
Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years - tomohawk
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30499/the-truth-is-the-military-has-been-researching-anti-gravity-for-nearly-70-years
======
ISL
Physicists have been searching for variations in the coupling of materials to
gravity for more than a century, and by some measure, for more than a
millenium.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle#Tests_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle#Tests_of_the_weak_equivalence_principle)

Every experiment anyone has ever tried has come up empty. The equivalence
principle is a postulate (Einstein's "happiest idea") that underlies General
Relativity, making it essential to test.

(Source: This is literally what I do for a living.)

~~~
lisper
How much money does society need to spend supporting the work you do before we
can safely conclude that Einstein was actually correct and we don't need to
test it any more?

~~~
ISL
That's a great and important question. (doubly so for me, as constrained
resources may see me leave the field, to which I have devoted my entire
professional life, in the coming months) We are perennially grateful for the
support we receive to do the work that we do.

To a high degree of approximation, Einstein's predictions are very, very
correct. We are trying to look very carefully at Nature because we don't think
we have the whole story.

It is possible that Einstein is exactly right. If so, we would never be able
to describe the four forces of Nature with one unified theory. Today, we need
two theories to describe everything we see -- the quantum-mechanical/particle-
physics description of the Standard Model and gravity. There is no quantum-
mechanical fuzziness in the mathematics of gravity, and there is no hint of
the differential geometry of gravity in the mathematics of the Standard Model.
The aspiration of almost every fundamental-physics physicist is to find a way
to either simplify the Standard Model or connect it with gravity.

If the return on investment seems insufficent, know, too, that the technology
we develop to push the boundaries of knowledge has important spin-offs. GPS is
impossible without corrections from both special relativity and general
relativity. The instrumentation we develop to make gravitational experiments
possible on earth requires the development of new classes of seismometer [1]
that may open new understanding of Earth's dynamics and allow better chip-
fabrication instrumentation. The instrumentation developed to test gravity in
space is also being used to measure the movement of mass (i.e. ice and water)
on Earth's surface [2].

Even more important is the training we provide to students. Just as athletes
train in the gym to get stronger, confrontation with the hardest known
technical problems provides an efficient path for students and young faculty
to become proficient at the entire range of modern measurement science. Alumni
from our group have not only gone on to fancy academic positions, but also
helped to redefine the kilogram, designed upgraded digital calipers used by
tens of thousands of people worldwide, built key components of a major
quantum-computing company's infrastructure, and more.

The people who work on these kinds of experiments are making a fraction of
what they could make in industry. We are doing it for love, not money, and the
returns to society are myriad.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03084](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03084) [2]
[https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/](https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/)

~~~
dr_dshiv
Some argue that keeping talented people out of industry is a downside of the
sciences not an upside.

Personally, particle physics irritates me because I don't believe in
particles... It's all vibrations, man :)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Academia isn't keeping talented people out of the industry. At any point, a
talented person can leave the university, join a company, and easily quintuple
their earnings.

It's the industry that's keeping talented people out by giving them mundane or
bullshit jobs, and not leaving any space for long-term research and vision.

~~~
raverbashing
Though I might say that Academia is making a good job of keeping talented
people out of it because their incentive structure is skewed.

~~~
xtracto
This. I did not leave academia to search for fame and fortune. I left it
because the bureaucracy and politics of it was terrible.

------
duchenne
I love the following Feynman's quote:

``In those days, one of the theories proposed was that the planets went around
because behind them were invisible angels, beating their wings and driving the
planets forward. You will see that this theory is now modified! It turns out
that in order to keep the planets going around, the invisible angels must fly
in a different direction and they have no wings. Otherwise, it is a somewhat
similar theory!``

The point is that, still today, we have no idea why mass attracts mass. We
observe it. We measure it. We model it. We predict it. But, we do not
understands its mechanism. At that time, it was making people crazy to think
that an object could remotely affect another one. Now, people just accept it.
But, when you think about it, it really sounds magic.

~~~
rurban
Gravity is very similar to magnetism, a "magically" attracting force of
distinct objects. The explanation is very easy via fields. Just trying to
explain it via particles will get you into trouble, e.g. the flawed standard
model, or the Higgs.

Einstein was pretty close in his spacetime bending explanation, but this still
doesn't explain dark matter or the recent gravity experiments with fast
rotating magnets in strong supra conductors. There are better gravity field
theories out there, but they are lacking experimental verification. Some
experiments are cheap, but most are cosmic scale, beyond simple galaxies.

This army guy came up with nice and cheap experiments, similar to Tajmar's
experiments. We will see what will come out of it. Tajmar is also holding an
old patent of an Anti-Gravity device, which nobody built so far. The army
device with two rotating fields seems to be much better.

~~~
de_watcher
> Gravity is very similar to magnetism

But magnets, how do they work? (C)

~~~
poelzi
They don't understand the dirac see and how field lines work, nor how a CL
node operates when it's in magnetic mode. In fact, they even think that you
can describe EM with vector math, which is half bollocks. Maxwell tried to
formulate Vector equations from his Quaternion equations and failed, because
it's not possible without loosing certain effects.

