https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/general/the-us-built-an-anti-gravity-aircraft-and-it-defies-physics/vi-AA22Vsya?ocid=socialshare

All aircraft are anti-gravity...

1 hour ago, eslader said:

All aircraft are anti-gravity...

Exactly. Many don't look at the issue this way.

We have always used propulsion based on accelerating gas at a high velocity to produce an accelerative force in the opposite direction. This is indeed a method that counteracts gravity.

I'm sure there are other ways to do the same thing. For example, finding some way to distort space and in effect cancel out the earth's spacial distortion otherwise known as gravity.

Dave

I did watch the video.

So many suspicious claims in it.

The name. Aurora. We were talking about the CIA's supposed Aurora aircraft back when I was in middle school. Aurora is the Loch Ness Monster of made-up military aircraft.

TR-3B name. The AI that wrote this messed up, because the TR-3B is another conspiracy theory triangle aircraft that is supposedly a stealth spy plane, not a multiplatform weapons system, and its nickname is "Black Manta," not "Aurora."

An F22 pilot sees one of these things flying at Area 51 and then goes around telling the world what he saw, but he's not in a black-site prison forever? No.

"It can do all of this while remaining completely invisible to detection systems." Then why are you using so many videos as evidence that it exists? The invisibility shield must suck?

The laser weapon system. 450kw, 20km range. Obviously, whoever wrote this malarkey has never heard of thermal bloom, which you can mitigate by going really fast, but then when you go really fast you have shockwaves around the aircraft that screw with the laser and you're still hosed.

17 hours ago, eslader said:

All aircraft are anti-gravity...

"Anti-gravity is defined as a hypothetical force or technology that can completely cancel, neutralize, or reverse the pull of gravity without using external mechanical support or reaction mass. "

Which means that either general relativity is wrong or anti-gravity doesn't exist, and further calls this video's claims into question.

The physics definition of anti-gravity got trashed once it was determined that gravity has the same impact on anti-matter as it does on matter. Once that was known, anti-gravity as previously defined by physics was deemed to be impossible, because the hypothetical force you refer to relied on gravity repelling anti-matter.

The other problem with defining antigravity as a force is that it requires defining gravity as a force when in reality it's not. It's considered to be a force in purely classical physics because it's a model that works. In reality, gravity is not a force, it's the end result of warping space time with objects that have mass.

If you put your car in neutral and coast down a hill, you don't claim that the force of hill accelerated you. Same thing with gravity. Objects with mass create dimples in spacetime, and other objects get pulled toward those objects because they're going "downhill."

"Anti-gravity" from a physics standpoint would require neutralizing the warping of spacetime by the massive object that's currently causing gravitational effects on you, which requires something to be on the other side of spacetime exerting an equal effect in the opposite direction. Like putting a bowling ball on a stretched bed sheet and then putting something under the bed sheet that pushes up on the bowling ball.

But spacetime doesn't have sides, so that's a non-starter too.

In short, any time someone claims something is anti-gravity, they're either lying about how physics works, or they're using the more common parlance, which is that something overcame the (classical-physics) force of gravity.

Under the former definition, nothing qualifies. Under the latter, anything that causes you to stop falling as fast as you should be falling without it qualifies, whether that's wings, rotors, rocket engines, or a bungee cord.

3 hours ago, eslader said:

In reality, gravity is not a force, it's the end result of warping space time with objects that have mass.

I've been playing with a theory I've had for many years. It's likely dead wrong, but it does provide another way to look at "forces".

I've always found it interesting that the equations for electromagnetic force and gravitational force are the same. For gravity its F = G x m1m2/r² , so the "force" is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between 2 masses and the larger the masses the greater the "force".

For electromagnetism its F = k x q1q2/r2, with the force being inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the charged particles and the greater the charge the greater the force.

Does that seem like coincidence? I don' think so. I think there may be something else going on here when speaking of charged particles, those mysterious protons and electrons that have positive and negative charges and act on each other at a distance. This has always been explained as the charges attracting or repelling each other because, well, they're "charges" and they produce an electric "field", but I wonder if there's another explanation.

Is it possible that these particles simply distort space in such a way that they attract or repel, maybe due to different spins?

