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February 19, 2017 — Robert Schroeder


Sure, they'd quickly evaporate in space where there's no mass around them to suck in. But hypothetically, if they came into contact with a large mass of the right kind, there's no reason to think a micro black-hole wouldn't start absorbing it and growing. This is what the fear around creating them in labs is based on. It's a black-hole China Syndrome sort of thing.

I don't think so.

If the sun became a black hole right now nothing would happen to the earth's orbit. Because the mass of the sun would be the same.

Anything outside the gravity well before it was a black hole would still be outside the gravity well once it was a black hole. Mass doesn't just appear.

A micro black hole would have small mass, and therefore would still be a small effective gravity well. It would just be a very dense small event horizon in the middle of it.

And if that well was smaller than the nucleus of an atom, it could fall right through you without you noticing. Just like neutrinos do to you every day.

We are mostly empty space after all.
 
Also found this:

Hawking's calculation[10] and more general quantum mechanical arguments predict that micro black holes evaporate almost instantaneously. Additional safety arguments beyond those based on Hawking radiation were given in the paper,[23][24] which showed that in hypothetical scenarios with stable black holes that could damage Earth, such black holes would have been produced by cosmic rays and would have already destroyed known astronomical objects such as the Earth, Sun, neutron stars, or white dwarfs.

Micro black hole - Wikipedia

In other words, if we could create stable micro black holes, and they were dangerous, we'd already be dead because the universe would be creating a lot of them all around us.
 
I don't think the Romulans are. They're supposed to use quantum singularities to power their warp cores.

Given that they would evaporate in something on the orders of plank time, you'd run out of gas real quick.

Well, look at what happened to Romulus in the Star Trek reboot! I realize it may be unrelated, but that supernova certainly had it out for them.
 
I don't think so.

If the sun became a black hole right now nothing would happen to the earth's orbit. Because the mass of the sun would be the same.

Anything outside the gravity well before it was a black hole would still be outside the gravity well once it was a black hole. Mass doesn't just appear.

A micro black hole would have small mass, and therefore would still be a small effective gravity well. It would just be a very dense small event horizon in the middle of it.

And if that well was smaller than the nucleus of an atom, it could fall right through you without you noticing. Just like neutrinos do to you every day.

We are mostly empty space after all.
Sure, we're essentially making the same point. Everything is mostly space, so the chance of a micro black hole grabbing enough matter to maintain itself before evaporating is highly unlikely, but given the Schwarzschild radius, it's not theoretically impossible either. For example if one formed inside highly compressed plasma, the free particles in the plasma, could conceivably be drawn into the MBH. In fact, that is probably how natural black holes are formed in the first place, and "micro-black-hole" is a bit of a misnomer because they all start small ( dimension wise ) and they don't actually get any bigger.

Black holes are also weird in the sense that they aren't really made of anything. It's not like they're little Bohr model atoms squished down into mini Bohr model atoms. They're conceived of as gravitational anomalies that don't have any conventional physical composition. I don't know exactly how that is possible if they can emit radiation, but if you scan around asking for what a black hole is actually made of, that's how they're described ( example here ). This creates a paradox that I don't know how to reconcile, other than perhaps by the computational theory of the universe. I don't think that there's even a scientific consensus on everything about them.
 
Sure, we're essentially making the same point. Everything is mostly space, so the chance of a micro black hole grabbing enough matter to maintain itself before evaporating is highly unlikely, but given the Schwarzschild radius, it's not theoretically impossible either. For example if one formed inside highly compressed plasma, the free particles in the plasma, could conceivably be drawn into the MBH. In fact, that is probably how natural black holes are formed in the first place, and "micro-black-hole" is a bit of a misnomer because they all start small ( dimension wise ) and they don't actually get any bigger.

Black holes are also weird in the sense that they aren't really made of anything. It's not like they're little Bohr model atoms squished down into mini Bohr model atoms. They're conceived of as gravitational anomalies that don't have any conventional physical composition. I don't know exactly how that is possible if they can emit radiation, but if you scan around asking for what a black hole is actually made of, that's how they're described ( example here ). This creates a paradox that I don't know how to reconcile, other than perhaps by the computational theory of the universe. I don't think that there's even a scientific consensus on everything about them.

I remember reading an article in Scientific American or something surmising that there might be small black holes living in the core of the earth, where they can eat just enough to sustain themselves but not enough to grow. There was some math involved including matter density that I forget.

Essentially what I remember is that they'd have to be surrounded by pretty dense matter to even stay put for a few seconds.

I agree -- black holes don't actually have a lot of properties we conventionally think of as matter. They only have three properties: spin, charge and mass. Kind of like an elementary particle.

They emit radiation via virtual particles if I remember. Empty space can create + and - virtual particles out of nothing as long as the forces balance out. In a black hole, some of these virtual particles would be created inside the event horizon, and some outside. The ones outside could escape, the ones inside wouldn't.

Which would result in a net loss of mass. I think this is what 'Hawking radiation' is.

I think of black holes as nature's 'divide by zero' error bit.

Your computer has a flag when you tell it to divide by zero - there is no answer to this computation (even though it trends towards infinity). Maybe event horizons are nature's way of containing the cascade failure when it tries to divide by zero.
 
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Is this a technology we might soon perfect to free humans from being forced to use oversized firecrackers for space travel?
And
Could anyone recommend some recent resources (books, lectures, essays, etc) that deal with the same topics? They wouldn't necessarily have to contain the space travel aspect, but that would make it extra interesting. I'm talking about things written and presented by "real scientists" but in a fashion the common man can understand.

