Science contradicts itself..Questions

[Koen1]

@Charlie: here's an article from 2000, from Purdue University,
in which they stated quite clearly that the Lifter effect can not
be explained by ion wind, corona discharge, or electrostatic repulsion,
and that more research is needed to explain the amount of thrust
produced by Lifters. This is one of the sources that made me believe
the ion wind is not the driving force, and as I recall also the reason
for Nasa to decide to do their own electrokinetic thruster tests.
Oh, and if I am not mistaken Purdue also did vacuum chamber tests...
The Doc version: http://www.geocities.com/john_goodwind/doc/EKP_satellite_maneuvering.doc
The html version: http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:oggOF-O5tLEJ:www.geocities.com/john_goodwind/doc/EKP_satellite_maneuvering.doc+purdue+university+electrokinetic&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2

hope it is of any use.

[Charlie_V]

I've built and tested my own lifters.  I've actually felt the wind that comes off them.  Its the same mechanism that gives a helicopter its lift.  Your right, ion movement alone does little to contribute to their thrust.  As a matter of fact, it was calculated long ago that the speed and amount of ions would not contribute to any appreciable thrust and for many years the design was abandoned.  However, what was overlooked was the fact that those ions impart a large momentum to neutral air molecules - which do not get ionized, only accelerated.  Like the wind felt near a waterfall from the water molecules colliding with the air.  It is the acceleration of the neutrals that contributes to the increased thrust.  Take away the air molecules and the lifting force drops significantly.  Take them away all together and there is no more force. 

There could be other forces at work, I don't doubt that.  But they are very very minute.  On the whole, I would say that 99% of the force that allows a lifter to fly comes from the gas that it is in, the other 1% are forces like field emission, PERHAPS electrogravitational stuff (although I've never seen anything like that - but I was never looking either), thermal gradients, etc.  Place a lifter in a vacuum and watch what happens, it will just sit at the bottom of the chamber because any force developed cannot lift its weight - to me, that is a significant sign that they need gas to fly.  Place them on a frictionless wheel so they don't have to fight gravity, and sure they might spin around a little.  But its going to be an extremely weak force because there are extremely low amounts of particles in the chamber.  Start bringing the vacuum up to standard air pressure, and you will see they will spin very well! 

In NASA's experiment, they had the lifter on a wheel of low friction, suspended.  They did not have a triangular lifter sitting on the bottom of the chamber floor.  If they had, at 45kV they would of saw no movement.  At 100kV they would of saw no movement.  I bet that the voltage required to lift the device would need to be so high, you would get breakdown before you reached it. 

To sum up, lifters need a gas environment for them to produce any PRACTICAL amount of force.

[Koen1]

Well this is sort of what I concluded as well....
... there's hordes of people out there on the web that are convinced
you can actually generate antigravity as in the opposite of gravity,
by electrokinetic/Biefelt-Brown methods.
I'm not sure. I know we can make Lifters and other asymmetrical capacitors
generate thrust in a direction, and I know if that thrust is opposed to the
pull of gravity we can achieve effective lift, but I am uncertain if that
could be considered "anti-gravity". Not really, I think.
Although I guess many people think that any force that opposes the pull
of gravity can be considered an anti-force and thus anti-gravity... But that is
obviously incorrect. An oppositely directed force is not immediately a negative
form of the primary force. Why am I telling you this? You know this.

On a sideline, what remain seem to be reports of masses experiencing slightly
lower drop speeds when they are rotated fast (like a gyro), and possible explanations
suggesting the decrease of inertia in a zone close to and inside the spinning masses.
The TR31b "flying triangle" "UFO" was claimed to be a USAF prototype with 3 swivelable
jets for a high degree of thrust vectoring, and two large rings inside which mercury plasma
is rotated at high speed, in opposite directions. It is said this mercury "gyroscope" setup
generated a sort of field inside of which the inertia was decreased significantly, which effectively
made everything inside the rings lose mass, and made the thing lighter and able to achieve
much higher speeds, without much discomfort for the passengers at all.
How much of that is actually true remains to be seen, but at least it does seem to indicate that
counter-rotating gyroscopes or flywheels may be worth investigating.

[Charlie_V]

On a sideline, what remain seem to be reports of masses experiencing slightly
lower drop speeds when they are rotated fast (like a gyro), and possible explanations
suggesting the decrease of inertia in a zone close to and inside the spinning masses.
The TR31b "flying triangle" "UFO" was claimed to be a USAF prototype with 3 swivelable
jets for a high degree of thrust vectoring, and two large rings inside which mercury plasma
is rotated at high speed, in opposite directions. It is said this mercury "gyroscope" setup
generated a sort of field inside of which the inertia was decreased significantly, which effectively
made everything inside the rings lose mass, and made the thing lighter and able to achieve
much higher speeds, without much discomfort for the passengers at all.
How much of that is actually true remains to be seen, but at least it does seem to indicate that
counter-rotating gyroscopes or flywheels may be worth investigating. Wink

I greatly agree.  There is a 1970s Christmas lecture (the same place Faraday gave his lectures) on gyroscopes.  The most interesting part to me is when the guy placed a gyroscope on one end of a see-saw.  If the gyroscope was not spun up, it weighed more than the little weight at the other end of the see-saw.  But when he spun it up and allowed it to precess (not sure if the precession was necessary or not), the entire device was much lighter than the opposing weight and the gyroscope was actually lifted upwards! 

Perhaps with a plasma you can spin the media up so fast that it would not only become weightless under the forces of gravity, but actually "oppose" gravity (aka generate a force exceeding the mass times gravitational acceleration).  You would need a way to negate the precession though - otherwise the passengers would get really dizzy haha. 

About what you said earlier, anti-gravity to me is a way of generating a gravitational force that opposes (like two same-pole magnets) an object's gravitational pull.  This is different from generating any force that would lift an object.  Even if spinning mercury at high speeds did create a lift force, if you turned the device on its side, it would move you horizontal instead of vertical.  A true "anti-gravity" setup would probably still produce a lift force (just weakened since it was no longer parallel to gravity).  What I mean is, an anti-gravity device would only repel from a gravitational field, if placed in a region of space void of any gravitational lines of force, it would just sit there doing nothing.  We don't want true anti-gravity, we want a method of producing a linear force without expelling any substance - an external action generated from an internal action.

ADD: by the way, here is a link to the 1970 lecture I was talking about.

http://www.gyroscopes.org/1974lecture.asp

[Koen1]

Thanks for that lecture, it's an interesting read.

As for precesion, I seem to recall quite a number of stories and
claims about two oppositely spinning gyroscopes also showing
decreased drop speeds when dropped as one unit...
... and that would eliminate precession, would it not?

Seems like we may have something worth testing...
Perhaps even worth combining several of these...
So let's see; what if we build a spherical contraption containing
two oppositely rotating "gyroscopes" or plate masses, with
magnets attached to them and in rejection with eachother,
and perhaps even the option to store high voltages on the plates.
And of course another spherical mass that weighs exactly the same
as the test rig when nothing spins and no charges are applied.
Then we could test the effects of these different suggested techniques
seperately as well as in combination, and see how much difference
in drop speeds and scale balance it actually makes.
Idea?
I've been talking to a friend of mine who is also interested in these things,
and we're actually considering building one. Although it's probably going
to be me building the thing when push comes to shove. If time and
funds allow it of course.