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February 19, 2017 — Robert Schroeder


I love it.

I actually said that I thought you were referring to frame dragging. So good.

The problem with frame dragging is that it isn't antigravity. In fact, it's the opposite of that.

It's a torsional effect of distorted space time that compresses it when you go against the rotational direction, and stretches it when you go with it.

What it doesn't do is flatten space time, which is about the only thing I could imagine antigravity to do.

By AWD I meant Alcubierre Warp Drive. My spelling is terrible.

My point about DA is simply this. You are rushing to engineering when the science isn't done. I think it's there. I hope it's there. But even if it is, we don't know what it is at all. But what it doesn't appear to be is antigravity.

And not one theoretical peer reviewed paper has ever demonstrated a testable antigravity effect that has been replicated to my knowledge.

Not one.

So these 'breakthroughs' are just like every string theory paper I've ever read. Full of great ideas that aren't testable.
 
Another interesting consequence is that, for an object constrained in an equatorial orbit, but not in freefall, it weighs more if orbiting anti-spinward, and less if orbiting spinward. For example, in a suspended equatorial bowling alley, a bowling ball rolled anti-spinward would weigh more than the same ball rolled in a spinward direction. Note, frame dragging will neither accelerate or slow down the bowling ball in either direction. It is not a "viscosity". Similarly, a stationary plumb-bob suspended over the rotating object will not list. It will hang vertically. If it starts to fall, induction will push it in the spinward direction.

Is this the source of the proposed effect?

Some great stuff here:
Alcubierre drive - Wikipedia
 
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You know, the more I think about it the more I don't think AG is the answer.

You get too tied up with things like negative mass and inertial frames.

What if it's plain old propulsion? Just really efficient?

Like an ion drive scaled up?

That would explain burn marks on landing sites and the EM effects people talk about maybe.

No need for exotic anything.

I mean, why not?
 
I love it.

I actually said that I thought you were referring to frame dragging. So good.
Here’s the problem: the term “frame-dragging” fails to convey the complete analogy between electromagnetic phenomena and gravitoelectromagnetic phenomenena. “Frame-dragging” only describes the effect of a mass in constant rotation. This is the source of your confusion.

Because when the rotation rate is increasing, gravitation produces an effect known as gravitoelectric induction, which is analogous to induced EMF in electrical circuits.

So now if you have a toroidal shape, and wind a pipe around it (like a toroidal RF choke in an electrical circuit employs an electrical winding), and then increase the rate of high-density fluid flow through the piping wound around the torus, you generate a dipolar gravitoelectric field. So on one side of the “donut hole” a test body will be gravitationally attracted, and on the other side it will be gravitationally repelled.

If the fluid is flowing upward through the center and downward around the outside of the torus, and the rate of flow is increasing with time, then a test body placed above that region (say, on the Earth’s surface) will levitate. If the flow is dense enough and accelerating fast enough, you could even launch the test body like a cannon ball into space.

That’s an antigravitational field effect, by all standards and measures – and without the requirement of negative mass (which is the great bugaboo with the Alcubierre warp field). And it's conceivably testable in the future, unlike the conventional formulation of the Alcubierre metric which requires negative mass - which doesn't appear to exist in any useful form.

So all of this is wrong:

The problem with frame dragging is that it isn't antigravity. In fact, it's the opposite of that.

It's a torsional effect of distorted space time that compresses it when you go against the rotational direction, and stretches it when you go with it.

What it doesn't do is flatten space time, which is about the only thing I could imagine antigravity to do.

My point about DA is simply this. You are rushing to engineering when the science isn't done. I think it's there. I hope it's there. But even if it is, we don't know what it is at all. But what it doesn't appear to be is antigravity.

And not one theoretical peer reviewed paper has ever demonstrated a testable antigravity effect that has been replicated to my knowledge.

Not one.

So these 'breakthroughs' are just like every string theory paper I've ever read. Full of great ideas that aren't testable.


Some great stuff here:
Alcubierre drive - Wikipedia
There are a couple of mistakes in the section about Dr. White’s work: 1.) his test device is toroidal, but it generates a spherical warp shell, not a toroidal one (that’s in the papers I provided previously), and it fails to mention that his theoretical construct eliminates the need for negative energy. If you read his theoretical papers you’ll find that he’s attempting to replicate the “dark energy” effect using positive energy only. But like I said, I think the higher dimensional basis of that work is a wild shot at best.

You know, the more I think about it the more I don't think AG is the answer.

You get too tied up with things like negative mass and inertial frames.

What if it's plane old propulsion? Just really efficient?

Like an ion drive scaled up?

That would explain burn marks on landing sites and the EM effects people talk about maybe.

No need for exotic anything.

I mean, why not?
Simply put: time. But also: energy.

The only way to travel to a star that’s, say, ten light-years away, and get back in time for dinner, is a gravitational field propulsion system. Otherwise, you have to leave your point of reference at home - so at least 20 years will pass upon the Earth before you return. You, personally, can still make the trip in an hour (but we'd have to solve the problem of crushing acceleration forces first). But it would be a huge bummer to come back and find everyone had aged 20 years, or died during your absence.

