From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Thu Feb 19 1998 - 07:42:48 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> Michael Lorrey <retroman@together.net> writes:
>
> > Henri Kluytmans wrote:
> >
> > > Brian Atkins wrote :
> > > >Interesting article on this in the new Wired 6.03
> > > >I remember reading about this a long while back, but it seemed
> > > >to be dismissed... now, maybe not.
> > >
> > > However there is a fundamental problem with gravity shielding,
> > > it could be used to construct a perpetual motion machine thereby violating
> > > the principle of conservation of energy !
> >
> > Only if it is an over unity system, which I would doubt. A machine could be
> > made to move perpetually, but so long as the sheild is energized. I would
> > expect that conservation of energy would mandate that the energy required to
> > sheild x amount of gravity would be more than the e/t that could be generated
> > from the bias in the field, thus it would still need an external source of
> > additionally energy to keep from running down.
>
> So what people are really talking about is a "force field" rather than
> a gravity shield. I have tried coming up with a "reasonable" gravity
> shield for some science fiction games, but it stumbles on the fact
> that once you set up such a shield you could put in as many
> gravity-driven devices (like a wheel with one side lighter than the
> other) as you want and extract an arbitrary amount of energy from the
> shield, even if they are very remote.
>
> I'm very sceptical of this area, I don't see how it could be made to
> fit with what we know of general relativity.
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
> asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
> GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
Yes the article mentioned that, and the supposition was that
the effect being seen by this shield apparatus must be some
kind of "macro quantum" effect, whereby the whole superconducting
spinning disc acts together in a single state. Or anyway
something like that, I'm not up on quantum or even regular
physics much :-) At any rate, they think that if this is
real then general relativity will need to be modded for quantum
effects.
--
The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed.
-William Gibson
______________________________________________________________________
Visit Hypermart at http://www.hypermart.net for free business hosting!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:48:38 MST