Anti-gravity is the idea of creating a place or object that is free from the force of gravity. It does not refer to countering the gravitational force by an equal and opposite force as a helicopter does; instead, anti-gravity requires that the fundamental causes of the force be made either not present or not applicable to the place or object through some kind of intervention, be it technological or supernatural.
It is a recurring theme in science fiction, particularly in the context of spacecraft propulsion. Often a special "gravity shield" or "anti-gravity force field" is employed, allowing a spacecraft to maneuver in a gravitational field free from the effects of its force. Science has, as yet, failed in its attempts to shield or nullify the effects of gravity, though some continue to study possible methods of success in this endeavor.
The modern term for antigravity is "metric engineering" coined by Hal Puthoff. The idea is to locally control the fabric of space from the ship itself that free floats along a controlled geodesic of its own making. The discovery of repulsive dark energy accelerating the expansion rate of the universe has given new impetus to antigravity research ("Super Cosmos" by Jack Sarfatti).
H.G. Wells and cavorite
Newton's Law of Gravitation considered gravity to be a force between two objects, causing attraction in proportion to the objects' mass and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. Under this interpretation, an object with negative mass would repel ordinary matter, and could be used to produce an anti-gravity effect. Alternatively, depending on the mechanism assumed to underlie the gravitational force, it may seem reasonable to postulate a material that shields against gravity or otherwise interferes with the force. A fictional example of such a material is cavorite, which is a major element in H. G. Wells' famous book The First Men in the Moon, although cavorite isn't consistent with even a Newtonian view of the universe—it causes violations of conservation laws. Neither negative-mass exotic matter nor gravity-screening material have been observed experimentally. While the potential existence of exotic matter is still debated, general relativity presents persuasive arguments against the existence of screening materials.
The work of Larry Niven
In several works of science-fiction by Larry Niven, there are spacecraft who make use of a "gravity lens", which, presumably, is not an anti-gravity device, but rather deflects gravitational attraction into a different direction. One work mentions that a gravity lens vehicle is incapable of gaining potential energy.
Some proposed models of anti-gravity
Einstein's theory of general relativity, published in 1915, supplanted Newton's model of gravity with an entirely different mechanism, one based entirely on the geometry of the universe. Under this model, gravity in a universe containing only matter with positive mass is purely attractive. No arrangement of ordinary matter can produce an anti-gravity effect. Spacetime geometries corresponding to true anti-gravity in general relativity require negative mass.
Some models of anti-gravity claim to derive from general relativity.
The model of gravity proposed by the theory of general relativity breaks down under extreme conditions (beyond the event horizon of a black hole, and in the very early life of the universe under the big bang model). The rapid expansion of the early universe (cosmic inflation) has been verified by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) result; however, no satisfactory explanations have been found as of 2007. The galaxy rotation problem is a case where the spiral galaxy rotation observations do not fit well with traditional gravitation theory. Most physicists believe that at extremely high energies, gravity and the other fundamental forces unify, which would allow gravity to be manipulated in ways that are not readily apparent now. Candidate models for this regime are theories of everything, which attempt to model all four forces (example: string theory), and theories of quantum gravity, which attempt to produce a model of gravity that is consistent with quantum mechanics, though not necessarily unified with the other forces.
Some models of anti-gravity claim to be based on quantum gravity models, though the connection of these to mainstream quantum gravity models is often tenuous.
Physicist Jack Sarfatti is controversial because, like Nobel Prize physicist Brian Josephson, he supports claims of the paranormal including retro-causal remote viewing. Sarfatti also thinks alien ETs are visiting Earth through stargate wormholes that use the cosmic dark energy's antigravity. As evidence he points to the book "Skinwalker" by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp. Sarfatti has published the basis for his antigravity theory in the Cornell e-print archive http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602022 His basic idea comes from two battle-tested principles of physics, the gauge principle and spontaneous breaking of symmetry called the Goldstone-Higgs mechanism. Using inflation cosmology Sarfatti claims to derive Einstein's general relativity from the cohering of the random zero point energy of the pre-inflation false vacuum in the moment of inflation. The random dark energy is so small today ~ (10^-3 ev)^4 because most of it is used up in creating smooth curved spacetime. Sarfatti then speculates that a variation on the Josephson phase lock of a control superconductor to the coherent vacuum phases enables a ship to control its own zero g-force path. This would explain how the flying saucers make sharp high speed turns that would require impossibly large g-forces using conventional propulsion (e.g."Super Cosmos" (2005) Authorhouse).
