Inertial Mass Separate From Gravitational Mass? 405
CPerdue writes with this excerpt from the MIT arXiv blog:
"The equivalence principle is one of the more fascinating ideas in modern science. It asserts that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Einstein put it like this: the gravitational force we experience on Earth is identical to the force we would experience were we sitting in a spaceship accelerating at 1g. Newton might have said that the m in F=ma is the same as the ms in F=Gm1m2/r^2. ... All that changes today with the extraordinary work of Endre Kajari at the University of Ulm in Germany and a few buddies. They show how it is possible to create situations in the quantum world in which the effects of inertial and gravitational mass must be different. In fact, they show that these differences can be arbitrarily large."
Next stop: Arisia (Score:5, Funny)
Because once we have inertial drives, it's only a little while before we can colonize other planets.
The technology lens itself very well to that.
Re:Next stop: Arisia (Score:5, Funny)
The technology lens itself very well to that.
I sea what you mean.
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Your comment will go over the heads of many, but ...
Dude. Nice one.
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You don't exactly need a magnifying glass to see the joke..
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Your comment will go over the heads of many
If you compensate for the refraction, you can still hit them.
Re:Next stop: Arisia (Score:5, Funny)
Your comment will go over the heads of many, but ...
Dude. Nice one.
Oh, come on now. You must have meant "Nice won."
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Look at the title..
General Relativity? (Score:3, Interesting)
I realize that this all works only at that quantum level but what implications, if any, does this have for Einstein's general theory of relativity?
Re:General Relativity? (Score:5, Informative)
General relativity is known to be incompatible with quantum mechanics. People are still trying to come up with a theory that reconciles the two.
This is similar to the way we knew:
* the constant speed of light (regardless of reference frame) was incompatible with the classical laws of momentum and energy [resolved by Special Relativity]
* the equations for low energy blackbody radiation and high energy blackbody radiation were incompatible with one another [resolved by quantum mechanics]
I haven't RTFA, but if they have something testable, I would think this means we have a basis for making quantitative measurements of what happens where GR and QM collide. (And hence a basis for coming up with a unifying theory.)
No GR in Article (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think this means we have a basis for making quantitative measurements of what happens where GR and QM collide.
Not quite. They make no assumptions about GR in the article, what they have done is come up with a way to test one of the assumptions of GR - assuming the article passes peer review, arXiv is just a preprint server. There are too possible outcomes to the test they propose: m_i=m_g or m_i!=m_g. In the first case nothing has changed and in the second case one of GR's core assumptions has been dismantled so GR cannot be a fundamental theory since there is a phenomenon which it cannot explain. Hence QM and GR will never 'collide' because GR will have disappeared to be replaced by something else - possibly something which QM has no problem with.
My personal guess is that any such experiment will show that m_i=m_g but it will be an interesting test to do and potentially result in a far more accurate test of the equivalence principle.
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It allows new measurements to find potential deviation in the relation of inertial and gravitational mass. If no deviations are found, then this means nothing for general relativity (the equations would just contain the same quantity under two different names). If deviations are found, then it probably means that GR must be modified.
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Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:5, Funny)
I will take the option of seatbelts while sitting at the bridge of your spaceship, thank you very much.
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:4, Interesting)
I will take the option of seatbelts while sitting at the bridge of your spaceship, thank you very much.
Reverse engineering things like Star Trek to come up with plausible explanations is lots of fun.
My take on near misses with photon torpedoes making "bang" sounds and throwing people around the bridge (besides the needs of dramatic presentation).
- Photon torpedoes are established as matter-antimatter nuclear bombs.
- These can be expected to produce some extreme EMP as a side-effect of their detonation and the "gamma light" from it striking any nearby matter.
- The artificial gravity / inertial compensation for multi-G impulse engine thrust (and any oddball forces from warp drive and changes to it) has to be variable to handle such variable conditions.
- The EMP interferes with its control mechanism. Not enough to smear the crew like paint over a nearby bulkhead. But enough for a near-miss to throw them around in their seats and rattle the ship enough to create the "bang" sound in the air. (Perhaps also the "whoosh" of a passing spacecraft, due to an electromagnetic "wake" from its systems - though that was clearly established as use of artistic license after the soundless flybys in the first trial footage were unsatisfying.)
