Science contradicts itself..Questions

[Charlie_V]

The T.T. Brown lifter, cannot work in vacuum, which means it works on thrust (at least that?s
what they showed in ?Mythbusters?).

And like is so often the case in Mythbusters, they got it wrong.
Those guys get things wrong more than half the time. According to them, "ice bullets" can never work,
you always get less wet when you run through rain, etc. But in reality, the US army actually developed
ice-shooting guns for arctiv environments, and at least two seperate universities had shown that
on average you tend to get less wet when you walk through rain, depending on the amount of
rainfall and the size of the drops of course. And those are only two examples. Wink
But to get back to the Lifters, it is a recurring misconception that they do not work in high vacuum.
They most certainly do work in a high vacuum. They just work a little less well. But they still work.
Check it out: http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/ascvacuum/index.htm
And please keep in mind that, although that test did not use a perfect vacuum, the high vacuum
of 1.72 x 10^-6 Torr they used in those tests is almost as close to the perfect vacuum as we can get,
and certainly comparable to the type of vacuum found in interstellar space. So yes they work in space.

That has not only been verified by mythbusters (who really are a bad source of verification) but independently by many other researchers including myself.  The website you linked Koen1 talked about a lifter set on a rotating wheel - of very low friction.  The ONLY reason it rotated was because there were particles in the 0.000001 torr vacuum.  These devices use ionic wind to develop their lifting power.  Typically in air they require about 25kV to lift (if made of balsa wood and aluminum foil).  Reducing the pressure would require higher voltage, hence the 45kV needed to move the lifter in the NASA experiment.  If you set that device up so that it was like a standard lifter, it would not leave the chamber ground because the thrust it produced in vacuum is so weak due to the lack of particles.  In space, its ability to move would be even worse (since space is 1x10^-14 torr roughly).  You might get some movement at 100kV or greater but at some point you would produce field emission between the capacitor plates and then you would have a much different effect causing it to move (basically you would have an ion thruster like what NASA is developing - field emission is very different from ionic movement). 

I've never heard or seen an electrogravitational effect with high voltage.  If something is moving in a high vacuum due to electricity it is because the voltage is so high its producing field emission at the high voltage terminal and electrons (or metal from the electrode) are flying away from the electrode, imparting momentum to the device as they leave (every action has an opposite an equal reaction).  It would be a very slow, accumulative affect but could get a space ship moving pretty quick after months or even years. 

[Koen1]

Well yes, the power needed to get a Lifter to move by electrokinetics in a
near perfect vacuum will obviously be higher than in air, where there is indeed an additional
ion "wind" effect that assists the Lifters lift.
Point is that many people say "it doesn't work in a vacuum", but the Nasa tests
show it does. Alright, they don't use a true perfect vacuum. But they don't need to,
because the high vacuum they did use is as close to the interstellar "vacuum"
we can get, and the effect did persist, even if the power requirement went up.
They can use it for propulsion.
I never claimed it was a terribly efficient method of propulsion...

As for electrogravity; Darn, I can't find the video now... but perhaps one of our German
friends here has seen it... I saw a clip from a German tv show a number of years ago,
where they had a really simple setup of two identical high voltage capacitors suspended
on either side of a balance scale, in perfect balance, and when they charged one capacitor
with very high voltage, the scale on that side went up a little. The experiment was
repeated and broadcast on one of the German tv stations.
I also seem to recall a story from an old Boeing engineer who described how they dropped
two identically charged capacitors off a building, of which one was highly charged, and
that one arrived on the ground just a moment later than the uncharged one...
But that experiment on German tv stuck with me, I still remember vividly how the scale
went off balance as they charged the one capacitor.

[Charlie_V]

That is interesting.  Do you know what voltage they were using?  I have access to a lab that has 50-100kV power capacitors, I could repeat the experiment.  That way I could make sure there was no corona (i.e. ionic wind) associated with the mass change. 

[PYRODIN123321]

HEY Charlie_V,

I THINK YOU CAN FIND WHAT YOU WANT AT NAUDIN'S SITE.

I also seem to recall a story from an old Boeing engineer who described how they dropped
two identically charged capacitors off a building, of which one was highly charged, and
that one arrived on the ground just a moment later than the uncharged one...
But that experiment on German tv stuck with me, I still remember vividly how the scale
went off balance as they charged the one capacitor.

I READ A THING ABOUT HOW A GYROSCOPE WILL FALL FASTER THAN AN OBJECT OF THE SAME SIZE, SHAPE AND WEIGHT
SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE SPIN-I THINK THE SAME SPIN EFFECT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ASYMETRIC(TT BROWN) CAPACITOR EFFECT BUT WITH ELECTRONS
MAYBE A SPINNING OBJECT MOVES THROUGH MORE SPACE-TIME AND FEELS GRAVITY ACCEL.MORE
I KNOW GRAVITY EFFECTS TIME AND SPACE SO WHY NOT THE OTHERWAY AROUND?

ANY INSIGHTS?

[Koen1]

@Charlie: I don't recall the voltages used, but I do seem to recall it was charged
using a high voltage power source... I would guesstimate you'd need something
like the Lifter- and Biefelt-Brown voltages, so that's at least 20+ kV.
I have tried to dig up that video on the web but have not been able to find it so far.
But I'm sure it must be around somewhere...
Indeed, the capacitors did not have much of a contact surface like the Lifters do,
so one would assume that eliminates most of the ion wind...
If you have caps lying around that can handle such high voltages, and if you have a
simple oldschool balance scale, you should indeed be able to replicate that experiment.
You could even video it and put it on youtube or whatever... meanwhile I'll keep
looking around for that footage.

@Pyrodin: Yes, I seem to recall the same story about a gyroscope falling slightly slower
than an object of the same mass, size and shape... Wasn't that another one of those
experiments done at Boeing?
I have been told that a similar experiment was done using two strong magnets that were
bolted together tightly, while their fields were in opposition, and that object also fell
slightly slower than the control object. I haven't read a source on that claimed experiment, though.
... May be interesting to try and combine the three? So if we make an object that consists of two
opposing magnets, as well as two highly charged plates with a very good dielectric around them,
as well as having the entire setup spin very fast like a gyroscope, would the difference in drop
speed be three times as large too?