Let's get the bad news out of the way so we can focus on the good stuff: Robert Schroeder's theoretical propulsion concept is damn good fun to hear about, particularly for those of us addicted to theoretical physics topics, but at this point it's a house of cards build upon a tesseract riding upon a unicorn. To date, there's no evidence - not even indirect evidence, of any higher dimensions beyond the four we know and love. And string theory, and it's red-haired step-child M-theory, are the wildest speculations known to science. Recall the Ptolemaic model of the "celestial spheres" where all of planetary motions were considered to be based upon circles - and how an ever more complex system of spheres within spheres were required to preserve the model, as the eccentricities of elliptical orbits were discovered, until an impossibly complex network of wheels within wheels toppled the original postulate of divine simplicity and elegance. That exactly correlates to the advent of string theory and M-theory: failing to find the underlying laws of nature, theoretical physicists have been forced to introduce a mind-boggling variety of new degrees of freedom to try to explain our observations of particles and forces. If there's any physical validity at all to string theory or M-theory, nobody's found a way to demonstrate it yet. I think these theories more properly belong in the category of "conceptual art based on physical ideas and modeled with abstract mathematics." Beautiful, but useless.

But the good news is actually rather wonderful: we don't need higher and as-yet-undiscovered dimensions or "the bulk" to seriously consider the technological prospect of manned interstellar spaceflight or gravitational field propulsion - this is a valid area of academic research that requires little more than Einstein's field equations - among the most well-tested and proven models of physics in history (along with quantum mechanics).

Most of us are probably already familiar with Miguel Alcubierre's seminal 1994 paper describing warp field propulsion - the idea of creating a spherical dipolar gravitational field around a spacecraft. Star Trek TNG adopted this model to describe the propulsion system for the Enterprise. But most people are unaware of some fascinating developments that have brought this concept much closer to human technological feasibility. Dr. Harold “Sonny” White at NASA's Eagleworks program created a canonical formulation (with Dr. Eric Davis) of this warp field theory, and he ran some optimization tests on the computer, which brought the mass requirements down from the scale of Jupiter's mass, to the mass of a VW bug automobile. (Note: links below) That's still a lot of mass-energy to try to contain as an energy field, but it's a huge step in the right direction. And using a very speculative higher-dimensional physics model, he's designed and built a little test rig to see if he can detect a spacetime distortion at their lab in Houston, which employs a laser interferometer which may be able to detect an Alcubierre-type of spacetime distortion field. Personally I think he's barking up the wrong tree by relying upon that higher-dimensional physics model, but it's a neat effort, and if he succeeds then we could have an announcement about a viable warp field propulsion concept literally any day now.

The really fun part of Dr. White's idea has to do with "dark energy" - that mysterious effect which is accelerating distant galaxies faster and faster apart. Because the "dark energy" effect has the earmarks of a *repulsive gravitational field." And that's the key to warp field propulsion (and more broadly, any form of gravitational field propulsion). That was missing from mainstream academic physics until "dark energy" was discovered - most physicists thought that a repulsive gravitational field (or more colloquially, "antigravity") was unphysical, if not laughable, until "dark energy" was observed by astronomers. But now we see that nature appears to manifest an antigravitational effect - and anything that nature can do, we can do better...at least that's the way everything else has gone so far. So warp field propulsion is back on the table, and that's extremely exciting.

Because if you can build a device which generates positive gravity in front of your craft, and antigravity behind your craft, then everything we've been taught about rapid spaceflight goes right out the window: wanna go to the nearest star system and be back in time for dinner? No problem! There's no upper limit to your rate of travel with a gravitational field propulsion system, because your spaceship isn't actually moving -through- spacetime; spacetime is moving around your craft. So you could travel to Alpha Centauri and back in an hour, with no time dilation effects… if you can control enough energy to produce the acceleration field.

It's even more interesting when you consider the nature of constant acceleration (gravitation) on spaceflight: greater distances become less and less relevant with passing time-of-flight. It might take you an hour to reach the nearest star, two hours to reach the galactic center, and eight hours to reach the Andromeda galaxy, and three days to reach the observable limit of the known universe (numbers for illustrative purposes only; I'm too lazy to do the calculations for precision). At a constant acceleration, distances become compressed to a startling degree, so a gravitational field propulsion system opens up the whole universe to manned exploration in ways that we can scarcely imagine.

Now get ready to be really blown away ; The military has known how to create an antigravitational field effect via Einstein's general theory of relativity for over 50 years. This is the kind of stuff you only uncover when you're an obsessed physics freak who's dedicated most of his adult life to chasing down weird leads, but it's worth it. A brilliant physicist, engineer, and science fiction author named Robert L. Forward got an amazing gig at the fledgling Hughes Research Laboratories back in the early 60's, when he was still a grad student. Presumably after torturing some Ph.D's versed in the tensor calculus of Einstein's field equations, he learned of the linearized Einstein field equations for gravity (which are useful approximations of Einstein's equations that make calculations simple for special cases) and thereby re-discovered the exhilarating principles of gravitoelectromagnetic induction (Oliver Heaviside had originally discovered these effects in the late 19th Century, but few physicists noticed), and with it, he devised the first technological method for creating a dipole gravitational field - one side of the device would create an attractive gravitational field, and the other side would manifest an antigravitational field. If that doesn't shock you then you're not paying attention. By 1963, one of the most elite military black budget research corporations had a viable method for producing an antigravity field effect, which required nothing more than dense matter spinning around a toroidal (donut-shaped) test body.

Here's the paper at the American Journal of Physics (sadly, all of the free copies online have vanished):
http://aapt.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1119/1.1969340

I could go on forever about this stuff - hit me up if you have any questions or if you'd like a copy of that paper. He published the foundation for that discovery a year earlier in a paper called "General Relativity for the Experimentalist," but I don't think he has the dipole gravitational field generator in that one. But the point is simply this: it doesn't take exotic physics to achieve the effects we’re looking for - we already know the basic principles. The hard part is the engineering, which might be ameliorated by a little ingenuity ;

People like George Knapp take Lazar seriously. Maybe there's more going on there.