- The engineers made the artificial gravity system VERY reliable. (Note that it keeps working when most of the ship's mechanisms, including other life support, is on the fritz.) And they made it good enough to keep the crew largely intact through "impacts" that seriously degrade the other systems and structural integrity of the ship. But they weren't able to get it down to no noticeable effect.
- And the designers didn't add seatbelt-equivalents until the first movie (after Admiral Kirk, done with his five-year missino, had given them hell about it.) B-)
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:5, Funny)
Color me baffled. Are you disagreeing with him or not? ;)
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Reverse engineering things like Star Trek to come up with plausible explanations is lots of fun.
Reverse engineering things like Star Trek to come up with plausible explanations is fucking stupid.
Just because something is stupid doesn't mean it isn't fun. Don't be a party pooper. Star Trek was good enough science fiction that many, many people working in both physics and engineering will point to Star Trek as inspiring them to pay attention in science class.
These days I prefer my reading a little more challenging, but if it wasn't for my Dad waking me up early to watch Captain Kirk shoot phasers at Klingons and punch out guys in rubber suits, I probably would have just learned how to play baseball or something.
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Actually, they were. FAR more so than any previous scifi to come out of Hollywood. (And note the SciFi / SF distinction. Star Trek is much closer to SF than just about anything "studio" before Babylon 5.)
Gene R. and his cohorts put together an engineering manual for the authors (which eventually was published and made available to the general public) in order to maintain technical consistency across episodes and keep things plausible enough th
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Actually, they were. FAR more so than any previous scifi to come out of Hollywood. (And note the SciFi / SF distinction. Star Trek is much closer to SF than just about anything "studio" before Babylon 5.)
2001
Silent Running
Logans run
THX1138
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Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:4, Funny)
Hm, maybe you're onto something - that could, maybe, account for exploding control panels... (not to later problems with repairing them, though)
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I will take the option of seatbelts while sitting at the bridge of your spaceship, thank you very much.
You'd rather be carried out in a bucket?
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:4, Funny)
In space, no one can hear you screech.
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It wasn't until I started reading SF rather than just watching Star Trek that I realised how inertial dampeners would be useful. Of course being able to absorb an impact or two without turning the occupants to jelly would be nice but if you can lower the inertial mass of your spaceship can't you accelerate at ridiculous rates?
Holidays on Nereid, here I come!
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:5, Informative)
... if you can lower the inertial mass of your spaceship can't you accelerate at ridiculous rates?
See E. E. Smith's _Lensman_ series for an exploration of that.
My own take: All bets are off since the principles are currently unknown. But assuming that things like energy conservation and action/reaction remain valid, an "inertial damper" seems likely to function as a way to transfer thrust evenly from the engines to the matter of the ship, crew, cargo, etc. (Or deliberately unevenly to achieve a convenient artificial gravity without spinning the ship.)
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't until I started reading SF rather than just watching Star Trek that I realised how inertial dampeners would be useful. Of course being able to absorb an impact or two without turning the occupants to jelly would be nice but if you can lower the inertial mass of your spaceship can't you accelerate at ridiculous rates?
That was a key idea in "Lensman"... (And it's a pretty silly idea, though I enjoy how the books explore the exploitation of this idea)
Inertial dampeners don't imply that you're negating the mass of the passengers, however - just that you're translating external forces to make them also apply to the ship's contents. Whether this means some kind of accelerometer/tractor beam combo, or if you imagine some kind of pervasive force field acting to translate external forces smoothly and continuously onto everything inside the ship - the idea of an inertial dampener is beyond our technology, but it doesn't necessarily break conservation of mass.
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To damp - to reduce
To dampen - to make moist
So unless you got some quantum sponge or something, yer getting it wrong! Please use "inertia dampers" instead.
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:4, Informative)
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This was a fun read about inertia...
http://physics.fullerton.edu/~jimw/general/inertia/index.htm [fullerton.edu]
One of the probable explanations seems to be - inertia is equivalent to the gravitational force that acts on the body...from the rest of the Universe. With a disclaimer that this would need propagation of gravitational disturbances into and from distant future!