And there’s also the problem of energy. If you have to bring your reaction fuel with you to power any variety of rocket engine, or ion propulsion, or what have you – then you have to accelerate all of that fuel up to relativistic velocities. And when you arrive at your destination, you have to decelerate as well. So you run into an ugly problem of diminishing returns. Here’s what it looks like if you use antimatter/matter reaction propulsion, which is the most efficient rocket fuel imaginable (roughly 100% efficient):

“To demonstrate the sheer impossibility of interstellar travel we will examine the physics and economics involved in sending a one person spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. We will begin by providing our astronaut with a life-support capsule the size of a small car and weighing 1000 kg. Since matter/antimatter fuel provides the only possible means of accelerating a craft to such a high velocity, we will assume that we have access to large quantities of this fuel. Now, how much fuel would it take to accelerate our 1,000-kg craft to .99C? We can calculate that at .99C, the 1,000 kg ship would have a momentum (P) of about 7000 where (MC=1) (p=MV/√1-V^2/C^2). Thus, it would take 14,000 kg of matter/antimatter fuel to accelerate the craft to .99C because the photons produced by its annihilation would have a total momentum of 14,000 (p=MC). According to Newton’s third law of motion, half of this momentum would be contained within the backward moving photons and the other half would remain with the forward moving space ship.

However, the round trip to a star would require not one acceleration to .99C but four, because it takes just as much energy to decelerate to a stop. Since the possibility of finding matter/antimatter fuel readily available within the Alpha Centauri solar system is very uncertain, prudence would dictate that the entire amount of fuel necessary for the journey be carried from earth. This would mean that when the astronaut left the earth he would have to carry 41,160,000 kg of matter/antimatter containing about 3.7 x 10^24 J of energy. At 10 cents per kilowatt-hour it would cost over $4,800,000,000,000,000,000. This is approximately the same amount of energy that the entire earth receives from the sun over a period of about 100 days and the cost would be several millions times greater than the current US national debt. These figures clearly demonstrate the physical as well as the financial impossibility of travel between the stars.”
The Starship Titanic - J.Carter

That’s why the only rational approach to manned interstellar spaceflight requires some form of gravitational field propulsion system.
 
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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.

If I may add my 2 cents about your point, which with I wholeheartedly agree, I think the show itself tends to attract mostly a certain type of person with interests in the esoteric and paranormal, people who are willing to listen to arguments and data, rather than come with minds already fixed. Because of what is often stated and argued on the show, I doubt too many 'true believers' find much comfort here. There are of course exceptions but I think the content of the show naturally attracts people to the forum who are more interested in learning than coming here to either force certain beliefs on others or to have those beliefs reaffirmed.

This forum has had its fair share of battles and some trolling, but in the main members are rational, curious and pretty open-minded. Thankfully!
 
If I may add my 2 cents about your point, which with I wholeheartedly agree, I think the show itself tends to attract mostly a certain type of person with interests in the esoteric and paranormal, people who are willing to listen to arguments and data, rather than come with minds already fixed. Because of what is often stated and argued on the show, I doubt too many 'true believers' find much comfort here. There are of course exceptions but I think the content of the show naturally attracts people to the forum who are more interested in learning than coming here to either force certain beliefs on others or to have those beliefs reaffirmed.

This forum has had its fair share of battles and some trolling, but in the main members are rational, curious and pretty open-minded. Thankfully!
It's great to hear from you Goggs - I really liked your contributions to this episode. The scientific literacy of the show and of so many commentators on the forum is probably the main draw for me. All of the hosts and guest hosts have some kind of technical proficiency - and that not only helps to frame the content in an analytical manner, which is crucial to understanding anything, but I think it provides a solid basis for logical debate. I suppose that's a safety valve against the typical "flame wars" that are ubiquitous online, because a logical and empirical debate can usually be settled with facts and reason.
 
I still don't see it.

Gravitomagnetic arguments also predict that a flexible or fluid toroidal mass undergoing minor axis rotational acceleration (accelerating "smoke ring" rotation) will tend to pull matter through the throat (a case of rotational frame dragging, acting through the throat). In theory, this configuration might be used for accelerating objects (through the throat) without such objects experiencing any g-forces.[12]

Consider a toroidal mass with two degrees of rotation (both major axis and minor-axis spin, both turning inside out and revolving). This represents a "special case" in which gravitomagnetic effects generate a chiralcorkscrew-like gravitational field around the object. The reaction forces to dragging at the inner and outer equators would normally be expected to be equal and opposite in magnitude and direction respectively in the simpler case involving only minor-axis spin. When both rotations are applied simultaneously, these two sets of reaction forces can be said to occur at different depths in a radial Coriolis field that extends across the rotating torus, making it more difficult to establish that cancellation is complete.[citation needed]

What that says to me is you can torsionally accelerate an object through the toroid but not the toroid itself. And the toroid would have to have a very large mass.

