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

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

You are quite correct , Richard, and I apologize to the forum at large; the "wild ideas" of yesterday have, with almost disquieting frequency in the history of science, become the standard theories. It is therefore just as erroneous to dismiss those hypotheses that diverge from the norm as it is to accept established dogma without a qualm. Thank you for the valuable lesson (and reminder) that pragmatic objectivity is THE primary principle in the expansion of human knowledge!

Please don't apologize: there really IS a lot of rubbish on the net and into fringe science, some who are frankly and happily nuts, and we must be very cautious before accepting something. Examples:

-there is "another forum" where guies also use to comment the Mars images of Oppy and Spirit. But some used to point at a random rock and say "it is a car sit" or "a machined part" and when we told them it was just rock, they started to say we were narrow minded censors, and spam all the threads and stalk all the posters. So, as several others, I moved to UMSF where such posts are deleted at once without even a notice. This is why UMSF is a pleasant yet serious forum.

-by chance I was vaccinated early against nut theories. I remember in the 1970 I read in the french monthly "science et vie" (the most popular science popularization review) about "synergetics" telling that we could easily extract huge amounts of energy from vacuum, with a simple device. Of course synergetics was "censored" by true scientists. When I contacted the guies, to ask what experiments they were doing, what results they obtained, they replied that they were doing nothing, waiting for this to be recognized by mainstream science. And with this reply was a sample of their monthly review, explaining that... the Jews were the main danger in society. At that time nobody yet was speaking of false science, but I however understood that there was something very wrong with synergetics. This don't avoid that the idea of the vacuum containing energy was presented by others, sometimes by mainstream scientists.

-etc. etc.


The problem is that there is no clear limit between a science which would be completelly nuts and always false, and a science which would be completelly serious and always true. Some fringe theories open interesting concepts, and there may be some flaw into the standard theories (like with the former aether) or even in the science method itself. For instance the Heim theories seem completelly nut (they open the door to all the Starwars technologies, hyperdrives, repulsors...) yet Heim was the only one able to predict the mass of the known particules. This ambiguity also appears on this forum, with disagreements, for instance about the presence of a thread on SETI and one on Intelligent Design.

So there is no simplistic behaviour guideline. We must keep an open mind, while keeping a sane amount of criticism. But this is just how science works.

[ugordan]

Why is it that any out-of-the ordinary claim has to initiate yet another discussion on k00ks and fringe science like this? Instead of discussing possible implications and future use if this indeed turns out not to be a bogus effect.

Sheesh...

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Why is it that any out-of-the ordinary claim has to initiate yet another discussion on k00ks and fringe science like this? Instead of discussing possible implications and future use if this indeed turns out not to be a bogus effect.

Sheesh...

Aaarghhh as what I was saying, it is not simple....

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Jeffrey Bell, ever the party-pooper, sends me the following E-mail:

"These gentlemen have previously published theoretical papers on this
effect in three journals:

"INDIAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICS
JOURNAL OF THEORETICS (sic)
PHYSICA C

"These are all fringe physics journals. PHYSICA C published Polednikov's
now-discredited gravity screening work. I'll wait for this 'discovery'
to appear in PHYSICS REVIEW, like most serious work in this field."

[Bob Shaw]

Richard:

It's not just the facts of science which betray the difference between 'us guys' and the tribe over the hill - we at least can identify speculation -and downright fiction - as entertainment and intellectual stimulation, without getting overly emotional about the whole shooting match. Some scientists of great repute can't quite make that distinction, and so become fanatically anti-credulous, and that's as bad as the loons in it's own way! There's nowt wrong with some out-of-the-box gedanken fun and games, and long may it continue - just so long as it's clearly labelled as such.

Or we could just put a Caution: May Contain Nuts label on it!

Hehe.

Bob Shaw

[The Messenger]

Jeffrey Bell, ever the party-pooper, sends me the following E-mail:

"These gentlemen have previously published theoretical papers on this
effect in three journals:

"INDIAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICS
JOURNAL OF THEORETICS (sic)
PHYSICA C

"These are all fringe physics journals. PHYSICA C published Polednikov's
now-discredited gravity screening work. I'll wait for this 'discovery'
to appear in PHYSICS REVIEW, like most serious work in this field."

Thanks for the heads up.

Fortunately, this will not be a difficult experimental setup to duplicate. (I would try to do it myself, if they would let me back in the NMR room ) Let's hope this does not argue down to "But you have to use nickel from the slobovia mine excavated between 1963 and 1967!...". One Stanley Pons is enough.

If there is a red flag in the data already presented, it is the 30 magnitude number - something that out-of-wack should have surfaced before. This is one of the weaknesses of being on the fringe - it is easy to read more credibity into a goofy paper than it is for skeptics with more faith in the system...odd paradox.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Did Jay Ward ever say just WHERE that Upsidaisium mine that Rocky and Bullwinkle were looking for finally turned out to be located?

[dvandorn]

Ummm... directly over the vault where the formula for Hush-a-Boom was stored, I think.

"Now, there's something you don't see every day, Chauncy..."

-the other Doug

[nprev]

From Wikipedia's article on Boris Badenov, infamous high-ranking official of the People's Republic of Pottsylvania's foreign intelligence apparatus during the 1960s:

"The source of upsidaisium came [edit-sic] from Mount Flatten, a mountain located in the American southwest that floated high above the ground (due to the mountain being full of upsidaisium)."