Certain Atoms or combinations cause their sourounding CL nodes to be in
paramagnetic mode. (They are dislocated from groundstate to the left part of
the diagram). If you heat the material under external magnetic field, the
atoms and grains order to the external field. Once the matter is cold enough,
the external Electron bindings hold the atoms in place that one large magnetic
field is created. Everything is basically a phase looked loop oscillator and
stabilizes its frequency to neighboring nodes.

Since you most likely only had contact with the standard model, giving enough
explanation for you to understand the mechanics behind it would definitely be
to long.

Dr. Stoyan Sargs - Basic Structures of Matter Supergravitation unified Theory,
Chapter 2, 3, 6 and partially 12 (Planet magnetic field) should answer your
question :)

------
GuiA
_If you do not work on an important problem, it 's unlikely you'll do
important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through,
in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep
an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem'
must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a
certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I
mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We
didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They
are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the
consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable
attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most
scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The
average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time
working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also
doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems._

Richard Hamming, _You and Your Research_

[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

~~~
kiba
Time travel back into the past is understood to be impossible.

~~~
garmaine
Physicist here (by degree, not profession). What you state is not true: by
currently accepted physical theories, time travel to the past IS very much
possible. It's known as a "closed, time-like curve" in the literature. Now,
most mechanisms explored for doing so wouldn't allow travel back further than
the initial creation of the time travel device, so you could say that time
travel to our past is not possible since the construction of such a thing is
necessarily in the future. But as a matter of physics, general relativity
allows it.

Now that said, most physicists are convinced that time travel cannot be
possible, because if it were then paradoxical situations could be constructed
--e.g. going back in time and killing yourself (the earlier you) before you
entered the machine, or killing your grandfather before your father was born,
etc. There are as many theorized rules preventing or limiting time travel as
there are physicists that have looked at it, but critically they are all
ADDITIONAL rules, postulated not to explain observable phenomenon but purely
to think up a way time travel paradoxes might be avoided. Physics, as
currently understood from available experimental evidence, 100% allows time
travel to the past, paradoxes included.

~~~
pdonis
_> Physics, as currently understood from available experimental evidence, 100%
allows time travel to the past, paradoxes included._

General Relativity, which is where the term "closed timelike curve" is used,
does _not_ allow paradoxes. A spacetime with closed timelike curves in it (for
example, the Godel universe) still has only one thing happening at each event.

The real problem conceptually with such solutions is that they appear to
contradict free will: since only one thing can happen at each event, if you
experience visiting that event multiple times, you cannot freely choose what
to do at that event.

~~~
adrianN
Luckily "free will" as would fit a layman's interpretation of the term is
already incompatible with physics, so the existence of CTCs doesn't pose
additional problems.

~~~
ralusek
I think most people would interpret free will to mean something that is
perfectly compatible with any definition of determinism.

If I decide to raise my right hand, I raise it. Don't get pedantic in regards
to disabled people. It doesn't matter if the universe is completely
deterministic, that doesn't mean that I'm not the entity that decided to raise
my right hand. The deterministic universe may have produced me, but the
software I'm running _is_ me. The reason I raised my hand is _because_ of me.
Sure there are an infinite number of factors that have fed into the
circumstances of my birth, and everything that's happened to me, but
everything that I do is specifically as a consequence of my free will. I am
the software, deterministic or not.

~~~
gpderetta
That's an interpretation of free will that I completely subscribe to, but I do
not think it is a majority view.

~~~
rbanffy
It's still the unavoidable consequence of the past.

------
excalibur
> Throughout his career, Witten conducted research into gravitation, quantum
> gravity, and general relativity. The last one of these is the theory first
> put forward by Albert Einstein that proposes that gravity is essentially a
> warp or curve in the geometry of space-time caused by mass.

You're assuming that your readers are already familiar with quantum gravity,
but need an introduction to general relativity?

~~~
martincmartin
They're assuming that the readers will infer, from the name "quantum gravity",
that it has to do with gravity. From just the name, "general relativity,"
people who don't know what it is probably wouldn't guess it's a theory of
gravity.

------
walrus01
> Throughout the expansive Project Outgrowth document, Mead and the other
> scientists also explored field propulsion, defined as those concepts which
> use “electric and/or magnetic fields to accelerate an ionized working fluid,

hall effect thrusters

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall-
effect_thruster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall-effect_thruster)

totally compliant with conventional physics

~~~
lawlessone
this too?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive)

------
mLuby
There are Gravity Stones from the 60's scattered among US colleges to

> "remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is
> discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane
> accidents"

Decent way to get students thinking about it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation#Mo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation#Monuments)

~~~
jacobreg
Oh the story behind that is a wild ride from start to finish. Babson's sister
drowned when they were children, and he decided the real reason that happened
is anti-gravity technology wasn't sufficiently advanced to prevent her
drowning. He spent a large amount of his philanthropy funding anti-gravity
research for the rest of his life.