So even if the drive worked, you couldn't take it with you. In this regard it seems more like a gauss cannon than a propulsion mechanism.

This sounds to me like trying to make a sailboat go faster by blowing on the sail - when you're standing on the boat.

I'd love to see it work, though.

And you can send probes very far away - if you're patient. We could do it today with no exotic requirements.

This is one of the reasons I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't biological - at least the way we think about it. One could imagine sending a small advanced 3-d printer to a star even if it took thousands of years to get there. Once it arrived, it could use local resources to print out whatever it needed - even biological components.

And if they're not biological and use local resources to assemble as needed, it would also explain why they don't seem to care about g- forces and they don't seem to be manufactured. They seem to each kinda be one off things instead of rolling off an assembly line.
 
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I still don't see it.

What that says to me is you can torsionally accelerate an object through the toroid but not the toroid itself. And the toroid would have to have a very large mass.

So even if the drive worked, you couldn't take it with you. In this regard it seems more like a gauss cannon than a propulsion mechanism.

This sounds to me like trying to make a sailboat go faster by blowing on the sail - when you're standing on the boat.

I'd love to see it work, though.

And you can send probes very far away - if you're patient. We could do it today with no exotic requirements.
That's all correct (except the part about torsion - it's tempting to see this as a torsion effect, but it's not; there's no spacetime torsion in general relativity). It's not a propulsion device. What it is, though, is the one conceptually sound method known to academic science for producing an antigravity effect without exotic matter.

I've stumbled across a method that I believe could focus that antigravitational field significantly, which would allow us to produce things like flying cars, and perhaps antigravity aircraft, but of course there are still significant technological hurdles to overcome before we can harness these effects. And there may be much easier non-gravitational ways to go about it. But flying cars don't really interest me; I'm almost exclusively concerned with manned interstellar travel for the public sector, because that will fundamentally transform the entire world. I think the age of manned interstellar spaceflight will make the Renaissance look like a dress rehearsal.

This is one of the reasons I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't biological - at least the way we think about it. One could imagine sending a small advanced 3-d printer to a star even if it took thousands of years to get there. Once it arrived, it could use local resources to print out whatever it needed - even biological components.

And if they're not biological and use local resources to assemble as needed, it would also explain why they don't seem to care about g- forces and they don't seem to be manufactured. They seem to each kinda be one off things instead of rolling off an assembly line.
Yeah that's an interesting concept, along the lines of a Von Neumann machine.

But here's the thing: some of these objects in our skies appear to be machines employing gravitational field propulsion. Because some of them show up on radar as solid objects, and execute maneuvers that defy inertia: I saw a pair of these things execute a zig-zag trajectory at extremely high velocity, in perfect formation. If they'd used any other form of propulsion, the g-forces would've been devastating, like a bullet ricocheting off of a block of metal. But with a gravitational field propulsion mechanism, you could perform those maneuvers without feeling a thing - as if the world below you were zig-zagging on a movie screen. So it seems like that's what they have, total technological control over gravitation.

And with that control, interstellar flight is child's play. Like I said, you could get to Alpha Centauri and be back in time for dinner, with no time dilation effects because with gravity control, you take your reference point with you, and it remains time-synchronized with your point of departure.

And here's the other thing: if any of the landing site data is correct, then they've achieved control of gravity without massive amounts of neutronium, without extraordinary magnitudes of mass of any kind, because they don't leave a crater or a deep well whenever they set down.

So there's a way to generate these gravitational control effects without compressing the mass of the Moon into some kind of superfluid degenerate matter. And one of the ways that may be possible is by engineering a material as Forward describes in that paper, which has a highly nonlinear gravitomagnetic permeability. This is analogous to using iron as a magnetic core - the same electrical current wound around iron vastly amplifies the strength of the magnetic field of the coil. The same possibility exists with gravitoelectromagnetism, but we haven't discovered a gravitomagnetic analogue to iron yet (not publicly anyway).

There were some papers about 15 years ago by a researcher named Dr. Ning Li who was looking in this direction, but as soon as she got a defense contract, she stopped publishing (military researchers don't publish because their work is almost always classified). I assume that she's making progress, because nobody's heard a word from her in over 15 years, and yet her company, AC Gravity, still exists.

Of course, even if we had a material with highly nonlinear gravitomagnetic permeability, that wouldn't change the fact that Forward's gravitational dipole generator isn't a propulsion device. But, there's more than one way to skin a cat. And if you've ever studied acoustic levitation, then you may see where I'm going with this.
 
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.

Strange... I heard you would need a collider the size of this solar system to test string theory. Any reference for this ? :)
 
Strange... I heard you would need a collider the size of this solar system to test string theory. Any reference for this ? :)
Yeah that's the kind of accelerator you'd need, ostensibly, to make a direct test of string theory, because it would take energies close to the Planck scale to probe matter at the string level.

