Electromagnetic Spacecraft Drive

can you cite or reference that article?

And why would the magnets drive it up rather than down?

The father of a friend's girlfriend worked at the UC Berkeley Lawrence Livermore Lab told me he had collaborated with this guy. They were also working on a project to beam microwaves down from an orbiting space station to the North Pole for the purpose of melting the polar ice cap to generate electricity. I mention that because as intelligent as these guys were, they were bordering on crackpots too.

Lots of FAIL in that video. Hardly worth the effort of discussing.

BTW, Four fundamental forces in nature not five. He has magnetism twice. I guess he just really likes magnetism.

A "cored out rock" sounds really scientific to me.

And did he use the same rocks and magnets for all his experiments?

This might be the answer to the perpetual energy machine questions that we get about every 2 - 3 weeks.

I watched the video but the guy doing the interview kept saying antigravity, when none of the stuff he was being shown said or implied anything about that.

So they had plans for a flying saucer shaped thing craft. If it was antigravity based, it wouldn't of had a ceiling height. The retired guy they were interviewing said it himself, the atmosphere space boundary wouldn't matter with antigravity.

Then at the end he does a thing with a magnet and pipes which demonstrates eddy currents, and once again this is called antigravity.

As far as I can tell this video was made to look like something interesting when it really it is a crock of sh#!

I just tried to watch the video. It's a hoot!

Besides, how do we know that gravity wasn't sucking the non-magnetic rock down toward the ground faster than normal because of the force field surrounding the magnetic-magnetic rock? Couldn't anybody afford to video this? No instruments?

And, what's up with the falling ball? Give me a break.

Wow rapid responses, hey I'm not a flying saucer fanatic or anything like that, I'm looking at this accidentally stumbled upon text (I never saw the video til now) and trying to find the text again. I'll submit a more complete response tomorrow with regard to the Earth's magnetic field and the one generated by the conjoined magnets which I believe is repulsive to the Earth's field.

If you flipped the two magnets over so that the other poles touched, would it then be attracted to the earth's magnetic field? This is crazy stuff.

No, since you've still got the two magnets repelling I believe you would have an identical field. Ofcourse if you only flip one they'll attract and the field would reduce to a far smaller one. Hey, this is new to me, although I've been in the electrical field for 30 some years and I'm still trying to make sense out of this one, just looking for some input.

I think Tornado's point is that (presumably) this is an attempt to make a monopole magnet. In one case it would be (say) an N pole and with both magnets flipped it would turn into an S pole.

Wow, Every time "I" dropped the rocks... Why didn't he get the nine other guys to drop the rocks? Gee whiz, what's wrong with this picture?

Qustion: If we do not yet know what gravity actually is, only how it acts on us, by what means are we determining that anti-gravity exists? and as we also do not yet know how to re-create gravity, how can we make something anti-gravity??

One way is by experiment.

There's nothing wrong with trying to discover some kind of 'anti-gravity' effect, provided that the experimental evidence stands up to peer review, and is repeatable.

This does not apply to "dropping a couple of rocks and noting which hits the ground first".

On my desk I have a pair of magnets from the head control mechanism from an old hard disk drive:-

Together with an aluminium washer (which was used to hold the platters in place). When you hold up the magnets and drop the washer between them, it falls through in "slow motion". It's a very compulsive little toy.

When I was at TI I performed a similar experiment using a 1/4" aluminium panel placed at a 45-degree angle. Our MIT Summer Interns were at a complete loss as to why the rare-earth magnet crawled down the slope whilst a similar piece of unmagnetised metal slid down unimpeded. They couldn't explain it (nor did any of them understand how a colour CRT worked which I found positively astonishing, given the school. Some of them were MsEEs. I sprayed a few droplets of glass cleaner on the face of the CRT to act as magnifying lenses so they could see the phosphor triads more easily but they still didn't understand how three electron guns could produce three colours even so).

I also suspended two Samarium-Cobalt magnets from a length of fishing line attached to the ceiling. Two magnets stuck together over the free end of the line made them convenient to attach in this way. I cut the length of the line so that the magnets were suspended off the floor by about 1 cm.

Just hanging there they aligned themselves to the local magnetic field, like a compass needle. Then I nudged them and let them swing, like a pendulum. Then I placed a 20x20 cm piece of sheet copper under the centrepoint. As the swinging magnets moved over the sheet their trajectory went haywire because of the induced currents in the sheet.

"But the copper is not magnetic!"

Sigh.

The Earth's magnetic field lines if you will "flow" from North to South (pic #1) so whether the repelling magnets (pic # 2) have the North or South poles pointing at each other makes no difference because the emanated field around the pair is strong enough to interact with the Earth's magnetic field in a repulsive way (imho) unless you're either at the North pole or South pole (in the case of pic # 2 I think the pair of magnets would fall faster on the South pole since it has a North-North configuration). How gravity and the Earth's magnetic field are interrelated is perhaps not as important in this scenario since the effectual relationship between the pair of magnets and the Earth's magnetic field "seem" to counteract gravity. Wish I could afford to buy a pair of $5000 each magnets! Oh wait, government funding, never mind.

You don't need a $5k magnet to perform this experiment. Moreover, Earth's magnetic field will exert a torque on the magnet causing it to align itself with the ambient field. Unless it is constrained in some way the magnet will orient itself in such a manner as to NOT repel the Earth's magnetic field. For $5 you can prove this to yourself on the cruise for which you spent the other $4995.

[From Guest: Question: If we do not yet know what gravity actually is, only how it acts on us, by what means are we determining that anti-gravity exists? and as we also do not yet know how to re-create gravity, how can we make something anti-gravity??]

Gravity (vs. magnetism) is the result of mass interacting with the space-time "fabric" where the greater the mass - the greater the "gravity". The result is a seemingly continuous acceleration while remaining at a relatively constant velocity.

You only experience gravitational 'force' whilst something (like the ground on which you're standing) is impeding your trajectory along the local geodesic, and that interaction you speak of between matter and the spacetime 'fabric' is due to the Higgs field. It is mediated by Higgs bosons. In theory.

We'll just have to wait until Fermilab wades through all the data they've collected for confirmation (snubs nose at the LHC. heehee).