Conventional effects that mimic anti-gravity effects
- Magnetic levitation suspends an object against gravity by use of electromagnetic forces. While visually impressive, gravitation itself functions normally in such devices. Critics of various alleged anti-gravity devices often suggest that unusual effects observed around them are due to electromagnetism.
- A tidal force causes objects to move along diverging paths near a massive body (such as a planet or star), producing effects that seem like repulsion or disruptive forces when observed locally. This is not anti-gravity. In Newtonian mechanics, the tidal force is the effect of the larger object's gravitational force being different at the differing locations of the diverging bodies. In Einsteinian gravity, the tidal force is the effect of the diverging bodies following different paths in the negatively curved spacetime around the larger body.
- Large amounts of normal matter can be used to produce a gravitational field that compensates for the effects of another gravitational field, though the entire assembly will still be attracted to the source of the larger field. Physicist Robert L. Forward proposed using lumps of degenerate matter to locally compensate for the tidal forces near a neutron star.
- Dark energy's negative pressure causes a large-scale gravitational repulsion and thus the accelerating expansion of the universe. However, this is not subject to manipulation by human agencies.
Anti-gravity in the context of non-mainstream physics
Gravity control propulsion projects
The United States government and aerospace contractors had publicly announced ambitious Manhattan project-style goals to crack the anti-gravity problem during the mid-1950s while the atomic airplane was on the drawing board, but by the end of 1966, no more information was flowing into the newspapers and magazines. According to established secondary sources, the gravity control propulsion projects had received political, defense, financial, and academic support in the absence of any known theoretical breakthroughs, discoveries, and/or inventions. The articles, although from very reputable publishers with nation-wide subscription bases, resembled hype because they did not reveal the breakthroughs that had caused the projects. Cleaver (1957b, p. 85) summarized the reports in the following statement: “Unknown, too - or at least unannounced – is the name of agency or individual who decided to encourage, stimulate, or sponsor this effort, also in just what way it is being done. However, that the effort is in progress there can be little doubt, and, of course, it is entirely to be welcomed.” According to Talbert (1955a, d) the gravity control propulsion projects had stemmed from the exciting prospects presented in Bryce DeWitt’s essay for the Gravity Research Foundation, Pascual Jordan’s book on gravitation, and Burkhard Heim’s theoretical research. None of these represented an invention or a theoretical breakthrough (Cleaver, 1957a; Weyl 1957).
The first step towards applying significant financial, industrial, and academic resources to develop anti-gravity theories and materials commenced during the summer of 1948 with the creation of the Gravity Research Foundation by Bostonian investment tycoon, Roger W. Babson (Science section, 1948; Babson, 1950). The purpose of the Foundation was to nurture gravitation research for the goal of developing gravity shielding technology that could reduce airplane crashes. It held annual gravitation essay competitions that awarded up to $5,000 and sponsored yearly Gravity Day conferences.
Even though some of the physicists who attended the Gravity Day Conferences quietly mocked the anti-gravity mission of the Foundation (Kaiser, 2000), it provided significant contributions to mainstream physics (Witten, 1998). The Gravity Research Foundation essay written by Robert L. Forward (1963) "Guidelines to Antigravity" received a Second Award and was published a year later in the American Journal of Physics. The gravity shielding emphasis of the Foundation was removed after the death of Babson in 1967. In 1968, theoretical physicist Louis Witten became the Vice President and Director of Science Affairs for the Foundation. The International Journal of Modern Physics D has featured selected papers from the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition. Many have been incorporated with the collections of the Neils Bohr Library (Center for History of Physics Newsletter, 34(2), 10). A few of the Foundation essay contest winners became Nobel laureates (e.g., Ilya Prigogine, Maurice Allais, George F. Smoot).
The gravity control propulsion phase of the anti-gravity effort was announced in the New York Herald Tribune (Talbert, 1955a, b, c) and The Miami Herald (Talbert, 1955d, e, f) during the weeks of the 1955 Thanksgiving Holiday. Both series of articles stated Glenn L. Martin Company, Convair, Bell Aircraft Corporation, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, Lear, Incorporated, Clarke Electronics, Sperry Gyroscope Division, Sperry-Rand Corporation, and Gluhareff Helicopter and Airplane Corporation, had explicitly acknowledged commitments to conducting gravity control propulsion research.