Edit: Just realized this is mentioned in the article you linked.

~~~
wolfd
It's still worth a call-out. The other line in the article that always gets me
is "Sometimes, attendees [of the Gravity Research Foundation] sat in chairs
with their feet higher than their heads, to counterbalance gravity."

It feels like absurd lore in Fallout, but probably actually happened.

------
jml7c5
This is a terrible article that is little more than conspiracy theorist
baiting. For example, the author takes this quote from Ben Rich:

>“We have some new things. We are not stagnating. What we are doing is
updating ourselves, without advertising. There are some new programs, and
there are certain things, some of them 20 or 30 years old, that are still
breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about [because] other people don’t
have them yet.”

and by throwing the quote at the end of a long series of anti-gravity/EM
papers tries to give the impression that the military is hiding something wild
like a secret anti-gravity device. It's very National Enquirer.

There are other examples of this. The discussion of the WEAV pulls the quote
"no moving parts and assures near-instantaneous response time", which
presumably is to hint that this explains those instantly-accelerating discs
seen in various videos. That "near-instantaneous response time" refers to the
ability to change thrust quickly and not velocity is, of course, obscured.

~~~
DoctorOetker
>This is a terrible article

From what I have read up till now on thedrive, the whole outlet is terrible,
all their articles seem to be drivel like this.

------
newsbinator
What is the currently accepted answer to the question, "what is gravity"?

~~~
dvh
Gravity is one of the essential forces in nature. If you want to explain it in
simpler terms it is not possible because gravity is the simpler thing. You can
use gravity to explain other things, but you cannot use other things to
explain gravity.

~~~
pmorais
That’s not really true. The other 3 “fundamental” forces are irreducible yet
still entirely explained by the standard model.

~~~
gpderetta
Well, gravity is similarly explained by general relativity.

------
misterprime
Is this article just a derivative of the patents that were discussed on HN
several weeks ago?

I liked that discussion. Plenty of varying perspectives such as "Bob Lasar was
proven right!" and "in an arms race, keep your enemy busy [with
disinformation]".

Is there new info here?

~~~
bonestamp2
I agree it's just a rehashing of information they know will get a lot of
clicks. I have a vested interest in this topic so I've been following it
closely and I don't see anything new here.

------
officemonkey
I checked that this article wasn't posted on 1 April.

------
JoeAltmaier
Not surprising in the 1950's. Every other science fiction author was a
believer - they wrote endlessly about shields that 'blocked' gravity, fields
that interacted with gravity, materials that had variable gravitational force,
and on and on. Their speculation helped fuel/was fueled by science
investigation of that era.

------
conexions
For anyone interested, a book was written on this about 15 years ago by a
reporter from "Janes Defense Weekly". "The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the
Classified World of Antigravity Technology". Not as tin-hat as you might
think, mostly a story of a lot of dead ends while trying to research some
DARPA dark projects.

------
carapace
If you like this, do check out Rex Research. You have to sift through a lot of
BS but there's some great stuff buried in it.

[http://www.rexresearch.com/index.htm](http://www.rexresearch.com/index.htm)

------
claytongulick
Not sure how this topic could be covered without a mention of Dr. Ning Li's
work:

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

------
hanniabu
They must have some reason to think it's possible. I've also always wondered
if Coral Castle was really constructed using some ancient lost technique to
harness this power. _Takes foil hat back off..._

------
sgt
They'll at some point stumble across a Goa'uld device that does precisely
that. But for the love of God, don't just plug it in!

------
danschumann
To really be able to manipulate gravity, you would also need to manipulate
mass, and so far nuclear is the only way I know of, in which we do that, but
uhh.. I don't think we'll get anti gravity until we can control mini stars...
Little nuclear engines.

~~~
fsh
It is a common myth that nuclear reactions "turn mass into energy". What
actually happens is that the products of the reaction have less binding energy
than the initial nucleus. Since energy gravitates, this reduces the mass of
the products. The exact same thing happens in chemical reactions. If you burn
something, the product are lighter than the initial substances by the mass
equivalent of the energy released.

~~~
amdavidson
"...energy gravitates, this reduces the mass of the products." "...the product
are lighter than the initial substances by the mass equivalent of the energy
released."

How are these not restating "turn mass into energy"?

Both scenarios approximate: High Mass => Low Mass + Energy

~~~
codebc
[https://youtu.be/Xo232kyTsO0](https://youtu.be/Xo232kyTsO0) check out this
PBS spacetime explanation for what it means for energy to have mass. It's
impossible to convert energy into mass, adding up all the mass inside a
composite does not equal the true mass, because energy itself has mass. When
we split an atom, we are releasing some of that extra (energy) that was stored
as potential energy holding the parts together, not converting energy into
matter, just moving states of energy to other types.

------
philip142au
Gravity is related to time and entropy.

------
f2f
oh, you mean since Roswell? ok.

------
shireboy
I hear the research has been looking up.