Hmm. It seems that cavorite (described by Wells, 1901) in fact occurs naturally in abundance at at least one location where it was independently rediscovered more than sixty years later...and is now lost again.

I blame moose and squirrel!!!!

[edstrick]

Bob Shaw: "Or we could just put a Caution: May Contain Nuts label on it!"

Is that like the text on the cardboard box Wallace was wearing at the end of the WereRabbit movie?

AND..... just when you thought it was safe to get back in the heavy-water:
http://pesn.com/2006/03/24/9600253_Fleisch...joins_D2Fusion/

Unlike some.... who see it when they believe it... I'll believe it when I see it. Pumping power to the grid, day in, day out. Metered.

[tty]

Jeffrey Bell, ever the party-pooper, sends me the following E-mail:

"These gentlemen have previously published theoretical papers on this
effect in three journals:

"INDIAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICS
JOURNAL OF THEORETICS (sic)
PHYSICA C

"These are all fringe physics journals. PHYSICA C published Polednikov's
now-discredited gravity screening work. I'll wait for this 'discovery'
to appear in PHYSICS REVIEW, like most serious work in this field."

I suppose he means Physical Review?

tty

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Sorry ugordan, but seemingly I am not alone to be cautious about this strange result. Of course it is too soon to decide weither or not the effect is true (replication is still missing) but there was already some false alarms... The worse of all is that, if one day some fringe theory proves valuable, it will be all the more difficult for scientists to accept it, and even to notice it. We have a proverb in France, about a guy who always shout "fire fire" for nothing. Until one day his own house is on fire, but nobody believes him...


About the result itself, admitting it is true, I don't think it makes a hole in General Relativity. Why? a field is generated, that relativity knows. It arises into conditions which are not predicted by relativity, because they arise from quantum phenomena. But after, this force still behaves how relativity predicts. We have discovered the gravitationnal equivalent of a magnet, fine.


What is strange however (I say strange, not suspicious) is that this field appears when Cooper pairs* are rotating. Why Cooper pairs? To be exact, any rotating mass generates a magnetogravitationnal field, and any particule do it, the intensity of the field depending only on the rotating mass. So 1kg of electrons and 1kg of protons give the same result. But Cooper pairs would give a 10 power 30 more intense field. What is special with Cooper pairs? Have they an unusual spin, giving them some special properties, for instance being Böse-Einstein*** in place of the Fermi-Dirac** electron? Are they Böse-Einstein with a mass, unlike the photons? (they would be the only particules like that). Or are they just much bigger in geometric size? Or what else?


*Cooper pairs are two coupled electrons which allow for superconductivity.

** Böse Einstein particules can be piled the ones on the other, like photons the particules of light that we can "go through" without touching them. Beams of light can cross each other without disturbing each other.

*** Fermi Dirac particules cannot be together on the same place, like the atoms, protons, etc. So the result is that they form "solid" bodies which occupy a minimum volume, we can touch them and we cannot go through.

[ugordan]

Sorry ugordan, but seemingly I am not alone to be cautious about this strange result.

Cautious is fine, but let's not dismiss this immediately on the grounds it's unconventional. And let's not also accept it as a given, either. More experiments clearly are needed to veryify/dismiss this effect.

We have a proverb in France, about a guy who always shout "fire fire" for nothing. Until one day his own house is on fire, but nobody believes him...

Or as the English speaking folks would say: "the boy who cried wolf".

But Cooper pairs would give a 10 power 30 more intense field. What is special with Cooper pairs? Have they an unusual spin, giving them some special properties, for instance being Böse-Einstein*** in place of the Fermi-Dirac** electron? Are they Böse-Einstein with a mass, unlike the photons? (they would be the only particules like that). Or are they just much bigger in geometric size? Or what else?

The article seems to suggest that the effect arises because of a non-zero graviton mass in the superconductor. I'm in no position to judge the validity/plausibility of that claim, though, but it does look like a quantum effect manifesting itself gravitationally, which might be the first experiment ever to do so (?!).
And there, I think, might lie the significance.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Cautious is fine, but let's not dismiss this immediately on the grounds it's unconventional. And let's not also accept it as a given, either. More experiments clearly are needed to veryify/dismiss this effect.
Or as the English speaking folks would say: "the boy who cried wolf".

I agree.

The article seems to suggest that the effect arises because of a non-zero graviton mass in the superconductor. I'm in no position to judge the validity/plausibility of that claim, though, but it does look like a quantum effect manifesting itself gravitationally, which might be the first experiment ever to do so (?!).
And there, I think, might lie the significance.

The effect would be unusual, because the graviton would have an unusual property in superconductors. But why it should have a mass here and not elsewhere? We already know very little about gravitons, which are still hypothetical particules, not yet observed (as far as I know). But what is there special in a superconductor? There are only very ordinary electrons, protons and neutrons. If there is something special, it can be only about Cooper pairs, which may have a special spin, or are the "largest" known particules.

I agree that if the effect is real, it is extremely important, as you say, a gravitationnal effect resulting only from quantum stuff. Important theoretically, and maybe in practice, for eventual technical applications. Still far from an UFO working with a gravitation ring, but...

[ugordan]

The effect would be unusual, because the graviton would have an unusual property in superconductors. But why it should have a mass here and not elsewhere?

Well, the experiment builds on the already known and existing London moment which arises from photons gaining mass inside the superconductor. Plus, the experiment only sought to explain a discrepancy found in previous measurements where the Cooper pair masses were different than what was predicted. Thus this proposing model was brought up and apparently was a pretty decent fit to the data.