Which would be...most interesting. Possibly actually strenghtening speed limits present in our Universe, with those limits being probably even more crucial
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:5, Funny)
That's "dampers", unless you're talking about devices that make the bridge slightly moist when the ship is subject to acceleration.
We call those red-shirts around here.
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:5, Funny)
That's a bloody good joke, sir.
Re:Inertial Dampeners??? (Score:5, Informative)
From Princeton's WordNet on the definition of "dampen":
# S: (v) dampen, damp, soften, weaken, break (lessen in force or effect) "soften a shock"; "break a fall"
A damper is either a movable iron plate to control the draft in a furnace, a device that decreases the amplitude of oscillations, or a depressing (as in emotional) restraint. Inertia is not a furnace, an oscillation, nor an emotion.
This post was brought to you by the Arrogant Pedants' Society.
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No, that's Tuvok.
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They are called humidors.
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Picard: LaForge, how’s your status? ;)
LaForge: The decreased resistance from the inertial dampeners allowed me to insert the plasma coils into the warp core. We should be able to create a massive phaser burst shortly.
Picard: Don’t you mean dampers? Or have you been...ehrm...meeting... Ensign Clancy a bit too much, lately?
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Would this lead to science fictions "Inertial Dampeners"?
Not only that, but if we can establish a low-level warp field around the station, then we can move it to the mouth of the wormhole really quickly.
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I think you'd have to strap the toast to its feet actually
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oh wait, I guess it depends on whether the butter is facing the cat or not..
I would submit.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I would submit.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I would submit.... (Score:5, Funny)
You mean this one [xkcd.com] from 2004?
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The law of gravity says that fat people are more attractive than thin ones.
Ringworld (Score:2, Interesting)
"But we had purchased a reactionless, inertialess drive from the Outsiders. You may have guessed their price. We are still paying in installments. "
I seem to remember that in one of his other stories, the figure is a trillion stars, which was the worth of an entire, technologically advanced, planet.
Has tremendous importance, even if just sub-atomic (Score:5, Informative)
In a gravity well, this explains why we need so much fuel to get out. But that assumes that inertial mass acts like gravitional mass. If we change that, then suddenly we use HIGH inertial mass but low gravitational mass as rocket exhaust, tremendously reducing the mass of the rocket's fuel, which has exponential gains in increasing the potential payload.
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Dark matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Dark matter? (Score:5, Funny)
More importantly, it means that one pound of dark matter COULD weigh over ten thousand pounds!
Johann Gambolputty (Score:2, Funny)
Let me interrupt you (Score:2)
Let me interrupt you, Herr de von Ausfern -schplenden -schlitter -crasscrenbon -fried -digger -dangle -dungle -burstein -von -knacker -thrasher -apple -banger -horowitz -ticolensic -grander -knotty -spelltinkle -grandlich -grumblemeyer -spelterwasser -kürstlich -himbleeisen -bahnwagen -gutenabend -bitte -eine -nürnburger -bratwustle -gerspurten -mit -zweimache -luber -hundsfut -gumberaber -shönendanker -kalbsfleisch -mittler -raucher von Hautkopft auf Ulm, and ask you, just quickly...
Inertial mass must equal gravitational mass (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider two giant bouncyballs in space, with the same inertial mass but where ball A has 4 times the gravitational mass of ball B. They start off some distance apart from each other, with velocity 0. As they attract each other, B will be accelerating 4 times faster than A since A has 4 times the gravity, and at one point they will meet. When they meet, A will have velocity -1 and B velocity +4. When they bounce off of each other, A will, naturally, have velocity +4 and B velocity -1. Now, B is still accelerating (or rather, decelerating) toward A 4 times faster than A is toward B, and when their relative velocity reaches 0, A will have velocity +3 and B will have velocity +3. Thus, each bounce accelerates the entire system by +3 with ZERO energy input, thus violating conservation of momentum and conservation of energy.
This is why any universe with a concept of conservation of energy and/or momentum must have the property inertial mass = gravitational mass. Now, if we can somehow break this rule with energy input, those of us interested in interstellar travel might have a completely new type of engine on our hands.
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OK.
