Gravitational Anomaly in Superconductors discovered by European Scientists

A team of European scientists funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) have discovered an anomalously large "gravitomagnetic" effect in a superconductivity experiment, far larger than that predicted by the classical theory of Einstein's General Relativity (GR). These scientists, with leading members from ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH, Austria and ESA-HQ, Paris, have announced results of 250 experiments over three years, which show that a ring of superconducting material, spinning up to 6500 RPM, display effects in a quantum-mechanical measurement which the scientists have interpreted to mean the appearance of an anomalously large gravitomagnetic field. Even though this field is still only hundred millionths the size of the Earth's ordinary gravitation, it is a hundred million trillion times larger than that predicted by classical General Relativity. Their experiment involves a ring of superconducting material rotating up to 6 500 times a minute.



Background:

In the 19th century it was discovered moving electrical charges, such electrons in a wire, produce magnetic fields, which forms the basis of radio technology and electrical machinery today. Einstein's GR theory predicted that moving masses also produce an unusual kind of gravitational field, called "gravitomagnetic", but in everyday situations on Earth, this effect is extraordinarily small and umeasurable.

Einstein's theory of General Relativity, is also notorious for being incompatible at its core with quantum mechanics, the modern framework of physics which explains the behavior of all known atomic and nuclear particles, light, and all physical effects---except gravitation. Superconductors are themselves fundamentally quantum-mechanical devices---a manifestation of quantum mechanics at the human laboratory scale instead of the microscopic atomic scale where it is usually important. Hence the appearance of anomalous gravitational effects in superconductors is not inconceivable, because the as yet unknown theory of quantum gravity---reconciling Einstein with quantum mechanics---is expected to show its first effect there. If the current results hold true and are replicated, this would be the first experimental violation of Einstein's General Relativity, which has withstood numerous verifications over nearly 100 years. In time, if the quantum theory of gravity is more fully developed, the very-long term technological consequences could be significant, if gravity could be manipulated by superconductors or other quantum effects. In my opinion, there is a chance, small, but not zero that this result could be the opening step of most important physical discovery since that of nuclear fission in the late 1930's.

(the author is a physicist, but not one specializing in gravitation or superconductivity)

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[edit on 23/3/2006 by Umbrax]

This is an important development, if it turns out to be real. It could lead to a unified physics model, as well as antigravity and FTL.

I just read the article and I must say that while I don't know what I'm talking about, these guys certainly seem to.

If it ends up being true the implications are cooler than cool

My favorite little quote from the article:

Depending on further confirmation, this effect could form the basis for a new technological domain, which would have numerous applications in space and other high-tech sectors" says de Matos

Science at it's finest...or at least as close to the Fantastic Four as we can get so far.

Spiderj

While a wonderful development in its own right, I don't see a violation of the General Theory of Relativity--the force was predicted. It's only about 100 million trillion times stronger than predicted. I hope this leads the way to a true reconcilliation of the differences between General Relativity and Quantum Theory and paves the way at last for a Grand Unified Theory.

This appears to be an important discovery and I'm glad it's in the news. It does make me wonder if those stories I've been reading about the US military using very fast rotating superconducting material to create anti-gravity might actually have some truth to them.

Is this like spinning mercury at 10000 rpm in a heavy magnetic field as in gravity disruptor?

If so see the TR3b, for a similar concept:

TR3B

Wow, thats eerily similar to a theory I posted on a similar gravity related thread a long time ago. Interesting.

Some guy jumped all over me about that one...glad to know rotation induces the quantum effect of gravity. I don't have the math or physics background to back it up, but I based it on logic and it seems sound.

I'll look it up.

[edit on 24-3-2006 by CAPT PROTON]

Ahh here we go...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

19-12-2004
From what I've seen, Gravity is more of an effect as opposed to some actual thing. Like a very complicated form of centripetal motion or centrifugal motion. Where you have to think of a huge wash of electrons desperately trying to reduce their orbits over their super heated parent atoms. Heat something it expands, cool something it contracts. So, as the core is super heated an pressurized and then rapidly spun, the electrons are spun outward and away, but they must still maintain some sort of orbit no matter how far out they are. Example, heat a magnet and the field disappears or did it? The field may be weaker just simply because the force was sent further out over a larger area and can no longer be detected. Cool it off, and presto, it returns. Now, really cool it down, and the force falls in on itself and will do wierd things like superconducting.

I say all this, after observing a strange effect from some university science experiment on TV. They had a huge magnet at some lab. A large round one on its side, probably about 6-7 feet in diameter. With a 3 inch hole in its center. Not sure what their experiment was supposed to be, but one of the students put an object in that hole while the magnet was on and it went into a free fall. The object floated in the center. They put a spider and frog in there, and both became weightless while in the center of this giant magnet. Neither was harmed. I guess they blew off their main experiment to explain this new effect. Nothing was super cooled, so it wasn't like those levitation, anti-gravity experiments you see.

