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ESA confirms Podkletnov's Anti-Gravity Effect (2006) (sciencedaily.com)
53 points by Mitt on July 20, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments


According to http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=13020.1575 "Martin Tajmar retracts 2006 claims of gravitomagnetic version of frame-dragging as noise" in the publication at http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-2048/24/12/125011 , Supercond. Sci. Technol. (2011) 24.

Tajmar is one of the researchers in that 2006 ESA project.


It's interesting how several other research groups have done the same - gone "yup, replicated", then followed up with a retraction not long after.

There's also a paper floating around in which the phenomenon is explained, and the author posits you could do it with normal (strong) ferrite magnets.

If I were wearing my tin-foil-hat, today...


This was 2006, but couldn't be reproduced by others so far.

I would consider this quantum gravity research by far more important and cheaper than the CERN experiments which got us the mass of the Higgs boson. So far only Podkletnov, Tajmar and de Matos worked on this.

Goff and Siegel 2004 on FTL "Faster Than Light": “Current warp drive investigations [Goldin and Svetlicny, 1994] apply general relativity to try to produce spacetime curvature that propagates at superlight speeds. Special relativity is preserved inside the warp field, but the contents are perceived to move at FTL speeds from the external frames. Such a classical warp drive cannot avoid the temporal paradox (i.e, time travel). If quantum systems are the only system that permits backward-in-time causality without temporal paradox, then any rational warp drive will need to be based on quantum principles. This means that until we have a workable theory of quantum gravity; research into warp drives based on General Relativity is probably doomed to failure.”


> The results were presented at a one-day conference at ESA's European Space and Technology Research Centre (ESTEC), in the Netherlands, 21 March 2006.

It's not clear that this result was later published in a peer reviewed journal. The Wikipedia page about Eugene_Podkletnov ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Podkletnov ) don't mention this work, and says that all this research field is very "controversial".


Is up on arxiv - http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0603033

Also, wikipedia is alright as a starting point for looking at something, but I personally wouldn't give much weight to opinion in the articles.


I agree that you can't trust everything that Wikipedia says, but it's a good starting point. In these cases, I also read the talk and history page, to see if there is a lot of people reading and editing the page.

In the arxiv, this article is marked as "Submitted to Physica C". I went to "Physica C" and I can't find the article. I only found three previous theoretical articles of some of the authors. ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleListURL&_met... )


I'm cautiously optimistic, but let's be a bit more reserved on this until we see it properly peer reviewed. This area is ripe for pathological science and a myriad errors induced by human factors.

Hopefully other labs around the world will be able to duplicate the experiment soon. We'll see if the results are as well.


I may be misreading, but isn't the "real story" that they ran essentially the "gravity probe B" experiment on the ground and generated data despite all the noise sources and interference and all that on the ground?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroscope#London_moment

Its pretty impressive technologically to pull that off. Don't have to worry about seismic noise when you're on a space satellite, for example.


But this is what concerns me as well. Yes, the effect is significantly - several orders of magnitude - greater than what the theory predicted, however there's no reassurance that it's outside local noise in the lab. "Gravity probe B" was extraordinarily sensitive and safely outside local noise.

I suppose the next step in testing this effect would really be to try it in space.


"could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity."

Could they also make a significant step towards the long-sought-after antigrav drive?

"Dear scientists, I sincerely respect your hard work but WHERE IS THE TELEPORTER YET?"


Congratulations! You've discovered Gravitonics. "What goes up, better damn well stay up!"

Would you like to research?

- Anti-gravity

- Space Manipulation




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