Artificial gravity produced.

[Schwarzwald]

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html

The link leads to an article in which scientists, using superconductor rings, have produced a tiny amount of quantum gravity.

The effect is tiny, so it won't be usable on space stations anytime soon, but it is promising in one respect: The effect is 10 to the 20th x more powerful that the general relativity theory predicted.

General relativity has been used to club down the dreams of SF writers and fhans for decades, but now an experiment shows that it may be less restricitve than anyone thought before. Basically, it seems that mot only can 'artificual gravity' be produced, but it is 10^20 times easier to do so than general relativity predicted.

Gravity is a curvature of space, a warping of space in other words. This experiment proves that space can be warped artificially, and that doing so is much easier than general relativity ever believed possible.

So maybe the ability to warp space, along with what it entails like artificial gravity, more efficient space drives and even (Dare I say? Dare! Dare!) FTL travel is in fact possible after all.

it's nice to dream.

[tkdguy]

This is great stuff! I'll keep an eye out for further developments.

[gamerz123]

Okay, news this cool has got to deserve rep! :D

[L. Marcus]

. . . But sooner or later the very Denim of time and space will unravel like a badly-knitted cardigan! :eek:

Seriously cool, though.!

[Old Man]

I always thought space-time was more like a felt than an actual weave...

[gamerz123]

I always thought space-time was more like a felt than an actual weave...

Actually, it's Jello :D

[L. Marcus]

. . . Jell-O shot.

[BobGreenwade]

I always thought space-time was more like a felt than an actual weave...I've always felt that way myself... ;)

[Starwolf]

:jawdrop:
:think:

:hail:

Nuff said!

[Zeropoint]

I always have to wonder why stuff like this isn't front-page news. I mean, six-inch headline front page news.

The explanation, as best I can figure it, is that the general public (or at least newspaper editors) lacks the imagination to realize what this really means.

Zeropoint

[bigdamnhero]

I always have to wonder why stuff like this isn't front-page news. I mean, six-inch headline front page news.

The explanation, as best I can figure it, is that the general public (or at least newspaper editors) lacks the imagination to realize what this really means.
But isn't that supposed to be the role of the press: to educate and inform the public?

Hey, I too can dream. ;)

[Cancer]

Well, the owners of Big Media have to buy up the rights first. THEN they get the public excited about something.

[Nyrath]

Well, maybe this isn't front page news due to the "boy who cried Wolf!" syndrome. This sort of thing has been announced again and again (once by NASA) and it aways seems to not pan out.

[BobGreenwade]

I always have to wonder why stuff like this isn't front-page news. I mean, six-inch headline front page news.

The explanation, as best I can figure it, is that the general public (or at least newspaper editors) lacks the imagination to realize what this really means.

Zeropoint
More likely the newspapers are more interested in publishing about such developments when there are actual, current practical uses for them. The mere production of artificial gravity is relatively worthless until it can actually hold an object to the floor.

[keithcurtis]

I always have to wonder why stuff like this isn't front-page news. I mean, six-inch headline front page news.

The explanation, as best I can figure it, is that the general public (or at least newspaper editors) lacks the imagination to realize what this really means.

Zeropoint
There's little to go by in the article, since it was written in layman's terms. This could lead to nothing useful, or true artificial gravity in twenty generations, or be a mistake altogether. Nothing in the article makes any claims about practical use. I remember the furor when cold fusion seemed around the corner in the mid-80's. What happened there?

Keith "Cold water thrower" Curtis

[McCoy]

There's little to go by in the article, since it was written in layman's terms. This could lead to nothing useful, or true artificial gravity in twenty generations, or be a mistake altogether. Nothing in the article makes any claims about practical use. I remember the furor when cold fusion seemed around the corner in the mid-80's. What happened there?

Keith "Cold water thrower" Curtis
Most of the results for cold fusion could not be reproduced, but some people, including some of the brightest in the field, still think there's something there.

[Cancer]

Cold fusion wasn't fusion. No one could replicate the claimed results. AFAIK a retraction was never made, but no one (besides the original investigators) now believes that what they had was really fusion.

[keithcurtis]

All I'm saying is that a newspaper article or two don't amount to much. We'll see if interest in this increases, or if it just quietly disappears into the realm of one more "breakthrough" that might mean a great deal to theoretical physicists, but not very much to society at large.
This needs time and more investigation before I'll even start to get excited. As it is, it really isn't worth banner headlines because it doesn't mean much.

Keith "Persepective" Curtis

[Cancer]

When I read the (technical) preprint on the linked page, the signal-to-noise in their detection is only 3.3. Interesting enough to investigate further, not interesting enough (yet) to do more than that.

[Schwarzwald]

As I read the article, they sat on the results for months and reverified it severasl times before announcing it to avoid a 'cold fusion' debacle.

[McCoy]

Cold fusion wasn't fusion. No one could replicate the claimed results. AFAIK a retraction was never made, but no one (besides the original investigators) now believes that what they had was really fusion.
But some still believe it was a "net release of energy" (I think that's the phrase they used); that the experiment produced more energy than it consumed.