There's definitely something more going on with the Lazar story, but it's probably not what most people think. The US intelligence community is very sneaky - we have to wise up to their crafty ways to understand what they're up to with some of this stuff. There's no way that a guy like Bob Lazar would be let anywhere near a top-level security clearance - he was a low-grade tech with a crap education and little in the way of ethics or reliability. There's an in-depth examination of his life based upon all of the available public records on him, and it paints a clear picture of a clever weasel with a huge ego. A terrible candidate for a highly classified research program...but an ideal candidate for a massive public disinformation campaign.

So I think we can safely throw out all of the rubbish he claims about UFOs and alien technology. But element 115 is a whole other matter - there may well be isotopes of element 115 that exist on the "island of stability" - superheavy neutron-rich elements with surprisingly long half-lives that exhibit exotic properties. I think that Lazar was recruited by high-level intelligence officials to get the word out to other compartmentalized research programs (and to Congress for funding) to get them working on those elements because they found something interesting. It's possible that what they found involves gravitational waves, for technical reasons that would probably bore everyone to death. So they hired Lazar to tell this crazy story about UFOs, as a mass-dissemination wrapping for wide public exposure, to get the word out that they found stable isotopes on the island of stability that were worth looking into for defense applications. He did apparently work at Los Alamos as a fairly low-level tech. But his claims about an MIT education and working at Area 51 were almost certainly pure crap - they can hire the best people on the planet for top research positions; a guy like Lazar wouldn't even make their radar, his nifty rocket-car notwithstanding.

The problem with highly compartmentalized research is that when you find something juicy, you can't tell anyone about it. So how do you let your friends in other highly classified research programs know when you've got something useful? You hire some shady little weasel with no future to go out and tell a zany sensational story that will get an avalanche of press exposure, and bury your meaningful info inside his story as a footnote. You make sure that there's just enough verifiable data in the story, like security protocols that only "insiders" will be able to verify, to make your friends in other high-security research divisions sit up and notice. Then while the public chases down fake leads about imaginary research facilities and little green men, you send in an appropriations request for funding to look into the exotic properties of some stable elements that you haven't looked into before, then blammo - you have a useful new tool for your advanced military technology toolbox.

Here are some links to Dr. White’s papers that laid the foundation for his warp field experiment, currently underway at NASA:

A Discussion of Space-Time Metric Engineering, white 2003
http://crowlspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Warp-Metric-White-2003.pdf

The Alcubierre drive in higher dimensional space-time 2006
http://earthtech.org/publications/davis_STAIF_conference_2.pdf

Warp Field Mechanics 101, 2011
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936.pdf

Warp Field 102: Energy Optimization
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20130011213.pdf

And here’s Miguel Alcubierre’s original 1994 paper that founded the warp field propulsion concept in the public domain:

“The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity”
http://arxiv.org/pdf/grqc/0009013.pdf
 
And


Let's get the bad news out of the way so we can focus on the good stuff: Robert Schroeder's theoretical propulsion concept is damn good fun to hear about, particularly for those of us addicted to theoretical physics topics, but at this point it's a house of cards build upon a tesseract riding upon a unicorn. To date, there's no evidence - not even indirect evidence, of any higher dimensions beyond the four we know and love. And string theory, and it's red-haired step-child M-theory, are the wildest speculations known to science. Recall the Ptolemaic model of the "celestial spheres" where all of planetary motions were considered to be based upon circles - and how an ever more complex system of spheres within spheres were required to preserve the model, as the eccentricities of elliptical orbits were discovered, until an impossibly complex network of wheels within wheels toppled the original postulate of divine simplicity and elegance. That exactly correlates to the advent of string theory and M-theory: failing to find the underlying laws of nature, theoretical physicists have been forced to introduce a mind-boggling variety of new degrees of freedom to try to explain our observations of particles and forces. If there's any physical validity at all to string theory or M-theory, nobody's found a way to demonstrate it yet. I think these theories more properly belong in the category of "conceptual art based on physical ideas and modeled with abstract mathematics." Beautiful, but useless.

But the good news is actually rather wonderful: we don't need higher and as-yet-undiscovered dimensions or "the bulk" to seriously consider the technological prospect of manned interstellar spaceflight or gravitational field propulsion - this is a valid area of academic research that requires little more than Einstein's field equations - among the most well-tested and proven models of physics in history (along with quantum mechanics).

Most of us are probably already familiar with Miguel Alcubierre's seminal 1994 paper describing warp field propulsion - the idea of creating a spherical dipolar gravitational field around a spacecraft. Star Trek TNG adopted this model to describe the propulsion system for the Enterprise. But most people are unaware of some fascinating developments that have brought this concept much closer to human technological feasibility. Dr. Harold “Sonny” White at NASA's Eagleworks program created a canonical formulation (with Dr. Eric Davis) of this warp field theory, and he ran some optimization tests on the computer, which brought the mass requirements down from the scale of Jupiter's mass, to the mass of a VW bug automobile. (Note: links below) That's still a lot of mass-energy to try to contain as an energy field, but it's a huge step in the right direction. And using a very speculative higher-dimensional physics model, he's designed and built a little test rig to see if he can detect a spacetime distortion at their lab in Houston, which employs a laser interferometer which may be able to detect an Alcubierre-type of spacetime distortion field. Personally I think he's barking up the wrong tree by relying upon that higher-dimensional physics model, but it's a neat effort, and if he succeeds then we could have an announcement about a viable warp field propulsion concept literally any day now.

The really fun part of Dr. White's idea has to do with "dark energy" - that mysterious effect which is accelerating distant galaxies faster and faster apart. Because the "dark energy" effect has the earmarks of a *repulsive gravitational field." And that's the key to warp field propulsion (and more broadly, any form of gravitational field propulsion). That was missing from mainstream academic physics until "dark energy" was discovered - most physicists thought that a repulsive gravitational field (or more colloquially, "antigravity") was unphysical, if not laughable, until "dark energy" was observed by astronomers. But now we see that nature appears to manifest an antigravitational effect - and anything that nature can do, we can do better...at least that's the way everything else has gone so far. So warp field propulsion is back on the table, and that's extremely exciting.