He was most likely referring to that 750 GeV diphoton signal they thought they saw at the Large Hadron Collider starting in 2015 and ending on August 5, 2016 - at which time they discovered that it was just a statistical fluke that disappeared with additional data. As usual, string theorists jumped on the anomaly and claimed the mysterious new signal as a retroactive prediction of one of the bazillion versions of string theory, publishing a rash of papers like this one, faster than you can say "licketty split":
[1512.08502] 750 GeV diphotons from closed string states
 
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That's all correct (except the part about torsion - it's tempting to see this as a torsion effect, but it's not; there's no spacetime torsion in general relativity). It's not a propulsion device. What it is, though, is the one conceptually sound method known to academic science for producing an antigravity effect without exotic matter.

Maybe I'm being pedantic but what I read seemed to be saying it wasn't antigravity at all. It was bending gravity to go the opposite way through a toroidal shape.

The difference being in my mind like a lens, not a shield. Unless you're thinking of some kind of 'gravity cloak' perhaps?

I've stumbled across a method that I believe could focus that antigravitational field significantly, which would allow us to produce things like flying cars, and perhaps antigravity aircraft, but of course there are still significant technological hurdles to overcome before we can harness these effects. And there may be much easier non-gravitational ways to go about it. But flying cars don't really interest me; I'm almost exclusively concerned with manned interstellar travel for the public sector, because that will fundamentally transform the entire world. I think the age of manned interstellar spaceflight will make the Renaissance look like a dress rehearsal.

On that, I would agree. But what's your method?


Yeah that's an interesting concept, along the lines of a Von Neumann machine.
It's actually an old idea, not mine. It's a Bracewell probe put together with a Von Neumann probe.

Bracewell probe - Wikipedia

A Bracewell probe would be constructed as an autonomous robotic interstellar space probe with a high level of artificial intelligence, and all relevant information that its home civilization might wish to communicate to another culture. It would seek out technological civilizations–or alternatively monitor worlds where there is a likelihood of technological civilizations arising–and communicate over "short" distances (compared to the interstellar distances between inhabited worlds) once it discovered a civilization that meets its contact criteria. It would make its presence known, carry out a dialogue with the contacted culture, and presumably communicate the results of its encounter to its place of origin. In essence, such probes would act as an autonomous local representative of their home civilization and would act as the point of contact between the cultures.

Since a Bracewell probe can communicate much faster, over shorter distances, and over large spans of time, it can communicate with alien cultures more efficiently than radio message exchange might. The disadvantage to this approach is that such probes cannot communicate anything not in their data storage, nor can their contact criteria or policies for communication be quickly updated by their "base of operations".

While a Bracewell probe need not be a von Neumann probe as well, the two concepts are compatible, and a self-replicating device as proposed by von Neumann would greatly speed up a Bracewell probe's search for alien civilizations.

It is also possible that such a probe (or system of probes if launched as a von Neumann-Bracewell probe) may outlive the civilization which created and launched it.

There have been some efforts under the SETA and SETV projects[clarification needed] to detect evidence for the visitation of the Solar System by such hypothetical probes, and to signal or activate such an alleged probe that may be lying dormant in local space[dubiousdiscuss][citation needed]. Variations in the echo delay times of radio transmissions, known as long delayed echoes, or LDEs, have also been interpreted in Professor Bracewell's 1960 paper as evidence for such probes.[dubiousdiscuss][1][2]

The near-earth object 1991 VG was initially suggested as a candidate for a Bracewell probe due to its unusual characteristics.[3] In more recent years, however, additional discoveries have accounted for the characteristics of 1991 VG, and it is no longer regarded as anomalous.

But here's the thing: some of these objects in our skies appear to be machines employing gravitational field propulsion. Because some of them show up on radar as solid objects, and execute maneuvers that defy inertia: I saw a pair of these things execute a zig-zag trajectory at extremely high velocity, in perfect formation. If they'd used any other form of propulsion, the g-forces would've been devastating, like a bullet ricocheting off of a block of metal. But with a gravitational field propulsion mechanism, you could perform those maneuvers without feeling a thing - as if the world below you were zig-zagging on a movie screen. So it seems like that's what they have, total technological control over gravitation.

Sure, it could be control of gravitation. As a child, I used to watch lights in the sky do exactly what you describe -- fast motion, right angle turns that sure looked non-ballistic.

But if they're solid state devices, they could also tolerate extreme g forces and not care. And that right there is parsimony. No extra actors needed that profoundly change the rules of the game as we understand it.

And should that be explored first?

And with that control, interstellar flight is child's play. Like I said, you could get to Alpha Centauri and be back in time for dinner, with no time dilation effects because with gravity control, you take your reference point with you, and it remains time-synchronized with your point of departure.

Sure. It's a neat trick if it works, and you find tachionic matter, and don't blast your target with equivalent of a mini quasar's worth of redshifted radiation if you get there.

And here's the other thing: if any of the landing site data is correct, then they've achieved control of gravity without massive amounts of neutronium, without extraordinary magnitudes of mass of any kind, because they don't leave a crater or a deep well whenever they set down.

Exactly. They appear to have conventional levels of mass, which makes all the mass-energy dense conceptions of propulsion go away. Because a large toroid capable of generating lift like you described above could be so M-A dense it would sink down to the earth's core if you shut it off.