I believe the magnet was powerful enough to cancel the effect of gravity or electron wash within that hole and cause a free fall. Its field created a bubble strong enough for a tiny area to be free of gravity, or those particles responsible for it which are orbiting in and out of the core, like a vacuum tube is sealed from the atmosphere.

Interesting, I hadn't heard that term before - gravitomagnetic. I'll give a look into that before responding in more detail (which could be awhile since I'm leaving on a two day trip today).

However, I don't know if this experiment could lead to a Unified Field Theory. It's observational proof that something "different" is happening, and yet also something the same. In essence "yes this is predicted - only it happened at a 100 million trillion times stronger than expected" even though it is excessively weak still.

But mathematical proof is a whole different ballpark and road to go down. It was one thing for Newton to say that gravity exists. It was another to get the precise measurement of the Gravitational Constant.

Could be an error in measurement. THough, none of this data seems to explain the mechanism of superconductivity.

Awesome science, this! I can't wait to see what develops next from this.
I do have a sneaking suspicion though, that this science (and technology), has been known to the American military since the very early 1950's, during some of their reverse engineering projects on recovered craft found in the late 40's. I'd imagine that Bob Lazar knows all kinds of things about this science (if he is truly legitimate).

Any spinning object produces gravity in the form of inertia.

They should determine if there is any weakening of inertia... if so then this device is actually redirecting gravity not generating it. The implications are no less, if not of even greater significance. The ability to direct and manipulate gravity leads to obvious conclusions.

This is exciting.... It might not be super earth shaking for practical applications as of yet.

But it does open up a new avenue to explore.

Information of extreme sweetness. Ever since I saw a UFO on tv Ive fanticized about creating a home-built small anti-gravity/gravity disruptor device (without the rockets). After reading that, im guessing the home-project would run a high risk of being vaporized by the electricity or hole-punched by the mercury!

I wonder if they keep the mercury super cooled (-190F) with the liquid ozygen?

OR, a ring of supercharged platinum-naquida alloy , spun electromagnetically at 10,000 RPM (like having the platinum being part of the motor), while the entire thing is spun at 100RPM (1 million RPM)! But at that speed im guessing the platinum-naquida would break apart, but maybee not if the mass is reduced, but then the conductor might become discharged. Still, mercury would be a hell of alot cheaper than platinum.

Even with that technology, were still not going to get to the nearest neighboring star in a lifetime.

I wonder if they keep the mercury super cooled (-190F) with the liquid ozygen?

They never even said what superconducting material they use in the original article. I'm searching through the Paper now, though the search term "mercury" turned up nothing.

Some science replies to various comments.

Example, heat a magnet and the field disappears or did it? The field may be weaker just simply because the force was sent further out over a larger area and can no longer be detected. Cool it off, and presto, it returns.

This is a well-known phenomenon of ferromagnetic materials explainable with standard physics.

You have to consider that magnetism in materials is that way because of the alignment of the spins of electrons in the material: such spins generate magnetic fields as an intrinsic property of the particle, i.e. there is no deeper explanation that we know about other than it is an observed fact that electrons have a magnetic moment, period.

Ferromagnets (permanent magnets) have a special property that once you get some spins aligned, they tend to push their neighbors to be aligned in the same direction. As a result you get whole large collections of atoms/electrons whose spins are all aligned and make a magnetic field. Most of the time, they point every which way and so do not add up to anything macroscopic.

This is a thermodynamical process---as random motions from heat try to push the spins out of alignment and the self-attraction energy tries to bring it back. So what happens is that at a certain temperature (Curie point) the heat is sufficient to tip the balance, and just like solids can melt at a certain temperature, the permanent magnetism melts and the spins become unaligned, and the large scale field collapses. And yes, there is some heat required to "melt" the alignment of the magnetic fields. This is a classic problem in statistical mechanics.

So the answer, "is the magnetic field completely gone" depends on how you think about it. The intrinsic generators of the magnetic field, electrons, are still there, but now their individual fields are not aligned and so the outside field, feeling more than trillions of electrons is not significant, because it feels the sum of the individual generators. But yet, the big external magnetic field really is gone.

Now, really cool it down, and the force falls in on itself and will do wierd things like superconducting.