Because if you can build a device which generates positive gravity in front of your craft, and antigravity behind your craft, then everything we've been taught about rapid spaceflight goes right out the window: wanna go to the nearest star system and be back in time for dinner? No problem! There's no upper limit to your rate of travel with a gravitational field propulsion system, because your spaceship isn't actually moving -through- spacetime; spacetime is moving around your craft. So you could travel to Alpha Centauri and back in an hour, with no time dilation effects… if you can control enough energy to produce the acceleration field.

It's even more interesting when you consider the nature of constant acceleration (gravitation) on spaceflight: greater distances become less and less relevant with passing time-of-flight. It might take you an hour to reach the nearest star, two hours to reach the galactic center, and eight hours to reach the Andromeda galaxy, and three days to reach the observable limit of the known universe (numbers for illustrative purposes only; I'm too lazy to do the calculations for precision). At a constant acceleration, distances become compressed to a startling degree, so a gravitational field propulsion system opens up the whole universe to manned exploration in ways that we can scarcely imagine.

Now get ready to be really blown away ; The military has known how to create an antigravitational field effect via Einstein's general theory of relativity for over 50 years. This is the kind of stuff you only uncover when you're an obsessed physics freak who's dedicated most of his adult life to chasing down weird leads, but it's worth it. A brilliant physicist, engineer, and science fiction author named Robert L. Forward got an amazing gig at the fledgling Hughes Research Laboratories back in the early 60's, when he was still a grad student. Presumably after torturing some Ph.D's versed in the tensor calculus of Einstein's field equations, he learned of the linearized Einstein field equations for gravity (which are useful approximations of Einstein's equations that make calculations simple for special cases) and thereby re-discovered the exhilarating principles of gravitoelectromagnetic induction (Oliver Heaviside had originally discovered these effects in the late 19th Century, but few physicists noticed), and with it, he devised the first technological method for creating a dipole gravitational field - one side of the device would create an attractive gravitational field, and the other side would manifest an antigravitational field. If that doesn't shock you then you're not paying attention. By 1963, one of the most elite military black budget research corporations had a viable method for producing an antigravity field effect, which required nothing more than dense matter spinning around a toroidal (donut-shaped) test body.

Here's the paper at the American Journal of Physics (sadly, all of the free copies online have vanished):
http://aapt.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1119/1.1969340

I could go on forever about this stuff - hit me up if you have any questions or if you'd like a copy of that paper. He published the foundation for that discovery a year earlier in a paper called "General Relativity for the Experimentalist," but I don't think he has the dipole gravitational field generator in that one. But the point is simply this: it doesn't take exotic physics to achieve the effects we’re looking for - we already know the basic principles. The hard part is the engineering, which might be ameliorated by a little ingenuity ;



There's definitely something more going on with the Lazar story, but it's probably not what most people think. The US intelligence community is very sneaky - we have to wise up to their crafty ways to understand what they're up to with some of this stuff. There's no way that a guy like Bob Lazar would be let anywhere near a top-level security clearance - he was a low-grade tech with a crap education and little in the way of ethics or reliability. There's an in-depth examination of his life based upon all of the available public records on him, and it paints a clear picture of a clever weasel with a huge ego. A terrible candidate for a highly classified research program...but an ideal candidate for a massive public disinformation campaign.

So I think we can safely throw out all of the rubbish he claims about UFOs and alien technology. But element 115 is a whole other matter - there may well be isotopes of element 115 that exist on the "island of stability" - superheavy neutron-rich elements with surprisingly long half-lives that exhibit exotic properties. I think that Lazar was recruited by high-level intelligence officials to get the word out to other compartmentalized research programs (and to Congress for funding) to get them working on those elements because they found something interesting. It's possible that what they found involves gravitational waves, for technical reasons that would probably bore everyone to death. So they hired Lazar to tell this crazy story about UFOs, as a mass-dissemination wrapping for wide public exposure, to get the word out that they found stable isotopes on the island of stability that were worth looking into for defense applications. He did apparently work at Los Alamos as a fairly low-level tech. But his claims about an MIT education and working at Area 51 were almost certainly pure crap - they can hire the best people on the planet for top research positions; a guy like Lazar wouldn't even make their radar, his nifty rocket-car notwithstanding.

The problem with highly compartmentalized research is that when you find something juicy, you can't tell anyone about it. So how do you let your friends in other highly classified research programs know when you've got something useful? You hire some shady little weasel with no future to go out and tell a zany sensational story that will get an avalanche of press exposure, and bury your meaningful info inside his story as a footnote. You make sure that there's just enough verifiable data in the story, like security protocols that only "insiders" will be able to verify, to make your friends in other high-security research divisions sit up and notice. Then while the public chases down fake leads about imaginary research facilities and little green men, you send in an appropriations request for funding to look into the exotic properties of some stable elements that you haven't looked into before, then blammo - you have a useful new tool for your advanced military technology toolbox.

Here are some links to Dr. White’s papers that laid the foundation for his warp field experiment, currently underway at NASA:

A Discussion of Space-Time Metric Engineering, white 2003
http://crowlspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Warp-Metric-White-2003.pdf

The Alcubierre drive in higher dimensional space-time 2006
http://earthtech.org/publications/davis_STAIF_conference_2.pdf

Warp Field Mechanics 101, 2011
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936.pdf

Warp Field 102: Energy Optimization
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20130011213.pdf

And here’s Miguel Alcubierre’s original 1994 paper that founded the warp field propulsion concept in the public domain:

“The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity”
http://arxiv.org/pdf/grqc/0009013.pdf

With apologies to many of Burnt State's wonderful comments in the forum, this post by Thomas just became my current all-time favorite. Clear, concise, well articulated and well reasoned. Thank you for taking the time to post this. Participants like this remind me why this forum can be a valuable place for sharing ideas.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
With apologies to many of Burnt State's wonderful comments in the forum, this post by Thomas just became my current all-time favorite. Clear, concise, well articulated and well reasoned. Thank you for taking the time to post this. Participants like this remind me why this forum can be a valuable place for sharing ideas.

