Text 9003, 226 rader
Skriven 2006-01-08 10:34:44 av Geo (1:379/45)
Ärende: anti-gravity
====================
From: "Geo" <georger@nls.net>

if you can create a gravity well in space, why not a gravity hill within that
well? Anyway I had this bookmarked to read, don't remember if someone here
mentioned it or not but didn't want to miss the chance to post more whacky
science stuff. <g>

Geo.

Take a leap into hyperspace
05 January 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Haiko Lietz

EVERY year, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awards
prizes for the best papers presented at its annual conference. Last year's
winner in the nuclear and future flight category went to a paper calling for
experimental tests of an astonishing new type of engine. According to the
paper, this hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at
enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time
for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely
unrecognised kind of physics. Can they possibly be serious?

The AIAA is certainly not embarrassed. What's more, the US military has begun
to cast its eyes over the hyperdrive concept, and a space propulsion researcher
at the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories has said he would
be interested in putting the idea to the test. And despite the bafflement of
most physicists at the theory that supposedly underpins it, Pavlos Mikellides,
an aerospace engineer at the Arizona State University in Tempe who reviewed the
winning paper, stands by the committee's choice. "Even though such features
have been explored before, this particular approach is quite unique," he says.

Unique it certainly is. If the experiment gets the go-ahead and works, it could
reveal new interactions between the fundamental forces of nature that would
change the future of space travel. Forget spending six months or more holed up
in a rocket on the way to Mars, a round trip on the hyperdrive could take as
little as 5 hours. All our worries about astronauts' muscles wasting away or
their DNA being irreparably damaged by cosmic radiation would disappear
overnight. What's more the device would put travel to the stars within reach
for the first time. But can the hyperdrive really get off the ground?

The answer to that question hinges on the work of a little-known German
physicist. Burkhard Heim began to explore the hyperdrive propulsion concept in
the 1950s as a spin-off from his attempts to heal the biggest divide in
physics: the rift between quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of
relativity.

Quantum theory describes the realm of the very small - atoms, electrons and
elementary particles - while general relativity deals with gravity. The two
theories are immensely successful in their separate spheres. The clash arises
when it comes to describing the basic structure of space. In general
relativity, space-time is an active, malleable fabric. It has four dimensions -
three of space and one of time - that deform when masses are placed in them. In
Einstein's formulation, the force of gravity is a result of the deformation of
these dimensions. Quantum theory, on the other hand, demands that space is a
fixed and passive stage, something simply there for particles to exist on. It
also suggests that space itself must somehow be made up of discrete, quantum
elements.

In the early 1950s, Heim began to rewrite the equations of general relativity
in a quantum framework. He drew on Einstein's idea that the gravitational force
emerges from the dimensions of space and time, but suggested that all
fundamental forces, including electromagnetism, might emerge from a new,
different set of dimensions. Originally he had four extra dimensions, but he
discarded two of them believing that they did not produce any forces, and
settled for adding a new two-dimensional "sub-space" onto Einstein's
four-dimensional space-time.

In Heim's six-dimensional world, the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are
coupled together. Even in our familiar four-dimensional world, we can see a
link between the two forces through the behaviour of fundamental particles such
as the electron. An electron has both mass and charge. When an electron falls
under the pull of gravity its moving electric charge creates a magnetic field.
And if you use an electromagnetic field to accelerate an electron you move the
gravitational field associated with its mass. But in the four dimensions we
know, you cannot change the strength of gravity simply by cranking up the
electromagnetic field.

In Heim's view of space and time, this limitation disappears. He claimed it is
possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again,
and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of
gravity on a spacecraft enough for it to take off.

When he presented his idea in public in 1957, he became an instant celebrity.
Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who at the time was leading the Saturn
rocket programme that later launched astronauts to the moon, approached Heim
about his work and asked whether the expensive Saturn rockets were worthwhile.
And in a letter in 1964, the German relativity theorist Pascual Jordan, who had
worked with the distinguished physicists Max Born and Werner Heisenberg and was
a member of the Nobel committee, told Heim that his plan was so important "that
its successful experimental treatment would without doubt make the researcher a
candidate for the Nobel prize".

But all this attention only led Heim to retreat from the public eye. This was
partly because of his severe multiple disabilities, caused by a lab accident
when he was still in his teens. But Heim was also reluctant to disclose his
theory without an experiment to prove it. He never learned English because he
did not want his work to leave the country. As a result, very few people knew
about his work and no one came up with the necessary research funding. In 1958
the aerospace company Bölkow did offer some money, but not enough to do the
proposed experiment.

While Heim waited for more money to come in, the company's director, Ludwig
Bölkow, encouraged him to develop his theory further. Heim took his advice, and
one of the results was a theorem that led to a series of formulae for
calculating the masses of the fundamental particles - something conventional
theories have conspicuously failed to achieve. He outlined this work in 1977 in
the Max Planck Institute's journal Zeitschrift für Naturforschung, his only
peer-reviewed paper. In an abstruse way that few physicists even claim to
understand, the formulae work out a particle's mass starting from physical
characteristics, such as its charge and angular momentum.

Yet the theorem has proved surprisingly powerful. The standard model of
physics, which is generally accepted as the best available theory of elementary
particles, is incapable of predicting a particle's mass. Even the accepted
means of estimating mass theoretically, known as lattice quantum
chromodynamics, only gets to between 1 and 10 per cent of the experimental
values.

