Talk:Eugene Podkletnov
Burkhard Heim
Even if it is most likely recognized that this experiment does not work. It is still interessting that Burkhard Heim invented a theory that could explain the theory.
Gravitomagnetic explanation?
Under general relativity, a forcibly-accelerated mass generates an gravitational field that points in its direction of acceleration - basically, it resists (inertia) and fights back by trying to drag nearby stuff along with it (frame-dragging).
pod-thingy's disc was a superconducting wafer with a hole punched in the middle, spun by an applied EM field from a current passed through coils (above one surface?). Now, perhaps you might expect this to set up eddy currents in the disc, and if those currents circulate inward along one surface and outward along the other, what you have at the inner and outer edges is an horribly-abrupt acceleration in the ballistc electrons that ought to be projectng a gravitaitonal effect that points along the rotaion axis, in one direction and in the other direction around the rim. You might expect these to cancel out at a distance for a non-rotating disc (ignoring non-linearities), but since these discs were spinning, the existence of a radial Coriolis field throws some assumptions off that would suggest cancellation.
So there's possibly a genuine effect expected under standard theory here, there's just a grey area over whether its supposed to be unmeasurably small or something more notable.
The good news is, IF this is the missing explanation for the effect, the gravitomagnetic hypthesis would be easily testable: you'd just reverse the electical polarity of the "spinner" coils to produce opposite eddy currents and change the upper surface from "blowing" to "sucking". Oh, and maybe flip the wafer over, too, in case there are any persistent eddy currents trapped in the wafer after power-down.
I'm not claiming that this is what's really happenning, buy hey, its logical and testable idea. (one might also want to look for an anomalous power drain from the rotator coils when the field is supposedly doing something physical)
Shouldn't ...
Shouldn't this be placed under pseudoscience?
Not yet ...
I think that'd be premature. Some "anomalous" results turn out to be due to accidents, some turn out to be malice by third parties, others are unfortunate coincidences and "complex" behaviour (e.g. the secretary upstairs can't work when your equipment is running because of the noise, and always choses to switch on the expresso machine at that moment, creating a power surge that always throws off your readings whenever you warm up your accelerator coil), some are fraud, some are self-delusion, and some ... some actually turn out to be genuine. Sometimes experiments just go legitimately wrong, there are piles of reasonably well known physics experiments that really shouldn't have been taken seriously with hindsight, even though they gave the "right" answers.
If people were running about claiming that the Podkletnov result is definitely correct, then that might be pseudoscience (but I haven't personally seen anyone doing that). If they claim its definitely wrong, that might be pseudoscience too (personal bias masquerading as scientific fact). The scientific approach, IMO, is to try to find out, objectvely, if the thing is right or not. Which the appropriate people seem to be trying to do, in measured way, only expending approriate resources, and not saying much in advance. This all seems to me to be appropriate.
As I said, the good news is that because of the topology of the experiment, if it is a "pseudoeffect" then some of the obvious sources of error should be comparatively easy to debunk. For instance, if one visited his lab, and asked him to run the experiment with the coil polarity reversed and the disk flipped over, and his colleague in another part of the building still reported a deflection of the same polarity, then that would rule out the first gravitomagnetic explanation (above), and make the test more "problematic" (but still not necessarily wrong) ... OTOH, if the distant colleague reports a reversed effect, and guesses the polarity correct each time in repeated blind tests, then one's confidence that this might be a real effect would tend to be higher. One can't always guarantee to work out what's really going on in an experiment, but there are things one can try (as a polite neutral observer, with an invite) to narrow down the options.ErkDemon 03:57, 25 October 2005 (UTC)