Much obliged, ChrisJohnsen. I haven't figured out how Gene and Chris manage to keep The Paracast forum the last refuge for polite and well-informed discussions of ufology on the wild-and-woolly internet, but I too am always grateful for a fun place to poke around and read some interesting discussions among bright minds.
 
Because if you can build a device which generates positive gravity in front of your craft, and antigravity behind your craft, then everything we've been taught about rapid spaceflight goes right out the window: wanna go to the nearest star system and be back in time for dinner? No problem!

The problem is that nobody knows what dark energy is, or if it is in fact there at all.

This is like saying dilithium solves the matter/antimatter conversion problem in Star Trek. Warp drive works great when you're allowed to make up stuff that you don't know exists.

This is not an engineering problem. This is a fundamental new force of nature we're proposing being used to make the drive work. In terms of science, this is exactly like waiving your hands and saying 'dilithium makes it go!'

Yes we should try to figure out if DA is a thing and how it works. Yes it could solve everything. Just like the Higgs Boson was supposed to do, and didn't.

By 1963, one of the most elite military black budget research corporations had a viable method for producing an antigravity field effect, which required nothing more than dense matter spinning around a toroidal (donut-shaped) test body.

Here's the paper at the American Journal of Physics (sadly, all of the free copies online have vanished):
http://aapt.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1119/1.1969340

Nope. That paper proposed ways to investigate, with no record of such an investigation ever happening.

There is no data to support your assertion that I'm aware of, and a ton of data to support the opposite.
 
The problem is that nobody knows what dark energy is, or if it is in fact there at all.

Actually at this point there isn’t much in the way of debate – a real phenomenon is accelerating masses apart at cosmological distances. Can we harness it technologically? Tough to say, until we have a better understanding of it.

But if you look at human history, we have a pretty good track record of mastering the laws of nature. Once we observe something, we rack our brains until we understand how it works, then we find ways to harness it to serve our ambitions. Nearly every observed force in nature has succumbed to human ingenuity in due time. Just last century we even made our first crude use of the nuclear strong force to transmute lead into gold, fulfilling the centuries-old ambition of alchemy. Imagine what we’ll achieve over the next few centuries.

And even if, for some reason, the dark energy effect remains beyond our capacity to master via technological means, we already know how to create a dipole gravitational field, as Robert Forward describes in the “Guidelines to Antigravity” paper I cited above. To which you object:

Nope. That paper proposed ways to investigate, with no record of such an investigation ever happening.

Some people just don’t get excited about major theoretical breakthroughs. And that’s fine; there’s a place for pragmatism, and a place for pioneering thought that leads to new practical applications.

There’s no doubt that Robert Forward’s dipole gravitational field generator works in principle – it’s founded on the most solid theoretical framework in the canon of modern academic physics. But yes, as proposed, the technological requirements to produce a measurable effect with that device remains beyond our grasp. In fact every toroidal RF choke in our modern electronics is a little dipole gravitational field generator, but the effect is simply vastly too small for human technology to measure. Unlike the “Dilithium crystals” of Star Trek, we know how Forward’s device works, and that it would indeed generate an observable antigravitational field effect if we could build it as he described.

For pragmatists, that’s an irksome and unfulfilling reality. For theorists, it’s a ray of light shining through a keyhole in a door they’ve been eagerly searching for – and an exciting challenge to puzzle together the right key to open that door to a new future. And in the intervening half century, theorists and engineers working within our top military research programs may have already unlocked that door. If so, that would be an exciting development in the minds of many pragmatists awaiting the arrival of “applied gravitics,” but it would be rather disappointing to most theorists, since the thrill of discovering the key revelation that expands the limits of human capability is the Holy Grail that drives the entire quest.
 
Ah - here we go: I stumbled upon a copy of Robert Forward's 1963 "Guidelines to Antigravity" paper, which has the gravitational dipole generator at the end:
http://pkl.net/~node/misc/antigrav.pdf

DROBNJAK cited this paper in the UFO Design thread, but it wasn't properly understood, so I'll just sketch the broad outline and if anyone cares to discuss it in more detail I'd be happy to do so.

The basic idea is simple, and a little bit mind-boggling at first blush: if you replace electric charge with "mass charge" in the electrostatic and electrodynamic equations and flip the sign, you get the equations for ordinary (first order) gravitational attraction, and the dynamical (second-order) equations of "gravitoelectromagnetism." That sounds like a unified field theory, but it's not. All it means is that when you spin a massive body (like the Earth or a star) then you get a gravitomagnetic field, which is *analogous* to an electrically charged spinning object creating a magnetic field. And when you accelerate a gravitational body, you produce a gravitoelectric induction effect which is analogous to electrical induction - the only difference is that these forces act on mass/matter, rather than electrical charge.

In practice it's actually quite simple: if you start with a non-rotating planet or star, with a little satellite nearby, then when you begin rotating the celestial body faster and faster, the little satellite will begin to orbit around it in the same direction. Forward realized that if you applied that to a torus, and rotated a substantial magnitude of mass around that torus so all of the circulating matter flowed through the center in the same direction and back around again (like a smoke ring) with increasing velocity, then you'd generate a positive (attractive) gravitational pole on one side of the "donut hole" and a repulsive (antigravity) pole on the other side of the donut hole - a test body near that pole would be gravitational repelled away from it. The trouble is this: if the velocity of the mass flowing around the toroid is small, then you need matter of incredible density akin to that of a neutron star. But, there's more than one way to skin a cat, if you wish to look into it more closely.
 
