First real challenge to General Relativity?, (and not from Gravity Probe-B) Options

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

...in the form of what may be an accidentally discovered artificial gravity generator, with possible practical applications!:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GSP/SEM0L6OVGJE_0.html

If this effect is real, it's fully 1/10,000 G -- which is not to be sneezed at, and might conceivably lead us to Bigger Things.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I believe -- although I may be wrong, given my Mr. Wizard level of scientific understanding -- that "angular acceleration" just refers to the acceleration produced by the simple fact that the different parts of the disk keep changing their direction of motion as it turns: i.e., slowing down along one straight-line direction at the same time that they start moving in another. This, after all, is what centrifugal "force" really is: the power of inertia operating because the parts of a spinning object keep changing their velocity of motion along straight-line directions.

I imagine this will turn out to be nothing, just like the Aviation Week "Spaceplane" article -- but who knows? Maybe we'll luck out and it will actually amount to something.

One small thing, "Gmbh" means "Limited Liability Company", it's the bit before that is the name of the firm.

Oops. Actually, it ain't that small; I've never heard of "ARC Seibersdorf" and have no idea what kind of reputation it has, even given that it's supposedly "Austria's largest research institution". (Tajmar turns out to have been interested in research into gravity control for some time: http://ilfb.tuwien.ac.at/~tajmar/ .) Still, the other guy is General Studies Officer for ESA's Advanced Concepts & Studies Office, which implies some kind of reputation.

[ugordan]

I believe -- although I may be wrong, given my Mr. Wizard level of scientific understanding -- that "angular acceleration" just refers to the acceleration produced by the simple fact that the different parts of the disk keep changing their direction of motion as it turns: i.e., slowing down along one straight-line direction at the same time that they start moving in another.

Nope, that would be radial acceleration as the acceleration vector points to the center of rotation. The angular velocity remains the same. Angular acceleration is the change (or derivation) of omega, which is the angular velocity. They even mentioned in one part of the paper thew were using two electric motors, one could go up to 6500 RPM but provided a slower spin-up speed and the other could go to (IIRC) 4500 but had a faster spin-up. They wouldn't mention that if the effect is totally determined by RPMs alone, IMHO.

This is going to be very difficult to confirm, and very difficult to assign the force strictly to a gravitational vector.

Have you read the paper? Apparently they conducted numerous experiments because they were as well reluctant to believe what they were seeing. They did isolate the accelerometers inside Faraday cages to get rid of electromagnetic side-effects. As Bruce points out, they think this is totally independent of Podkletnov's claims.

[The Messenger]

Nope, that would be radial acceleration as the acceleration vector points to the center of rotation. The angular velocity remains the same. Angular acceleration is the change (or derivation) of omega, which is the angular velocity. They even mentioned in one part of the paper thew were using two electric motors, one could go up to 6500 RPM but provided a slower spin-up speed and the other could go to (IIRC) 4500 but had a faster spin-up. They wouldn't mention that if the effect is totally determined by RPMs alone, IMHO.
Have you read the paper? Apparently they conducted numerous experiments because they were as well reluctant to believe what they were seeing. They did isolate the accelerometers inside Faraday cages to get rid of electromagnetic side-effects. As Bruce points out, they think this is totally independent of Podkletnov's claims.

There is a potential, in an accelerating superconducting environment, of spawning shearing "Eddy moments" at unclockable frequencies. The resulting frequency domain of such a magnetic field - (if possible) - would only weakly interact with matter, and slice through any Faraday cage like a neutrino. For those of use who think this is what gravity is, there are many situations where similar shear fields can and do bleed off gravitational field energy.

Bruce jumps all over me for going off on this Teslaian concept. But I think it is real, has a major effect upon orbital calculation of masses, and ultimately predicts many of the quirky observations of Galileo and Cassini.