Here’s an abstract by a couple physicists named Evgeny Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0108005
They apparently found an anomalous force as a result of putting high current and high voltage through a superconductor. Anyone know what the straight dope is on this one?
The abstract didn’t seem to imply anti-gravity. Still very interesting though. The mention of the results depending on mass alone and not composition was new to me.
I thought I’d clarify… what would anti-gravity be, anyway? Every force acts against every other force. Is the electric force “anti-gravity” when static from my comb picks up a small piece of paper?
At any rate:
Neat.
kind of UnTractor beam then…
Nope…the electromagnetic force is just that. When your comb picks up paper with a static charge it is merely the electromagnetic force overcoming gravity…it is not anti-gravity. Remember, gravity is stunningly weak in comparison to all of the other forces as illustrated by your comb partially overcoming the gravitational attraction of the entire earth (to completely overcome the gravitational attraction of the earth I imagine you’d have to get the piece of paper to leave earth’s orbit which I’ll admit takes a bit more energy).
Of course, at extrmely high temperatures and pressures all four forces are supposed to unify into one uberforce[sup]tm[/sup]. However, the last time such temperatures and pressures were seen were in the very earliest instants (tiny fractions of a second) after the Big Bang so we’re not likely to be able to achieve this in a lab anytime soon.
I would be very leery of any claim for anti-gravity. I suspect anything that looks like anti-gravity will likely turn out to be another force (i.e. electromagnetic) doing the work. As of now no one has been able to identify a graviton. Presumably one would have to generate anti-gravitons to get anti-gravity. Since the only way I know of to produce gravitons is to have a hunk of mass (or equivalent energy) I would suppose you would need to get your hands on negative matter (different than antimatter) to produce anti-gravitons.
Or, picture it like this… Use the rubber sheet analogy where a weight is placed on it and deforms the sheet. The ‘well’ where the weight lies equates to gravity. If you roll a ball across the sheet it will want to roll downhill into the weight’s ‘gravity well’. Anti-gravity will need to be something that cancels the weight’s downward pull and flattens the sheet out again or at the very least keeps the part of the sheet under the ball flat. It’s kinda hard to imagine what would be able to do that short of another ‘weight’ (or anti-weight) pulling the sheet back up and that in and of itself is kinda hard to imagine.
Whack-a-Mole is right. while i would consider this research interesting and ground-breaking, it does not (nor does it claim) to have created anti-gravity. rather, it is using electromagnetic force and radiation to counteract gravity. so maybe someday we’ll be able to focus the output of radiation from a microwave to make objects float! 
My point was just that: there’s no such thing as antigravity. At least in current understanding.
What sort of particles are gravitons hypothesized to be? If they are (bosons?) like light (as I suspect they would be) then the anti-particle and particle would be identical as far as we are concerned.
Are gravitons hypothesized to be bosons or fermions?
Reminds me of Fleischmann-Pons of hot-fusion fame. Although the artivle sounds really well written and thought-through I fear that it will go the same way as that ‘breakthrough’. Let’s not start designing anti-gravity space-ships until other groups have reproduced the results.
Remember:
Bosons, of course!
Then that settles it absolutely: as long as we consider gravitons as bosons then I don’t think there can be an anti-force that is distinguishable from the regular force.
But then… we still need to get our hands on some gravitons to test this. Heh.
And tc, what do you mean “of course”?
erl, they would be bosons because ALL “messenger” particles are bosons. Specifically, they’d be spin 2 and massless. I can’t think of any messenger particles that aren’t their own antiparticles (except the W[sup]+/-[/sup], but they’re charged). Regardless, I don’t see how one could use gravitons to levitate something.
Well, my understanding of the intricacies of particle force carriers is pretty fucking weak, but can all forces interfere with themselves? If so, one could create a beam that interfered with another so that intensity was limited at a distinct period (if you’re following what I mean).
I’m thinking that where the gravitons were at any instant determined their interaction with other gravitons, hence the attractive force.