So there's a way to generate these gravitational control effects without compressing the mass of the Moon into some kind of superfluid degenerate matter. And one of the ways that may be possible is by engineering a material as Forward describes in that paper, which has a highly nonlinear gravitomagnetic permeability. This is analogous to using iron as a magnetic core - the same electrical current wound around iron vastly amplifies the strength of the magnetic field of the coil. The same possibility exists with gravitoelectromagnetism, but we haven't discovered a gravitomagnetic analogue to iron yet (not publicly anyway).

There were some papers about 15 years ago by a researcher named Dr. Ning Li who was looking in this direction, but as soon as she got a defense contract, she stopped publishing (military researchers don't publish because their work is almost always classified). I assume that she's making progress, because nobody's heard a word from her in over 15 years, and yet her company, AC Gravity, still exists.

Of course, even if we had a material with highly nonlinear gravitomagnetic permeability, that wouldn't change the fact that Forward's gravitational dipole generator isn't a propulsion device. But, there's more than one way to skin a cat. And if you've ever studied acoustic levitation, then you may see where I'm going with this.

So, again, we're back to magic in my mind.

Because matter is pretty pretty much transparent to gravity waves.

Gravitational waves interact only weakly with matter. This is what makes them difficult to detect. It also means that they can travel freely through the Universe, and are not absorbed or scattered like electromagnetic radiation. It is therefore possible to see to the center of dense systems, like the cores of supernovae or the Galactic Centre. It is also possible to see further back in time than with electromagnetic radiation, as the early universe was opaque to light prior to recombination, but transparent to gravitational waves.

The ability of gravitational waves to move freely through matter also means that gravitational-wave detectors, unlike telescopes, are not pointed to observe a single field of view but observe the entire sky. Detectors are more sensitive in some directions than others, which is one reason why it is beneficial to have a network of detectors.[37]
Gravitational-wave astronomy - Wikipedia
 
Maybe I'm being pedantic but what I read seemed to be saying it wasn't antigravity at all. It was bending gravity to go the opposite way through a toroidal shape.
Pure semantics. Contemporary physicists bend over backwards to avoid the term "antigravity."

If you have a gravitational dipole generator on the table and objects placed above it float to the ceiling, then it doesn't really matter how you describe it; for all practical purposes, it's antigravity. The language of general relativity is particularly unhelpful in cases like this. It's vastly superior to describe these effects in gravitoelectromagnetic terms, because it's perfectly qualitatively analogous to electromagnetism, and it's actually useful to the engineering to describe it that way.

In this case, the analogy corresponds to an electromagnetic inductor - Forward's device is simply a gravitomagnetic inductor. And when the current is changing through a toroidal inductor, it generates a dipole. In this case, a gravitoelectric dipole, just as an electromagnetic inductor with a changing current creates an electric dipole. For all practical, conceptual and mathematical purposes, a positive gravitoelectric pole is an ordinary positive gravitational field, and a negative gravitoelectric pole is a negative gravitational field, aka "antigravity."

It’s kinda bizarre that you seem so fixated on discrediting this idea, which you’ve never encountered before. Most of the people I share this with are excited to learn that this effect, which they’ve been told is impossible without exotic matter, isn’t. But you just seem to be annoyed about it. At present this is literally the only gleam of real hope pointing the way toward practical manned interstellar spaceflight, unless you’re willing to take some huge (and I believe unwarranted) leaps of faith to either embrace Robert Schroeder’s M-theory idea, or to postulate the existence of exotic/negative mass and it’s practical implementation.

The difference being in my mind like a lens, not a shield. Unless you're thinking of some kind of 'gravity cloak' perhaps?
Definitely none of those. A negative gravitoelectric pole would actually produce the opposite of an ordinary gravitational lens effect - diverging light paths rather than focusing them, and producing a gravitational blueshift rather than a redshift. The relevant region perfectly mimics the negative gravitational field effect of exotic matter, via matter only.

On that, I would agree. But what's your method?
I think of a "method" as something that's been experimentally, or at least theoretically, verified in the academic literature. Anything less is speculation, and I'd rather not waste anyone's time with idle speculation. So far, everything we’ve discussed is established, hard science. Let’s keep it that way.

It's actually an old idea, not mine. It's a Bracewell probe put together with a Von Neumann probe.

Bracewell probe - Wikipedia
A Bracewell probe would be something like an artificially intelligent UFO. I don't see anything about it building little greys to perform medical examinations. Maybe you should coin the idea and call it a Marduk Probe. Though I do worry about the connotations that may engender, here in the post-Communion era ;

Sure, it could be control of gravitation. As a child, I used to watch lights in the sky do exactly what you describe -- fast motion, right angle turns that sure looked non-ballistic.

But if they're solid state devices, they could also tolerate extreme g forces and not care. And that right there is parsimony. No extra actors needed that profoundly change the rules of the game as we understand it.

