[Nuke]

wow, they invented the stargate

an antigravity system could be a usefull tool for escaping the earths atmosphere without burning a gargantuan amount of fuel. nullify gravity, all youd have to overcome is wind resistance. also once in space navigation would be much easyer as you could take the direct root to another planet rather than following orbital paths as your not being pulled twards any bodies.

the tru importance of this is that it will help bridge understanding between general relativity and quantum theory. which could have potential to prove or disprove m theory or whatever they call the current model.

[Bobboau]

if this can lead to anti-gravity it'll be the key to FTL

[Nuke]

i wouldnt go as fat as saying it would lead to ftl. perhaps driver coils, that could convert electrical power to thrust withut the side effects of burning fuel. you could still do interstellar travel with it due to the effects of time dialation. the radius of travel would only be limited by the capabilities of life support systems.

[Bobboau]

no, you don't get it, most FTL theorys currently requier negitive mass gravity feilds, anti-gravity, as the essental component we have no idea how to create.

[Nuke]

anti gravity fields, even if you could create them, would need to be extremely powerfull for those kinds of drives to work.  you would also need to maintain drive operation to keep moving. as far as general relativity is concerned, youre not really moving, so if your drive disengages you return to your original velocity. youre ship is in its own little bubble, and sence its not really moving youre immune to inertia, time dialation and such (so inertial dampners are just for show). i dont think its gonna happen until long after we can fit a fusion reactor into a small briefcase. i think that in the interim we would use a drive that would nullify gravitational influences so that we can do more spaceflight on less fuel.

[Bobboau]

my point was though that this could be the key technological discovery that may eventualy make it posable,, I was in no way asserting that we'd be bombing vasuda by next tuesday.

[Fenrir]

Okay, so there's electromagnetism and graviomagnatism now. Are we going to end up finding magnetic counterparts to the Weak and Strong forces also?

[perihelion]

@ Fenrir, I'm not sure.  I wondered the same thing several years back when I first read about Lense-Thirring fields (aka Frame-Dragging) (aka Protational Fields) (aka Gravitomagnetic Fields...)  There's so much white noise out there on this topic it is kind of hard to tell what is legitimate science and what is just crank.  This latest test using the spinning superconducter is the first rigourous test I've heard of that actually seems to be have positive confirmation of the effect's existance.  I'm hopeful that once they finish crunching the data from Gravity Probe B that their results will agree in magnitude.  That would be a big step in bridging the gap between QED and GR.

Not so sure we'd be able to use it for inertial dampers on anything smaller than a city, though.  They are measuring the effect several orders of magnitude higher than predicted, but that's still so miniscule to be virtually useless.  You'd have to be accelerating an absolutely gargantuan mass (or gargantuan acceleration, more likely you'd need both) for the effect to be of a useful magnitude.  Ok.  So, maybe you could use a very small mass and just spin the crap out of it, but the effect only works so long as the spin is accelerating or decelerating.  Still, this is one of the coolest experimental results I've seen in awhile.

[Flaser]

Another limit comes in though: you get negative gravities in normal flight. The body's tolerance for those is much less, you can only do about half as many negative as you can positive.

There is no such real thing as negative gravity or negative force. It's a misnomer - negative-G just means that you're upside down. Instead rushing into your legs blood rushes into your head.
If a grav field could lessen forces acting on you - which isn't all that easy when you realise that it's a volumetric force, whereas ordinary forces acting on your body do so on a surface - it could equally compansate the so called "negative-G forces just as easly as the positive ones".

[bfobar]

Now I'm busting my brain trying to figure out how an attractive central force induced field like gravity could interact with a nondivergent field. In E&M, you have either positive or negative sources of electricity, and all magnetic moments are dipoles. Gravity sources are only negative. What the hell does a gravitomagnetic field induce for a current? Makes...no...sense...

[Turambar]

Now I'm busting my brain trying to figure out how an attractive central force induced field like gravity could interact with a nondivergent field. In E&M, you have either positive or negative sources of electricity, and all magnetic moments are dipoles. Gravity sources are only negative. What the hell does a gravitomagnetic field induce for a current? Makes...no...sense...

amazing, they've created a bfobar brain-explosion device

[bfobar]

amazing, they've created a bfobar brain-explosion device

There are so many of those already though.

[Bobboau]

IIRC the 'current' was matter.

[Nuke]

Another limit comes in though: you get negative gravities in normal flight. The body's tolerance for those is much less, you can only do about half as many negative as you can positive.

There is no such real thing as negative gravity or negative force. It's a misnomer - negative-G just means that you're upside down. Instead rushing into your legs blood rushes into your head.
If a grav field could lessen forces acting on you - which isn't all that easy when you realise that it's a volumetric force, whereas ordinary forces acting on your body do so on a surface - it could equally compansate the so called "negative-G forces just as easly as the positive ones".

well yes if youre in the cocpit of an aircraft under the rules of general relativity, but in quantum mechanics (or was it string/m theyory?) theres a thing called supersymetry which essentially means that for every particle type theres also another one that exists in other dimentions outside our own that is an exact opposite of it. there is such a thing as negative gravity (sence we have gravatons we should also have anti-gravatons), unfortunately it doesnt exist withing the constraints of the 4 dimentions we know so well.

[Descenterace]

There is no such real thing as negative gravity or negative force.

'Real' meaning 'known about'. Theoretical parallel universes don't really count.

[perihelion]

@Nuke: Why on earth should there be an anti-graviton?  The Electromagnetic Force has no need for an anti-photon, so I hardly see why gravity should be any different.  (FYI, supersymmetry is String and M-Theory, not QM.  Honestly, I've never taken those two theories very seriously for the simple reason that, unlike General Relativity or Quantum Electrodynamic, they make no predictions which are actually testable.)

@bfobar: Just think of it like electromagnetism.  You run electrical current through a wire and you create a cylindrical magnetic field.  When you increase or decrease the current, the magnetic field generated will increase or decrease in intensity.  Whenever the magnetic field changes, you induce an electrostatic field.  As long as your magnetic field is stationary, there will be no electrostatic field.  But as soon as the magnetic field starts changing, some electric field E is induced.  Not sure it will help, but you might look at this:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday%27s_law_of_induction

This gravitomagnetism should theoretically behave the same way.  With EM, your current is moving electrical charge.  With Lense-Thirring fields, your current is just moving mass.  Most talk I've heard about this effect, though, suggests that you'd need a "current" of matter as dense as the degenerate core of a white dwarf accelerated to an appreciable fraction of light-speed to get much of an effect.

[Shadow0000]

There is no such real thing as negative gravity or negative force. It's a misnomer - negative-G just means that you're upside down. Instead rushing into your legs blood rushes into your head.
If a grav field could lessen forces acting on you - which isn't all that easy when you realise that it's a volumetric force, whereas ordinary forces acting on your body do so on a surface - it could equally compansate the so called "negative-G forces just as easly as the positive ones".

In a theorical description, an object with Negative Gravity should have Negative Mass, meaning that it should start to repel objects in exchange of attract them. FS1 and FS2 works somewhat like this with Positive and Negative Mass (have someone tried ?).

Negative Gravity is oftenly mistaken with Anti-Gravity that is a concept which means of countering or otherwise modifying the effects of gravity, typically used in the context of spacecraft propulsion.

[Nuke]

although the supersymetry of string/m theory is only theoretical and cannot be tested, still it remains a possibility and you cant just dismiss the concept of an anti-graviton on those grounds. thats one of the reasons why this spinney superconductor experiment is so cool, because it might lead to a discovery that can determine the validity of string/m theory.