[Mutant for Hire]

Among other things, I'm waiting for some other independent research facility to duplicate the results first. Repeatability is the key. Then I'll get excited.

[Zeropoint]

I've done some reading on the subject, and it seems that research on what's now called "catalytic fusion" is still going on, quietly, in many places around the country. According to what I've read, the main reason that it's not more mainstream is first, that Pons and Fleischman utterly ruined any chance of cold fusion being taken seriously by the public again, and second, that while the experiments are repeatable, they aren't reliably repeatable--the same cell may take half an hour to start one time, start immediately the next, and refuse to start altogether the next time, until it's dissasembled and put back together with no noticable change. Also, they don't really have a good theory for what's going on, or why the cells will/won't work when they do/don't. It's basically one step up from black magic.

But, there are still people working on it, and they DO report excess heat, helium, and neutron production.

Again, according to what I've read.

Zeropoint

[Dr. Anomaly]

Do you have a link or source for that? I'd be interested in taking a look.

[Yansuf]

There is a basic incompatability between quantum mechanics and relativity.
In the real world, it can only be found experimentally at the atomic or subatomic (its been many years since I looked at this, I'm and engineer, not a physicist, and Newton is good enough for me) level.
Most likely final outcome, both theories are shown to be special cases of a more general theory, which (as of now) no-one has a clue about.

BTW, there is NO reason that FTL is not possible. It is assumed to be impossible because relativity seems to say that if you can move FTL, you can send messages back in time. Since that is assumed to violate causality physicists say FTL is impossible. As one SF site says:
Relativity, Causality, FTL. Pick any two."

OF course, to date the record of physicists saying something is impossible, except for things that are impossible by definition (there cannot be a 4 sided triangle), is pretty dismal.

Concerning "cold fusion" there is still work being done on that in Europe and Asia. It may not be fusion, of course, but something is happening.
The statement that "results could not be duplicated" is not quite right. The exact results could not be duplicated, but about half the major labs that tried got results that did not make sense in light of all known theories.
In the US, where too much of our idiot scientific community thinks that if you don't have a theory, it isn't science; we abandoned the subject. Elsewhere, there are still people trying to get enough data to form a theory.

[Nyrath]

BTW, there is NO reason that FTL is not possible. It is assumed to be impossible because relativity seems to say that if you can move FTL, you can send messages back in time. Since that is assumed to violate causality physicists say FTL is impossible. As one SF site says:
Relativity, Causality, FTL. Pick any two."
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3v.html#causality

[Nyrath]

More commentary on the ESA article here:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/HSblog.php?itemid=1231

[keithcurtis]

"NO reason that FTL is not possible"?
What about energy requirements? As you approach c, the energy requirements approach ?.

Keith "I can come up with more, but that's the biggie." Curtis

[Cancer]

"NO reason that FTL is not possible"?
What about energy requirements? As you approach c, the energy requirements approach ?.

Keith "I can come up with more, but that's the biggie." Curtis
I've seen schemes where the energy requirement goes up asymptotically as you approach c ... from either below or above, and that energy requirement is roughly symmetric around c. Then, v = c becomes an "energy barrier", and speculations about "tunnelling" through that energy barrier follow from there, where something jumps between two states of equal energy on either side of the barrier (that is, either v < c or v > c). I don't find these schemes convincing, but they can be assembled.

An objection I have is that there isn't anyplace in the natural world that has an energy budget item available for FTL phenomena. To explain what I mean by that: in general, if there is a channel which is capable of being an energy output route, then some amount of energy will escape that route, according to how much resistance to energy flow exists on that path.

But stars, at least, are well-enough studied now that the known energy output routes -- that is, normal relativistic physics -- seem to absorb all the energy produced by the star. The neutrino problem seems to have been successfully resolved by neutrino flavor mixing, so all the stellar energy generation is accounted for. That suggests that either the FTL energy escape channel is either impossibly difficult to put energy into (because otherwise some luminosity would escape through that channel), or that it just doesn't exist. The alternative to that is abandonment of the idea of energy conservation, and that's not a very pleasant suggestion to make.

[Dr. Anomaly]

The neutrino problem seems to have been successfully resolved by neutrino flavor mixing, so all the stellar energy generation is accounted for.
Did they ever decide if that actually settled the question of neutrino mass or not? IIRC, it's not possible to have flavor mixing unless a neutrino has mass, no matter how tiny, and the different flavors have different masses.

(Last I actually read on this all that had been done was establishing yet more stringent limits for an upper bound on mass, and that limit kept getting lower and lower...)

[Cancer]

I'm going from this reprint (http://pdg.lbl.gov/2005/reviews/numixrpp.pdf) dated Sep 2005
From various cosmological and other constraints

0.04 eV < Mass [Heaviest neutrino species] < (0.2 - 0.4) eV
Interpreting the various neutrino experiment results is hard, and apparently they can't give you the absolute mass of the neutrinos themselves (this is from p 16-17 of the linked reprint) ... what you get is the mass difference of the various flavors. Also, interpretation depends on "details" like whether there are three or four neutrino flavors. I can't find any statement about what the masses of the two lighter neutrino flavors might be (and probably those are the two involved with the solar neutrino flux).