Gravity reduction

But in 1982, when researchers at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in
Hamburg implemented Heim's mass theorem in a computer program, it predicted
masses of fundamental particles that matched the measured values to within the
accuracy of experimental error. If they are let down by anything, it is the
precision to which we know the values of the fundamental constants. Two years
after Heim's death in 2001, his long-term collaborator Illobrand von Ludwiger
calculated the mass formula using a more accurate gravitational constant. "The
masses came out even more precise," he says. After publishing the mass
formulae, Heim never really looked at hyperspace propulsion again. Instead, in
response to requests for more information about the theory behind the mass
predictions, he spent all his time detailing his ideas in three books published
in German. It was only in 1980, when the first of his books came to the
attention of a retired Austrian patent officer called Walter Dröscher, that the
hyperspace propulsion idea came back to life. Dröscher looked again at Heim's
ideas and produced an "extended" version, resurrecting the dimensions that Heim
originally discarded. The result is "Heim-Dröscher space", a mathematical
description of an eight-dimensional universe.

From this, Dröscher claims, you can derive the four forces known in physics:
the gravitational and electromagnetic forces, and the strong and weak nuclear
forces. But there's more to it than that. "If Heim's picture is to make sense,"
Dröscher says, "we are forced to postulate two more fundamental forces." These
are, Dröscher claims, related to the familiar gravitational force: one is a
repulsive anti-gravity similar to the dark energy that appears to be causing
the universe's expansion to accelerate. And the other might be used to
accelerate a spacecraft without any rocket fuel.

This force is a result of the interaction of Heim's fifth and sixth dimensions
and the extra dimensions that Dröscher introduced. It produces pairs of
"gravitophotons", particles that mediate the interconversion of electromagnetic
and gravitational energy. Dröscher teamed up with Jochem Häuser, a physicist
and professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in
Salzgitter, Germany, to turn the theoretical framework into a proposal for an
experimental test. The paper they produced, "Guidelines for a space propulsion
device based on Heim's quantum theory", is what won the AIAA's award last year.

Claims of the possibility of "gravity reduction" or "anti-gravity" induced by
magnetic fields have been investigated by NASA before (New Scientist, 12
January 2002, p 24). But this one, Dröscher insists, is different. "Our theory
is not about anti-gravity. It's about completely new fields with new
properties," he says. And he and Häuser have suggested an experiment to prove
it.

This will require a huge rotating ring placed above a superconducting coil to
create an intense magnetic field. With a large enough current in the coil, and
a large enough magnetic field, Dröscher claims the electromagnetic force can
reduce the gravitational pull on the ring to the point where it floats free.
Dröscher and Häuser say that to completely counter Earth's pull on a 150-tonne
spacecraft a magnetic field of around 25 tesla would be needed. While that's
500,000 times the strength of Earth's magnetic field, pulsed magnets briefly
reach field strengths up to 80 tesla. And Dröscher and Häuser go further. With
a faster-spinning ring and an even stronger magnetic field, gravitophotons
would interact with conventional gravity to produce a repulsive anti-gravity
force, they suggest.

Dröscher is hazy about the details, but he suggests that a spacecraft fitted
with a coil and ring could be propelled into a multidimensional hyperspace.
Here the constants of nature could be different, and even the speed of light
could be several times faster than we experience. If this happens, it would be
possible to reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in
only 80 days, Dröscher and Häuser say.

So is this all fanciful nonsense, or a revolution in the making? The majority
of physicists have never heard of Heim theory, and most of those contacted by
New Scientist said they couldn't make sense of Dröscher and Häuser's
description of the theory behind their proposed experiment. Following Heim
theory is hard work even without Dröscher's extension, says Markus Pössel, a
theoretical physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in
Potsdam, Germany. Several years ago, while an undergraduate at the University
of Hamburg, he took a careful look at Heim theory. He says he finds it "largely
incomprehensible", and difficult to tie in with today's physics. "What is
needed is a step-by-step introduction, beginning at modern physical concepts,"
he says.

The general consensus seems to be that Dröscher and Häuser's theory is
incomplete at best, and certainly extremely difficult to follow. And it has not
passed any normal form of peer review, a fact that surprised the AIAA prize
reviewers when they made their decision. "It seemed to be quite developed and
ready for such publication," Mikellides told New Scientist.

At the moment, the main reason for taking the proposal seriously must be Heim
theory's uncannily successful prediction of particle masses. Maybe, just maybe,
Heim theory really does have something to contribute to modern physics. "As far
as I understand it, Heim theory is ingenious," says Hans Theodor Auerbach, a
theoretical physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
who worked with Heim. "I think that physics will take this direction in the
future."

It may be a long while before we find out if he's right. In its present design,
Dröscher and Häuser's experiment requires a magnetic coil several metres in
diameter capable of sustaining an enormous current density. Most engineers say
that this is not feasible with existing materials and technology, but Roger
Lenard, a space propulsion researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in New
Mexico thinks it might just be possible. Sandia runs an X-ray generator known
as the Z machine which "could probably generate the necessary field intensities
and gradients".

For now, though, Lenard considers the theory too shaky to justify the use of
the Z machine. "I would be very interested in getting Sandia interested if we
could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the
proposed experiment," he says. "Even if the results are negative, that, in my
mind, is a successful experiment."

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