Why are UFO's lit up at night??

The lights in the sky, making strange manouvers that people see may actually
be something alive. I've a feeling we're trying to Hilti-Nail the tail on the donkey
we agree to and not what we know to be.

If it were a creature OF THIS PLANET, it wouldn't be bothered about being seen,
especially if it's attracting prey or a mate.
I know we tend to put the Ufo on the table and ask how and why it's here, but
we must walk before we run, so I believe we should prove that Ufo's exist first
and then ask questions.

Sorry to be the cold fish.

A quick response...for a tangible object to make a literal right angle turn requires either zero mass, zero inertia, or an infinite amount of acceleration. It's been a while since I worked out the math on that one but it's a first or second semester physics problem.

So maybe if UFOs are real, that is a hint! I don't buy infinite power, so maybe they're massless, or inertia-less, or not *quite* making a right angle turn.

Anyway, how can a thing made of matter seem to be inertia-less or mass-free? Maybe there's where your glow comes in, something like that is bound to take a lot of power, and atoms of gas entering and leaving the field might be excited and fluoresce. Or they might become massless, accelerate to hellacious speeds and then whack into 'normal' air when leaving the field, giving up their energy in fluorescence. Either way, it would require energy from the field or whatever-it-is and would be a constant "leak". Too bad no-one's gotten a good spectrogram of one, I'd expect to get more energy distribution in the radio and IR bands if that were true, with a smattering up and down the spectrum.

I'll get around to looking at your film as soon as I can, I think I still owe you one on another film I didn't get a chance to look at either. And I owe Lear a letter or two to be sent that I'm way overdue on. (sigh) Thank God it's spring break, not that I get one, maybe I can push some of the backlog off the table here at work and do some of the fun stuff on ATS I haven't had a chance to get to. It's a pain in the butt to work full time and do school as well. And I keep expecting the kids to say "Who is that strange man, Mommy?" any day now.

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
A quick response...for a tangible object to make a literal right angle turn requires either zero mass, zero inertia, or an infinite amount of acceleration. It's been a while since I worked out the math on that one but it's a first or second semester physics problem.

So maybe if UFOs are real, that is a hint! I don't buy infinite power, so maybe they're massless, or inertia-less, or not *quite* making a right angle turn.

Now if you listen to Bob Lazar, he says that they don't actually make true instantaneous
90 degree right turns; that is an optical illusion due to relativistic effects.

One thing is clear, Bob Lazar's story is the closest to anything remotely like "real physics" of UFOs that I've heard about. It is consistent with a magic device of unobtainium functioning as a novel source term of general releativity. Interestingly he describes effects looking at the 'warp drive' reasonably consistent with gravitational lensing. And then the effects of a metric-warping device to the outside would result in apparently instantaneous turns which were not quite so in the local frame. Humans haven't evolved with a visual cortex aware of significant gravitational optical effects.

Of course the physics of the unobtanium is blithely ignored as well as the magic 'amplification' from a magic-super-strong-force effect of femtometer size to macroscopic scale. No particle physics ever does that! Then the amplifiers are "just like" a microwave cavity resonator (and so what perchance are the walls of this cavity made out of to have a cross section with Magic New Gravity Field?).

It's nothing beyond something that a reasonably educated person could come up with pretty quickly as a science fiction story.

Anyway, how can a thing made of matter seem to be inertia-less or mass-free?

Arthur C Clarke had a better story, using the Haisch-Rueda theory of inertia as being an electromagnetic (predominantly) zero-point effect. And then with some magic control of boundary conditions moving the zero-point spectrum around----less inertia!

Better than Lazar at least that is based on serious, though highly speculative and unlikely, physics.

Maybe there's where your glow comes in, something like that is bound to take a lot of power, and atoms of gas entering and leaving the field might be excited and fluoresce. Or they might become massless, accelerate to hellacious speeds and then whack into 'normal' air when leaving the field, giving up their energy in fluorescence. Either way, it would require energy from the field or whatever-it-is and would be a constant "leak". Too bad no-one's gotten a good spectrogram of one, I'd expect to get more energy distribution in the radio and IR bands if that were true, with a smattering up and down the spectrum.

So now what's powering the damned thing? The self-energy of a sufficiently warped
local metric to be useful to fly in has to be pretty damn big! Gotta come from somehwere. What would spontaneous e+/e- pair generation (taking energy from the warped metric) look like? Would alot of 511 keV annihilation X-rays collide and cause the glow? What about the dangers for the pale people inside? Holy mutation saucer Batman!

Is the glow the inevitable thermodynamic consequence of the 2nd law?

The power & energy source is another gigantic piece of Magic.

I'll get around to looking at your film as soon as I can, I think I still owe you one on another film I didn't get a chance to look at either. And I owe Lear a letter or two to be sent that I'm way overdue on. (sigh) Thank God it's spring break, not that I get one, maybe I can push some of the backlog off the table here at work and do some of the fun stuff on ATS I haven't had a chance to get to. It's a pain in the butt to work full time and do school as well. And I keep expecting the kids to say "Who is that strange man, Mommy?" any day now.

Originally posted by simonmagus
what do you think are the physics principles behind this levitation video?

Maxwellian electrodynamics. Creating a resonant cavity like structure and hence amplifying electric fields to strong potentials. Notice the pepsi can.

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