work.
But in this case, they really are pushing the boundaries of credibility.
A (crack)potted history of Podkletnov goes something like this. Podkletnov throws together a bunch of superconducting junk that he has lying around his lab, and spins it up. He then waves some instruments at it, decides that he's seeing a 2% reduction in weight, and ascribes that to a reduction in gravitic mass (he can't test inertial mass, as he can't move the mass).
So far, so good. Stranger things have happened through serendipity. Podkletnov has no theory to explain it, but that's incidental. All he needs to do to obtain credibility is to publish all details of his experiment so that it can be replicated.
He fails to do this.
Instead, he publishes a vague description of the apparatus, and continues to make the claims. He refuses to disclose further details, or to let anyone examine his apparatus. Eventually, his university becomes so tired of his antics that they terminate his employment.
Various people with more money than sense try to replicate the experiment. Nobody who claims to have seen the weight loss will publish their details. Sound familiar? To anyone who reports that they cannot replicate the result, Podkletnov replies that they have the details wrong, but he still won't tell them what the details are.
Enter NASA. With some input from Podkletnov, NASA spends $1 million and thinks it maybe kinda might be seeing a 2e-6 reduction, sorta. Podkletnov suggests a few changes, but he still won't just give them his details, and NASA spend another $1 million, at the end of which, they stop claiming that they even might be seeing an effect.
And so here we are again. Someone's scraped together the spare change from other projects, and they've maybe, kinda, sorta got some details out of Podkletnov now. Or not. Who knows? Probably not NASA, and almost certainly not Podkletnov.
Podkletnov is a poor scientist, but a great publicist. Maybe that's what gets funding in NASA these days. It certainly gets publicity, as this discussion proves.
Re:Forget Antigravity, how about a Gravity device? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing something, but can't you just create a windowless torus, spin it about an axis going through its centre perpendicular to the plane of the torus, and use the outer wall as the floor? (Pretty much how it was done in 2001, iirc).
There's no disorientation, as there's nothing visibly moving. Sure, if you think about it too hard, it might cause you a few conceptual problems, but surely no more so than thinking about people on the other side of a planet.
the moon is a shitload closer and we cant convince anyone to fork over funding to go back there
I'm hopeful about a Mars mission; after all, we've sent people to the Moon, and there are no more political points to be gained from doing so again. Mars, on the other hand, is another "Species First" thing - the first time a human being has set foot on another fully-fledged planet. I can see Bush now - "not only are we successfully waging war on terror and making the world a safer place, we're expanding our reach to the rest of the Solar System too, furthering the cause of all humankind. God Bless America!"
I just have to hope that he sees it that way, too, and not just as a waste of valuable dollars that could be better spent on expanding America's reach on this planet.
Cheers,
Tim
Re:Why its not antigravity.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Once the weight of these new scientists is great enough, there is a violent 'paradigm shift' to a new theory that fits all the old data and all the new.
Re:less gravity is good for fat people (Score:2, Insightful)
But if the entire continent/earth whatever had this same gravity reduction, then youre fit in the same sense you are today.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gravitational vs. Inertial Mass (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really: G is a conversion factor between mass and force, making it a coupling constant (like Coulomb's constant) - it's more a field strength than anything else.
Note that you can make G go away with a convenient choice of units (mass is mass is mass: they would still have the same units - grams - even if you had inertial and gravitational, just like kinetic energy, potential energy are both measured in joules). For the rest of this, we'll work in units (call them 'statgrams') such that G = 1 Newton-m^2/statgram^2.
When people say that gravitational mass is the same as inertial mass, we mean: force is equal to inertial mass times acceleration, and force is equal to gravitational mass of the two objects divided by radius squared.
OK, so F = (m_i)a , and F = (m_g)M/r^2. Now, when we say that gravitational mass is the same as inertial mass, we mean that if you set these two forces equal, so gravity's providing all the acceleration, the inertial and gravitational masses cancel, that is, g = (m_g/m_i) M/r^2 goes to g= M/r^2.
There are several ways to test this, and all any of them can test is that the ratio is constant (indep. of radius, indep. of inertial mass, etc.) and so we set this constant to 1.