Wrong. B will have a four times as strong gravitational field than A, therefore A will also have four times the acceleration it would have if B had just the same gravitiat
what about gradients? (Score:2)
S
Re:what about gradients? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite. Acceleration starts at a specific point and "pushes" its way through the object at the speed of sound in the material of the object. If you had a 10 mile long metal bar and were strong enough to shove one end, the other end wouldn't move instantly. Your force would start a compression wave along the metal bar, traveling at the speed of sound though the metal, until it reached the other end. Same with a rocket, the engines apply acceleration at their connection point and the acceleration pushes its way through the materiel. This is why they have to be built out of such strong stuff, it has to be able to withstand the compression forces of the acceleration without fracturing due to stress.
Re:what about gradients? (Score:4, Interesting)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof (Score:2)
building anti-grav spaceship in my garage now (Score:4, Funny)
There a few bugs to be worked out however. First, the grav-shield must be aligned within ten arc-seconds perpendicular to main gravitational body (Earth) or gravity leaks through. Second, stray cosmic rays have the disturbing habit of energizing the condensate about the phase-change temp and destroying the null-grav effect. I hope to have fixes by next week.
This Can't Be (Score:3, Funny)
If he's right, they'll call it that "Kajari Drive". That just doesn't ring for me. We need someone else to refine this and make it go. An Archer maybe, or a Cochrane. Now those are names a real space drive can wear. Hell even inter-compartment conduits get names like Jefferies Tubes. Kajari? No way. He can have an episode of his own when they serialize history (as we know they have, so we can see it but consider it fiction thus avoiding paradox), but not the name of the drive.
It's all relative... so to speak... (Score:4, Interesting)
"The equivalence principle is one of the corner stones of general relativity. Now physicists have used quantum mechanics to show how it fails."
Alternatively, they could choose to look at this equivalent assertion: The wave-particle duality of matter is one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics. Now physicists have used general relativity to show how quantum mechanics fails.
Of course, in actuality, they haven't shown anything yet...
Cartman (Score:3, Funny)
I don't have a lot of gravitational mass ... it's my bones that have a lot of inertia.
Re:Show how it is possible to create? (Score:5, Interesting)
The "show" here is a proof, or rather, a calculation. They describe what kind of experiment can be used to test the calculation (on a Bose-Einstein condensate in free-fall).
The experiment isn't trivial, and these theoreticians won't be the ones doing it. They publish the theory, and everybody else looks at it to see if it's worth the time and money to set up an experiment. That's pretty much canonical science going on there, and doesn't merit being dismissed as "just a pretty theory".
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"Free-fall" so, say, something as relatively trivial as "in orbit"?Y
es, there's some vestigal drag - just use high orbit or circumsolar one, and encase the experiment in "external" spacecraft, without physical contact between the two; the internal one being in as pure free-fall as we can get, the external one shielding the interior from miniscule drag by stationkeeping (that's not my ideas, that's actually a setup of some mission that's in the works already)
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Actually, until it's actually been proven, or at least many scientists have failed to disprove it, it -is- "just a pretty theory." THAT is science.
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The process of science goes back and forth between theory and experiment. The theory step is important, since it helps guide experiment.
So it's not "just" a pretty theory, in the sense of one that sits on the shelf and doesn't do anything. It makes prescriptions; it's participating in the back-and-forth between theoreticians and experimentalists.
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They "show how it is possible to create situations", according to the summary. I think the experiment they outline in Appendix D of the paper satisfies that sentence.
Handy side effect! (Score:2)
"One of the more awesome things is that when you are at +/-0.159g, you disappear from regular space-time because you are too weakly interacting with it, like a neutrino."
A lot of grade school kids probably wish they could do that.
Of course, then the ring wraiths and Sauron could see them.
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Too true. In the Kinetic.pdf paper, he devises a "imaginary space-time imager", with "imaginary space-time" being where you go between +/-0.159g.
That would lead to quite a similar effect. You would be cloaked. But others in imaginary time without t he detector could see you.
Also, the paper goes on to explain faster-than light travel (because "light" is no in "imaginary space-time" and instant communications, again FTL.) Actually it solves a ton of mysteries regarding UFOs - how they could be here despite va
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What he has discovered is that it is the PLASMA above the properly charged surface that creates a gravity shielding effect, and shielding includes inversion. Yes, -1g is possible.
Except it don't work on water..
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He also seems to have books on "The Physics of Miracles," "The Physics of UFOs," and "The Physics of Spirits."