The intensified effort to increase the understanding of gravitation had the backing of outstanding physicists such as Dr. Edward Teller of the University of California, and Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, and Dr. John A. Wheeler of Princeton University (Talbert, 1955a, d). Conservative endorsements by physicists for the projects' goal to attain gravity control propulsion through the development of the unified field theory were made by Dr. Stanley Deser and Dr. Richard Arnowitt of the Institute for Advanced Study and Dr. Václav Hlavatý of Indiana University (Talbert, 1955a,d). Similar endorsements of the American effort by Lucien A. A. Gerardin (1956) of Compagnie Francaise Thomas-Houston, Le Raincy, France, and M. Gutmann (1956), Göteborg, Sweden, appeared in British publications the following year. The scientific community had publicly welcomed the initiative to learn more about gravitation and its possible manipulation for propulsion.
Early references to the involvement of the aerospace companies committed to conducting the gravity research projects had carried acknowledgements of the support by the Gravity Research Foundation (Talbert, 1955a, d; Anti-gravity studies booming, 1956; Gravity Research Group, 1956; Gravity Rand Ltd, 1956; Gladych, 1957; Stine, 1957). For example, Gravity Research Foundation papers by F. Mozer, J. W. Beams, Stanley Deser, Richard Arnowitt, J. W. Wickenden, and Martin L. Perl complemented the list of areas of anti-gravity research given in the Gravitics Situation technical report (Gravity Rand Ltd, 1956).
The Gravity Research Foundation had nurtured the birth of a major theoretical physics institute. Talbert’s articles announced the proposal to create the Institute of Pure Physics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Funds for the Institute had been raised by Agnew H. Bahnson, Jr., one of the Gravity Research Foundation trustees. Bryce DeWitt, winner of the 1953 Gravity Research Foundation essay competition, was asked to head the Institute.[1] It was established in 1956 as the Institute of Field Physics under the direction of Bryce and his wife, Cecile DeWitt. Its goal was to increase understanding about gravitation – not the pursuit of anti-gravity.
Another announcement[2][3] was the creation of the Research Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) by George S. Trimble. He was the vice president for aviation and advance propulsion systems for the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company, Baltimore, Maryland. The quest for propulsion through gravity control was vaguely implied in initial RIAS publications[4][5][6]. An interview indicated one of Trimble’s major reasons for creating RIAS was “the control of the force of gravity itself for propulsion.”[7]. Its first recruit was the internationally recognized expert in gravitation, Louis Witten[8].
Trimble’s completion of contractual arrangements between RIAS and Burkhard Heim was the second segment of Talbert’s news about RIAS. Burkhard Heim was the first to claim to have united general relativity with quantum mechanics for interplanetary, force field propulsion. He called his theory the principle of dynamic contrabarie and had presented it to the congressional sessions of the International Astronautical Federation during September, 1952 and 1954 at Stuttgart, Germany, and Innsbruck, Austria, respectively (Weyl, 1957, 1959a,b; Sigma, 1996; Dröscher & Häuser, 2002). The contract had been offered before the completion of his progress report (Heim, 1956) and first publication (Heim, 1959a, b, c, d).
Within a year of Talbert's series of articles, the General Physics Laboratory of the Aeronautical Research Laboratories (ARL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, commenced an intense program to coordinate research into gravitational and unified field theories with the hiring of Joshua N. Goldberg (1992, p. 90). During the following sixteen years, ARL scientists produced 19 technical reports and over seventy peer-reviewed journal articles. The 19 ARL Technical Reports had been written by P. Jordan, W. Kundt, J. Erhlers, P. Bergmann, A. Schild, R. Arnowit, P. Havas, H. Bondi, V. H'lavaty, R. Schiller, E. T. Newman, A. I. Janis, J. N. Goldberg, W. M. Fairbanks, W. O. Hamilton, M. Carmeli, and S. Malin. The papers that had been sponsored by the ARL were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Physical Review, Jounral of Mathematical Physics, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, Review of Modern Physics, General Relativity and Gravitation, International Journal of Theorectical Physics, and Nuovo Cimento B. Major contributions in talent and research for general relativity physics came from the ARL.