And should that be explored first?
Bah. Even if it were possible to execute zig-zag trajectories at thousands of miles per hour, and leap from a standstill to 8,000mph in the blink of an eye, through some other method, and without any visible or detectable reaction mass emissions of any kind including wind - we'd actually have to find some new force in nature to do that, if it's not a gravitational effect. That might be possible, like Schroeder's idea about tapping into the bulk. But I'd rather work with a force in nature that's proven, and we already understand in principle how to engineer, and which holds real promise for the development of rapid manned interstellar spaceflight without incurring insurmountable costs in energy.

Magnetoaerodynamics, which Stanton Friedman seems to advocate as an explanation for some UFOs, won't work in space (and I see no way to produce the maneuvers that I've seen in the sky, via this method). And all of the known techniques for interstellar propulsion, ranging from fusion propulsion to light sails, are wholly inadequate for a host of reasons, some of which we’ve covered. Plus, lots of very capable people are already working on all that stuff. They can have it.

Sure. It's a neat trick if it works, and you find tachionic matter, and don't blast your target with equivalent of a mini quasar's worth of redshifted radiation if you get there.
Here's the thing: if you're looking for a known, viable method of manned interstellar spaceflight propulsion that can get you to the nearest star and back without bankrupting the planetary economy several million times over and/or requiring travel times that leave all of your loved ones dead upon your return to Earth, then prepare to be disappointed, because it doesn't exist.

It has to be invented. Or perhaps re-invented: the military may have already invented it, or maybe not, but they'll never share with us – they’re entirely too concerned with the serious business of perpetrating mass murder on a daily basis, to diddle around with harebrained hippie ambitions like creating a better future for humanity.

Exactly. They appear to have conventional levels of mass, which makes all the mass-energy dense conceptions of propulsion go away. Because a large toroid capable of generating lift like you described above could be so M-A dense it would sink down to the earth's core if you shut it off.
It's possible that the field is never fully shut off, even when they land. But if any of the crash cases are real, then yes, these objects can't contain neutronium mass-energy densities or they'd either plunge straight through the planet, or vaporize a continent when they lost field containment.

But a gravitomagnetic core with a highly nonlinear gravitomagnetic permeability could provide all of the effects that we’re talking about here without the huge mass requirement.

So, again, we're back to magic in my mind.

Because matter is pretty pretty much transparent to gravity waves.

Gravitational-wave astronomy - Wikipedia
You haven't understood the point about gravitomagnetic permeability; it has nothing to do with matter's inherent transparency to gravitational waves. Atomic nuclei intrinsically couple the magnetic moment with the gravitomagnetic moment, which is a good starting point. And some nuclei, like Uranium, possess an interesting quadrupole by virtue of their nonspherical deformation.

It's going to take a deep love of theoretical physics, a creative and technical brilliance, patience, and eventually some very challenging experimentation, to make the breakthrough in field propulsion technology that will usher in an era of practical manned interstellar spaceflight.

About the only thing going for us, beyond our own primitive understanding of physics, is the fact that someone, or something, has provided breathtaking aerial demonstrations that prove (to me anyway) that it can be done.
 
You MUST be kidding.
Are you actually going to go on the record stating that because George Knapp takes Lazar seriously that you think that, 'Maybe there's more going on there' ???

Good Gawd!

Anyone who thinks Lazar was anything but a con artist really needs to read this:
Robert Lazar Timeline

As far as putting any stock in Knapp's opinion of him, well, if Knapp is such a crack investigative journalist, then why did none of this come to light before Tom Mahood took the trouble to look it up? Knapp worked in Las Vegas! As an investigative journalist! Yet he either failed to do any basic research into the public records right there in town, or he did find some of it and kept it quiet. Neither tells me anything good about his own credibility.

A word of warning about what's in that link. Some of it will turn your stomach unless you have experience dealing with, well, creeps.

More here.
The Bob Lazar Corner
 
Pure semantics. Contemporary physicists bend over backwards to avoid the term "antigravity."

If you have a gravitational dipole generator on the table and objects placed above it float to the ceiling, then it doesn't really matter how you describe it; for all practical purposes, it's antigravity. The language of general relativity is particularly unhelpful in cases like this. It's vastly superior to describe these effects in gravitoelectromagnetic terms, because it's perfectly qualitatively analogous to electromagnetism, and it's actually useful to the engineering to describe it that way.

In this case, the analogy corresponds to an electromagnetic inductor - Forward's device is simply a gravitomagnetic inductor. And when the current is changing through a toroidal inductor, it generates a dipole. In this case, a gravitoelectric dipole, just as an electromagnetic inductor with a changing current creates an electric dipole. For all practical, conceptual and mathematical purposes, a positive gravitoelectric pole is an ordinary positive gravitational field, and a negative gravitoelectric pole is a negative gravitational field, aka "antigravity."

Except that isn't accurately describing the proposed effect at all. What it is doing is providing acceleration.

It's not that different at all mass/energy wise than sinking a bunch of mass energy into a point above you, and then using gravity to accelerate an object upward. That isn't antigravity. It's just gravity.