It's a subtle difference, but there: there're two different things that're in the force equation, a coupling of matter to matter (G) and a conversion between gravitational mass and inertial mass (m_g/m_i). Setting one of them to 1 doesn't necessarily set the other to 1, but since they're both 'unit choices', you can freely set them both to 1. The important thing is that since all derivatives of m_g/m_i appear to be zero, it IS merely a unit choice. If there WAS a difference, you could set G to 1, but not m_g/m_i.
One other thing: quantum-mechanically, it's not surprising that gravity is solely attractive: it's a tensor (spin-2) field, which IS solely attractive. That part's understood (We know that a spin-2 field can mimic linearized GR - that is, GR in the weak field limit).
Re:Getting Dizzy... (Score:2, Insightful)
If photons are absorbed by matter to cast a shadow proportional to the absorption rate, then gravity must as well under the right circumstances. Problem is: matter generates gravity, hence a fancy way to mask gravitons (which by the way have never been detected) is needed to cast a weight reducing shadow.
If their claims are correct, the weight of an object will be reduced, but the mass itself will remain unchanged since that is a property of the object itself.
They beleive the cooper pairs in the superconductor are somehow responsible for this absorption, though I have a hard time believing this is true since amorphous superconductors have been spun up and exposed to large RF pumping with no effect.
My idea is it is more likely an effect brought about by the alternating conductive and insulating layers of the composit superconductor that might produce the effect, creating a pseudo cassimer barrier with a negative net energy ballance which could attenuate gravitational flux.
By the way: any attempt to measure the mass will not find any mass reduction, though the weight will decrease due to the gravitational shadow being cast by the device. I imagine that the 2% reduction is optimistic at best, since the umbra and penumbra of any gravitaional shadow would be rather acute, due to an inability to mask the gravitation coming from mass off-center to the device.
Then again it could be another cold fusion episode, though NASA lends it more credibility, though Pod could held and give them the real scoop.
Re:Poor Article Poor chances (Score:2, Insightful)
4. Gravitational mass is no longer tied to inertial mass.
Falsifiability (Score:5, Insightful)
However, suppose the experiment fails to demonstrate the sought-after effect. This does not constitute a victory for the existing models, because Podkletnov just says, "Oh, you didn't use the right superconductor," or the right temperature, or something.
There is no way to disprove his theory. That's called "non-falsifiable". Non-falsifiable theories are generally unproductive because you can never stop trying to prove them; you're caught in an infinite loop. Eventually you just lose interest, or start to apply Occam's Razor.
It does not bother me that NASA should pursue research with a low likelihood of yield when the potential benefits are high. But whenever someone posits a non-falsifiable theory you must be suspicious, because it's the mark of somebody who is trying to get you to waste time and money.
Note that "falsifiable" is different from "not easily proveable". I can't really go out and check that those points in the sky are really massive hot balls of gas. But at least theoretically it's possible, just not convenient. And I can run other tests which could disprove my hypothesis. I can prove that they're not real close, for example, by sending up a rocket ship. I can check that they happen to produce light in the same fashion that really hot things do. If these tests fail, you know that my theory is wrong.
Inventing non-falsifiable theories is easy; you just leave a variable unbound. (That's the more general, and more useful, form of saying "you can't disprove a negative." You _can_ disprove a negative; I can prove that there's no elephant between me and my monitor right now.)
Because creating non-falsifiable theories is both easier and less productive than creating real scientific theories, but make it possible to fool people into believing something they want to believe, such theories must be treated with extreme suspicion, especially when somebody has something personal to gain out of it. The theory is not necessarily wrong, but the odds decrease drastically, to the point where the probability * cost is lower than the potential value.
The potential value may be very high here, but $2.6 million is non-trivial money, even for NASA, and the probability is vanishingly small.
Re:Interesting situation, terrible article (Score:2, Insightful)
We need a revolutionary jump (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not the first $600K NASA dumped down this ratho (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case, the money spent on this project is rather small, in a NASA budget expense -- but even with a 2% chance of partial success, the amortized savings as a result of even a pointer in the right direction are enough to make the fool's rush more than worth it.
As was vaguely aluded to in the article, the possible PR cost to NASA's credibility was probably more of an impediment to funding this venture than the financial cost.
Think what would have happened if people had refused to fund semiconductor research? I mean, really! Electronics on silicon??? That stuf is almost an insulator!!!