The notable paper on the Roy Kerr metric by Boyer and Lindquist (1967) was an example of one of the many ARL sponsored articles. Roy Kerr, born and raised in New Zealand, had completed his famous paper on spinning black holes during his transition from ARL to the University of Texas, Austin. Some of the ARL papers were written in collaboration with RIAS, the U.S. Army Signal Research and Development Laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and the Office of Naval Research.
Military support for the general relativity projects was terminated by an act of Congress. The Mansfield Amendment of 1973 restricted Department of Defense spending to only the areas of scientific research with explicit military applications.
Cleaver (1957a, p. 385) reported the publicity the gravity control projects had received in the following statement: "In the United States, newspapers and magazines, and nearly all the American aviation periodicals, have printed references to current work. Some of these accounts have been repeated in British and European papers, again more especially in the aeronautical publications, and sometimes with embellishment." For eleven years, one or more gravity control propulsion project articles appeared in Aero Digest, Aeronautics, Aeroplane, Aviation Week, Holiday, Interavia, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Mechanix Illustrated, Missiles and Rockets, and True. Intel’s May 1956 article started a “flood of letters” that caused another Interavia electrogravitics article to be prepared for December (Mind of Mr. Reader, 1956). Of those many letters, Kurt Heintzenberg's represented one of the earliest statements in English about Viktor Schauberger's work (Mind of Mr. Reader, 1956).
Most writers praised the effort. Stambler (1957), Cleaver (1957a,b), and Weyl (1957, 1959) were among the few who were very critical of it.
A few papers evinced American efforts to investigate rumors (Mallan, 1959; Beller, 1961; Radzievskiy, 1964) about Soviet Union anti-gravity projects (e.g., Schwartz, 1958). One of the letters to the editor by Schulz Pillgram (Mind of Mr. Reader, 1956) referred to breakthroughs in weightless flight by German engineer Lewetzow that had been successfully exploited by the Soviets since 1945.
The last periodical to publish an explicit article about the gravity control propulsion project (G-project) was the January 1966 issue of True, The Man’s Magazine (Keyhoe, 1966). It contained longer lists of aerospace firms, research institutes, and academic institutions than had been cited in Talbert's series of articles. A notable feature of the G-project articles was the absence of denials, retractions, and reports of failures. The G-projects were a reality that had emerged from secrecy, doubled its size, and had quietly receded from public view over an eleven-year period.
During the late 1950s the intense interest in anti-gravity had started the resurgence of general relativity as a component of physics department curriculum across the country. “Einstein’s elegant theory of gravitation, completed in 1915-1916, had by the 1940s nearly disappeared from the training of American graduate students in physics” (Kaiser, 1998, p. 321). The projects nurtured by the Gravity Research Foundation and its spin-off, the Institute of Field Physics, contributed to the return of general relativity to physics departments (Kaiser, 1999, 2000a,b). Additional stimuli came from the recruitment activities, conferences, peer review journal papers, and support by RIAS and ARL. "However, it should be recognized that, in the United States, the Department of Defense played an essential role in building a strong scientific community without widespread encroachment on academic values" (Goldberg, 1992, p. 100). Anti-gravity dreams had nurtured the growth and return of general relativity.
During the close of the twentieth century, a smaller American gravity control propulsion project was established for only seven years. NASA had provided funding for the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program from 1996 through 2002. The magnitude of support it had received from aerospace companies, universities, and national defense agencies was much smaller than the projects that had been publicized during the 1950s and 1960's.
The advent of the Internet brought the development of many web sites dedicated to finding ways to produce anti-gravity. In 1999, Project Omicron (Rinaldi, 1999) was created by James Tracy to explore the idea of a Luminiferous aether with no inertia. Other sites explored this notion, dubbed Neo-Aetherics.
Reported experiments
According to the aviation trade publication Interavia, research into "electro-gravitic propulsion" was done in 1956. "In this particular line of research, the weights of some materials have already been cut as much as 30 percent by 'energizing' them. Security prevents disclosure of what precisely is meant by 'energizing' or in which country this work is under way," the magazine reported. A localized gravitic field used as a ponderamotive force has been created (Intel, 1956).
Gravity control propulsion articles became rare after Missile and Rockets (LaFond, 1960) had reported a breakthrough by Ryan Aeronautical Company. It indicated their experimental achievements allowed the projection of a beam of either attracting or repelling gravity-like force to cause accelerations up to one hundred times the rate of the Earth’s acceleration (g) due to gravity. Accelerating an object at 100 g’s from a standstill would cause it to attain a speed in excess of 2,181.8 miles per hour within just one second! Similar force field beam projections have been reported by Eugene Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese (2001).
