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Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

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Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

#141
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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!"

Subtract 2% from what?

Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

#142
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physicist here (by degree, not profession). What you state is not true: by currently accepted physical theories, time travel to the past IS very much possible. It's known as a "closed, time-like curve" in the literature. Now, most mechanisms explored for doing so wouldn't allow travel back further than the initial creation of the time travel device, so you could say that time travel to our past is not possible since…

I've never understood why "paradoxes make cause-and-effect-reasoning difficult" concerns are a valid argument that something could not be possible. Does physics care whether the workings of the universe are accessible to our logic?

If I look at a random numeric oracle of 1-10, and consider the result as N, and apply to it some kind of mathematical formalism of:

If ( N + 10 = 20 ) then eat(last_bagel)

My wife comes home and is cross with me for eating the last_bagel. So, I hop in my handy time machine, travel back to before the time where I access the oracle, and alter it to only produce a random number from 1-9.

If I succeed, my wife is no longer cross with me. But, if she is no longer cross with me, then why would I alter past events? Likely, I would have no cause to travel back in time in this scenario, so the oracle remains programmed to produce up to 10.

Now my wife is cross with me again.

Which one happens?

Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

#143
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time travel back into the past is understood to be impossible.

Yes, a more in depth analysis of this can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

this should properly be called a conjecture, as I have never encountered a formal proof of this "theorem"

Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

#144
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an illusion. You are floating freely in the space, but massive mass near-by is causing curvature in space-time. In other words: Time goes more slowly in your shoes, because they are closer to the mass. This causes any movement to be circular movement, which is pressing you to the near-by mass, which you experience as "gravity".

Wow, what an excellent way of phrasing it. Give me more. Why "any movement is circular"?

If you're not going in a straight line then your motion has a radius. This is why people lost in the woods go in circles, because their walk (unless a compass is correcting you) always has a slight curve.

Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that, as soon as there is mass in the universe which curves space-time, all paths of movement are closed. To a first approximation, for anything close to a single large mass that means an elliptical path. That assumes, of course, that an instantaneous "path of movement" is something that is even worth considering, given that it ignores the time dimension and the fact that all those other objects aren't…

I would think that parabolic trajectories only close in infinity, and hyperbolic not even there? Or both close only in infinity? The math on that is currently out of my brain's cache.

They all close. Worst case is they'll get longer and longer as the universe expands and the objects will never be able to complete them and come back for a second lap.

Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

#146
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people would interpret free will to mean something that is perfectly compatible with any definition of determinism. If I decide to raise my right hand, I raise it. Don't get pedantic in regards to disabled people. It doesn't matter if the universe is completely deterministic, that doesn't mean that I'm not the entity that decided to raise my right hand. The deterministic universe may have produced me, bu…

That's an interpretation of free will that I completely subscribe to, but I do not think it is a majority view.

It's still the unavoidable consequence of the past.

Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

#147
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a common myth that nuclear reactions "turn mass into energy". What actually happens is that the products of the reaction have less binding energy than the initial nucleus. Since energy gravitates, this reduces the mass of the products. The exact same thing happens in chemical reactions. If you burn something, the product are lighter than the initial substances by the mass equivalent of the energy released.

"...energy gravitates, this reduces the mass of the products." "...the product are lighter than the initial substances by the mass equivalent of the energy released." How are these not restating "turn mass into energy"? Both scenarios approximate: High Mass => Low Mass + Energy

https://youtu.be/Xo232kyTsO0 check out this PBS spacetime explanation for what it means for energy to have mass. It's impossible to convert energy into mass, adding up all the mass inside a composite does not equal the true mass, because energy itself has mass. When we split an atom, we are releasing some of that extra (energy) that was stored as potential energy holding the parts together, not converting energy into matter, just moving states of energy to other types.

Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

#149
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why "paradoxes make cause-and-effect-reasoning difficult" concerns are a valid argument that something could not be possible. Does physics care whether the workings of the universe are accessible to our logic?

If I look at a random numeric oracle of 1-10, and consider the result as N, and apply to it some kind of mathematical formalism of: If ( N + 10 = 20 ) then eat(last_bagel) My wife comes home and is cross with me for eating the last_bagel. So, I hop in my handy time machine, travel back to before the time where I access the oracle, and alter it to only produce a random number from 1-9. If I succeed, my wife is no long…

Of course there is no answer to this question yet, but thats the point. Just because a thought experiment doesn't solve it, doesn't mean it cannot be physically produced.

For all we know in actual implementation you would simply eat the bagel, time travel back and bias the oracle, but your conscious experience only ever consists of finding that your oracle was modified and has your fingerprints on it somehow.

Re: Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years

#150
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we are litearaly at square 0 still here?

Physics took 2 wrong roads and it got stuck in a local minima of the truth plane. Understanding that physics is the most ignorant field of science and how proud the field is of it's models, I don't think this will come anytime soon. https://www.pnas.org/content/112/24/7426 PS: you need to understand how gravity is derived to manipulate it's propagation. Since the mechanisms are very stable due various reasons, only a…

What's your physics model?
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