First time I've seen Podkletnov interviewed. 

Edited January 31, 20224 yr by martin-w

I'm starting to worry about the pair of Antigrav shoes I bought from a door to door salesman last week. But they don't seem to work like his demonstration.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to put this right in there with the EmDrive.

I'm thinking more along the lines of the enima drive system.  Gives so much propulsion you'd swear you're taking off! 🚀

 

19 hours ago, Fielder said:

I'm starting to worry about the pair of Antigrav shoes I bought from a door to door salesman last week. But they don't seem to work like his demonstration.

 

My advice is don't jump of  ab building to test them. 

18 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

I'm afraid I'm going to have to put this right in there with the EmDrive.

 

Podklotnev was an interesting man with interesting claims, none of which could be replicated, despite all manner of researchers trying. (as far as we know 🤨)

Ning Li was just as fascinating. She came up with a theory to explain the rotating superconductor anti-grav phenomenon. She even set up a company that I believe is still in existence.

We cant really comment much on anti-gravity because we don't fully understand gravity. I like to keep an open mind and regard it as an unknown. Maybe it will be possible one day but maybe it wont. 

I do find it an interesting coincidence that Ning Li refers to rotating superconductors just as Podklotnev did. 

 

Quote

 

Ning Li (January 14, 1943 – July 27, 2021) was an American scientist known for her controversial anti-gravity research. In the 1990s, Dr Li worked as a research scientist at the Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research, University of Alabama in Huntsville. In 1999, she left the university to form a company, AC Gravity, LLC, to continue anti-gravity research.

 

 

In a series of papers co-authored with fellow university physicist Douglas Torr and published between 1991 and 1993, she claimed a practical way to produce anti-gravity effects. She claimed that an anti-gravity effect could be produced by rotating ions creating a gravitomagnetic field perpendicular to their spin axis. In her theory, if a large number of ions could be aligned, (in a Bose–Einstein condensate) the resulting effect would be a very strong gravitomagnetic field producing a strong repulsive force. The alignment may be possible by trapping superconductor ions in a lattice structure in a high-temperature superconducting disc. Li claimed that experimental results confirmed her theories.^[1][2][3][4] Her claim of having functional anti-gravity devices was cited by the popular press and in popular science magazines with some enthusiasm at the time.^[5][6] In 1997 Li published a paper stating that recent experiments reported anomalous weight changes of 0.05-2.1% for a test mass suspended above a rotating superconductor. Although the same paper describes another experiment that showed the gravitational effect of a non rotating superconductor was very small, if any effect existed at all.^[7]

Li is reported to have left the University of Alabama in 1999 to found the company AC Gravity LLC. AC Gravity was awarded a U.S. DOD grant for $448,970 in 2001 to continue anti-gravity research. The grant period ended in 2002 but no results from this research were ever made public.^[8] No evidence exists that the company performed any other work, although as of 2021, AC Gravity still remains listed as an extant business.^[9]

 

 

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

Edited February 1, 20224 yr by martin-w

On 2/1/2022 at 9:07 AM, martin-w said:

She claimed that an anti-gravity effect could be produced by rotating ions creating a gravitomagnetic field perpendicular to their spin axis. In her theory, if a large number of ions could be aligned, (in a Bose–Einstein condensate) the resulting effect would be a very strong gravitomagnetic field producing a strong repulsive force. The alignment may be possible by trapping superconductor ions in a lattice structure in a high-temperature superconducting disc.

This makes me picture the recreations of what people assert they see when reporting alien spacecraft... a craft with rotating pattern of light around its base and radiation burns in places where those craft were seen.

  We need craft encircled by superconducting particle accelerators that could create such a field... I guess?

alternative comment:  whenever I hear about 'anti-gravity' I always picture superfluid hydrogen and the way it seems to ignore gravity but I don't know if those experiments are conducted in a vacuum.  If they are not then maybe superchilled superfluid hydrogen is acting like a gas more than a fluid but if so then -- I wish I understood more about it -- or at least I think I wish I understood.

my brain is too foggy for this... oh well.

The problem is, nobody really knows what gravity actually is; we know it exists and we know what it does, but that's where our understanding ends. There is speculation that there are undetected 'graviton particles' which cause it, but that is just a notion people have come up with as a possible avenue for exploration. Because that is so, there is no solid starting point for being able to think about how we'd mess with gravity. If we find out exactly what gravity is and what causes it, we'll then be able to have a stab at trying to control it or possibly even counter it, so it's down to us learning what it actually is first of all, but there's no real sign that we're any further along the road of discovering this, at least not in any mainstream science, so I suspect we're a long way from creating some kind of anti-gravity device.

Clearly gravity does exist as a phenomenon because we can measure its effect, which probably means that there is ultimately some way to play around with it. Those 'tic tac' UFOs, which a US Navy F/A-18 filmed, may possibly be using such stuff to propel them but again this is just something we either don't know, or if we do know, then is massively top secret stuff. If the classic 'flying saucers' which people report do indeed make massive changes in trajectory pretty much instantaneously, as is often claimed, this does sort of point toward the notion of them being able to use gravitational control of the space they are occupying to 'move around' without incurring massive acceleration and deceleration stresses, but again, we just don't actually know.

3 hours ago, sightseer said:

This makes me picture the recreations of what people assert they see when reporting alien spacecraft... a craft with rotating pattern of light around its base and radiation burns in places where those craft were seen.