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Seriously, how did that get rated up? Do the mods just say "oh that sounds interesting" and mod it up without even looking at the links or think about what the person is saying? Yes, I'm sure some random guy on the internet has come up with a convenient, easy, reproducible way to produce an anti-gravity device and it somehow slipped our attention. Thanks for filling us in GP!
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What you haven't done is read the Kinetic.pdf paper.
You find that gravitational shielding allows for faster than light travel, as well as many other UFO phenomenon. Why wouldn't an advanced race already have control over gravity? Why wouldn't they exploit it to its fullest extent.
The physics of miracles and spirits books similarly fall out of the same math. What he is alluding to here, is that the phenomenons come from a wave collapse function, and these wave collapses can add up, when coordinated to non-tr
Re:Sure, here you go (Score:4, Funny)
The standard crackpot "a single equation" makes me want to cry, but the "see t-shirt below" part more than makes up for it.
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Oh, I can easily write all equations of Physics into one equation.
To see how it works, let's assume I want to "unify" the Schrödinger equation and Einsteins field equation (don't worry about the fact that the Schrödinger equation is non-relativistic ...).
Schrödinger: i hbar d/dt psi = H psi [d here should be the partial derivative sign]
Einstein: G = 8 pi gamma/c^4 T [gamma here is the gravitational constant, because G is already used for the Einstein curvature tensor]
The first step is to br
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What he has discovered is that it is the PLASMA above the properly charged surface that creates a gravity shielding effect, and shielding includes inversion. Yes, -1g is possible.
What happens if you re-route it through the anti-matter injectors? Would it be like putting too much air into a balloon?
Re:Sure, here you go (Score:5, Informative)
"Professor" Aquino is widely known as a total nut. For Newton's sake, his theory "includes not only force particles and matter particles, not only general relativity and Quantum Gravity, but also a theory of consciousness"!! He can't publish his papers at the "Journal of New Energy"! Heck, one of his abstracts starts with "The existence of imaginary mass associated to the neutrino is already well-known" (and as a particle physicist, I've never seen any theory or experiment that even suggests an imaginary mass). He was worked at INPE (which is a very respected research institution) in a data-taking-monkey position; then got a job at the Maranhão state university (where there is NO research at all). He is listed at UEMA as having only a masters' degree (no PhD, so he can't have a research position). Please, don't mention him on an article about science. It's just like mentioning a 1940 VW Beetle when discussing today's F1 cars.
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No kidding... this would be the first step toward gravity control and drive systems based on inertial control.
Imagine if you could lift an aircraft carrier sized ship in to space with nearly no energy, then accelerate to .999 light speed with no more thrust than a model rocket.
What amuses me is how scientists say "this stuff is impossible", and not long later, someone comes along and says "Hey... here's some evidence that it is possible."
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Would you rip your own arm off if you tried to move it?
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When a scientist says "this stuff is impossible," they actually mean "given our best understanding, evidence and theories, we don't believe these things are possible."
They know that fundamental changes or misunderstandings or new discoveries can change that, it just doesn't make much sense to say that every single time. The qualifications are assumed.
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You may be correct about what scientists think they are are saying, but it rarely comes out that way. A physicist may say something like "FTL drive is impossible," and he may be thinking, at least until someone discovers a way to transform the underlying space-time matrix, but what people hear is "That's the final word, and it will never change."
If the "until someone discovers differently" qualifier went without saying, people wouldn't be starting these ridiculous movements like "Mundane Science Fiction."
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Re:Quantum (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if you could lift an aircraft carrier sized ship in to space with nearly no energy, then accelerate to .999 light speed with no more thrust than a model rocket.
Note that one situation means low/zero gravitic mass, the other means low/zero inertial mass. You might be able to arbitrarily control both. You might be able to trade one off for another. Or maybe only modify one. Also, the problems with SR and QM are at a small scale, so your aircraft carrier might only be one atom in diameter or something.
Finally, I haven't read the paper, but it'll be interesting to see how it gets around various perpetual motion type problems. Right off the top of my head, extracting energy from a pendulum where gravitic and inertial mass are different and varying is going to be a serious issue.