Superconductivity doesn't happen with most materials---it is a very special, and very complex property. It is as if the quantum mechanicanical nature, which is usually for tiny atoms, can self-interact and you get a macroscopic "quantum state". This is why it is so valuable and fascinating. It has long been considered the only possible avenue into exploring quantum mechanics and gravity, as in the currently discussed experiment. The reason is that because gravity is so enormously weak compared to other forces, and seeing the effects of quantum gravity would be a tiny alteration of the already tiny force of classical gravity, you must have some kind of massive amplification of quantum mechanical properties (superconductors) to even have a gnat's chance. Quantum gravity is so hard because the math is apparently intractable, and that we have very little way of doing experiments. For other forces, we have particle accelerators, but the effect of gravity is so utterly insignificant with high-energy particles comapred to the other huge forces. Then in the cosmos, there are astrophysical ways to probe gravity---but then you have such immense sizes and masses that there is no significant influence of quantum mechanics any more.

There are various kinds of superconductivity, and apparently the newer "high-temperature" kind (liquid nitrogen versus liquid helium) did NOT show any novel gravitational effects. This is probably because the quantum mechanical properties of the higher-temperature class of superconductors are distinct from the older class.

Kind of a bummer, as liquid helium experiments are much harder and more expensive than liquid nitrogen experiments.

I say all this, after observing a strange effect from some university science experiment on TV. They had a huge magnet at some lab. A large round one on its side, probably about 6-7 feet in diameter. With a 3 inch hole in its center. Not sure what their experiment was supposed to be, but one of the students put an object in that hole while the magnet was on and it went into a free fall. The object floated in the center. They put a spider and frog in there, and both became weightless while in the center of this giant magnet. Neither was harmed. I guess they blew off their main experiment to explain this new effect. Nothing was super cooled, so it wasn't like those levitation, anti-gravity experiments you see.

I believe the magnet was powerful enough to cancel the effect of gravity or electron wash within that hole and cause a free fall. Its field created a bubble strong enough for a tiny area to be free of gravity, or those particles responsible for it which are orbiting in and out of the core, like a vacuum tube is sealed from the atmosphere.

This is also a well-known phenomenon, and not surprising. There is no actual gravitational effect here. What is happening is that most materials have di-magnetic property in that a small magnetic field from the atoms in the material can be induced by an external strong field, and this can then form a force of its own.

This force can be strong enough to counteract gravity.

But it isn't antigravity any more than the earth holding up your shoes is 'anti-gravity', it is just a force going in the other direction.


As far as the 'tin-foil' hat reports of a TR-3B with a spinning mercury plasma: makes absolutely no sense in the current context. I find it difficult to imagine that any violent hot plasma could form a macroscopic quantum mechanical state of matter, which woudl be apparently needed to have any new gravitational effect.

Lasers are examples of macrocopic 'quantum states' of photons. But photons don't have mass, and so contribute virtually nothing as a source of gravity. Superconductors have macroscopic quantum states of electrons (paired up specially), and electrons have mass and charge, unlike photons.

That's much more rare and probably key for the new gravitational results.

Note, that the results could still very well be mistaken. All the sensors for acceleration used for the novel effects use electromagnetic connections of course, and there could very well be some as yet undetermined or uncorrected induced tiny effects from the much more powerful E&M (versus gravito) magnetic fields and electric fields which could end up "faking" the result.

Remember Podletknovs anti gravity experiments using superconducting spinning disks reducing gravity above it?

This sounds connected to those experiments and could provide a fundamental
basis to that effect.

i urge everyone to re4search podletknovs experiments and get more details for this and establish the very probable connection.

The results could be fantastic in terms of gravity cancellation.

The applications are limitless

For example womens bras could have gravity shielding preventing droop and sag.

A good overview of the article is on americanantigravity.com, here's the link
www.americanantigravity.com...

The European authors say that they did not observe any effects of the sort claimed by Podkletnov. Contrary to what is said on the american antigravity.com site, the setups and results do not appear to be particularly parallel. In fact, the new results were found only in old-style superconductors, not the newer 'high-temperature' superconductors, which is where Podklednov claimed his effect. The underlying quantum mechanics of the two kinds of superdoncutros appear to be rather different so seeing different effects depending on the kind of superconductor does not invalidate the idea, in fact it reinforces the idea that this may be a quantum-mechanical/gravitational coupling.

Podkletnov's setup and results are apparently hard/impossible to replicate and he is not particularly forthcoming. Supposedly serious scientists who have tried and given up and decided that he is probably a fraud.

I think the new results stand a much better chance of being evaluated fairly, as it appears to be a careful experiment done by a significant, serious team willing to criticize themselves.

It could still be a mistake, of course, due to a subtle experimental flaw.

Real progress on experimental quantum gravity (that phrase is wonderful to write as science, and not science fiction!) will proceed from this one.