And the big problem here is that from a wider frame of reference, the combined generator and object being generated would still be subject to the earth's gravity.

That's why I likened it to a gauss gun. If you drop a gauss gun towards the earth and fire it while it's falling, the pellet will go upward. While the whole frame is still going downward from the perspective of the rest of the universe. It's a gravity rail gun -- if it works at all.

It’s kinda bizarre that you seem so fixated on discrediting this idea, which you’ve never encountered before. Most of the people I share this with are excited to learn that this effect, which they’ve been told is impossible without exotic matter, isn’t. But you just seem to be annoyed about it. At present this is literally the only gleam of real hope pointing the way toward practical manned interstellar spaceflight, unless you’re willing to take some huge (and I believe unwarranted) leaps of faith to either embrace Robert Schroeder’s M-theory idea, or to postulate the existence of exotic/negative mass and it’s practical implementation.

Here's my point. I'm a fan of the discourse. And I really don't know much about physics.

If you want to get through to folks, you're going to have to get used to having people poke holes at your ideas. Because far, far smarter people than I will if you're right.

And I want you to be right. I just am not yet convinced that you are.


Definitely none of those. A negative gravitoelectric pole would actually produce the opposite of an ordinary gravitational lens effect - diverging light paths rather than focusing them, and producing a gravitational blueshift rather than a redshift. The relevant region perfectly mimics the negative gravitational field effect of exotic matter, via matter only.

That's a good point -- I was thinking of a concave lensing effect. How would you use it?


I think of a "method" as something that's been experimentally, or at least theoretically, verified in the academic literature. Anything less is speculation, and I'd rather not waste anyone's time with idle speculation. So far, everything we’ve discussed is established, hard science. Let’s keep it that way.

We're good. Although I've bounced some of your thoughts off some other folks I know, and the response has been not good in terms of 'hard' science. But let's proceed as if they were and set that aside.

A Bracewell probe would be something like an artificially intelligent UFO. I don't see anything about it building little greys to perform medical examinations. Maybe you should coin the idea and call it a Marduk Probe. Though I do worry about the connotations that may engender, here in the post-Communion era ;
Lol, let's not call it that. The idea is more akin to Clark and Kubrick's monoliths and not my idea at all.


Bah. Even if it were possible to execute zig-zag trajectories at thousands of miles per hour, and leap from a standstill to 8,000mph in the blink of an eye, through some other method, and without any visible or detectable reaction mass emissions of any kind including wind - we'd actually have to find some new force in nature to do that, if it's not a gravitational effect. That might be possible, like Schroeder's idea about tapping into the bulk. But I'd rather work with a force in nature that's proven, and we already understand in principle how to engineer, and which holds real promise for the development of rapid manned interstellar spaceflight without incurring insurmountable costs in energy.

See, that's where you and I disagree. Very high g (but ballistic) thrust can sure look like right angle turns, but not be. Replicating that would be an engineering problem -- materials and thrust.

What you're describing still isn't an engineering problem. It's a science problem. So reverse engineering causal mechanisms that require stuff we don't already know exist is very problematic.

There's a big difference between this:
Indirect validations of gravitomagnetic effects have been derived from analyses of relativistic jets. Roger Penrose had proposed a frame dragging mechanism for extracting energy and momentum from rotating black holes.[2] Reva Kay Williams, University of Florida, developed a rigorous proof that validated Penrose's mechanism.[3] Her model showed how the Lense–Thirring effect could account for the observed high energies and luminosities of quasars and active galactic nuclei; the collimated jets about their polar axis; and the asymmetrical jets (relative to the orbital plane).[4] All of those observed properties could be explained in terms of gravitomagnetic effects.[5] Williams' application of Penrose's mechanism can be applied to black holes of any size.[6] Relativistic jets can serve as the largest and brightest form of validations for gravitomagnetism.

and this:
Gravitomagnetic arguments also predict that a flexible or fluid toroidal mass undergoing minor axis rotational acceleration (accelerating "smoke ring" rotation) will tend to pull matter through the throat (a case of rotational frame dragging, acting through the throat). In theory, this configuration might be used for accelerating objects (through the throat) without such objects experiencing any g-forces.[12]

Consider a toroidal mass with two degrees of rotation (both major axis and minor-axis spin, both turning inside out and revolving). This represents a "special case" in which gravitomagnetic effects generate a chiral corkscrew-like gravitational field around the object. The reaction forces to dragging at the inner and outer equators would normally be expected to be equal and opposite in magnitude and direction respectively in the simpler case involving only minor-axis spin. When both rotations are applied simultaneously, these two sets of reaction forces can be said to occur at different depths in a radial Coriolis field that extends across the rotating torus, making it more difficult to establish that cancellation is complete.[citation needed]

Modelling this complex behaviour as a curved spacetime problem has yet to be done and is believed to be very difficult.

One is being tested at a cosmic scale and has nothing to do with AG.

The other is a special case which hasn't been tested, and even if it works does not infer either AG nor a propulsion device.

So I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on that one.

