> Throughout the expansive Project Outgrowth document, Mead and the other scientists also explored field propulsion, defined as those concepts which use “electric and/or magnetic fields to accelerate an ionized working fluid, hall effect thrusters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall-effect_thruster totally compliant with conventional physics
Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
121–130 of 161 posts
Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great and important question. (doubly so for me, as constrained resources may see me leave the field, to which I have devoted my entire professional life, in the coming months) We are perennially grateful for the support we receive to do the work that we do. To a high degree of approximation, Einstein's predictions are very, very correct. We are trying to look very carefully at Nature because we don't think…
Short-termism, and the financialization of research, seems to be a huge problem in all fields of science. By "financialization," I mean deciding which research projects get funding based on their expected measurable results, i.e., based on some rate of return that can be estimated today. If a research project can lead to more citations soon, or slightly better products soon, or lower costs soon, etc., it will get fun…
Your viewpoint is very agreeable, but how do you propose to do it otherwise? Given limited resources (which continues to be the case even today), you have to allocate them somehow. Can you think of a simple and objective measure to distribute the available resources between research projects?
It's all right to decry financialization of research, but it is a very difficult problem to solve.
Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short-termism, and the financialization of research, seems to be a huge problem in all fields of science. By "financialization," I mean deciding which research projects get funding based on their expected measurable results, i.e., based on some rate of return that can be estimated today. If a research project can lead to more citations soon, or slightly better products soon, or lower costs soon, etc., it will get fun…
Your viewpoint is very agreeable, but how do you propose to do it otherwise? Given limited resources (which continues to be the case even today), you have to allocate them somehow. Can you think of a simple and objective measure to distribute the available resources between research projects? It's all right to decry financialization of research, but it is a very difficult problem to solve.
Round robin or following a uniform distribution?
Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Academia isn't keeping talented people out of the industry. At any point, a talented person can leave the university, join a company, and easily quintuple their earnings. It's the industry that's keeping talented people out by giving them mundane or bullshit jobs, and not leaving any space for long-term research and vision.
Though I might say that Academia is making a good job of keeping talented people out of it because their incentive structure is skewed.
This. I did not leave academia to search for fame and fortune. I left it because the bureaucracy and politics of it was terrible.
Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did he think to mention airplanes? The whole concept of airplanes would be obsolete with anti-gravity.
I feel like in 40% of SF stories it will at one point be important that your spaceship not have the glide ratio of a buttered brick, even if it has an antigravity drive.
Depends on the nature of the anti-gravity drive. If it's like an engine, which needs some sort of process to operate, then yes, it can fail to work and you want a backup system. If it's a specific material, which works like a magnet in that the anti-gravity effect is present as a result of the passive configuration of matter, less so.
Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
#126Is this article just a derivative of the patents that were discussed on HN several weeks ago? I liked that discussion. Plenty of varying perspectives such as "Bob Lasar was proven right!" and "in an arms race, keep your enemy busy [with disinformation]". Is there new info here?
I agree it's just a rehashing of information they know will get a lot of clicks. I have a vested interest in this topic so I've been following it closely and I don't see anything new here.
Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
#127This is a terrible article that is little more than conspiracy theorist baiting. For example, the author takes this quote from Ben Rich: >“We have some new things. We are not stagnating. What we are doing is updating ourselves, without advertising. There are some new programs, and there are certain things, some of them 20 or 30 years old, that are still breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about [because] othe…
>This is a terrible article
From what I have read up till now on thedrive, the whole outlet is terrible, all their articles seem to be drivel like this.
Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great and important question. (doubly so for me, as constrained resources may see me leave the field, to which I have devoted my entire professional life, in the coming months) We are perennially grateful for the support we receive to do the work that we do. To a high degree of approximation, Einstein's predictions are very, very correct. We are trying to look very carefully at Nature because we don't think…
"GPS is impossible without corrections from both special relativity and general relativity" I appreciate your comments in general, but I feel that this point needs to be tempered. Yes there are corrections due to SR and GR effects in GNSS, but they tend to get lost in the morass of the least squares residuals compared to all the other much bigger effects, like clock errors, orbital errors, ionosphere delays, etc, etc…
The relativistic corrections are cumulative (and, if I recall correctly, have opposite sign!). Without correcting for the shifts, it is my understanding that GPS would be degraded within minutes and useless in less than a day.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
#129> Throughout his career, Witten conducted research into gravitation, quantum gravity, and general relativity. The last one of these is the theory first put forward by Albert Einstein that proposes that gravity is essentially a warp or curve in the geometry of space-time caused by mass. You're assuming that your readers are already familiar with quantum gravity, but need an introduction to general relativity?
They're assuming that the readers will infer, from the name "quantum gravity", that it has to do with gravity. From just the name, "general relativity," people who don't know what it is probably wouldn't guess it's a theory of gravity.
Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great and important question. (doubly so for me, as constrained resources may see me leave the field, to which I have devoted my entire professional life, in the coming months) We are perennially grateful for the support we receive to do the work that we do. To a high degree of approximation, Einstein's predictions are very, very correct. We are trying to look very carefully at Nature because we don't think…
"GPS is impossible without corrections from both special relativity and general relativity" I appreciate your comments in general, but I feel that this point needs to be tempered. Yes there are corrections due to SR and GR effects in GNSS, but they tend to get lost in the morass of the least squares residuals compared to all the other much bigger effects, like clock errors, orbital errors, ionosphere delays, etc, etc…
Also, we surely would have compensated for relativity experimentally:
"The clock seems to run 0.2% more slowly than predicted. We don't know why, but if we subtract 0.2% everything just work. Let's ship it!"