Thus, given that a period will be noticed over a distinct distance, if the beam-generator was moved at the same time as the object moved, it would constantly be held in a certain place on the beam once activated (since the other periodic peaks would have power decrease due to the square of the distance by “normal” gravitational formulas).
Given the proper Fournier equation, it is possible to assemble a specific waveform to arbitrary precision.
So, in essence, what I am suggesting here is creating a multi-phase gaser (yes, gaser) which has the effect of cancelled graviton waves (or sufficiently dampened ones) except at a specific point (well, set of points since it is periodic after all) which acts as the “tractor” beam.
Now, all I need to do is find gravitons, justify that they have a frequency analogous to light (which I’m pretty sure they don’t but hey, maybe they do), construct a functional gaser, demonstrate deliberate graviton interference, and viola! Bona-fide tractor beam.
So when do I start working for Paramount Productions? Or maybe FOX television…
On to something more serious
I suppose it would matter if this thing actually generates a coherent “wave” of gravitons or not. If so, why is it pushing instead of pulling?
I’m with those who think this is yet another facet of the already brilliantly cut four forces (ok 3; ok 2). I’m not prepared to think this is anti-gravity by the mention of bosons being their own antiparticles (and hence the force and anti-force would be indistinguishable).
I make this opinion without reading that paper as I have no method of extracting it from the .tar.gz file.
a specific kind of lepton, IIRRC.
You’re right, it didn’t say antigravity. It said “Impulse Gravity Generator”. They’ve obviously discovered the fundamental principles for the Star Trek impulse engines.
And everyone thought ST was just bad science fiction. Next they’ll be discovering how the warp drive and transporters work. Can the holodeck be far behind?
Seriously, yes, I understand that it has to be replicated by someone else. That device for generating 10,000 amps sounds like it could be tricky to reproduce. As tc says, this definitely has the faint aroma of cold fusion (not hot fusion) about it…
Definitely not a lepton; we’ve already exhausted those (we think), they’re spin 1/2 (hence fermions), and are the electron, mu, tau, and their respective neutrinos (plus the antiparticles). No, the graviton is a massless (because gravity is an infinite range force) spin 2 (because the classical theory of gravity is a 2nd rank tensor field) particle that has yet to be observed.
Now then, all forces can indeed interfere with themselves. I think what you’re proposing, erl, without putting great thought into it, is basically a device that creates gravitational radiation in such a way as to cancel the gravitational field at certain points. Am I even close to right in understanding you?
(Thinking that maybe he ought to read this paper so he can see if it’s horsesh** or not.)
Oh, I’m not proposing that’s what this thing does! Ack!
That was just technobabble for creating a tractor beam. 
No seriousness was implied.
I am at a loss to explain a repulsive force that acts on seemingly an medium. I’m going to assume they used something magnetic, something easily polarized, and something like a tennis ball which is neither, and then noticed that regardless of the object the movement was about the same.
Please do exctract that file if you’ve got the tools for it. I’m pretty interested.
Actually, though, that is what I was saying (waiting for my nobel prize). I’m thinking of even neater ways to accomplish what I was saying up there.
Why not just download it as a pdf? That’s what I did, and while the pdf I have displays a little funny, it’s certainly readable. I’m just getting to it now; hopefully it’ll make sense…
Would a Lagrange Point count? I know (I think) this is not what erislover had in mind but nevertheless I thought of it.
Does gravity at a Lagrange Point cancel each other out in that the gravitons interfere with each other (ala an inverse soundwave cancels another sound wave) or is it just that you’re being tugged in opposite directions equally so as to have the effect of true zero gravity?
You know, any time someone tries to use quantum gravity (and has question marks in their usage of it!) to explain a macroscopic phenomenon, I start to really worry about them (especially since QG is neither a fully developed theory nor a generally accepted theory).
I certainly can’t explain their observations off the top of my head, and I can’t make any insightful comments into their theoretical argument (especially not without looking up some of the references), but let’s just say that I’m somewhat skeptical.