Magnetoaerodynamics, which Stanton Friedman seems to advocate as an explanation for some UFOs, won't work in space (and I see no way to produce the maneuvers that I've seen in the sky, via this method). And all of the known techniques for interstellar propulsion, ranging from fusion propulsion to light sails, are wholly inadequate for a host of reasons, some of which we’ve covered. Plus, lots of very capable people are already working on all that stuff. They can have it.

I've aways disagreed with Uncle Stan about that. For a very simple reason, the very same one you sited.

Hey look -- we agree on something!


Here's the thing: if you're looking for a known, viable method of manned interstellar spaceflight propulsion that can get you to the nearest star and back without bankrupting the planetary economy several million times over and/or requiring travel times that leave all of your loved ones dead upon your return to Earth, then prepare to be disappointed, because it doesn't exist.

Sure it does if you don't care about time dilation or think out side the box.

Take a sperm and ova and freeze it. Put it into the equivalent of a voyager probe. Shoot it at alpha centari with a lander on it.

Wait a long time.

Lander drops on planet. Joins sperm and ova. Presto. You have a human on another planet. With today's technology.

All I'm proposing is that but in a smarter way -- by essentially taking humans out of the mix until required.

It has to be invented. Or perhaps re-invented: the military may have already invented it, or maybe not, but they'll never share with us – they’re entirely too concerned with the serious business of perpetrating mass murder on a daily basis, to diddle around with harebrained hippie ambitions like creating a better future for humanity.

I seriously doubt the military industrial complex has it.

Why not use it? How would it not be leaked? And why would they be so profoundly smart about AG but so profoundly stupid with everything else they do?

The M-I industrial complex is like the government. Lowest common denominator leading the inept to do the unwise. Add money.


It's possible that the field is never fully shut off, even when they land. But if any of the crash cases are real, then yes, these objects can't contain neutronium mass-energy densities or they'd either plunge straight through the planet, or vaporize a continent when they lost field containment.

Holy shit, that would make a great movie. Atlantis (or Mu) goes boom because of a neutronium drive.

But a gravitomagnetic core with a highly nonlinear gravitomagnetic permeability could provide all of the effects that we’re talking about here without the huge mass requirement.

OK, let's say it works. It would effectively be inertialess, right?

So why wouldn't they blow away in a strong breeze just like a balloon? It would effectively have zero mass from an outside reference.


You haven't understood the point about gravitomagnetic permeability; it has nothing to do with matter's inherent transparency to gravitational waves. Atomic nuclei intrinsically couple the magnetic moment with the gravitomagnetic moment, which is a good starting point. And some nuclei, like Uranium, possess an interesting quadrupole by virtue of their nonspherical deformation.

It's going to take a deep love of theoretical physics, a creative and technical brilliance, patience, and eventually some very challenging experimentation, to make the breakthrough in field propulsion technology that will usher in an era of practical manned interstellar spaceflight.

About the only thing going for us, beyond our own primitive understanding of physics, is the fact that someone, or something, has provided breathtaking aerial demonstrations that prove (to me anyway) that it can be done.

OK, I'll keep noodling at it to see if I can see what you see.
 
Whee!

For his theory of emergent gravity, Verlinde takes the bold leap that the entropy of spacetime has an additional component that scales with volume. His thinking is that our universe, which approximates a spatiotemporal geometry called de Sitter space, is expanding at an accelerated rate, and so has a cosmological horizon—a distance beyond which we cannot see, because galaxies are receding faster than their light can reach us. Such a horizon is very similar to the boundary of a black hole and, by Bekenstein’s and Hawking’s arguments, implies an entropy. This entropy must be counted in addition to the entropy that physicists already ascribe to spacetime, and—crucially, according to Verlinde—it is not localized at the horizon. “The entropy that we normally associate with the horizon should be thought of as entropy that is distributed throughout the de Sitter space,” he says.

To justify his assumptions about entropy, Verlinde appeals to the nature of the spacetime microstructure. The microstructure is highly patterned, so that its parts are mutually correlated. Normally physicists assume that these correlations extend over only very short distances; the properties of two nearby points are very similar, while the properties of two distant points are unrelated. This patterning leads to an area scaling law for entropy. But in de Sitter space, Verlinde argues that the microstructure also has correlations that span large distances. Two distant points may be very similar. Such a patterning implies a volume scaling law.

Sprinkling entropy throughout the volume is tantamount to adding energy to the vacuum of spacetime and raising its temperature. “That energy is dark energy,” says Verlinde. And just like that, the problem of dark energy goes away.

Cosmos on Nautilus: Some theorists think a new theory of gravity can explain away dark matter.

Far from proven... but if you think it's there for sure, you just might be mistaken. So don't start building your enterprises if there's no dilithium to put in your warp core to make the thing run.
 
Thank you Gene and Goggs for a very interesting and entertaining episode. For a nerdy like me, this is a real pleasure to listen to. Goggs was very funny with his "A Roswell free Paracast" and "The Paracast Membrane" comments at the end of segments. I was laughing alone in my car. You guys are the best ( I am including Chris of course).
 
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