Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

[ISL]

Physicists have been searching for variations in the coupling of materials to gravity for more than a century, and by some measure, for more than a millenium.

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.)

[lisper]

How much money does society need to spend supporting the work you do before we can safely conclude that Einstein was actually correct and we don't need to test it any more?

[jeffdavis]

Assuming we find dark matter, do you think it will represent some departure from our current understanding of gravity and how it relates to mass? Or do you think it will just be some boring dust clouds?

[zzzcarrot]

So we are litearaly at square 0 still here?

[duchenne]

I love the following Feynman's quote:

``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.

[concordDance]

> why mass attracts mass

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?

[gizmo686]

> 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.

Do people (read physisicts) accept this. My understanding is that, while unconfirmed, the graviton is still a respectable hypothesis.

[Erlich_Bachman]

When you go deeper, it is like that with every part of physics. We don't understand any of it. We just move the horizon of understanding farther and farther, we are not even pretending to know what is behind it. Care to explain where the big bang came from and why did it give birth to these specific sets of physical laws and this specific number of elements and why are there just enough forces and randomness for them ot produce biological life and not kill it instantly with all chaos and random motion etc? Why is life somewhat stable? Science never really "explains" anything, it just learns to describe, model and predict the observations better and better. Observation is all we have.

[croh]

Thus journey in spirituality starts.

[lliamander]

> At that time, it was making people crazy to think that an object could remotely affect another one.

Astrology?

[rurban]

Gravity is very similar to magnetism, a "magically" attracting force of distinct objects. The explanation is very easy via fields. Just trying to explain it via particles will get you into trouble, e.g. the flawed standard model, or the Higgs.

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.

[GuiA]

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem' must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems.

Richard Hamming, You and Your Research

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

[kiba]

Time travel back into the past is understood to be impossible.

[excalibur]

> Throughout his career, Witten conducted research into gravitation, quantum gravity, and general relativity. The last one of these is the theory first put forward by Albert Einstein that proposes that gravity is essentially a warp or curve in the geometry of space-time caused by mass.

You're assuming that your readers are already familiar with quantum gravity, but need an introduction to general relativity?

[martincmartin]

They're assuming that the readers will infer, from the name "quantum gravity", that it has to do with gravity. From just the name, "general relativity," people who don't know what it is probably wouldn't guess it's a theory of gravity.

[walrus01]

> Throughout the expansive Project Outgrowth document, Mead and the other scientists also explored field propulsion, defined as those concepts which use “electric and/or magnetic fields to accelerate an ionized working fluid,

hall effect thrusters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall-effect_thruster

totally compliant with conventional physics

[lawlessone]

this too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive

[mLuby]

There are Gravity Stones from the 60's scattered among US colleges to

> "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...

[jacobreg]

Oh the story behind that is a wild ride from start to finish. Babson's sister drowned when they were children, and he decided the real reason that happened is anti-gravity technology wasn't sufficiently advanced to prevent her drowning. He spent a large amount of his philanthropy funding anti-gravity research for the rest of his life.

Edit: Just realized this is mentioned in the article you linked.

[mojomark]

I took a look and found plenty of semi-insulators out there, but no peep about what association those materials have to do with taming the gravitational force - or am I missing the point?

[hackerbabz]

Why did he think to mention airplanes? The whole concept of airplanes would be obsolete with anti-gravity.

[jml7c5]

This is a terrible article that is little more than conspiracy theorist baiting. For example, the author takes this quote from Ben Rich:

>“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.

[DoctorOetker]

>This is a terrible article

From what I have read up till now on thedrive, the whole outlet is terrible, all their articles seem to be drivel like this.

[newsbinator]

What is the currently accepted answer to the question, "what is gravity"?

[timonoko]

It is an illusion. You are floating freely in the space, but massive mass near-by is causing curvature in space-time. In other words: Time goes more slowly in your shoes, because they are closer to the mass. This causes any movement to be circular movement, which is pressing you to the near-by mass, which you experience as "gravity".

[narag]

Einstein believed gravity isn't really a force in the same sense as the other three fundamental forces, but a property of space-time. That seems to be a problem because it causes some kind of "incompatibilty" with the others. Trying to reconcile those, efforts has been made to create quantum gravity theories, that view space itself as quantized and in this direction you find strings and quantum loop gravity.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert, just parroting what I found in Wikipedia.

[dvh]

Gravity is one of the essential forces in nature. If you want to explain it in simpler terms it is not possible because gravity is the simpler thing. You can use gravity to explain other things, but you cannot use other things to explain gravity.

[NeedMoreTea]

The dent in the rubber sheet that the earth currently sits on - hence the whole curvature in spacetime thing. As far as I know no one has figured out or found gravitons yet, so it's just a theory.

Which I assume means there should be a few gravity-deniers out there to give themselves a break from global heating denial. :)

[ralusek]

That which maketh the apple bonk the skull most uninvitedly.

[tus88]

Curvature in spacetime.

[Grimm665]

This video by Vsauce really put it in a way that made it stick for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc4xYacTu-E

[misterprime]

Is this article just a derivative of the patents that were discussed on HN several weeks ago?

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?

[bonestamp2]

I agree it's just a rehashing of information they know will get a lot of clicks. I have a vested interest in this topic so I've been following it closely and I don't see anything new here.

[officemonkey]

I checked that this article wasn't posted on 1 April.

[JoeAltmaier]

Not surprising in the 1950's. Every other science fiction author was a believer - they wrote endlessly about shields that 'blocked' gravity, fields that interacted with gravity, materials that had variable gravitational force, and on and on. Their speculation helped fuel/was fueled by science investigation of that era.

[conexions]

For anyone interested, a book was written on this about 15 years ago by a reporter from "Janes Defense Weekly". "The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology". Not as tin-hat as you might think, mostly a story of a lot of dead ends while trying to research some DARPA dark projects.

[carapace]

If you like this, do check out Rex Research. You have to sift through a lot of BS but there's some great stuff buried in it.

http://www.rexresearch.com/index.htm

[claytongulick]

Not sure how this topic could be covered without a mention of Dr. Ning Li's work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning_Li_(physicist)

[hanniabu]

They must have some reason to think it's possible. I've also always wondered if Coral Castle was really constructed using some ancient lost technique to harness this power. Takes foil hat back off...

[sgt]

They'll at some point stumble across a Goa'uld device that does precisely that. But for the love of God, don't just plug it in!

[danschumann]

To really be able to manipulate gravity, you would also need to manipulate mass, and so far nuclear is the only way I know of, in which we do that, but uhh.. I don't think we'll get anti gravity until we can control mini stars... Little nuclear engines.

[fsh]

It is a common myth that nuclear reactions "turn mass into energy". What actually happens is that the products of the reaction have less binding energy than the initial nucleus. Since energy gravitates, this reduces the mass of the products. The exact same thing happens in chemical reactions. If you burn something, the product are lighter than the initial substances by the mass equivalent of the energy released.

[tim58]

I change the location of my gravitational field every time I move my body. I modify my gravitational field with every breath as I breath out heavier gases and breath in lighter gases.

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.

[nootropicat]

Gravity is a property of energy, of which mass is one form. That means a laser beam attracts other energy via gravity.

[bonestamp2]

What if gravity isn't always relative to mass? I mean, all of our scientific evidence suggests it is... but I suppose it's possible that's not quite right.

[philip142au]

Gravity is related to time and entropy.

[f2f]

oh, you mean since Roswell? ok.