Actually at this point there isn’t much in the way of debate – a real phenomenon is accelerating masses apart at cosmological distances. Can we harness it technologically? Tough to say, until we have a better understanding of it.

Hey, I'm with you there. I think it's there. But there is some debate about DA being a thing at all.

Just throw 'Dark Energy Alternative Theories' into google and you'll get a shwack of them.

Nobody has ever directly seen, measured, or come up with a testable theory of what it is. I'm just being skeptical here.

If it's not there, the AWD goes away.

But if you look at human history, we have a pretty good track record of mastering the laws of nature. Once we observe something, we rack our brains until we understand how it works, then we find ways to harness it to serve our ambitions. Nearly every observed force in nature has succumbed to human ingenuity in due time. Just last century we even made our first crude use of the nuclear strong force to transmute lead into gold, fulfilling the centuries-old ambition of alchemy. Imagine what we’ll achieve over the next few centuries.

You sound a lot like Kurzweil and his singularity.

Yes, advanced technology can seem like magic. Yes, we harness more and more on the Kardeshev scale. Yes, I think we'll get there some day.

But the difference between technology seeming like magic and being magic is profound.

Technology is not magic. Computers aren't magic. One of the best things I ever did was do some VLSI design all the way down to the gate level, and then understand how gates actually work physically (all the si/ge semiconductor stuff). Then the magic in computation goes away.

And even if, for some reason, the dark energy effect remains beyond our capacity to master via technological means, we already know how to create a dipole gravitational field, as Robert Forward describes in the “Guidelines to Antigravity” paper I cited above. To which you object:



Some people just don’t get excited about major theoretical breakthroughs. And that’s fine; there’s a place for pragmatism, and a place for pioneering thought that leads to new practical applications.

No, what I'm arguing is that it isn't a breakthrough at all.

Lots of people write theoretical papers on lots of things that are total shite. Until you come up with a testable, verifiable theory, I think this is one of them.

Just like I used to be a fan of string theory (thanks, Brian Greene) but I'm not any longer. Because a neat math theory that is ultimately untestable is just navel gazing. It might be true. Just like my cat might be the the hot chick from the Star Trek episode Assignment: Earth.

But I doubt it.

There’s no doubt that Robert Forward’s dipole gravitational field generator works in principle – it’s founded on the most solid theoretical framework in the canon of modern academic physics. But yes, as proposed, the technological requirements to produce a measurable effect with that device remains beyond our grasp. In fact every toroidal RF choke in our modern electronics is a little dipole gravitational field generator, but the effect is simply vastly too small for human technology to measure. Unlike the “Dilithium crystals” of Star Trek, we know how Forward’s device works, and that it would indeed generate an observable antigravitational field effect if we could build it as he described.

There is every doubt that it works.

Show me a peer-reviewed replication of his work. It's not there.

I know it's not there because if it was, people would be freaking out about it and I'd finally get my flying car.

For pragmatists, that’s an irksome and unfulfilling reality. For theorists, it’s a ray of light shining through a keyhole in a door they’ve been eagerly searching for – and an exciting challenge to puzzle together the right key to open that door to a new future. And in the intervening half century, theorists and engineers working within our top military research programs may have already unlocked that door. If so, that would be an exciting development in the minds of many pragmatists awaiting the arrival of “applied gravitics,” but it would be rather disappointing to most theorists, since the thrill of discovering the key revelation that expands the limits of human capability is the Holy Grail that drives the entire quest.

If they've already unlocked it I think we'd know about it.

I think there's disinformation there from the military-industrial complex, sure. I just think it's there to make us think that they're capable of magic, when they're mostly incapable of anything.

Just like if the NSA had workable QC they wouldn't have needed to hire an Israeli team to crack that guy's old iPhone.
 
Ah - here we go: I stumbled upon a copy of Robert Forward's 1963 "Guidelines to Antigravity" paper, which has the gravitational dipole generator at the end:
http://pkl.net/~node/misc/antigrav.pdf

DROBNJAK cited this paper in the UFO Design thread, but it wasn't properly understood, so I'll just sketch the broad outline and if anyone cares to discuss it in more detail I'd be happy to do so.

The basic idea is simple, and a little bit mind-boggling at first blush: if you replace electric charge with "mass charge" in the electrostatic and electrodynamic equations and flip the sign, you get the equations for ordinary (first order) gravitational attraction, and the dynamical (second-order) equations of "gravitoelectromagnetism." That sounds like a unified field theory, but it's not. All it means is that when you spin a massive body (like the Earth or a star) then you get a gravitomagnetic field, which is *analogous* to an electrically charged spinning object creating a magnetic field. And when you accelerate a gravitational body, you produce a gravitoelectric induction effect which is analogous to electrical induction - the only difference is that these forces act on mass/matter, rather than electrical charge.

In practice it's actually quite simple: if you start with a non-rotating planet or star, with a little satellite nearby, then when you begin rotating the celestial body faster and faster, the little satellite will begin to orbit around it in the same direction. Forward realized that if you applied that to a torus, and rotated a substantial magnitude of mass around that torus so all of the circulating matter flowed through the center in the same direction and back around again (like a smoke ring) with increasing velocity, then you'd generate a positive (attractive) gravitational pole on one side of the "donut hole" and a repulsive (antigravity) pole on the other side of the donut hole - a test body near that pole would be gravitational repelled away from it. The trouble is this: if the velocity of the mass flowing around the toroid is small, then you need matter of incredible density akin to that of a neutron star. But, there's more than one way to skin a cat, if you wish to look into it more closely.
I think you're talking about frame-dragging.