I've even wondered if what we call electromagnetic waves are actually spatial waves. So when you oscillate billions of electrons at, say, 10MHz, you're creating very tiny, but very high frequency, spatial waves which can be detected at a distance. Then you use an antenna with easily moveable electrons to detect those spatial waves which starts oscillating the electrons in the antenna. The waves are so tiny that only a small number of electrons in the antenna are affected, so this must be greatly amplified, and the further away the transmitter is, the smaller the amplitude of the waves, just like with electromagnetic waves, so they must be amplifed more and/or a larger collecting surface utilized. No electrical charges or electromagnetic waves needed. Everything done in an electronic circuit would come down to simply moving electrons around, which is easy to do because they have such a small mass.

Another related issue is the fact that you must physically move a conductor through a magnetic "field" to produce a current, IE movement of electrons. What if that field is simply a distortion of space created by magnetic substances(don't know how they do this, but they do) and electrons moving through that distortion are accelerated?

I wouldn't bet 1 penny that I'm onto something, but it's fun to think about. I wonder if any physicists have actually experimented with this concept.

Dave

You'll find the inverse square law interesting. Any point source that radiates a physical quantity will see that effect drop off proportional to the square of the distance you are from it.

This is also true of light (of course, since light is a specific frequency range of electromagnetism), nuclear radiation (the farther away you get from the plutonium, the less radiation you are exposed to), etc.

The reason this is a thing can be made more obvious by only considering light. Take a light bulb. It emits photons in all directions going in a straight line away from the light bulb. Stand right next to the light bulb and lots of photons hit your face. Get farther away, and the photons which were hitting the edge of your face now don't hit you at all. Get farther away still and even more photons miss you.

Picture the emitted light as a series of expanding spheres (very not accurate, but it makes for a good visual model). The closer you are to the source, the higher percentage of the sphere hits your face. Move farther away, and more of the sphere misses your face. The total light energy of the spheres does not change as they expand, which means that the light hitting your face as you move away from the bulb is more dilute the farther you get.

Gravity behaves the same way, except that the expanding "sphere" is the pull the gravity well has on you. An object with mass has a finite amount of "gravity" it can exert, which you can also think of as expanding spheres of gravity. The closer you are to the object, the more of the sphere is able to pull on you. Get farther away and you reduce the pull because more of the sphere is missing you.

To more directly address your hypothesis, electromagnetic emissions are not a distortion of spacetime themselves, but they do cause a distortion of spacetime. This is where the old favorite, E=mc² comes in. Energy equals matter times the speed of light squared. Because matter has an impact on spacetime (what we call gravity) it follows that energy must also have the same kind of impact on spacetime.

So, whether it's a radio signal, a lightning bolt or even heat, it curves spacetime just like mass does (only to a much lower degree because E=mc² -- gotta drop the square of the speed of light from the curvature).

BTW, that last is another example of why "antigravity" in the "countering the force of gravity" sense is bunk. You would need an insane amount of energy to float a marble because it takes so much more energy to warp spacetime to the degree that matter does.

It takes slightly more than 0.05 joules of energy to lift a marble 3 feet if you just pick it up, or the marble is made of metal and you apply a magnetic field that pushes it away. The energy cost is almost nil - you could do it thousands of times with a flashlight battery.

To nullify gravity with an energy field enough to do the same work, even if it were possible, would take hundreds of terajoules - we're talking multiple-nuclear-bomb levels of energy just to pick up a marble.

The more realistic scenario from a physics perspective would be to use an Alcubierre bubble that warps spacetime around the marble. If you shape the bubble just right, the marble would not experience the pull of gravity and would hover. But even though that is theoretically possible, it would take even more energy - now you're talking about levels on the order of the annual electrical consumption of a first-world country. To lift a marble up to your waist.

And these guys are claiming we've done it with a whole airplane. Even if we figured out how to make the physics work, it would be pointless because we could do it at a vastly lower energy cost just by putting a downward-facing ordinary boring engine on it. Heck, it would take less energy and logistics to attach several thousand seagulls to the plane and have them lift it. ;)

2 hours ago, eslader said:

You would need an insane amount of energy to float a marble because it takes so much more energy to warp spacetime to the degree that matter does.

That makes sense because if you think about how much mass it takes just to produce a weak gravitational "field", then consider how much energy that is with that mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

This brings to mind another physics issue that I've thought about. It's about Newton's third law of motion, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. Has anyone ever asked why that is? Why does producing an acceleration in one direction then produce the same acceleration in the opposite direction? I propose that the accelerated mass produces a spatial distortion that "pushes back", sort of an opposite gravitational "field".