  We need craft encircled by superconducting particle accelerators that could create such a field... I guess?

alternative comment:  whenever I hear about 'anti-gravity' I always picture superfluid hydrogen and the way it seems to ignore gravity but I don't know if those experiments are conducted in a vacuum.  If they are not then maybe superchilled superfluid hydrogen is acting like a gas more than a fluid but if so then -- I wish I understood more about it -- or at least I think I wish I understood.

my brain is too foggy for this... oh well.

You mean, like this? 🙂

 

Btw, the lead scientist in this experiment is Andrei Geim. He won the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize Ignoble prize for this experiment. He later won the actual Nobel Prize and I think he is the only recipient of both prizes 😄

3 hours ago, Chock said:

The problem is, nobody really knows what gravity actually is; we know it exists and we know what it does, but that's where our understanding ends. There is speculation that there are undetected 'graviton particles' which cause it, but that is just a notion people have come up with as a possible avenue for exploration. 

Not quite. Gravity is actually quite well understood in a classical (non-quantum) world. If you mix in quantum physics, thinks become less clear, and that's where the graviton enters the game. However, you only need quantum gravity to describe the innermost core of black holes (which we will never be able to observe) or a tiny tiny fraction of the first second after the Big Bang. Everything else works really well without the graviton.

Peter

1 hour ago, qqwertzde said:

Not quite. Gravity is actually quite well understood in a classical (non-quantum) world. If you mix in quantum physics, thinks become less clear, and that's where the graviton enters the game. However, you only need quantum gravity to describe the innermost core of black holes (which we will never be able to observe) or a tiny tiny fraction of the first second after the Big Bang. Everything else works really well without the graviton.

Peter

That's merely describing what gravity does, it's not explaining what causes it.

16 minutes ago, Chock said:

That's merely describing what gravity does, it's not explaining what causes it.

Gravity, that is, its effect, is caused by the distortion or curving of space.  Any mass will cause this, but it takes very large masses to distort the space enough so that we notice the effect.

Masses affect space and space affects masses.  The Earth causes the space around it to "bend" or "curve", which in turn causes other masses near it and within this "field" to "fall" towards it.  It is not an attractive "force" per se.

Einstein deduced this and also noticed that acceleration can mimic the effect of gravity.  As you accelerate and velocity increases, so does the time dilation effect, but what is really interesting is that time dilation also increases as the gravitational "field" strength increases.  It just shows how these things seem to be related, IE spacial distortion and acceleration/velocity.

I don't pretend to understand all the formulas and equations involved in the theory of relativity, only got as far as Calculus 2 and Linear Algebra in college and have forgotten most of that, but it can be mostly understood in layman's terms as well.

It's pretty fascinating when you think about it.  Most of us take for granted that space is just nothing, but it is actually not "nothing".

Dave

19 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

Gravity, that is, its effect, is caused by the distortion or curving of space.

Yup. But that still doesn't actually detail what is going on at a fundamental level. We know objects with mass cause this effect, but we still don't know what the actual mechanism behind that effect is.

1 hour ago, Chock said:

Yup. But that still doesn't actually detail what is going on at a fundamental level. We know objects with mass cause this effect, but we still don't know what the actual mechanism behind that effect is.

So, what do you mean with "on a fundamental level"? I daresay there are few things that we have understood so profoundly as Einstein's theory of gravity. That's not to say there couldn't be a deeper level (such as quantum gravity, superstring theory, or something else entirely), but for now, we can be pretty happy with what we have 🙂

44 minutes ago, qqwertzde said:

So, what do you mean with "on a fundamental level"? I daresay there are few things that we have understood so profoundly as Einstein's theory of gravity. That's not to say there couldn't be a deeper level (such as quantum gravity, superstring theory, or something else entirely), but for now, we can be pretty happy with what we have 🙂

Here's NASA on the question: what is gravity?...

'We don't really know. We can define what it is as a field of influence, because we know how it operates in the universe. And some scientists think that it is made up of particles called gravitons which travel at the speed of light. However, if we are to be honest, we do not know what gravity "is" in any fundamental way - we only know how it behaves.

Here is what we do know...

Gravity is a force of attraction that exists between any two masses, any two bodies, any two particles. Gravity is not just the attraction between objects and the Earth. It is an attraction that exists between all objects, everywhere in the universe. Sir Isaac Newton (1642 -- 1727) discovered that a force is required to change the speed or direction of movement of an object. He also realized that the force called "gravity" must make an apple fall from a tree, or humans and animals live on the surface of our spinning planet without being flung off. Furthermore, he deduced that gravity forces exist between all objects.

Newton's "law" of gravity is a mathematical description of the way bodies are observed to attract one another, based on many scientific experiments and observations. The gravitational equation says that the force of gravity is proportional to the product of the two masses (m1 and m2), and inversely proportional to the square of the distance (r) between their centers of mass. Mathematically speaking,

F=Gm1m2 / r2,

where G is called the Gravitational Constant. It has a value of 6.6726 x 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2.

The effect of gravity extends from each object out into space in all directions, and for an infinite distance. However, the strength of the gravitational force reduces quickly with distance. Humans are never aware of the Sun's gravity pulling them, because the pull is so small at the distance between the Earth and Sun. Yet, it is the Sun's gravity that keeps the Earth in its orbit! Neither are we aware of the pull of lunar gravity on our bodies, but the Moon's gravity is responsible for the ocean tides on Earth.'

That's what I'm referring to, i.e. we understand what gravity does, but you'll note that NASA use the same words as I did in writing 'we don't know what it is in any fundamental way' when discussing what gravity is. So whilst Einstein and Newton's works do adequately explain what gravity 'does' (even though some aspects of their work do actually contradict one another), the fact is, nothing anything either Newton or Einstein wrote or talked about explains what gravity actually 'is' because at the moment, nobody knows that.