Frame-dragging is an effect on spacetime, predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, that is due to non-static stationary distributions of mass–energy. A stationary field is one that is in a steady state, but the masses causing that field may be non-static, rotating for instance. The first frame-dragging effect was derived in 1918, in the framework of general relativity, by the Austrian physicists Josef Lense and Hans Thirring, and is also known as the Lense–Thirring effect.[1][2][3]They predicted that the rotation of a massive object would distort the spacetime metric, making the orbit of a nearby test particle precess. This does not happen in Newtonian mechanics for which the gravitational field of a body depends only on its mass, not on its rotation. The Lense–Thirring effect is very small—about one part in a few trillion. To detect it, it is necessary to examine a very massive object, or build an instrument that is very sensitive. More generally, the subject of effects caused by mass–energy currents is known as gravitomagnetism, in analogy with classical electromagnetism. In 2015, new general-relativistic extensions of Newtonian rotation laws were formulated to describe geometric dragging of frames which incorporates a newly discovered antidragging effect. [4]
Frame-dragging - Wikipedia
 
Much obliged, ChrisJohnsen. I haven't figured out how Gene and Chris manage to keep The Paracast forum the last refuge for polite and well-informed discussions of ufology on the wild-and-woolly internet, but I too am always grateful for a fun place to poke around and read some interesting discussions among bright minds.
Are you familiar w/ Paul Potter's work? Anti-Gravity and Propulsion Dynamics. If so, what do you think?
 
My PhD physics friend told me a while back that they're testing string theory now as he has been keeping up to date on the latest activity in this area. He said to me that they have gotten results from the Hadron super collider that confirmed certain string theory predictions. He used to do experimental particle physics work related to that.
 
Are you familiar w/ Paul Potter's work? Anti-Gravity and Propulsion Dynamics. If so, what do you think?
Thanks for the tip. I haven't heard of it before but I'll check it out and get back to you.

My PhD physics friend told me a while back that they're testing string theory now as he has been keeping up to date on the latest activity in this area. He said to me that they have gotten results from the Hadron super collider that confirmed certain string theory predictions. He used to do experimental particle physics work related to that.
One of the core problems with string theory and its extensions, is that they're not actually theories: they're comprised of huge classes of millions of various theories that result from the zany expanse of variables inherent in the higher dimensional physics of vibrating strings that can connect together and knot in nearly infinite configurations. So there's a string theory for every possible discovery or rumored discovery, but there's no experiment to disprove string theory - it's unfalsifiable (which, some argue, renders it inherently unscientific). At best, an experiment can rule out a certain class of string theories, but there's always a gazillion more that you haven't ruled out.

And if you follow particle physics for awhile, you'll see the horrendous impact of all this on the confirmation bias of string theory advocates. Literally every time a rumor of a new and unexplained signal turns up, string theorists immediately jump on it as "proof" that string theory is vindicated. And then, in time, additional data provides a more prosaic explanation for the original signal, or it's found to be a statistical anomaly that disappears in the larger data set. And there are no consequences for string theory because the theorists just say "oh well, that class of string theories wasn't proven after all, but we have trillions more possible string theories where that came from."

I assume that your friend was excited by the 750-GeV diphoton signal they found at the Large Hardron collider in 2015, which caused a huge stir in the particle physics community throughout the first half of 2016. Like clockwork, the string theorists jumped on it - and so did an army of hundreds if not thousands of other theorists, all eager to explain the first new particle beyond the Standard Model. That's a really fun time in physics, honestly - for awhile the frontier of physics becomes a "Wild West" rife with all kinds of kaleidoscopic new possibilities.

But sadly, on August 5, 2016, the hammer fell on the mysterious massive new particle - it was just a statistical fluke that slumped back into oblivion with the arrival of additional data, like so many others before it:
http://blog.physicsworld.com/2016/08/05/and-so-to-bed-for-the-750-gev-bump/

Please let us know if your particle physicist friend has been talking about something different - there are a lot of teams working on different projects at the LHC, and it's always fascinating to get the "inside baseball" from those folks. And links to that stuff are always greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks for the tip. I haven't heard of it before but I'll check it out and get back to you.


One of the core problems with string theory and its extensions, is that they're not actually theories: they're comprised of huge classes of millions of various theories that result from the zany expanse of variables inherent in the higher dimensional physics of vibrating strings that can connect together and knot in nearly infinite configurations. So there's a string theory for every possible discovery or rumored discovery, but there's no experiment to disprove string theory - it's unfalsifiable (which, some argue, renders it inherently unscientific). At best, an experiment can rule out a certain class of string theories, but there's always a gazillion more that you haven't ruled out.

And if you follow particle physics for awhile, you'll see the horrendous impact of all this on the confirmation bias of string theory advocates. Literally every time a rumor of a new and unexplained signal turns up, string theorists immediately jump on it as "proof" that string theory is vindicated. And then, in time, additional data provides a more prosaic explanation for the original signal, or it's found to be a statistical anomaly that disappears in the larger data set. And there are no consequences for string theory because the theorists just say "oh well, that class of string theories wasn't proven after all, but we have trillions more possible string theories where that came from."

I assume that your friend was excited by the 750-GeV diphoton signal they found at the Large Hardron collider in 2015, which caused a huge stir in the particle physics community throughout the first half of 2016. Like clockwork, the string theorists jumped on it - and so did an army of hundreds if not thousands of other theorists, all eager to explain the first new particle beyond the Standard Model. That's a really fun time in physics, honestly - for awhile the frontier of physics becomes a "Wild West" rife with all kinds of kaleidoscopic new possibilities.

But sadly, on August 5, 2016, the hammer fell on the mysterious massive new particle - it was just a statistical fluke that slumped back into oblivion with the arrival of additional data, like so many others before it:
http://blog.physicsworld.com/2016/08/05/and-so-to-bed-for-the-750-gev-bump/

Please let us know if your particle physicist friend has been talking about something different - there are a lot of teams working on different projects at the LHC, and it's always fascinating to get the "inside baseball" from those folks. And links to that stuff are always greatly appreciated.