Now, it might seem that it would take an enormous amount of accelerated mass to produce a large enough distortion, but what if the spatial distortion produced is greatly amplified by velocity, that is, a moving mass produces a much greater distortion than a stationary one. This would explain why a given propulsive mass at a higher velocity produces more acceleration - because it distorts space more. This also explains why acceleration can mimic gravity - you don't have to accelerate something all that much to produce the same effect of simulated gravity as the huge mass of the earth.

Just something to think about.

Dave

It's explained by conservation of momentum. If you have an isolated system with no external force applied to it, its momentum will not change. If you have an isolated system with an external force applied to it, its momentum will change.

But the laws of physics are not applied unfairly because the universe is itself a system. if momentum is conserved in one situation, it needs to be conserved in all situations. So when you shove something with X force, it needs to impart X force back on you so that the overall momentum of the universe is conserved. If this were not the case, the universe would be an unpleasant place with objects accelerating and decelerating for no reason. This would be a very dangerous place in which to exist, if you existed, which you wouldn't because life would have a hard time developing in a universe where planets couldn't consistently form and wouldn't reliably orbit suns even if they did.

But I suspect you're diving deeper than that, and at a certain point in science your "why" runs up against "because that's a fundamental way the universe has been observed to behave."

At the heart of it, there is no real "why" in science, there's just "how." Science can, with sufficient investigation, explain how something works, and there's always more investigation you can do to get a better understanding of the "how," but you will always eventually slam into a wall if you ask "why" and really mean it.

"why does this ball roll away from me when I push it" can be answered with explanations as to how physics works, but "why does physics work that way in the first place" always leads to untestable questions:

Did a god set it up that way?

Are we in a simulation and the nerd running the computer set the parameters of his simulated universe up that way? (and would it even be possible to tell the difference between a simulation-programming nerd and an actual deity?)

Do things not actually work that way but because of the limitations of our perceptions we are fooled into thinking they do?

Answering any of these questions would require observations from outside of the observable universe which is by definition impossible.

Some years ago, my wife put a fine newly tailored pair of medieval hierophant anti gravity pilot's breeches and hose for sale here in Classified Adds. But she got no offers. :(

9 hours ago, eslader said:

But I suspect you're diving deeper than that, and at a certain point in science your "why" runs up against "because that's a fundamental way the universe has been observed to behave."

That's it. I have a hard time just accepting that things behave a certain way because the laws of the universe are what they are.

I want to know why charged particles act upon other charged particles at a distance, and how exactly does that work, when there's probably no way to know the answer, due, as you mentioned, to our limited senses. I propose that it's actually spatial distortions created by particle spin and not some mysterious "charge", but I'm likely wrong in that assumption.

Thanks for the explanations.

Dave

Only cats have true anti-gravity.

Notice how this young kitten in the video accidentally activates this capability.

So... If we strap an upside-down cat to the bottom of an airplane...

36 minutes ago, eslader said:

So... If we strap an upside-down cat to the bottom of an airplane...

Yes, yes, this is a well known hypothesis. A cats tail is replete with rapidly rotating superconductors about 1/2 an inch in diameter. They run from the tip of the feline tail to almost the waste elimination hole.

So yes, you would assume that strapping a cat to the bottom of an aeroplane would render the primitive human flying machine weightless.

But no, I'm afraid not. There are a number of technological challenges to deal with, not to mention feline pychological issues (tendency to do the opposite of human requests) and certain biological issues. The biological issus relate to whether the feline in question is male or female and if male, whether it has donated it's testicles to the feline deity that requests such items. The feline testicles are the power source for the superconductors, you see.

Firstly, you would have to negotiate with the Feline Galactic Council and ask for an intact feline volunteer. Secondly, one feline would not be enough, as the anti-grav cats tail only generates a column of AG the size of the cat itself. Thus, only a small percentage of the primitive human machine would be weightless.

In fact, for something the size of an A320 you would require approximately 10,000 cats to cover it's surface area. (Thanks to Google AI for the estimate)

So no, I'm afraid not, the wondrous feline race would not authorise the availability of so many of it's kind.

Cat's have better things to do, like chasing mice, birds, sleeping and eating.

I'm suprised you suggested such a thing, really, it's a bit of a nerve if you ask me. 🤔