In 1999, Li and her team appeared in Popular Mechanics, having constructed a working prototype to generate what she describes as "AC Gravity". The device is known as the high temperature superconducting disc. Li acknowledges that to 'release' the device before knowing that it is indeed functional and not an unexplained aberration could cause a situation similar to the cold fusion discoveries. [1]
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In 2001, the Disclosure Project announced that anti-gravity and Zero-point energy were in use by secret government agencies, and had been so for over fifty years. Mark McCandlish, a member of the Disclosure Project, provided a drawing of an alleged product of those secret agencies called the Alien Reproduction Vehicle. It presented a view of large, very high voltage capacitors that functioned like Thomas Townsend Brown's gravitator. That mechanical drawing closely resembled an illustration that had been provided by Milton William Cooper (1991, p. 406) to evince the existence of man-made anti-gravity vehicles. According to its caption, the vehicle had been built by Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, and General Electric. Both drawings featured an apparatus that could be attributed to the electrogravitic portion of the Biefeld-Brown effect.
British analyses by the Gravity Research Group (1956) and by a technical writer, under the pen name of Intel (1956), had reported an electrogravitic component of the Biefeld-Brown effect as the primary theory tested by the aerospace firms of the American gravity control propulsion project. The Biefeld-Brown effect is known to encompass electrokinetic effects, but is often claimed to have an electrogravitic component as well. The latter was reported by Thomas Townsend Brown (1928, 1929) to generate thrust without the reliance on a surrounding medium (e.g., air) by applying high voltages to materials with high dielectric constants. Correlations between variations in thrust and the position of the Moon lead Brown (1929) to associating the electrostatic phenomenon with gravity. Thomas Townsend Brown's first article and patent emphasized electrogravitics.
Recent electrogravitic tests in Canada and Japan have been reportedly positive. Aviation photographer, Doyle R. Buehler, and Takaaki Musha, member of the Advanced Space Propulsion Investigation Committee under the Japan Society for Aeronautical and Space Sciences reported the positive results. Buehler (2004) conducted his experiments at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, in Calgary, Canada. Musha (2000, 2004) conducted experiments at the Honda Corporation Research Institute from the first of February to the first of March of 1996. A second group at Honda under Okamoto replicated his experiments with higher voltages and similar positive results (Musha, 2004). Musha used a weak field approximation of Einstein's General Relativity Theory to generate a formula to explain electrogravitics. Analyses by Noriki Iwanaga (1999) of Musha's theoretical explanations were judged to be flawed from the standpoint of general relativistic side, but he also found that it would be profitable to apply the Brown's propulsion method for small space vehicles if the Musha's theory was physically valid.
Five years later, a firm theoretical foundation for Brown's electrogravitic effect was put forth by Boyko Ivanov (2004) of the Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, Sofia, Bulgaria. He used classical approaches to Einstein's equations known as the Weyl-Majumdar-Papapetrou field solutions, dating back to 1916, to derive what he called root gravity. Ivanov's initial proofs were released through the Los Alamos National Laboratory archives (Ivanov, 2004, 2005a,b). They contained descriptions of eight types of experiments that could be performed in the laboratory to detect root gravity. The first one incorporates parallel plate capacitors carrying several hundred thousand volts. His formula for the electrostatic production of root gravity supports reports by Brown, Buehler, and Musha.
Invanov's and Musha's formulas are similar. Both are inverse functions of the dielectric thickness and directly proportional to the voltage. Musha (2004) incorporated modulo Z (dielectric atomic number) and international system units (SI) and Ivanov used the CGS (Gauss) system of units. Because both of them are linear approximation for the case of almost flat metric, neither formula accounted for the correlations between the electrogravitic variations of the Biefeld-Brown effect and the positions of the Moon that had been reported by Brown (1929) and Musha (2000). Statistical analyses of the electrokinetic variations of the Biefeld-Brown effect yielded insignificant correlations with lunar positions (Cady, 1952). It was reported by G.V.Stephenson (2005) that measured Biefeld-Brown effect showed a dependence on thunderstorm activity. Thus neither formula is applicable to the electrokinetic aspect of the Biefeld-Brown effect.
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