Yeah, unfortunately the game of telephone is very applicable here. I don't know what he specifically was referring to nor do I have the qualifications to assure proper communication of it unless he provides me a link or writes it up for me. He is no longer on the "inside", but he stays on top of new developments. If I learn anything specific from him, I'll post it.
 
But there is some debate about DA being a thing at all.
There’s some debate about everything; ultimately even the physical theories that we use to engineer modern technology are contingent upon subsequent developments. But for now, dark energy is widely considered to be a proven phenomenon among astronomers, physicists and cosmologists – so unless some new discovery refutes it, we can reasonably accept it as a scientific fact.

Just throw 'Dark Energy Alternative Theories' into google and you'll get a shwack of them.
But that means nothing – a Google search is not a valid empirical criterion of anything. I did a Google search of “aliens ate my homework” and came up with 260,000 listings:
Google

Nobody has ever directly seen, measured, or come up with a testable theory of what it is. I'm just being skeptical here.
I’d call this “being a contrarian,” perhaps. Skeptics generally accept the dark energy model because it’s so well-supported at this point. The dark energy effect has been directly measured via type Ia supernovae observations, and it conforms alarmingly well with the two Friedmann equations that describe cosmological evolution via Einstein’s field equations. So we have observational data confirmed by multiple independent sources, which fits within the limits of error to the prevailing cosmological equations in use since 1924. That’s good enough for science. But yes, until we have a more explicit understanding of the exact nature of dark energy, it’s fair to glance at it sideways…but it’s another matter altogether to reject the observations themselves. Perhaps there is some as-yet undiscovered physical mechanism that’s skewing those observations – that’s a legitimate concern. But to date, nobody’s offered a compelling model of such an effect which has held up to scrutiny, because in addition to the supernovae data, an alternative model would also have to explain the observed fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation and the resulting baryon acoustic oscillations observed in galactic distribution patterns:

"Furthermore, the overwhelming confidence astronomers have that the universe is expanding faster now than it was billions of years ago is based on much more than just supernova measurements. These include tiny fluctuations in the pattern of relic heat after the Big Bang (i.e., the cosmic microwave background) and the modern day imprint of those fluctuations in the distribution of galaxies around us (called baryon acoustic oscillations). The present study also ignores the presence of a substantial amount of matter in the Universe, confirmed numerous times and ways since the 1970’s, further reducing the study confidence. These other data show the universe to be accelerating independently from supernovae. If we combine the other observations with the supernova data, we go from 99.99 percent sure to 99.99999 percent sure."
Scolnic and Reiss, 10/26/16
No, Astronomers Haven't Decided Dark Energy Is Nonexistent

If it's not there, the AWD goes away.
I’d really miss my All-Wheel Drive. Or does “AWD” mean something else?

You sound a lot like Kurzweil and his singularity.
But that's not what I'm saying. It’s simply a historical fact that mankind masters the forces he observes in nature. Now that we’ve actually observed cosmic acceleration, we'll figure out how it works. And sooner or later, we'll figure out how to exploit it to serve our ambitions. This is what happens so reliably throughout history that it's hard not to see it as inevitable.

No, what I'm arguing is that it isn't a breakthrough at all.
Forward’s dipole gravitational field generator was a significant theoretical breakthrough. It’s regrettable that you personally can’t appreciate it. Most physicists get excited when I share this with them.

Lots of people write theoretical papers on lots of things that are total shite. Until you come up with a testable, verifiable theory, I think this is one of them.

Just like I used to be a fan of string theory (thanks, Brian Greene) but I'm not any longer. Because a neat math theory that is ultimately untestable is just navel gazing. It might be true. Just like my cat might be the the hot chick from the Star Trek episode Assignment: Earth.

There is every doubt that it works.

Show me a peer-reviewed replication of his work. It's not there.
You probably should’ve actually looked at the paper before typing all of that. The article in question, “Guidelines to Antigravity,” appeared in the widely respected peer-reviewed American Journal of Physics (American Journal of Physics - Wikipedia) in 1963, and if you look up “gravitomagnetism” in the physics literature you’ll find countless highly reputable citations - here's over 1,500 of them: gravitomagnetism - Google Scholar . There is no credible scientific debate about this paper’s foundations or conclusions, because the linearized weak-field approximations of Einstein’s field equations are well-established academic physics. And specifically the physics of gravitomagnetism that his proposed device is based upon has been observationally verified by multiple experiments and astronomical observations, including the Gravity Probe B satellite deployed by NASA in 2004. The effect is also called “frame dragging” and the “Lense-Thirring effect.”
Gravity Probe B - Wikipedia

Gravitomagnetism is an indisputable scientific fact. So Forward’s proposed device is theoretically unassailable.

I know it's not there because if it was, people would be freaking out about it and I'd finally get my flying car.

If they've already unlocked it I think we'd know about it.
Did you even look at the paper? Like I’ve said quite clearly, while the theoretical basis of this device is bullet-proof, building it as depicted to produce an observable effect is currently beyond human technological capabilities. It requires a density of matter that we can’t currently control – in the range of neutronium aka degenerate matter, moving at speeds that we can’t currently contain as required (at least not in any obvious manner).

I understand how frustrating/annoying that is. It’s like having Spock step through a wormhole in your living room and hand you the plans for a working time machine – but you can’t build it because the technology to make the parts is centuries ahead of us.

But who knows? Perhaps with a few hundred billion dollars, the brightest minds on the planet, and half a century to work on it, you might come up with something interesting based on those plans.

I think there's disinformation there from the military-industrial complex, sure. I just think it's there to make us think that they're capable of magic, when they're mostly incapable of anything.
Or maybe that’s just what they want you to think ;
 
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