Wouldn’t it be nice if our governments invested even half the money that we spend on killing strangers abroad, on improving the quality and longevity of human life? I wonder what we could accomplish if life extension were an actual priority.
That part’s correct.
Another example of Wikipedia’s shitty limitations, given that it’s edited by anonymous people who tend to be wrong on everything that’s even slightly on the fringe of mainstream knowledge.
The term “electrogravitics” grew and spread significantly throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and it was understood to mean "any electrical method of manipulating the gravitational field and/or producing an antigravitational effect" – as such, it was widely regarded as an unrealized scientific ambition, not an achieved technology.
Only since the lifter thingies became popular for a brief time in the first years of the 21st Century, did the term suddenly (and wrongly) come to refer to ion wind effects, which were originally explored by T. Townsend Brown.
For some reason that remains unclear, people got completely mixed up about the real origin of the term “electrogravitics” – this term arose in association with a different T. Townsend Brown device, British patent #300,311, called a “cellular gravitator,” which appears to be little more than a heavily insulated stack capacitor. Brown had claimed in this patent that this device produced a directional gravitational thrust when electrically charged. Oddly, I’ve never seen any credible experiments with this cellular gravitator concept, but Mark McCandlish bases his design on this concept. Note that this device doesn’t even have a superficial similarity to the ion wind devices that Brown experimented with decades later at Bahnson Labs, so the term electrogravitics predated the ion wind effect, and originally referred to a completely different type of research. You can still find lots of references to “electrogravitics” in publications and radio interviews throughout the 50s and 60s, and it was always used to describe electrical approaches to producing gravitational field propulsion and possible explanations of UFO antigravity.
Physicists don’t mistake the ion wind effect for electrogravitics – but a large number of online amateur UFO enthusiasts made that error about 15 years ago, so now it’s all over the damn internet, further confusing an already confusing subject.
It’s no wonder that the public is by and large scientifically illiterate when even the encyclopedias can’t get the basic facts straight. Gravitation is an acceleration field, not a force field. The weight we measure on a scale (our mass x the acceleration of gravity) is a force, and gravity was called a force in Newtonian physics for centuries, but we now understand that it’s an acceleration field, not a force field. That’s why photons, which have zero mass, are accelerated around the Sun by the gravitational field by twice the magnitude predicted by Newtonian physics.
I explicitly stated that it’s an analogy, so I don’t know what you’re complaining about. Gravitoelectromagnetism is a verified field of physics which makes explicit predictions about the gravitomagnetic field (aka frame dragging aka the Lense-Thirring effect) and a variety of inductive gravitational field effects, which are analogous to the full range of inductive electromagnetic effects. Both are real, concrete, well-formulated and observationally verified areas of physics. The linearized approximation is only that - an approximation which is only reasonably numerically accurate in the weak field and low-velocity limit. The fully correct predictions of gravitoelectromagnetic field dynamics are expressed with the Einstein field equation.
Oh ffs – I said: “A perfectly analogous effect happens when you spin a ring of matter around in a circle; you create a gravitomagnetic field (this is also known as “frame dragging” and “the Lense-Thirring effect”).” I didn’t say that GEM is a perfect analogy to EM overall. GR is nonlinear, for example, so the inductive GEM effects actually intensify logarithmically in the strong-field and high-velocity regime. And of course quantum effects are outside the scope of the analogy, because quantum phenomena like the Meissner effect are not inductive in nature.
Sure, plasma can bend radar signals around a craft. And a powerful laser beam could create an aerodynamic buffer against sonic booms. But nobody has reported powerful laser beams setting the air on fire in front of AAVs so evidently that’s not the method they’re using.