Changing inertial mass would do pretty weird things to rotating flywheels. I suppose you could make a spinning flywheel break apart with immense violence at a very low rotational speed. Or rotate a spinning flywheel at insane speeds without it flying apart. All at the same stored energy level. Theres probably a perpetual motion machine that would involve extracting constant energy at a constant torque at high vs low RPMs.
Similar problems at a quantum scale. Otherwise it would be too easy to accelerate two beams of "reduced inertial mass" deuterium to an arbitrarily high velocity and then increase their gravitic mass at the collision point until they fuse.
Finally, the most interesting apps might be arbitrarily increasing inertial and gravitic mass. Increasing gravitic mass would make gravity wave detectors much simpler to make. The odds of increasing the gravitic mass of something small on a spacecraft to something large like a planet seem unlikely aka artifical gravity. Increasing inertial mass might be useful for weapons, armor, pretty much anywhere you use lead, tungsten, or DU.
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I am not sure the actual, real perpetual motion would be a problem. I doubt that it exists, but I would be very happy to be proven wrong.
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Imagine if you could lift an aircraft carrier sized ship in to space with nearly no energy, then accelerate to .999 light speed with no more thrust than a model rocket.
Why insist on breaking the energy conservation laws? I'd settle for being able to lift an object from the Earth's surface to low Earth orbit, using electrical power at 50% efficiency. B-)
Of course once there it would be nice to fly it around using electrical power at similar efficiency, with the reaction being against the rest of the mass o
Well, nearly no energy (Score:2)
Even if you could negate inertia, your aircraft carrier would still be attracted to the earth.
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Yeah, in abstract, I think of the quantum world as one where anything can happen and nothing makes sense. From that perspective, on a layman's level, this doesn't seem particularly interesting. Those weird quantum things cancel out by the time you get to our level.
However, I don't know if this has some kind of crazy/awesome implications.
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C'mon guys. I've never seen a response so short-sighted as to discard a physics breakthrough so quickly.
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Yeah, I mean, quantum tunneling? Quantum confinement? Those effects totally just cancel out and never do us any good!
It would be a heck of a lot of fun to reduce the inertial mass of some hydrogen ions so the can be accelerated to high speed with very little power, then increase their gravitic mass until the inevitably fuse into a cloud of an atom with an atomic number and atomic mass in the zillions, then shut "the magic field" off and watch the giant atoms fission releasing considerable energy to their surroundings.
AKA a perpetual motion machine, at least from the thermodynamic perspective.
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Duuuude!!! You have the kernel of an awesome SF novel here...what you describe seems to be the recipe for a "Big Bang" and the plot could involve a scientist trying to recreat
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Now I was sure to qualify those things. These things generally do cancel out by the time you get to our level. From the general layman's perspective of quantum physics being a field where "nothing makes sense", another thing that doesn't make sense isn't all that interesting.
I think this is a mistake that science-minded people sometimes make: they throw endless amounts of seemingly nonsensical theories at laymen which the laymen have little hope of really understanding, and try to get us all caught up in
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Those weird quantum things cancel out by the time you get to our level.
Actually they don't. Otherwise your computer's chips wouldn't work, all metals would be silver-colored, and don't even get me STARTED on the chemistry that runs the cells of both animals and plants.
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Neutron: Electrically neutral particle. One of the particles out of which atomic nuclei are built.
Interferometry: Measurement of the interference of waves. Remember that according to quantum mechanics, particles also show wave-like properties, especially interference.
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In nominal terms, it's rare for there to be an absolute bound, yes. But it's not always the case that anything that can diverge can diverge arbitrarily far in relative terms.
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"Arbitrarily far" means that there isn't a bound on how far it can be. Simply saying that two things are not always identical isn't the same as saying that they can differ by an unbounded ("arbitrarily large") amount; the 2nd is an additional, stronger claim.
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No, it's entirely conceivable that inertial mass may only differ from gravitation mass by a limited amount. For instance contrast:
may differ by an arbitrary amount
with:
may differ by a factor of 10
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect [wikipedia.org]
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Re:I'm no Einstein (Score:4, Informative)
The point is that, according to the euivalence principle, X g of acceleration due to gravity is indistinguishable from X g of acceleration due to anything else. The article used the specific example of the 1 g you feel at the surface of the Earth.